Keith Devens .com

Moral Relativism

When asked for an objective basis for laws or morals, many (probably most) people will say that there isn't any. Someone close to me recently volunteered the example that if most people thought murder was ok, then it would be ok.

People will often go that far in their nosedive off the cliff of objectivity into the ravine of relativism, but you usually have to lead them off of it. He just jumped right off without me asking. I think that's great, because while we were debating moral systems, he showed that he has a system that can condone the murder of innocents, which to me immediately invalidates his system and shows that he's arguing nonsense.

This type of moral relativism is one of the most naive moral systems there is. Anyone who proposes that type of "system" typically hasn't done a lick of philosophy. I put scare quotes around "system" because it can't rightly be called a system of ethics. Under his "system", anything at all can be justified as long as "most people" agree. It's a simplistic majority rule, and lacks many important characteristics of ethical systems.

First, and most importantly, it's not normative. It makes no prescriptions about what is right and what is wrong. In other words, there's no way to query "most people" and find out what they believe in order for you to know what's "right". The issue of normativity is so important that I could just stop here, since if a system of ethics isn't normative, it isn't a system of ethics.

Second, it's not constant. Any sensible system of ethics must be timeless. Murder is always wrong, etc. There are issues, however, with cultural sensitivities, but that can be resolved simply by positing something like "It's wrong to be rude, but what's rude can change based on the society". That doesn't in any way diminish moral objectivity. The point is that it's nonsensical for what's right and wrong to be able to change. "Killing Jews in Nazi Germany was right at the time and in Germany, but isn't today." "Slavery in early America was a just system until most people decided it wasn't." Both statements are nonsensical.

The third problem with the "system" is that there's no reference point for it. I mean that, while it's "majority rule", there's not even any good definition for the "majority" -- the majority of what? Whatever your choice of "majority" is, it's completely arbitrary. The majority of people in your country? That seems absurd, since across the invisible line of a national boundary something can be "wrong" which is "right" a few millimeters away, and vice versa. (Keep in mind that there's a distinction between legal and moral, of course.) Maybe the majority in a given geographic area... that avoids the "invisible line" problem, but how big is the area? Where does it extend to? What about the majority living at one time? That seems to be a better measure, but it's still totally useless, and essentially arbitrary. Why can't I pick my own group? One might say one's immediate social group determines what's moral for a person, since the majority of people he knows believes a certain way. In short, it seems that one can pick which group to consider the majority in a situation according only to one's whims, and each choice is as arbitrary as any other.

So, possibly the most damning criticism of this type of "system" is that it can justify anything whatsoever. Like I said, it's complete nonsense, yet a surprising number of people today seem to unquestioningly accept this view of things as dogma.

Permalink | 11 Comments | Tags: Religion | id 4086

04:45 (utc-4)
edited: 04:53 (utc-4)

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Choosing an example (like murder) that leans towards the absurd clouds the fact that there are many hard moral issues which really are unclear under moral relativism. The treatment of women as chattle, still an ingrained part of many of the worlds cultures is a perfect example of this. When it is a cultural tradition to undereducate and disempower your women, does that make it ok? If you say no, try saying it in a place where it really is a cultural standard.

Murder is a weak example because it's easy to decry it as wrong. There are many other basic human rights that we hold to be universal that aren't so universal elsewhere. It is easy to defend moral absolutes when you do so in a relatively homogenous ethical environment (and conservatives telling homosexuals what they can do in private or women what they can do with their bodies aside, the US has a pretty well-established moral and ethical baseline.

A lot of what you say, Keith, makes good sense. But where do you draw the line between moral objectivity and relativism? I believe morality is an individual issue, and what the "majority" belives about a moral issue is of no consequence to what any given person chooses to think for themselves. What's "right" in my perspective could be "wrong" in yours. And just as a side note, to say that what the "majority" thinks is always morally right is absurd. The majority is always wrong because of the simple fact that before many people can be aware of a truth, one person must be aware, and by the time that the majority becomes aware of what the one person was aware of, another indivudual will have discovered another truth. Thus the majority is always doomed to be behind the truth of any issue, following constantly the ideas of an individual.

In fact then, nothing is ever "wrong", since each of us only does what he prefers

People all the time do things that they themselves would acknowledge as wrong according to their own moral standards. There is a difference between preference and one's morality. One may prefer raping women, but that does not mean that that person believes it is morally right.

My argument is not to excuse those who would commit horrible deeds in the name of their own personal morality. Becuase we live in a society that punishes such people, morality doesn't have much of a role in that matter. I am attempting to make the point that people bicker way too much over differences in opinion and morality because they have the "I'm right and you're wrong, and I must make you think like me" attitude. A more sensible attitude, I would argue, would be "I think one way and you think another, let's live with our differences." Of course we have laws that take care of the situations when the differences mean one person would infringe on the rights of another. I don't argue against the law, without it would be anarchy, and I'm not an anarchist.

First of all, your friend miscomprehends moral relativism, or you do, and hence label him as a proponent of the theory. Moral relativism merely asserts that people act based on what they deem to be acceptable and good; and hence such things are both relative and subject to themselves. Moral Relativism does imply that something becomes "right" because someone believes it is so- since it denies that there is external framework.

Moral Relativism does not assert that morality is subject to majority rule- only that the morals of the majority are respective to that majority.

Lastly, Moral Relativism cannot be used to justify anything. That morality is relative to oneself does not imply some universal right to kill everyone. It implies only that you can do so. Where you go from there is up to you- and those around you.

You misunderstand moral relativism. Moral relativism is an umbrella term that is used to refer to a few different kinds of moral theories, one of the most common being cultural relativism, which states that morals are relative to a particular culture.^[1]

Cultural relativism, which is what I was specifically referring to in the post above, "maintains that morality is grounded in the approval of one's society – and not simply in the preferences of individual people" and that "moral values in fact change from society to society throughout time and throughout the world"^[2].

Moral Relativism does not assert that morality is subject to majority rule- only that the morals of the majority are respective to that majority.

You're not saying anything here... only that the morals of the majority are the morals of the majority. Cultural relativism states that morals are subject to the views of the culture, and the views of the culture are necessarily those of the majority (for how could one claim that the culture at large believes different things than most of the people in the culture believe?). Keep in mind also that the person I was arguing against in my post above specifically stated he believed in majority-rule morality.

In your defense, you seem to be referring to the other main type of moral relativism, individual relativism, "which holds that individual people create their own moral standards"^[3], but that's not what I've been arguing against.

Footnotes:
[1]: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines moral relativism as the view that morals are "strictly human inventions", which I think is a useful way to look at it.
[2]: ibid
[3]: ibid

Friday, July 18, 2003

Moral Relativism

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