Moral relativism has distrubingly clear results when applied by national leaders. Historian Paul Johnson talks about it in context of a feature in The New Criterion. Johnson asks:
What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government. However, this, in turn, is made possible by the second and far more serious evil, moral relativism — the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, good for all human beings everywhere and in all ages, and that there is no such thing as unconditional truth.
Introducing The New Criterion feature, Roger Kimball writes:
It wasn’t that long ago that a responsible educated person in the West was someone who entertained firm moral and political principles. When those principles were challenged, he would typically rise to defend them. The more serious the challenge, the more concerted the defense.
Today, as the Canadian writer William Gairdner reminds us in his little-noticed but excellent new study of relativism, the equivalent educated person is likely to have a very different attitude towards whatever moral and political ideas—”principles” is no longer the right word—he lives by. When those ideas are challenged, deference to the challenger rather than defense of the principles is the order of the day. “While perhaps more broadly learned” than his less forgiving predecessor, such a person, Gairdner writes, “is more likely to think of him or herself as proudly distinguished by the absence of ‘rigid’ opinions and moral values, to be someone ‘tolerant’ and ‘open.'”