The Puzzle of Relativism

I wrote this article for Dialogue Magazine (Spring 2011). In it I explain that relativism has three meanings and we need to be careful which one we use – as Philosophers use it in at least these three ways. This will be the subject of my first webinar session in September 2014 – see you then! PB

The Nature of Moral Theory

Moral theory asks the questions: what is meant by “good”, what makes a “good action” or a “good character”? Consider the following statements which all have the word “ought” in them, implying that I am strongly for or against some action.

“You ought not to steal, because it will upset the person you steal from”.

“You ought to steal if you are starving and have no choice”.

Both are moral statements with the word “ought”. Both are about stealing. But they take two different views. Why is this?

Both are reasonable statements because they give grounds for a decision.

Both refer to an end in sight: the first example considers the end to be the welfare of the person you are stealing from, and the second, your own welfare, because if you don’t steal, you will die! We call theories that refer to ends teleological theories, from the Greek telos = end or purpose. We call theories that refer to duties or rules deontological theories. An example might be the statement: “stealing is always wrong”.

As the above example of stealing shows, if we present two different aims or ends (protecting your property or preserving your life) then we find two different moral prescriptions: “don’t steal” and “steal”. This is evidence for moral relativism – the claim that values are not absolute but depend on differences in ends, beliefs or cultures.

Relative and absolute theories of morality

Below is a diagram (not loaded yet!) showing the essential distinction we make when considering ethical theories, between relative and absolute theories. We make a distinction between two types of relativism, cultural and normative relativism, and the idea of absolute morality or absolutism.

The basic issue in question is whether there is such a thing as objective values, which hold for everyone, everywhere, irrespective of time or culture, such as the value in the statement genocide is wrong.

 

 

 

 

(Fig Moral theories)

A relative theory can be of two types.

Cultural relativism is simply the observation when we look at different cultures that they have different views of right and wrong. We are not judging the cultures, their practices or the ways they think about goodness. We are just observing and describing them. As one writer observed in 1934, “morality …is a convenient term for socially-approved habits” (Benedict: 1934).

Normative or ethical relativism makes the stronger claim that all values are relative to a framework of thinking – there is no such thing as an objective value or one universal way of reasoning (as Kant believed).

As an example of cultural relativism consider Spartan culture. Sparta was a warrior state which thrived in the second and third centuries BC, and was well illustrated by the film the 300 which told the story of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, when 300 Spartans held a pass against the huge Persian army until betrayed by a shepherd who showed the Persians a secret way through the mountains.

The end or telos of Spartan culture was to produce a strong warrior race in order to survive in the cut-throat world of Greek city states.

Here are some of the culturally-specific ways they produced this virtue of heroism.

Infanticide – weak male babies were left to die on the hillside and weak female babies were thrown off a cliff according to the decision of a panel of old wise men.
Childen’s education – this was taken over by the state at the age of 7, when boys were forced into the wilderness to fend for themselves.
Slavery – the Spartans enslaved the Macedonian people, who had no rights. Indeed, to prove yourself a warrior it was enough to kill a Macedonian in cold blood.

James Rachels’ argument

James Rachels argues that we make a false inference when we say:

1. Different cultures have different moral codes.
2. Therefore there is no objective truth.

The false inference lies in the “therefore”. Both appear to be statements of fact.
But statement (2) is actually a belief. We cannot prove the case that there is no objective morality, and it doesn’t follow from the observation that there are different moral systems in the world.

After all, we can have different belief systems (as a matter of fact) about whether the world is round or flat, but it doesn’t change the truth or falsity of the objective claims of science.

Rachels goes on to consider some consequences of relativism:

– We can’t judge other societies (such as Hitler’s Germany)
– We could in principle take a vote on slavery and judge its rightness by a simple majority decision.
– We can’t judge our own society and find, for example, fast driving “wrong”.
– Moral progress is called into doubt, where we seem to have new laws protecting human rights, for example.

Rachels concludes that:

“It makes sense to think that our own society has made some moral progress, while admitting that it is still imperfect and in need of reform” (Rachels, 1998:23).

Rachels goes on to argue that differences in moral codes stem from differences in beliefs.

If we go to India we may be surprised to find it’s wrong to eat a cow, but this is because cows have divine status in India, so relativism is correct in so far as it reminds us that morality is relative to belief systems.Yet relativism is wrong if it claims to establish that we cannot judge some practices as universally desirable and others undesirable.

For example, all cultures protect their young, otherwise we would not survive. Similarly, truth-telling is universally accepted, because trust is necessary for survival. What relativism helps us to see, however, is that all values have some reasonable basis, and it is our task to find the reasonable basis for moral statements and establish the reasonable grounds for saying, for example, that killing is wrong.

