Relativism and absolutism

«The reason  that I did not contrast relativism and absolutism, but rather contrasted relativism and fundamentalism, defining fundamentalism as the belief that ideals must be grounded in something already real, and relativism as denying that claim, was that I agree that there is no difference between the pope and philosophers like myself when it comes to the strenght of our political convictions. If you want to put it that way, you can say we both believe in absolutes. The pope believes in different absolutes than philosophers like me. So I want to grant the point that everyone with moral convictions is as absolutistic as everybody else. But I want to say that that is not the issue that philosophers are discussing. They are discussing the question whether we need metaphysics, whether we need theology, whether we need a picture of the world as already holding the ideals that we wish to bring into existence.
About democracy as the notion is used in the United States: people like Dewey, defenders of social democracy like Dewey, would say, I think, that democracy is not itself an absolute. It is simply the best means to the greatest human happiness that we have been able to imagine so far. In the past we had other visions of what would maximize human happiness. Today our vision is of democracy. Tomorrow it may be some other way of maximizing human happiness. But human happiness remains the only absolute in the area. We don't hnow now what the ideal society would look like. We don't even know whether it would be a democratic society, just as a thousand years ago we didn't know what the ideal society would look like, though we all thought it would be a Christian and Catholic society. It may turn out not to be a Christian and Catholic society. Perhaps it won't even turn out to be a democratic society. But if human beings can freely discuss how to make each other happier, it will still be an ideal society.»

Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today, Finding common ground between philosophy and religion