I was recently doing a survey recommended to me by BoingBoing. One of the questions involved a poor person giving money to a charity vs. a rich person giving the same amount of money to a charity. It reminded me of the parable of the widow’s mite.

Now, I have often been told, as a moral relativist/Aristotelian ethicist, that Judeo-Christian values stand in opposition to moral relativism. In fact, one of the major reasons my brother-in-law converted was because it was clear to him that god was an absolute; this was comfortable for him because, as a mathematician, he was comfortable with absolute values. My father and my sister both have made arguments to the effect that if one believes in the Divine, an absolute, one cannot be a moral relativist and vice versa, a moral relativist cannot accept any absolute.

When I reread the parable, however, it seems to me that Jesus is advocating moral relativism: the widow gave all that she could, an act more moral than any other who had donated money that day. It was not the effect (the money gained by the Temple) that was important, but the circumstances, manner, and intent behind the people acting.