* This essay is a revision of my article, “The Crisis of Our Times,” which was printed in the Congressional Record, July 31, 1968 (Extension of Remarks), pp. E7150–E7157.

¹ Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U. S. 463, 491, 492 (1966).

² According to Justice Douglas, masochists and homosexuals are nothing more than “somewhat offbeat, non-conformist and odd.” Their desires, he says, are just as legitimate as those of normal people. And after placing the word normal between quotation marks, he goes so far as to suggest that to prefer the mode of life of one to that of another is merely a matter of personal “taste.” But having thus boldly proclaimed his moral relativism, Justice Douglas humbly concludes: “How can we know enough to probe the mysteries of the subconscious of our people and say that this is good for them and that is not” (Ibid., 489, 491).

³ Marcuse, Herbert et al. , A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, 1965)Google Scholar. See his concluding essay entitled, “Repressive Tolerance,” and my essay, “The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse,” Review of Politics, October, 1969.

⁴ Devlin, Patrick, The Enforcement of Morals (New York, 1965), p. 9Google Scholar.

⁵ See Gropsey, Joseph, “The Moral Basis of International Action,” in Goldwin, Robert A. (ed.), America Armed (Chicago, 1961), p. 72Google Scholar.

⁶ See Minogue, Kenneth R., The Liberal Mind (New York, 1968), p. 83Google Scholar.

⁷ See Clor, Harry M., Obscenity and Public Morality (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar.

⁸ Minogue, , op. cit., p. 83Google Scholar.

⁹ Devlin, , op. cit., pp. 11, 13Google Scholar.

¹⁰ One need not be an ethical absolutist to reject moral relativism. See Wheelwright, Philip, A Critical Introduction to Ethics (3rd ed., New York, 1959), chapter 2Google Scholar.

Three major categories of moral relativism may be noted: cultural(or sociological), individualistic (or psychological), and linguistic. Examples of cultural relativists are: Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture (New York, 1946)Google Scholar, and Herskovits, Melville J., Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. Meanwhile the social sciences are dominated by logical positivism. This doctrine holds that moral judgments express no proposition which can be either true or false; they are merely emotive utterances expressing the subjective state of the speaker. Thus, to say, “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” is to utter nothing more than the factual statement, “You stole that money”; it merely evinces the speaker's moral disapproval. See Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic (New York, 1946), pp. 107–112Google Scholar. Accordingly, the social sciences are behaviorcdly oriented. See Berelson, Bernard (ed.), The Behavioral Sciences Today (New York, 1963), p. 3Google Scholar, who says: “The ultimate end [of the behavioral sciences] is to understand, explain, and predict human behavior in the same sense in which scientists understand, explain, and predict the behavior of physical forces or biological factors or, closer to home, the behavior of goods and prices in the economic market.”

For the writings of behaviorists in political science, see Ulmer, S. Sidney (ed.), Introductory Readings in Political Behavior (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar.

For critiques of behavioralism and of moral relativism (the two are inseparable), see Storing, Herbert J. (ed.), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; and Ward, Leo R. (ed.), Ethics and the Social Sciences (Notre Dame, 1959)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 5 (end), 6.

¹² Erich Roll, Elements of Economic Theory, cited in Wheelwright, Philip, A Critical Introduction to Ethics (rev. ed.: New York, 1949), p. 302Google Scholar.

¹³ See Glendon Schubert, “Is There a Public Interest Theory,” and Sorauf, Frand, “TheConceptual Muddle,” in Friedrich, Carl (ed.), The Public Interest NOMOS, V; New York, 1962Google Scholar; Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York, 1953), chapters 2 and 11Google Scholar; Gross, Bertram, The Legislative Struggle (New York, 1953), chapter 1Google Scholar; Lasswell, Harold, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York, 1936), chapter 1Google Scholar; Bentley, Arthur, The Process of Government (Chicago, 1908), chapters 11 and 15Google Scholar.

¹⁴ The statement that values are relative to culture does not logically entail the assertion that the values of one culture are neither better nor worse than those of another. This is admitted by Stace, W. T., a professed relativist, in The Concept of Morals (New York, 1962), pp. 13–16Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Fulbright, J. William, Old Myths and New Realities (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. Consistent with Hobbes, Fulbright suggests that “life and peace” are the ultimate values (pp. 75–76). Consequently, the Senator denies that the nation-state is an object of ultimate loyalty, by which I suppose he means political loyalty (p. 139). If so, we may wonder whom or what the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee represents. He cannot represent the American “ideology,” which he regards as a “luxury” we cannot afford (pp. 77, 141)—an ideology he calls a system of “myths” (p. 7). But what Senator Fulbright regards as the “new realities” are those seen from the perspective of old Hobbes modified by neo-Freudian psychology. (Note the authorities cited by Fulbright, many of whom share his moral or cultural relativism which is so clearly implied on pp. 6–7 and 9–10.)

¹⁶ See Fulbright's, Senator preface to Frank, Jerome D., Sanity and Survival (New York, 1968), p. x.Google Scholar

¹⁷ New York Times, August 22, 1968.

¹⁸ Op. cit., p. 67.