Last time, this series reached an uncomfortable conclusion. The move it keeps making — the one it has spent a long time building — only works if there is no neutral ground: no view from nowhere, no place outside all the traditions from which a person can stand and judge them. And if that is right, there is an obvious and tempting inference. If there is no neutral ground, then no one stands higher than anyone else. Everyone is situated. Everyone is simply reporting the view from their own position, and no one can be wrong about the view from where they stand. So you could stop. You could set the whole difficulty down, keep the parts you liked, let everyone else keep theirs, and never have to settle an argument again, because there would be nothing left to settle.
I will admit that I found this inference a relief, and that I nearly accepted it. It took me a while to see what was wrong with it.
Here is what was wrong. The way out I had just found has a name. People have used that name for a very long time, almost always as an accusation. It is relativism. And the philosopher who built the move I had come to trust saw that inference coming. He spent a large part of his life arguing that it is a trap — that it does not say what it appears to say, and that no one can actually live inside it. So before walking through it, I owed both of us the work of finding out whether he was right.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the sixth of eight episodes on the one move this show keeps making, and what it costs. Last time the move finally got its name — Alasdair MacIntyre's — and in the same breath it produced a cost. The move only works if there is no neutral ground to judge from, which means the clarity you felt, seeing through everyone else's broken pieces, was never a view from nowhere. It was a view from somewhere. Tonight we take up the oldest and hardest reply to all of that: the charge that "no neutral ground" is simply relativism in better clothes — the same empty middle as the crude version, with better manners, and no one ever really right about anything. I am going to give that charge its full force, because it deserves it and because I nearly accepted it myself. Then I will give MacIntyre's answer, the one he worked on for most of his life. And then I will show you the weak point in that answer — because there is one, and I am not going to cover it over.
Tonight there is no rescue waiting at the end. Let me set out the objection first, at full strength, so you can see why it is so tempting — and then we will find out together whether there is firm ground on the other side of it.
Let me give the objection its proper name, and then build it up properly, because most people meet it in a weak form, and the weak form is not the one that should worry you.
The weak form is the thing people say at parties. Who's to say? It's all relative. What's true for you isn't true for me. That version fails on its own, and you don't need my help to push it over. The moment someone says "it's all relative" as though that were plainly and flatly true for everyone, they have stepped outside the relativism they are announcing: they have made one claim that is not relative — the claim that everything is relative — and you can hold them to it. The party version refutes itself. Set it aside.
The serious form does not make that mistake, and it comes straight out of the conclusion I handed you last time, which is exactly why I have to take it seriously. Follow it slowly.
Last time I argued — and I think by the end you accepted — that there is no view from nowhere. Every judgment about better and worse is made from inside some inherited way of seeing, with its own standards. You do not measure the world from open ground; you measure it from inside a tradition, by that tradition's lights. Now someone well read in MacIntyre says: fine. I grant all of that. And look at what follows from it.
If every standard of judgment lives inside some tradition, then there is no standard that sits above all the traditions and rates them against each other. There cannot be — that was the whole point; there is no outside. So when two traditions disagree, there is no higher court. Each judges by its own rules, and by its own rules, each comes out well. The Thomist measures the world by Thomist standards and finds that Thomism passes. The modern liberal measures by liberal standards and finds that liberalism passes. Of course they do. Each tradition sets its own examination and marks its own paper, and each awards itself top marks, because the standards it is marking against are its own.
So far this sounds like a standoff. Here is where it becomes an objection, and where it aims directly at MacIntyre.
MacIntyre is not a relativist. He does not want to be one, he says he is not one, and he means it. He holds that one tradition really can be better than another. He holds that the older, fuller moral world he keeps recovering is genuinely superior to the modern fragments — not merely different, not merely his preference, but better. He spent his life arguing that the tradition running back through Aristotle and Aquinas actually defeats its modern rivals. Rationally defeats them. That word carries his whole project. Take it away and the project collapses into exactly the nostalgia his critics accuse him of.
Now the objection. You say one tradition rationally defeats another. By what standard? And on his own terms, MacIntyre has only two answers, and each one is fatal.
The first answer: he points to some standard of "better" that both traditions must answer to — some measure of what makes a moral world superior that holds whichever tradition you are in. But he cannot. He has just spent a book arguing that there is no such standard, that every standard is bound to a tradition, that the dream of a measure floating free above all traditions is the central illusion of the modern age. If he reaches for that measure now, to declare his own side superior, he contradicts himself: he is bringing back the view from nowhere the moment it suits him, the very thing he charged you with wrongly believing in.