And we must be humble about our own culture which may contain practices which we should seek to reform, where progress is still required.

The nature of normative relativism

J.L.Mackie argues in his book Inventing Right and Wrong that there are no objective moral values, even though, as William James observed, many of us are “absolutists by instinct”. Mackie argues that the claim to objectivity is stronger than just a claim to adopt the same “methods of ethics”, as Henry Sidgwick called the shared approach to ethical reasoning. It is a commitment to ideals.

These ideals are deeply held beliefs about the nature of the world, ourselves, and the right or wrong course of action. R.M. Hare called this “fanaticism” because very little can shake us from these deeply held beliefs, except perhaps some trauma, such as the slaughter of the First World War or the horror of the Holocaust.

Mackie concludes that:

“a belief in objective moral values is built into ordinary moral thought and language, but holding this ingrained belief is false” (1977:49).

Mackie claims it is possible to show how people persist in these false claims. This is because morality depends on what Mackie calls “forms of life”. The way we live, the patterns of behaviour adopted by our culture determine our views of right and wrong. It is not our views of right and wrong which determine our culture.

For example, even though there are plenty of verses in the Bible which, in principle, could be used to establish the equality of men and women (Galatians 3:28 “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus”), nonetheless, it took the two world wars, the rise in women’s employment in times of crisis, to show that women really could do the jobs men do.

So a change in form of life, the employment of women in factories to aid the war effort, came before a change in moral thinking, that the inequality in job opportunities between men and women was morally wrong.

Another example of a change in “form of life” leading to a change in moral thinking might be the attitude to pre-marital sex. If we think, for example, of changes in sexual ethics in the last hundred years, the invention of the contraceptive pill empowered women to make reproductive choices for themselves independent of any decision by their sexual partners. The change in the form of life arguably drove the change in ethical beliefs and practices. People increasingly argued “pre-marital sex is good and enjoyable, so it cannot be wrong”, not least because the risk of pregnancy was practically removed altogether.

Normative ethics

Normative ethics is the study of the values which underpin views of right and wrong and how these values are derived. Normative ethics looks at criteria of reasonableness. What different reasons can people give for saying something is wrong, and are those reasons coherent and logical?

So normative relativism, for example, is the study of why values differ according to different ends or purposes which people may define as “good” or desirable. The idea of goodness is relative to the end or goal we select as desirable. Notice the ambiguity here. Goodness can be relative to an end, which we may call “relativism of application”. How the value is applied differs from circumstance to circumstance.

However, there is a second implication: the value itself may be an absolute, unchanging value. So the absolute value for Joseph Fletcher is love (agape or unconditional love). The absolute for the utilitarian J.S.Mill is happiness. For this reason there has been disagreement about whether Utilitarianism and Situation Ethics are absolute or relative theories. The American academic Richard Jacobs even describes Situation Ethics as “principled relativism”.

As an example, consider these two relativistic theories of morality: situation ethics and utilitarianism and how they might be applied in practice.

Recall that in situation ethics the end (Greek: telos) is love, a special form of love (agape or commitment love). In utilitarianism the end or purpose is the maximising of happiness or pleasure (depending on the type of utilitarianism).

So if a family is considering the ethical question, should a 16 year old girl have an abortion, the situation ethicist will ask the question, what course of action will produce the most loving outcome? They would tend to look at the individual first, so the daughter’s interests would be paramount here. If the decision was to keep the child, then the family might find ways of giving the girl maximum support and love.

A utilitarian would look at the overall happiness of the daughter and her wider family.

If the society around them found illegitimacy unacceptable, then the family might argue that the daughter, the community and her family’s happiness would be maximised by having an abortion. The place of the unborn child would depend on another argument: whether a foetus should be given the status of a person. If the answer was “yes, it should” then we should consider the future happiness of the unborn child as well in our moral calculation.

So there are two factors which can vary and which are relative ideas: the cultural context of approval and disapproval and the view we take (most probably due to our belief system rather than any empirical test) over whether the foetus is a person.

Both situation ethics and utilitarianism are relativistic in this sense, that they look at circumstances and calculate consequences. We can see this as relative in application. But the values they make goodness relative to, agape love and happiness respectively are different and in a sense, absolute, because they are not negotiable.

So moral relativism can produce very different outcomes depending on the different goals or ends in view which are felt to be desirable – the relativism of application. And at the same time, internal to each theory, there may be a claim that one supreme value is absolute (unchanging).

Absolute theories of ethics

Absolute theories of ethics establish rules or duties which must always be followed, irrespective of the circumstances.

For example, some people have argued that the ten commandments in Exodus 20 are absolute rules which must always be obeyed, because they come from God.

