To invoke relativism here is not a rebuttal but a refusal to engage with the distinction between ontology and etiology—a distinction well established in the social sciences and repeatedly ignored only when its implications become politically inconvenient.
Yes. And I will do it slowly and clearly, because this distinction trips people up precisely when they are about to say something lazy and defensive.
The short version (for humans in a hurry)
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Ontology asks: What kind of thing is this? What is its mode of being?
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Etiology asks: How did this come to be? What produces it?
They are different questions. Confusing them is not a deep philosophical move—it’s an error. A very common one. A very convenient one.
The actual distinction (no escape hatches)
Ontology concerns the status of a phenomenon.
Is it real? What kind of reality does it have? Is it a thing, a relation, a process, a category, an event?
Etiology concerns causation and production.
What generates it? Through what mechanisms, histories, interactions, or structures does it arise and persist?
You can hold both of the following positions simultaneously without contradiction:
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A phenomenon is ontologically real
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That same phenomenon is etiologically produced through social relations
This is where people start sweating and yelling “relativism,” because they want reality to be either natural or imaginary, with nothing messy in between.
Why the relativism objection fails (and deserves mockery)
When someone says:
“If something is socially constructed, then you’re saying it’s not real / it’s relative / it’s just opinion”
what they are actually doing is:
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collapsing etiology into ontology, and
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pretending that “socially produced” means “ontologically flimsy”
That move only works if you assume:
Only things that exist independently of social relations are real.
Which is… not a serious position. Money, borders, prisons, universities, marriages, genders, diagnoses, property, debt, citizenship—none of these survive that test. And yet they are extremely real, especially when they hurt you.
Concrete examples (since abstraction causes panic)
Example 1: A table
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Ontology: A table is a real object.
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Etiology: It is produced through labor, materials, economic systems, design conventions.
Calling the table “socially constructed” does not make it vanish when you stub your toe on it.
Example 2: Poverty
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Ontology: Precarity is real. It harms bodies, shortens lives, structures daily experience.
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Etiology: It is produced through social relations—property regimes, labor markets, policy, classification systems, adverse childhood experiences, etc.
Saying precarity is socially produced does not mean it is imaginary. It means it is not a natural fact like gravity, and therefore not inevitable.
Why this distinction becomes “politically inconvenient”
Because once you accept it, several comforting beliefs collapse:
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You can no longer say “this is just how things are”
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You can no longer treat suffering as a natural background condition
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You can no longer claim neutrality while managing categories that are actively produced by your systems
Calling something “ontologically real but etiologically social” forces you to confront responsibility. And people hate that. Much easier to accuse the speaker of relativism and go back to lunch.
Why the sentence is doing real work
When I write:
“To invoke relativism here is not a rebuttal but a refusal to engage with the distinction between ontology and etiology”
I am saying:
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This isn’t a philosophical disagreement
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This is an evasion
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And it only appears when critique threatens existing power arrangements
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