The second answer: he admits there is no such standard. Then "defeats" cannot mean measured against a neutral standard and found higher, because there is no such standard. So what is left of "defeats"? Only this: that from inside his tradition, by his tradition's standards, his tradition looks like the winner. But we already knew that. Every tradition looks like the winner from inside itself — that was the first step. So "Thomism defeats liberalism" reduces to "Thomists, judging by Thomist standards, prefer Thomism." That is not a fact about which tradition is better. It is a fact about MacIntyre and people like him. It is a report of what one group happens to esteem, with the word "rationally" attached to make it sound like more.
That is the objection. Not "who's to say." It is sharper than that: the moment you claim one tradition is rationally superior to another, you are either cheating or merely telling me what your own side prefers. There is no third thing that "rational superiority across traditions" could mean. And so the conclusion: MacIntyre has not escaped relativism at all. He has built a more sophisticated version of it, with better manners and footnotes — the version critics have called relativism in a tweed jacket. The manners are impeccable; the empty middle is the same as the party version's. No one is ever really right; some people simply prefer their own position and have read more books in support of it.
This does not stay a quarrel about a Scottish philosopher. It reaches you directly.
Last time you ran the move and reached past the wellness version of Stoicism — the ten-minute cold-plunge version — to the older, fuller thing, and you were sure the older thing was better: deeper, more demanding, more true. That certainty was the whole reward. The objection takes it. Better by what standard? And now you are in MacIntyre's position, facing the same two answers. Either you point to a measure of "better" that holds outside both the cold-plunge version and the old Stoic world — and you cannot, because the claim that a life lived in accordance with the cosmic order is a higher life exists only inside Stoicism itself. Or you admit there is no such measure, and then "the real Stoicism is better than the cold-plunge version" reduces to "I, standing inside the Stoic standard, prefer what the Stoic standard rates highly." On that reading, your sense that you had discovered something better was not a discovery at all. It was you preferring your own standard, and mistaking the preference for a discovery.
And if that is all it ever was — preference dressed as discovery — then the whole year was theatre. Every time you felt clearer than the people still holding the fragments, you were not clearer. You simply had a different favourite. The cold-plunge enthusiast prefers his ten-minute Stoicism; you prefer the cosmic kind; and there is no fact of the matter about which of you is right — only two positions and two views. The show that taught you to see through everyone else's fragments was just one more tradition handing out its own fragments and calling them clarity.
That is the objection, at full strength. And it is a strong one, which is why I nearly accepted it. The reason I nearly did is simple: as stated, I cannot see what is wrong with it. It follows. Grant that there is no neutral ground, and relativism seems to come with it, as though it had been there all along.
MacIntyre says it does not. He says you can grant every part of "no neutral ground" and still not be a relativist, and that seeing why is the most important thing he ever worked out. So let me give you his answer — not a wave of the hand, but the actual argument — and then we will see whether it holds.
MacIntyre's answer begins by challenging a picture the objection needs to work — a picture you have probably been carrying without noticing. The picture is this: a tradition is a sealed, self-contained system. Inside it are its standards; the standards judge everything inside; and the system runs on indefinitely, certifying itself, never able to fail, because it owns the only measure that could ever assess it. Two such systems, two measures, no contact and no contest. That is the picture underneath "each tradition marks its own paper."
MacIntyre says that picture is false to what a tradition actually is. A tradition, as he describes it, is not a sealed system. It is an argument — a long, continuing argument, running across centuries, about what is good and true and how to live, carried by real people who inherit it, question it, find its gaps, and try to repair it. And the crucial point, the one the sealed-system picture hides, is this: an argument can fail on its own terms. It can run into a difficulty that its own standards identify as a difficulty.
Hold onto that, because it is the centre of the reply, so let me make it concrete before it becomes abstract.
Consider what it is like when something you believe stops working from the inside — not when an outsider attacks it, but when it fails you, by the very standards you brought to it. Suppose you have a way of reading people that has served you well for years, and it starts producing predictions that keep turning out wrong. The failures accumulate, and you cannot fix them with more of the same. The method that always sorted things out has begun producing errors it cannot correct. No one had to stand on neutral ground and inform you that your method had failed. Your method told you. By its own promise — I will let you read people — it failed, and you could see it fail, because you knew what success was supposed to look like and this was not it.
