It sounds ideal in a way to say Foucault got it right and managed to sweep away the two thousand year history of glorious and not-so-glorious attempts at envisaging some form of universal morality. One can now stand up and proudly be culturally and temporally contingent and conscious of it. In history (my particular personal pastime), Foucaultian analysis emphasises the centrality of language/discourse in the construction of contingent meanings, thus banishing the nasty metanarratives of unicausality and universalism forever. Huzzah (et al)! For moral philosophy, we can proudly stand tall and, with swellings of pride, declare
EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE!
Hold on a minute. Since reading a bit of Habermas, it surprises and shames me somewhat to observe the fundamental philosophical problem with that declaration. Secondly, with said small amount of knowledge of Habermas, like a leopard that changes its stripes, I don’t think I’m a relativist anymore.
Although that is possibly just because PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION is quite a cool phrase, philosophically speaking anyway. The obvious problem (as any fule know) with everything being relative is obviously that the statement everything is relative must be a part of everything and therefore must be relative. If everything is relative, declaring that everything is relative contradicts the content of the statement that everything is relative (since ‘everything is relative’ is a universal statement, not a relative one).
This puts post-modernism through the blender a bit since it constantly asserts (with overtones of the old Nietzschian Dionyssian stuff) the impossibility and undesirability of universalism. This is most apparent in Foucault’s history of the prison system where some have argued that his analysis rests on a cleverly cloaked essentialism of an age – the pre-modern as barbaric, and the modern as rational, controlling and unfree. The implied moral prescriptions here are problematic in the light of Habermas’ critical theory – Foucault’s moral philosophy (if such a thing is relativistically possible) rests on ethical and ontological relativism.
If one wants a moral philosophy of any sort and to engage in a debate, as Habermas points out, surely one must presume that both interlocuters believe absolutely in their own positions. This is where relativism falls down – if morality is relative, contingent and dependent on a thinly disguised its-just-what-we-do-around-here-at-this-point-in-time (or, to put it another way, shorter and with less hyphens, ‘contingency’) how can one engage in moral discourse?
Such a relativist position contradicts itself since, within the framework of critical theory (discourse) at least, it seems to me to be impossible to be a relativist. To do so robs one of the power to engage in the arguments one supports, and to reject those of your opposing interlocuters. Furthermore, the basic ontological contradiction of everything being relative leaves you in what is best termed a grey area of a moral vaccuum.
Of course, Habermas is not perfect. He himself robs the moral power of discourse through the lack of moral prescriptions in his advocacy of discourse (as opposed to ending the discussion or declaring a Hobbesian war). Yet I still feel profoundly shook up by discovering that I’m probably not a relativist (I’m not a critical theorist either, or a nihilist, or a particularly good philosophy student but those aren’t strictly relevant here).
Relativism has a certain self-centred security about it, particularly if we apply it to big moral questions like international relations. It allows me to support democracy, wholeheartedly believe in it, and yet contradict myself in (originally) opposing the (effectively democratising) invasion of Iraq. It neatly sidesteps issues of power relations and soft versus hard power with what is probably the discourse equivalent of a lilly livered liberal shrug of the shoulders which screams (or rather wetly suggests) that ‘everything is relative man.’
So if I am a moral universalist, what does that mean? Even as a relativist, I contradicted myself and had beliefs, ideals and politics, yet I could safely hide behind that screen of reflexivity or ironism. If I support democracy, then without relativism, I can’t talk vaguely about cultural rights. In that case, do I no longer think cultural difference is important? Implicitly, yes. And yet I think a strong form of relativism (nice oxymoron really) which acknowledged cultural difference yet empowered one to engage in moral/political critiques of inhuman, degrading, anti-democratic practices is perhaps impossible.
But that means a moral universalism is effectively what I’m left with. A view which (while clearly evolving, adapting and responding to change) has its positions and sticks to them, which believes in moral absolutes. Is that a loss of intellectual flexibility of an increase of intellectual maturity?
My head hurts. 