There is a problem with this argument, however. Even in the Old Testament it seems God himself commands people to kill. For example, Joshua is commanded to destroy Jericho and its inhabitants; “then they killed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21) and also annihilates the people of the city of Ai (Joshua 8), not even sparing the children.

If we argue that killing is absolutely wrong, how to we explain these apparent acts of murder (killing of the innocent children) as supposedly commanded by God himself? When does killing in war become justified?

There is a further difficulty. In court we distinguish between different degrees of murder. First degree murder is when someone kills in cold blood, for example, shooting a policeman to make good an escape.

Second and third degrees of murder have extenuating circumstances. For example, killing someone in a fit of anger because you discover they have lied or cheated on you. Then there is killing is self-defence, or shooting a burglar who you find in your house. We tend to treat the latter as manslaughter, and in law it takes a lesser penalty and sometimes, no penalty at all.

So to say “thou shalt not kill” is an absolute, even if we translate “kill” as “murder” doesn’t escape the problem, “what sort of killing is acceptable”?

As soon as we admit exceptions, or particular circumstances when we would kill, we become a relativist, because we make goodness relative to some other end, such as saving a life or preventing a bigger evil. We are making, to borrow Kant’s terminology, a hypothetical rather than a categorical judgement. We are saying, as Joshua may have reasoned as he set about killing the people of Jericho and Ai, “it’s okay to kill if idolatry is eliminated”.

Deontological theories

The word deon comes from the Greek word meaning “duty”. Duties and rules tend to be non-negotiable. For example, Kant establishes his theory of ethics on something he calls the categorical imperative.

With a relativistic statement, we present a conditional, if…then clause. The purpose of this clause is to try and establish the circumstances under which we might do or not do something.

► “If you are hungry, then it’s acceptable to steal”.

► “If you are defending yourself, it’s ok to kill”.

However, a duty tends to be expressed categorically with no “ifs”.

► “You ought to defend the young”.

► “Society should make provision for the elderly”.

Neither of these two statements say anything about the circumstances under which these things, the defending of the young, and providing for the elderly, should take place. The two statements are statements establishing duties.

Kant derives his theory of duty from a priori reason, before experience, as a universal rational principle and we should follow it in obedience to what he calls “the moral law”, irrespective of circumstances.

Natural Law is another form of theory which establishes rules for conduct based on what is observable as the natural function of something. For example the Roman Catholic Church has argued in documents like Humanae Vitae (available on this website) that the natural function of sex is reproduction, and that anything that interferes with this natural function is wrong.

For example, contraception interferes with this natural function of sex, according to the catholic view, and so is a serious sin. The Catholic view as expressed by the 1967 encyclical Humanae Vitae is that the use of contraception (and abortion) is an offence against God because it removes the potential for life and interferes with this natural process of conception.

So we have a law or rule,

“The use of contraception is wrong” and there are no circumstances considered in which this rule can be broken.

We might ask, however, do we agree with the Natural Law view of contraception? If we disagree, what argument can we think of that might oppose this view? Indeed, natural law theorists might argue that the preservation of life is a more important precept than reproduction, and in preventing AIDS and reducing population growth, contraception is a perfectly rational proper purpose for human beings.

Meta-ethical relativism

Part of the puzzle of relativism is that people mean different things by it. So far we have seen that we can be a relativist in the application of a norm in arguing that the norm is interpreted differently in different circumstances. This is Joseph Fletcher’s own justification for calling Situation Ethics relativistic.

Yet others might argue that, because Situation Ethics has one absolute principle at its heart, we should describe it as absolute. I have argued here that both are right in this sense: relativism looks two ways. It looks backwards at the value which is the source of goodness, and this value may be non-negotiable, and if so, then we can describe the theory as absolute in this sense. But it also looks forwards at the application to specific circumstances. In this, different, sense theories like Situation ethics and Utilitarianism can also be described as relativistic.

There is a third meaning of relativism. Meta-ethics examines the meaning of words like “good” and “right”. Meta-ethical relativism makes the claim that there is no ethical principle we can find that is objectively true everywhere and for all time. This is in fact what Mackie is claiming when he argues “there is no objective truth”. In this meta-ethical sense, you can be an absolute Kantian and I can be a relativistic follower of Joseph Fletcher and we can agree to differ because we can find no way of resolving our differences.

Our worldviews don’t connect, our assumptions about humanity and reason are so different, that both of us, the absolutist and the relativist may, without contradiction, agree to be relativists on the meta-ethical level.

Reading

Bowie R. (2004) chapter 1
Mackie J.L. (1977) Inventing Right and Wrong chapter 3
Rachels J. (1998) Problems of Moral Philosophy chapter 5
David Wong in Singer ed (1994) chapter 39
Humanae Vitae (1967)