My friend and colleague Dr. J writes what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs, Readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore. She recently posted two interesting notes on lazy relativism and strong relativism. Here's my comment on the latter:

And have you ever wondered if, like, what I see as "red" is what you see as "red?" And are you saying that "like, whatever" isn't a defensible position?

Seriously, thanks for the detailed explanation. The man or woman on the street--someone like me--probably thinks that all relativism is of the lazy variety.

Perhaps there's another idea for a SEGA panel: what are the biggest misconceptions non-specialists have about your field? The analogue to lazy relativism in economics is the mistaken view that "economics" means "money" or that "costs and benefits" are necessarily or exclusively financial. I think of "cost" very generally as whatever we give up when we make a choice and "benefit" very generally as whatever we gain when we make a choice. Every action is an attempt to change the world and to make it a better place (however we choose to define "better," and this is the point at which I refer students to the philosophy department) than the world we leave behind. The cost of an action is the action we didn't take.

The cost of reading this blog post and writing a comment is whatever else I could have done (nap, for example, or grade homework). The benefit was that I now have a better understanding of the difference between lazy relativism and strong relativism. If we really wanted to we could evaluate these in monetary terms. By investing my time in reading the blog post I gave up the opportunity to earn income now by going around the neighborhood offering to rake leaves (like a couple of kids on the sidewalk appear to be doing now) but I gained knowledge that might increase my income in the future. This is one way to think about action, but I think it actually limits our knowledge by throwing out non-pecuniary reasons for action.