I know last time I declared my intention to play the conservative game of ranting and raving until I feel faint and then swooning onto a divan but it’s just so damned boring I don’t think I can keep it up. OMG! I must think! As a sort of remedial treatment I thought I might spend a few moments this time dabbling in something a bit more philosophical so I’ve decided to revisit the idea of ethical relativism. It’s all related. Aren’t social conservatives always banging on about moral relativism? It’s not like I’m taking a week off to fly down to Mexico and drink myself into a stupor or anything like that.
So the other day I found myself leafing through a mildly entertaining little book entitled Fifty Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre, who from the biographical blurb appears to be a reasonably well educated guy but alas not a professional philosopher, and all the little two and three page summaries were going pretty much as I expected until I got to the entry on ethical relativism with the less than entirely obvious chapter title One Man’s Meat..., which I thought I had read previously on a website that shall go unnamed but which turned out to be something quite different. Now ever since taking Philosophy 101 never mind how many years ago I’ve considered myself very much your typical ethical relativist so I assumed I knew where we were headed. Wrong! Turns out when some people talk about ethical relativism they have in mind something very different from what I have in mind. If you’ve read my blog at all you’ll understand I couldn’t resist trying to straighten the issue out at least in my own mind. I just don’t like confusion, especially involving words. Makes it so difficult to know what one is even talking about.
First, let me just review moral relativism in the sense I understand it. To me, the distinctive thing about ethics, the feature that makes it such a perennially interesting topic of conversation, is that there is no objective or shall we say scientific way to demonstrate the correctness of moral propositions. In some cases one may be able to derive certain propositions from other propositions using logic, which I suppose would be objective. However, that only gets one so far. Like any logical system one has to start somewhere. In the case of ethics I think if you go back far enough you’ll eventually arrive at some sort of fundamental proposition or set of propositions you feel just must be right. Like many other people I believe that feeling derives from a sort of ethical intuition or emotion I believe some philosophers call one’s moral sense. But if someone disagrees with you at that level you’re basically screwed in terms of your ability to engage them intellectually. Let’s say you’ve worked your way back to a statement like, I don’t know, it’s wrong to kill someone for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You may think you must have hit bedrock with this one and you’re preparing to work your way back up to some point of contention when the sociopath in the back of the room pipes up and says oh no I disagree, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people for no reason whatsoever. So awkward when that happens. You’d really like to tell whoever it is to put a sock in it, right? Hey buddy! You’re wrong! End of story! Unfortunately, there’s no mutually accessible logical proposition or sensory data that can demonstrate to the person he or she is wrong in any sort of objective way that person would feel bound to accept. You can try to work your way back further still of course maybe to something like mankind is a social animal in the hope that maybe the sociopath arrived at his or her annoying conclusion through some flawed bit of logic but my point is there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to a point on which you can both agree. Hence the relativism.
Now let’s think about how Mr. Dupre presented moral relativism in his little summary article. He explained the relativism bit, which seemed fine, but he then continued on to associate moral relativism with the proposition that one cannot judge the morality of other people. Because it’s all relative you see. Thus, the way it was presented in this article moral relativism can be associated with a sort of flabby anything goes outlook on ethical issues (or to put it in a somewhat more flattering light a more open minded outlook on ethical issues than would otherwise be the case).
It was at this point my finely tuned intellect detected something was amiss. Although I endorse the idea of ethical relativism I certainly don’t feel myself to be any more open minded about ethical matters than the next guy. Not by a long shot. If you’re doing something I think is immoral I’ll be happy to let you know about it. I do it all the time. I don’t necessarily expect anyone to obey my ethical dictates or whatever but I’m ready to talk it to death, that’s for sure. Indeed, I think my readiness to engage people on ethical matters has led some people to describe me from time to time as a bit of what we call in this country a hard ass. So what’s going on here? Am I not understanding something important about ethical relativism?
Well, after a refreshing beverage or two and a few brief moments of consternation I determined the crux of the problem here must involve this notion one can start out with moral beliefs about something, read a bit of philosophy about how there is no objective interpersonally valid basis for determining what is moral, and end up being agnostic about whatever it was that you formerly had an opinion about. I mean, just how is something like that meant to happen? Well, I think the key to understanding why this story makes sense to some people is you have to imagine the protagonist is an ethical absolutist who supports the proposition that unless one can demonstrate one’s moral beliefs are objective and interpersonally valid in a way that is not relative to any particular person then one should give up those beliefs and get all flabby and anything goes on everyone. That particular proposition is in no way inherent in moral relativism itself.
