Cryptonomicon via Instapundit.com
I actually quite like Neal Stephenson and I think he's remarkably insightful in a number of things. But I have found a couple of his thoughts to be a bit off. The first was the book In the beginning there was the command line which I will summarize as because experts use something, everyone should really use that same thing as it relates to drills and operating systems because they really know what they are doing. I found the flaw to be two fold... first, everyone is not an expert and would derive no benefit from using that expert thing and two, even experts do not always use the most advanced, most powerful tool at their disposal. Experts actually tend to use the correct tool for the job.
The attached quote is an interesting one, but there's a subtlety here that I disagree with. People who are non-religious can still have a strict moral code in which they can behave, it just will not be as universal or as universally understood. Take the abortion discussion for a moment; well reasoned people can disagree with either side. If you are pro-choice, you believe that life does not begin until time x after conception. If you are pro-life, you believe that life begins at some point prior to time x after conception (x may be 0 or may, in fact, be negative if you believe in not using contreception). While you have plenty of moral relativists who might be considered fringe on one side, you have the same types of people on the other side who believe the alternative view point based solely on an external source (their priest or holy book, independent of their own thought). My problem with Mr. Stephenson's point, and Instapundit's point (by the transitive property of conclusions), is that the important component of the evaluation is not the derivation of each person's moral code, it is how many people in a given society subscribe to that same code. A person who believes in a mystical being that is all powerful, if he is the only one who believes it, is a nut job. A group of people who believe in the same is a cult. A really really big group of people who believe in the same have formed a religion. I would not say that moral relativists are without any documentation or guidance... it is just not quite as cut and dry as the Bible.