My tone was dismissive; I apologize. I recently began a history book that opens with Einstein and immediately links to moral relativism, and the author doesn't especially discourage the reader from concluding that the “anything goes, all opinions are valid” philosophy led fairly directly to the destruction of Europe.

The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe....

Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: ‘Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.’ Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

I do think it is important that we recognize that certain statements like “Marcus said this” are either true or false, and if people disagree about it we might not be certain who is right but we can be certain that only one of them is right.