“Morality is relative, but not arbitrary. It's not arbitrary at all.”
Within Reason · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Alex O'Connor worries that Rovelli's relational view of reality slides into relativism. Rovelli answers with the Moon: its velocity is only defined relative to something else, but it can't go wherever it wants. He then points to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who decides morality is arbitrary and finds he can't escape his own.
Transcript
…to relativity, you know, somebody says, oh, come on. If velocity is relative, then the moon doesn't have a velocity per se. It's all relative. It can go wherever it wants. No, the moon cannot go wherever it is. Yeah, right, right, right, exactly. The moon moves in a very unique way. It's relative,
but it's not arbitrary. It's
relative, but it's not arbitrary. And so morality is relative, but not arbitrary. It's not arbitrary at all. And then there's beautiful, beautiful literature on that. If you read Tostoevsky Crime and Punishment, Lakolnikov, main character, falls in this trap at the beginning of saying, oh, morality is arbitrary. I don't need to obey to my own morality because if I think, you know, I can do, I can kill the little old lady, because I do it for the good of humankind. And then, so he commits a crime, and then he just cannot escape its own morality. This is a beautiful novel, among other things, about the immense power of morality. But if you, a little piece of your brain, use reasons, try to deny it. There's an entire being that rebels at it.
Sometimes people say that the difference between the moral law and like scientific laws, like I think C.S. Lewis writes about this, is, the difference with the moral law is that you can disobey the moral law. You can't disobey the law of physics, but you can disobey the moral law. That's what makes…
And if you accept that there is this level of dependence of morality on where you are, also your culture, then you're wiser in relation to others. Yeah.
Right?
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