Just because we were against it when Bush did it, does NOT mean we are hypocrites now

[patrice]

43. "You develope a moral and ethical center, and judge actions against it."

To the extent that that center is an absolute, it will likely develop it's own hypocrisies in the real world, e.g. 3-strikes and you're out laws, or the protection of parental rights of dysfunctional or even abusive parents, or Israel's right to statehood and the oppression of Palestine, 10 year olds having babies . . . . Reality is not as consistent as your "ethical center". Which absolute moral center shall we use? Does the moral means justify the ends?

This is why moral relativism is based upon the principle that those things that make something right or wrong inher in the traits of the situation under consideration, relative to an identifiable set of values. To a moral relativist, morality is not external as you portray it. It is internal to the specific conditions and people involved in a given situation and the values manifest in those conditions. This is how it is possible for it to be wrong from me to engage in LGBTQ sex, but not wrong for someone who IS LGBTQ. Why it would be wrong for some people to choose abortion, but not wrong for others.

Moral relativism is a useful perspective to try to reduce the tendency toward "the means justifies the ends" and also reduces the inclination toward "the ends justifies the means", because abstractions do not take precedence over the facts of a situation. Or they are abstract only to the extent that they are either unknown or under someone else's control, other than that the means and the ends inhere there concretely in the detailed facts, not arbitrary ideologies imposed by others.

To have different standards based on some non-ethical, non-moral principle is, well, hypocrisy. It's moral if I do it, immoral if you don't.

Just because I/you/we don't know enough to perceive whether something is ethical or moral or not, does not necessarily mean that it is not. Based upon the principles and processes of moral relativism, I am willing to admit that I don't know enough to say that the situation we are talking about IS ethical/moral. Are you really claiming to know enough about all of the different people involved, other factors/means and ends/possible outcomes to say that it absolutely isn't?