The Is-Ought Gap, Post-Modernism and the French Facelift

by Richard Butrick (January 2014)

Relativistic versions of truth have been around since the dawn of philosophy and were certainly operative in ancient Greek philosophy.

If, as you say, Thrasymachus, truth is merely the interest of the stronger then we must consider the following. The stronger being men are fallible. If they are fallible then they may lay down truths which are not in their best interest. If they may lay down truths which prove not to be in their best interest then truth is not merely the interest of the stronger. Realizing he has lost his case, Thrasymachus becomes enraged and departs in a huff.

What is really true is what people need to believe for their own good.

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Enter Islam stage right.

Islam is in total agreement that right and wrong are not supported or refuted by empirical studies. Right and wrong is what Allah says it is and the Koran is the word of God. Period. No other code or ethic is its equal. All other codes are inferior. They can be tolerated only by admission of inferiority and adherents of such inferior codes must live the life of second class citizens. Islam does not make the faulty inference that because the world of oughts and shoulds and musts cannot be proved scientifically that therefore the edicts of the Koran must be seen as no better than other codes of behavior and social organization. Quite the contrary. Since empirical evidence does not do the trick, Islam must be made dominant by force. That force can be by stealth, deception and infiltration in the case that overt force is not feasible. Otherwise, Islam has the right to use all manner of brutal overt force. Unless the leadership of Dar al-Harb wakes up from their relativist slumbers and faulty inference and fatal conceit, Dar al-Harb and its denizens will go the way of the Dodo bird.

with the PC-relativist meme being some strange mutant of the former. With Western democracies increasingly under the leadership of the PC-mutant of the freedom-responsibility meme, typified by such stalwarts as Obama, it does not bode well. From North Korea to Dar al-Islam, the submission-domination meme seems to have found fertile breeding ground. As long as the freedom-responsibility meme of Enlightenment lineage is out-replicated by its mutant, both memes will lose their hosts and their future will be the barren breeding ground of fossildom.

Perhaps the denizens of Dar al-Harb need to take heed of the version of cultural relativism promulgated by General Sir Charles James Napier, the Commander-in-Chief in India from 1859 to 1861. When Hindu priests complained to him about the prohibition of sati by British authorities, General Napier replied,

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