I go to great pains to insist that skepticism is not the same as moral relativism. A relativist believes that there is no truth as such, no objective moral reality. A skeptic may affirm, as I do, the notion of an objective truth - but insist on the weakness of the human mind to know it fully. And so, in practical life, we eschew the moral certainties of fundamentalists.
Whether one agrees with this portrait of moral relativism, the problem, for me, with this is that an epistemological humility is NOT a Conservative value, per se.
I would suggest that so much belongs to a genre of what we might call right-thinking or a reasoning basis that goes beyond mere dogma or other untenored calculus, a calculus that may include great parts of the political machinations of getting and holding ruling authority as well as the social prefigurings of relations among small groups and individuals.
As such, it wouldn't really be correct (or fair?) to claim it for the Conservative tradition, really. Indeed, rather than this tempering of thought, it could be argued that Conservatism represents a distinct bias in thought, one that favors the "status quo ante", the content of which can be almost everything, including something as eponymously elevated as "Reagan Revolution" to outright injustice.
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