Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts

Excerpt of Justin McBrayer's opinion piece in the NY Times with my commentary throughout:

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

TB: No.

I was. 

TB: You shouldn't have been.

As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

TB: That comports fairly well with my own experience.  

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. 

TB: It is true that most philosophers seem to be moral realists and not relativists (relativism may or may not be a species of anti-realism depending on how one defines moral realism).  But it could be that there are a few intellectuals who hold a large degree of sway over the intelligentsia more generally.  Richard Rorty comes to mind as an anti-realist (not just about moral truths but truths more generally) whose writings have been  quite influential even if not in philosophy.  In addition, though it is true that most students entering college are not influenced directly by philosophers, that does not rule out that they have been influenced indirectly way downstream.

So where is the view coming from?

Was Martin Luther King, Jr. Like a Nonviable Fetus?

It just occurred to me that a certain kind of objection seems applicable both to moral relativism and a popular pro-abortion position. 

In short, I'll understand moral relativism as the view that moral truths are relative to particular cultures or societies.  If your society practices capital punishment, then it's morally permissible.  If it disapproves of it, then capital punishment is morally wrong.  [A bit more precisely I'll understand moral relativism as the view (a) denying the following: there are some moral truths independent of whatever people in a given society believe or practice, and (b) affirming the following: moral truths about some action A in a society are true only because people in that culture believe that A is right or wrong or practice A.]
 
Now there are all sorts of problems with moral relativism.  If true there would be numerous absurdities which I won't go into.  Instead, I'll focus on just one which also applies to arguments involving the viability of a fetus: