Moral Relativism (again)

Issues of moral relativism are, strictly speaking, beyond the scope of this course, but in many ways getting some clarity about basic morality is propaedeutic to our collective project. Perhaps it would be good if a course in moral philosophy were prerequisite for one like ours. Teaching and learning, at least among social beings like humans, always involves relationships with others, so it must operate on some set of presuppositions about the nature of those relationships and the boundaries that ought to govern them. Thus moral philosophy, and value theory generally, are deeply implicated in any serious thinking about pedagogy. In particular, standpoints that skeptically presume the indeterminability of moral questions, or reduce all answers to such questions to collective agreements or subjective preferences, would actually (if sound) make our project impossible.

Here, therefore, is a short argument, a reductio ad absurdum, of such views, and thus indirectly in favor of the fallible tractability of moral norms:

Suppose all moral propositions were nothing but subjective preferences. It would follow that we could never even in principle criticize anyone else’s behavior or moral views, since ex hypothesi whatever they believe would be true (for them), so long as they sincerely believed they were right (and sincerity is subjective, so not available for public inspection). It would also follow that no-one could ever, even in principle, make a mistake about what was right or wrong. Thus if Hitler says he sincerely believes that Jews are vermin, then that’s okay according to our supposition (too bad for Jews, and others who disagree), and we have no conceptual basis from which to criticize his view, or the actions he takes on the basis of it (including genocide). Suppose then Hitler has a conversion experience after encountering a kindly Jew, and adopts the view that Jews are as worthy of respect as Aryans and everyone else. Just as we had no basis to criticize him before, now we have no grounds to praise his conversion. Hitler himself cannot even honestly say he was wrong but had discovered his mistake, since whatever view he holds at any given time is by definition just fine – true for him, true for now, but subject to random change without notice.

So the bullet you would have to bite to equate moral propositions with purely subjective preferences is a bitter one indeed. We couldn’t even claim that murder was wrong; we could only express our idiosyncratic personal distaste for it, like an exotic food that a few people enjoy – to each his or her own – but that just happens to strike the rest of us as yucky. But who knows, maybe one day it will catch on!

Faced with this disastrous consequence, many people retreat to the idea of collective agreements or cultural determination of moral norms. What most people think is right and wrong, or what a culture determines is a part of its way of life, on this view actually determines right and wrong in any given time and place. This position presents some of the same problems as the other one: What of a society such as ours, that used to own slaves but has abolished the practice? Should we say that slaveholding was morally just fine until we collectively decided not to do it, and now it’s exploitative and wrong? What do we say of the brave minority of dissenters who actually brought the change about, in part by explaining to the rest of us on objective grounds why the practice – even while still popular – was in fact brutally immoral? At the very least this theory makes mincemeat of many otherwise meaningful ways of speaking about our world.

The real problem for the cultural norm/collective agreement theory, though, is that it actually collapses into the personal preference view. As Midgley points out, cultures aren’t monolithic bubbles; each is a dynamic amalgam of many influences, kept vital by constant change arising through dissent from both within and without. In all cultures and societies, what precisely the cultural norm or general agreement consists of on a moral question will depend on who we ask, and we’re once again back to individual preference and its difficulties.

Remember, by the way, that truth (see toolkit) is a relationship between statements and what is the case, so the phrases “true for you but not for me” or “true for us but not for them” are incoherent. To qualify as true, our beliefs must hook up with reality, which is the same for everyone no matter what we think. To those who persist in denying that there is any moral reality for moral claims to hook up with, I submit the proposition: “However much one might want to, it would be wrong to strangle one’s mother under almost any circumstances.” If there is anyone unwilling to accept this as a fact, we should hope they live very far away from their parents, and for that matter from us.