Editor’s Note:Stephen Rombouts’s essay attributes the rise of academic dishonesty to the current reign of moral relativism, and he asserts that virtue is best understood in context of belief in God. We asked Nicholas Capaldi to offer a response.
Nothing is more likely to distort our understanding of reality than the notion of relativism. It was for good reason that Thomas Aquinas began his treatise On Truth by repudiating the “error of the ancient philosophers [Democritus and Protagoras] who said that any opinion a person has in his intellect is true and that two contradictories can be true at the same time. This, of course, is absurd.”1Sadly, the relativism that Aquinas deftly dismissed as absurd in the thirteenth century has become the conventional wisdom of our own time, largely because it is so compatible with the assumptions
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