A modest relativism.

• Author: Griffin, Leslie
• Position: Tribute to retired Oregon Supreme Court Justice

"[N]o ends can be better than the means of their achievement."(1)

This phrase, quoted from Professor Linde's 1975 Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise Lecture, is distinctive and restrained. It is distinctive in contrast to the usual "the end does not justify the means." It is restrained in its rejection of unattainable ends sought by ever-inadequate means. It expresses the professor's preference for "`the morality of process'" over the "perfection of unique principles of justice."(2) After 1975, Justice Linde demonstrated his distinctive and restrained jurisprudence on the Oregon Supreme Court.

When I met him in 1991, Justice Linde was again Professor Linde, teaching constitutional law at Stanford Law School. He knew of my pre-law school education in moral philosophy and religion, and recognized that I often looked at law from the perspective of moral theory. Occasionally he expressed skepticism about comprehensive theories of morality and their relevance for the law, and I worried about law without morals.

This journal celebrates Justice Linde's distinctive contributions to state constitutional commentary. I appreciate the corresponding insights on morality and law that arise from the specifics of the states. Justice Linde reminds us, for example, that "a state court has reason for caution in describing even strongly held values as moral or social absolutes.... [A] modest relativism in such matters is forced upon us by the federal system itself"(3) (in which fifty states disagree about their values). State courts learn much of their "modest relativism" from the detailed work of "ordinary law,"(4) of marriage and death and debt. So may philosophers learn from this Justice the merits of a restrained inductive reasoning based on the details of ordinary life.

The moral relativism is modest and not absolute, a lesson that is reinforced by Justice Linde's analysis of state initiatives. Moral passions may drive majorities to impose their values on minorities through the initiative process. In such...