Evidence · Case 05 · Relativism

Christian Smith and others, “Lost in Transition”

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

Sociologist Christian Smith and his team interviewed 230 young adults, ages 18 to 23, for this Oxford University Press study. Most described morality as a personal choice, yet when pressed they could not say why anything was actually right or wrong, and many could not tell the difference between believing something is wrong and it being wrong. Smith’s own line is that slavery is evil whether or not anyone thinks so. Asked to name a moral dilemma they had faced, some offered things like whether to buy a second cat litter box.

Sources

Christian Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, “Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood,” Oxford University Press, 2011. (opens in a new tab)
Christian Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, “Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood,” Oxford University Press, 2011.

Objections & responses

A sample of 230 young adults can’t support claims about people today, and being unable to articulate a philosophy of ethics is normal. Most people can’t articulate a philosophy of science either. Inarticulacy isn’t inconsistency.: The sample point is fair: the study is illustrative rather than representative, and it should be read that way. The articulacy point is partly fair too; nobody expects a metaethics seminar from a twenty-year-old. But Smith’s finding was not that respondents lacked technical vocabulary. It was that many actively denied there was any fact of the matter about right and wrong, and then reacted to concrete evils as if there were. That gap between stated theory and moral reaction is the whole point: not that people cannot explain morality, but that what they say about it and how they respond to it come apart.

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