What makes the intensity and persistence of the Imus flap so curious is that there was no controversy over the remark itself. Left, right, and center, everybody agreed that it was a boorish and offensive thing to say.

         So commentators who were spoiling for an argument were forced to ratchet up the discussion a philosophical notch or two, transforming it into a debate between moral absolutists and the moral relativists. For most of the absolutists, the fault was not in condemning Imus, but in the hypocrisy of not condemning others whose offenses were no less reprehensible. Why haven't critics gone after hip-hop lyrics with the same zeal? What about South Park, Dave Chapelle, Sarah Silverman, or Borat? Or Al Sharpton? Or Bill O'Reilly? And how can you come down on Imus and give a pass to the anti-semite T. S. Eliot or the racist D. W. Griffiths?

         Then there were the first-amendment absolutists like the New York Times's Frank Rich, who deplored the "hypocrisy, sanctimony, and self-congratulation" of Imus's critics, and warned that silencing Imus would have a chilling effect on others who push the line, from Bill Maher and Rosie O'Donnell to Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck. While in the New York Post, Kinky Friedman went Rich one -- well, make that several -- better when he compared Imus to others who were as he lyrically put it, "sacrificed in the name of society's sanctimonious soul," a group in which he included Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, Mozart and Mark Twain. (Lenny Bruce, eat your heart out.)

         I can understand some of those concerns. But I also have an intellectual aversion to absolutism. If intelligence consists in being able to make fine distinctions, then it stands to reason that moral absolutism tends to make you stupid. You wind up thinking that the world is really a simple place -- or would be, if it weren't for all the excessively clever people who make it more complicated than it is.        

         So I tend to have more sympathy with the relativists who were trying to sort out all the contextual distinctions that the incident brought into play. Snoop Dogg said that it's one thing when a rapper uses "ho" to refer to some cheap girl in the neighborhood and another when the word is used by an old white man to refer to the Rutgers women's basketball team. In Time magazine, James Poniewozik argued that the ironic, self-deprecating Howard Stern could get away with material that sounded offensive in the mouth of the swaggering self-important Imus. And others drew distinctions between between ridiculing public and private figures, between talk and drama, or simply between funny and unfunny.

         I'm not convinced that all those hairs actually deserved splitting. But they made for a more interesting discussion than the indignant keening of the absolutists. And it doesn't end there. For example, you can be sure that there wouldn't have been much of an uproar over Imus's remark if his show weren't being simulcast over TV, even though a lot more people listen to him on radio than watch him on MSNBC. (You think of the way Rush Limbaugh gets away on his radio show with making much more pointed racial remarks than the relatively benign comments that got him tossed out of his job as an ESPN commentator a couple of years ago.) That might be because we think of TV as coming into our homes and of radio as delivered to us when we're alone in our cars, or because we imagine that it's easier to surf inadvertently into a TV program than a radio show. Or maybe it's just that an offensive remark is somehow more disturbing when you see someone making it than when you simply hear him.

         But that difference also has to do with the special role we assign to certain TV shows, newspapers and magazines. It wouldn't bother me to hear Bill Maher describe some politician as a dumb F-word on his HBO show. But it would be rather startling if someone used the same phrase on Meet the Press, a New York Times op-ed, or other forums reserved for our semi-official discussions of public values. In those spaces, we don't need the FCC to tell us that everyone should be held to a higher standard of propriety. True, the edges of that sanctified region aren't easy to define. What makes the Times different from The New Yorker, where the F-, A- , and N-words have been nonchalantly appearing for some years now? And Imus's own show falls in a penumbral zone: a radio talk show that was simulcast on a TV news channel, half serious political discussion and half gross-out shock-jockery. It's no wonder people were divided over whether his remark ought to be considered a capital offense, the way it would if Brian Williams had made it on the evening news.

         To absolutists, that's pure hypocrisy: we permit the offending language in one context while in another we pretend it doesn't exist. On that point, in fact, there's complete agreement between those who want to ban such language everywhere and those who want to remove every restriction on its use.

         And it is hypocritical, no question. But then hypocrisy has always gotten a worse rap than it deserves. Back in the 17^th century, La Rochefoucauld famously described hypocrisy as the homage that vice renders to virtue. But over the long run, homage has a way of turning into genuine respect -- as every parent knows, civility has to be forced before it can become sincere. And there's no question we owe a debt to hypocrisy for making us not just a more civil nation, but a more tolerant one. People had to be censured for using the n-word in public before they could begin to understand why it's right to avoid it in private, as well. George Bernard Shaw once observed that hypocrisy is only bad when it is improperly used. It's hard to imagine anything more relativist than that.