MacIntyre says whole traditions can do the same. He calls it an epistemological crisis — a technical phrase for a plain thing: a tradition reaches a point where, using its own best methods, asking its own questions, holding to its own standards, it begins generating problems it cannot solve. Its own thinkers, by their own lights, can see that it is failing. The contradictions accumulate. The questions it raises, it can no longer answer with its own resources. It is not that an outsider has declared it a failure. It has failed by its own accounting. And this is the part the sealed-system picture said was impossible: a tradition's own standards can be the thing that convicts it. You do not need a view from nowhere to know you have stopped being able to solve your own problems. You only need to have set yourself the problems.
Now the second half, and this is where MacIntyre earns the word "defeats" that he needs.
A tradition in crisis is sometimes rescued, and not always by itself. Sometimes a rival tradition can do what the failing one could not. And here is MacIntyre's test for when one tradition genuinely defeats another — take it slowly, because every part of it is doing work. Tradition B rationally defeats tradition A when, from inside B's resources, you can do two things that A could never do for itself. First, you can explain A's real achievements — not dismiss A, but account for everything A genuinely got right, why it was a serious enterprise, why intelligent people lived inside it for centuries. Second, you can explain, in terms A itself can recognise, exactly why A broke down — why it reached the difficulty it reached, in language A's own members would have to admit names a real failure. And the decisive part: A cannot do the same in return. A cannot explain B's successes, cannot diagnose B from the outside, cannot account for B's failures at all, because A lacks the resources to. The explanation runs in only one direction.
When that happens — when B can fully account for A, both its achievements and its breakdown, while A is helpless to account for B — that, MacIntyre says, is one tradition rationally defeating another. And notice what it required: no neutral ground at all. No one stood outside both traditions with a master measure. The whole judgment happened inside the encounter between the two, using the failing tradition's own standards to certify its own failure, and the surviving tradition's power to explain what the other could not. It is a fact about the relationship between them. It is local. And it is still a fact — not a preference — because A's own members, if they are honest, by their own standards, have to concede that B explained what they could not.
MacIntyre turns to the history of science to show the shape of it, and I will keep the history rough on purpose, because the real story is far messier than any short version; what I am borrowing is the shape, and the shape is his. Consider the way physics changed several centuries ago. For a long time the best available picture was, roughly, that a moving object carries a kind of impressed push that gradually runs down — a thrown stone coasting on a fading force. That is a simplified version of a serious medieval physics, with real explanations, real predictions, centuries of careful work behind it. Over time it ran into difficulties — motions it struggled to account for, questions it kept raising and could not close. Then a new physics grew up, the one we trace to Galileo and later Newton, and it could do both things. It could explain what the old picture got right — why the impressed-push account worked as well as it did, for the cases where it worked. And it could explain, in terms the older view could be brought to recognise, why that view stalled where it stalled. The reverse was not available: the older picture had no way to explain the new one's successes, or to diagnose its own breakdown. The explanation ran one way. So the new physics did not merely replace the old by fashion or force; on MacIntyre's reading, it defeated it — and you can say so without ever standing on physics-neutral ground, because there is no such ground and you never needed it. You needed only the two pictures, meeting, and the difference between what each could explain about the other.
Now bring it back, because this is MacIntyre's whole answer to the relativism charge. The charge said "defeats" can only mean a neutral measurement, which is cheating, or a tribal preference, which is sociology, and that there is no third possibility. MacIntyre says there is a third possibility. "B defeats A" means that B can explain A's achievements and A's breakdown in A's own terms, while A is helpless before B. That is not a neutral measurement — no one left the encounter to make it. And it is not a mere preference — A's own members, by their own standards, are forced to it. It is exactly the third option the charge insisted did not exist. The objection offered two options and claimed they were the only two: judge from nowhere, or merely report what your own side prefers. MacIntyre offers a third — that you can judge between traditions from no neutral place and still be tracking a fact, because the fact lives in the meeting between them, not above them.
That, at full strength, is why MacIntyre spent his life insisting that no-neutral-ground does not deliver you to relativism. The relativist thinks every tradition is a sealed system that can only ever pass its own examination. MacIntyre says no — traditions can fail their own examinations, and when they do, a rival that can account for the failure is, he argues, rationally superior to it, and you can say so without ever standing on neutral ground.
It is a serious answer, and I want to say plainly that I think it is a serious answer, because in a moment I am going to start testing it, and I do not want you to mistake the testing for a judgment that it is weak. It might be exactly right. Let us look for the weak point.