I think a good way to see what’s going on here is to take another concept that is defined relative to a particular person like taste for example. Now I may think some food tastes good and you may not. I don’t really have a way to demonstrate to you that whatever it is actually tastes good in some interpersonally valid way thus disproving your claim it tastes bad to you. It’s not that kind of proposition. I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk like that. It’s not the normal way of using the word is it? When we talk about something tasting good we mean relative to the particular person or group of people doing the tasting whether we say so or not. It would be a pretty peculiar sort of statement indeed to claim something really tastes good to someone (as a member of the group of people bound to acknowledge the postulated objective way of determining what tastes good) even though that person is busy spitting it out in disgust. However, and this is my main point, recognizing the relativistic dimension of what we mean by taste does not require one to become agnostic about how food tastes. That’s ridiculous. Either the food tastes good to me or it doesn’t.
It’s the same thing with ethics. The fact I cannot find an objective basis for proving the superiority of my moral sentiments does not require me to become agnostic about those sentiments or about ethical matters in general. I’m a person like anyone else and I have moral beliefs based on my moral sentiments and I can use logic to reason my way to other ethical propositions that might not otherwise be obvious. So some things will appear moral to me and some things will not. And we can talk about it. Indeed, to take the argument a step further one’s ethical beliefs about what one ought to do if one determines other people are acting unethically don’t seem to me to be involved in any way. An ethical relativist might subscribe to an anything goes sort of approach to other people acting unethically or a confrontational I’m not putting up with anything no matter how trivial sort of approach. That’s a matter one needs to work out within the context of one’s own moral belief system. We still have to get in there and discuss when it makes sense to talk and when it makes sense to start interfering with the behavior of other people. It doesn’t just fall out of moral relativism. That why I do so much talking about the liberal ethos and the significance of distinguishing activity one may believe is unethical and one wouldn’t do oneself but doesn’t involve having a significant effect on other people and therefore properly resides in the realm of personal liberty from activity that shares the former characteristic but also affects other people in a significant way thus creating an interpersonal conflict that may require one to take a more active role.
To summarize, I think the basic problem with the presentation of moral relativism in the little book I was reading is it viewed ethical relativism through the lens of an ethical absolutist and of course found it lacking. What the discussion highlighted for me is not so much a problem with moral relativism as a problem with moral absolutism, which is that it puts unrealistic epistemological requirements on ethical propositions. The only way to get where one needs to go under the moral absolutist perspective is to make something up, that is to declare something factually true because you believe it or would like it to be so. That type of thinking presumably underlies the social conservative argument that religions are necessary for human society because only religions can provide a suitably objective basis on which to rest one’s absolutist ethical beliefs, the only alternative to which they believe is a flabby anything goes moral agnosticism. Talk about getting one’s cart before one’s horse! Hello! Religion must be true because we think we need it to be true? Hey, I think I need a glass of beer right about now but that doesn’t mean I’m justified in believing I have one in my hand. But as I’ve pointed out before I suppose this must be why so many social conservatives get so agitated over seemingly inconsequential transgressions of their ethical codes. The way conservatives see it denying the objective correctness of any part of their code throws the entire foundation of ethical behavior into question. With conservatives it’s all about The Word. Cut your hair incorrectly today and what’s next? Murdering your neighbor and eating his brain? Because for social conservatives those are the only alternatives: accept some code word for word as originally carved on a stone somewhere in the Middle East most likely or become a wild man with no ethical beliefs whatsoever.
So much less confusing to just appreciate ethical beliefs for what they really are, isn’t it? Easier to discuss and hash out ethical differences where possible. Less room for bullying and head chopping. No need to pit one religion against another in a fight for global supremacy. No need to make things up. And we can all still fight for what we think is right. So are we agreed? Moral relativism yes. Flabby anything goes moral agnosticism no. Thank goodness for that. Now maybe we can all start talking about ethical issues in a way that actually makes sense. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?
