Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined.

Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done, but it was done proudly, with selfies taken for remembering the "good times" later.

I find that on the long term the discussion tends to coalesce towards children. Well, in most wars out there children suffered from it. Even in WWII, you can bet that there was an American or Russian bomb that killed a German child, and you won't find a lot of either feeling all that conflicted about their actions. The atomic bombs are a tad controversial, but still find plenty proponents of that the horrific slow deaths they inflicted on quite a few people (including children) were in the end for the greater good.

So far I think about the closest to an effective "objective moral rule" I've heard is that it's immoral to torture children for fun. But when I think of it that's almost a tautology -- It works out to "It's immoral to cause harm without a good reason", more or less.

Or, if the objection here is that a given individual finds their own code as rigid and unyielding, I don't think that's really true either. Amazing horrors are committed by soldiers in wars even well outside of their own direct duty, and moral compromises of all sorts have been made for the sake of diplomacy.

Moral relativists are moral realists, meaning that they believe that moral truths are dependent, in part, on the culture in which the truths are being evaluated. So I don't think what you're talking about is moral relativism but rather, the fact that different cultures may have slightly different moral beliefs, which is obviously true.

For actual objections to moral relativism, aside from the usual objections to moral realism that undercut all of these: https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#H4

That I can fully agree with. My issue is that he often criticizing the U.S while downplaying the other side violence.

Saying something like "France should not have had a military intervention in Lybia" is fine. But saying this and then adding "and Gaddafi repression of the Arab Spring was exaggerated by the media" is when I know what you really wanted to say.

Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-imperialist criticism.

I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a very real impact on my family's well being and even survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not opposed to some of Chomsky's views on anti-imperialism, even though I respect his principled stance.

But calling him a "genocide denier" is incredibly cheap. If you read the rationale behind his early assessments of the situation, it becomes clear that it was based on (well founded) mistrust of American reporting. As the author of "Manufacturing Consent" he has been very consistent in that view.