Here is the weak point, and I found it by asking MacIntyre the same question the objector asked him. He turned that question on the charge; I am going to turn it on the answer.
His test for one tradition defeating another was that B can explain more than A can — B accounts for A's successes and A's breakdown, and A cannot return the favour. The whole thing rests on that word, more. B explains more. B is more comprehensive. B has more resources. And the question I cannot get past is: more by what standard?
Because "the tradition that can explain more wins" sounds local — it sounds as though it is simply reading off a fact about the two of them. But consider what it quietly assumes. It assumes that explaining more is better than explaining less. That comprehensiveness is a virtue. That a picture which accounts for its rival's successes and failures is superior to one that cannot. Those are not nothing. Those are standards — standards about what makes one body of thought better than another. And here is the question: are those standards inside one tradition, or above all of them? If they are only MacIntyre's tradition's standards — if "the more comprehensive account wins" is itself a Thomist or Aristotelian value — then a rival tradition could simply shrug and say: we do not rank ourselves by how well we explain our opponents; we rank ourselves by faithfulness to what was revealed, or by how we live, or by something else entirely. And MacIntyre's test would get no grip on them. But if "the more comprehensive tradition is rationally superior" holds for every tradition, whether they accept it or not, then we have found a standard that stands above all the traditions and judges them all. Which is the view from nowhere — the thing he told us does not exist.
You see the worry. The crisis test might be the view from nowhere again, in disguise. "Explains more, with no reverse explanation available" could be a local dressing on a thoroughly neutral standard — explanatory power — that we are holding every tradition to whether it signed up to it or not.
MacIntyre has a reply to this as well, and I will give it to you, and I will tell you why I cannot decide whether it is enough. His reply is that the judgment is not made from nowhere; it is made by somebody — and not just anybody. It is made by a person who has actually lived inside both traditions: who learned the first as a native, from the inside, and then learned the second the same way, well enough to think in it, and who found — from having belonged to both — that the second could make sense of the first's collapse while the first stood mute before the second. That person is not standing on neutral ground. They are standing on two grounds, one after the other, fluent in both, and reporting what they could and could not do in each. The comparison is not made from above. It is the testimony of a traveller who has genuinely lived in both countries.
And perhaps that is the answer. But here is where I cannot find firm ground. When that traveller says "I lived in both, and the second could explain the first but not the other way around" — is that a discovery, or a conversion story? Every convert in history will tell you, sincerely, that their new world makes sense of their old one and not the reverse. That is more or less what conversion feels like from the inside; it is the standard shape of the testimony. The person who left the faith and the person who found it both say the same sentence — now I understand what I used to be, and back then I could not have understood this. They cannot both be tracking a tradition-neutral fact, because they travelled in opposite directions. So either "B explains A, but A cannot explain B" is doing real work that a mere conversion story cannot counterfeit — in which case we are back to needing some standard of what counts as really explaining, really accounting for, that holds across both, and that standard is looking neutral again — or it is the convert's own sense of completeness, felt as a fact, in just the way your certainty about the older Stoicism last time felt like a discovery and may have been a preference. I genuinely do not know which it is. I have read MacIntyre closely and I can argue it either way, and so can people far cleverer than I am. That is not coyness. That is the actual state of the question. The crisis test is either MacIntyre's escape from relativism or it is the view from nowhere returning unnoticed, and which one it is is not settled. It is the live argument, right now, among people who have given their lives to this.
Now let me bring in someone who thinks the whole quarrel rests on a mistake — because I owe you the other shape of the doubt, not only the one inside MacIntyre's own terms.
His name is Donald Davidson, an American philosopher, and in 1974 he wrote a paper with a title that sounds like nothing and means a great deal: On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. His move is to walk up to this entire conversation and ask: wait — these sealed traditions, these self-contained ways of seeing that cannot be judged from outside because there is no common ground between them — are you sure they even exist? Not "are they good or bad," not "should we be relativists about them," but something more basic: is the very idea of them coherent?
Here is his argument, and it is quietly powerful. For the relativist's picture to work, you need traditions that are genuinely sealed off from one another — different rationalities, different conceptual worlds, so different that there is no common ground between them at all. Wholly other. But now ask: how do you even know there is another tradition over there? How do you recognise it as a tradition, a way of reasoning, a scheme of thought at all? You can only do that by understanding enough of it — translating enough of it — to see that it is people reasoning, holding beliefs, making claims. The moment you recognise it as another rationality, you have already understood much of it from where you stand. And if you genuinely could not translate any of it — if it were truly and totally sealed off — you would have no way to recognise it as a rationality in the first place. It would be noise. You cannot even point to a wholly incommensurable scheme, because pointing to it as a scheme means you have already crossed the barrier.
