What moral guide should American society use for making moral decisions, moral absolutism, moral relativism, or something in between?

This is, of course, a matter of opinion.  My own view is that the US should use something in between as our moral standard.  Perhaps we should use moral absolutism on “big issues” and moral relativism on little ones.  Of course, that is still very difficult as we still have to define which issues are big or little.

Moral absolutism is not a good basis on which to make our moral decisions.  There is too...

This is, of course, a matter of opinion.  My own view is that the US should use something in between as our moral standard.  Perhaps we should use moral absolutism on “big issues” and moral relativism on little ones.  Of course, that is still very difficult as we still have to define which issues are big or little.

Moral absolutism is not a good basis on which to make our moral decisions.  There is too much danger that we will be prejudiced in favor of our own values and will not realize that other people’s ways are just different, not evil.  For example, should we ban arranged marriages because they go against our ideals of personal freedom?  You could clearly argue that we should.  However, I do not see where it is morally worse than, for example, people who rush into spontaneous marriages and then get divorced 3 months later, which is something we accept.  Arranged marriages seem antiquated and wrong to us, but I do not see where they are necessarily worse than what we have now.

On the other hand, moral relativism is a terrible basis on which to make moral decisions.  Do we want to allow a minority within our country to kill members of their religion who convert to another religion?  Do we want them to be able to kill their daughters when they bring dishonor on the family?  Do we want other groups to be able to practice religions that call for the use of illegal drugs?  (To many people, this last one will be an example of how it is hard to differentiate between big issues and little ones.)  Clearly, there are things that we would never want to allow or condone, even if other people think that they are just fine, morally speaking.

From this, it seems clear that we have to use something in between moral absolutism and moral relativism.  My own preference is that we should use moral absolutism for big issues and relativism for less important issues, but I fully understand that this does not make things easy for us as there is no clear line as to which moral issues are trivial and which are important.