So Davidson says the picture of sealed systems, mutually untranslatable, with no common ground, undermines itself. There are no fully incommensurable traditions, because anything you can recognise as a tradition is already partly within your reach. And if that is right, the whole no-neutral-ground anxiety may be an anxiety about something that was never there. The barriers the relativist needs, and perhaps the barriers MacIntyre needs, may be lower than either of them thinks — or not barriers at all.
That would be a clean way out, and it is the natural thing to reach for, so let me give you MacIntyre's reply before you take it, because he has one and it is good. MacIntyre says: Davidson has shown that traditions can communicate — that you can understand a rival in its own terms. Very well; more than well, in fact, because MacIntyre needs that. His whole crisis test requires you to understand the failing tradition well enough to state its failure in its own language. He never needed the systems to be totally sealed. But — and here the objection returns — being able to understand another tradition is not the same as there being a neutral judge between you. Two people can understand each other's positions completely, every word, and still have no shared court that settles which of them is right. Translation gets you communication. It does not get you a tribunal. Davidson removed a barrier MacIntyre was glad to see go; the thing MacIntyre actually claims — that there is no tradition-neutral standard of justification — is still standing.
And is that right? Is it true that you can understand someone all the way down and still share no standard for who is correct — or does enough shared understanding to communicate already bring in enough common ground to begin adjudicating, a little, and then more? I do not know. That is a third open question, and I am going to leave it open too, because it is open.
So here is where we actually stand tonight, and I am not going to tidy it up. The relativism charge is not dead. The view that "no neutral ground" collapses into "no one is ever really right" is serious, and it is still standing — I could not defeat it, and I cannot defeat it for you. MacIntyre's answer is not dead either — the idea that a tradition can fail by its own lights, and a rival can rationally defeat it from inside the encounter with no view from nowhere, is real and might be exactly right. And Davidson is standing too, off to one side, suggesting the whole fight assumes barriers that are not there. Three serious positions, all upright, none having knocked the others down. That is not evasion. That is the field.
But before you take that away — do the one thing that makes it yours rather than mine, because there is a move buried in all of this that you can use tomorrow, and you only own it if you run it yourself.
Watch what the objector did to you in the first part of tonight. They handed you two options and called them the only two. The first: you judge from nowhere, neutral, clear-eyed, tracking the plain truth. The second: you do not, and so it is all merely preference, your side against theirs, no one right. Two options — and the whole force of the relativism charge was in getting you to believe those are the only two, so that the moment you admit you are not doing the first, you have accepted the second. MacIntyre's entire life's work is the claim that there is a third option: rational judgment between situated people, neither from nowhere nor merely tribal. Davidson's work is the claim that the choice itself is malformed. Whether either of them is right is the open question. But the move — the thing you can keep — is catching a false choice in the act of presenting itself as the whole set of options. That is the oldest move this show has, from the very beginning, and the one you own best: someone hands you two options and swears they are the only two, and the first thing you do is ask whether there is a third.
So here is your case, and it is not Galileo and it is not the Stoics. It is you, this week. Find an argument you are actually in — a real disagreement, about politics or your family or how to run something, where you are sure you are right. And listen to how you describe the two sides to yourself. I expect it sounds like the false choice. I follow the evidence; they have an agenda. I am being reasonable; they are just emotional. I see how things really work; they are captured by their side. The first option for you, the second for them — you on neutral ground, they trapped in their own position. Now catch it. That is the same false choice the relativist handed MacIntyre, and you have just served it to yourself, with yourself in the only neutral chair in the room. Test it. Are you actually on neutral ground in this argument — or are you standing in a tradition too, with its own standards, which you have stopped being able to see because it is the lens and not the thing seen? And then the harder half, the part that does not let you off into easy relativism either: granting that you both stand somewhere, is there still a third thing here? Can one of you explain the other's position, and why they hold it, and the facts on the table, while the other cannot return it? Or are you simply sure you can explain them better — the way a convert is always sure — because you are the one standing inside your own answer? Run that, on a real argument, without flattering yourself. You will know the moment you cannot tell which it is. That inability to tell is exactly the weak point we are standing in tonight — and now it is in your hands, and not only in MacIntyre's.
Here is what you have now that you did not have an hour ago — and tonight the gain is real because of, not in spite of, the fact that we settled nothing.
You came in holding the relativist exit as a free pass. I know, because I was holding it too. No neutral ground, so no one is ever really right, so I can set the whole weight down and keep the parts I like. Here is what you take away instead: that exit is not free. It has its own cost, and a steep one. To take it, you have to actually say the words — the cold-plunge Stoicism is not worse than the real thing. Not a degraded fragment. Not a loss sold back to you as wellness. Merely different. One view, another view, no fact about which of them sees more. And you have to say that about every recovery that ever gave you the sense of reaching something more real — about every time you felt you had got underneath the marketing to something truer. None of it was truer. It was simply yours. If you can pay that cost, the exit is yours; relativism is a place some serious people genuinely live. But it is not the free shrug it appeared to be. It costs you the very thing that made the move feel like clarity in the first place. Most people who reach for it have not counted the price either.
And the other thing you take away — the tool, the part that is yours no matter who turns out to be right — is the false choice, and the habit of catching it. Someone hands you a hard choice and swears those are the only two options: judge from nowhere, or admit it is all merely preference. You now know to look for the third option, because the whole live argument in modern philosophy is about whether there is a third option — MacIntyre says he found one, the rational defeat of one tradition by another from inside their meeting, with no view from nowhere required; Davidson says the choice was malformed, that the sealed barriers it assumes were never there. You do not get to know tonight which of them is right. You do get to stop being fooled by a false choice, which is more than you walked in with.
Here I have to be honest about what we did and did not do, because the easy version of tonight would have me pick a winner, and I will not. I did not show you that MacIntyre defeats the relativism charge. I showed you that the charge does not win by default the way it promised to — there is at least a serious, worked-out answer, the idea that a tradition can fail by its own lights, that might be exactly right. And I showed you that the answer does not win by default either, because its central word — explains more — might be the view from nowhere in disguise, and even MacIntyre's traveller, the one who lived in both worlds, might be a convert mistaking a sense of completeness for a fact. The charge is standing. The answer is standing. Davidson is standing off to one side, saying you are all arguing about walls that are not there. None of them has been defeated. That is genuinely where the best people are tonight, and I am not going to pretend, once the recording stops, that it is tidier than it is.
This is the sixth of eight, and it was the episode in which no one rescued you. The first five walked you out onto the diagnosis, took away the secure ground, named the move, and showed you its cost. Tonight you reached for the one exit that looked free — and found it has a price, and that the man who built the move saw it coming and built an answer to it that may or may not hold.
Now, there is one comfort you have left, and I had it too. All right — perhaps I am inside a tradition; perhaps relativism costs more than I thought. But at least the diagnosis is true. We really do live in the fragments; we really have no shared moral world left; MacIntyre got that much right. Hold that thought carefully, because next time someone takes even that. The single most respected reply to MacIntyre argues that he looked straight at the living tradition he was standing in and pronounced it dead — that "we have no shared tradition, only fragments" is not a diagnosis but a man failing to see the ground under his own feet. I am not going to tell you tonight whether that is true. I am going to give it full force next time, the way I gave the relativist full force tonight, because it is the last of these ways out and you deserve to watch it tested.
But you take tonight away first. So take it as the thing it actually is — not "is it all relative," a question you have now seen has more than two answers, none of them settled. Take the harder one, the one that is yours whichever way the larger arguments go: you are standing somewhere. Not nowhere. Somewhere, in some inheritance, reasoning by standards you did not choose and mostly cannot see. You cannot buy your way out of that with a free "it is all relative anyway" — not any longer. Perhaps it really is all relative; some serious people think so, and tonight did not prove them wrong. But you have seen that saying so costs you something real, and that it may not even be the exit it appears to be, because the man who built the move has an answer that may hold. So "no one is ever right, so it does not matter" is not the free shrug it seemed to be. It is a position now — with a price, and a live dispute over whether it is even true — not a door you slip through for nothing. So the question from last time is still on the table, sharper now: which tradition is already reasoning through you, unnoticed — and can you find out where you are standing, and stand there deliberately, knowing it could be wrong? You could not answer that last time. You still cannot tonight. What you can no longer do is reach for "it is all relative" to make the question go away without paying for it. The fact that you are standing somewhere is still true, and still yours to do something about.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.