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Foot, “What Is Moral Relativism?”

A. What is moral relativism (MR) and what does it entail?

Foot begins by assessing various claims about what the moral relativist is committed to,
largely by means of drawing an analogy to the more plausible relativism about taste. She
thinks that thinking about the analogy with taste can show us that relativism does not fall prey
to some of the common objections raised against it, because it does not entail some of the
things people claim it entails.

(1) Stevenson: Moral relativists interpret any moral judgment about some act X to be a
reporting of a psychological or sociological fact about the reactions that people (perhaps
the speaker, or the agent, or the society to which one or the other belongs) have to it.
Stevenson says this shows MR to be mistaken, because (i) we don’t defend our moral
judgments about acts by pointing out how people react to those acts, but rather by
pointing to features of the acts themselves; and (ii) moral judgments, but not reports of
people’s attitudes, express feelings and attitudes of the speaker, and usually reflect a
desire of the speaker to change the feelings and attitudes of others.

(2) Foot: Stevenson is right that the view he describes (which looks like a kind of
subjectivism) is subject to these defects (or at least to defect (i)). But relativism needn’t
take this form. We’re inclined to accept relativism about judgments of taste, but we
wouldn’t interpret our judgments of taste to be reports of people’s reactions, since (i) we
don’t defend them by pointing to people’s reactions, (ii) we think we can make mistakes
in our judgments of taste, and that others in our community can make mistakes, and (iii)
we think we can show others who belong to our community that some judgment of taste
is the correct one.

(3) Why think we accept relativism about taste? (i) there is wide-spread disagreement
between cultures about such matters, and (ii)we acknowledge that while we might
reasonably debate about matters of taste within a community that shares a common basic
standard, there is no way to resolve disputes about taste between different communities
that embrace very different standards:

“It is empty to say of the judgements of another group whose reactions are very different from ours that their opinions are wrong. Our own discussions of these matters of “taste” implicitly evoke the standards set by our paradigms on our way of going on from them, and here we can speak of right and wrong. But if we are talking of the views of another society we shall speak of what is true by their standards and by our standards, without the slightest thought that our standards are “correct.” If the ancient Mexicans admired the looks of someone whose head had been flattened, a proposition not about this admiration may have been true as spoken by them, though it is false as spoken by us.” (p. 188)

(Question: Should we be relativists about taste? Do we think we can’t criticize the tastes
of other communities, or of our community as a whole? Are there other options?)

(4) Question: In those situations in which the differences in the applications of concepts
between different societies are so widespread and irresolvable as to make relativism
tempting, why are we so confident that at different times and in different places the
judgments are about the same thing? (pp. 186-7) For relativism about a given area of
discourse to be plausible, we must be able to understand people as employing the same
concepts even if there are limitless variations in the way people are inclined to apply it.
Foot thinks we can do this in the case of some taste concepts (like good-looking) but not
others (e.g., pretty): “It makes sense to speak of another society as thinking good-looking
just the faces we think not good-looking, but not as thinking pretty just the faces we think
not pretty.” It will be important, in the end, whether we think we can understand cultures
that use moral concepts like “good” or “right” very differently from how we use them as
genuinely employing moral concepts nonetheless. (Question: how do we decide which
concepts are flexible like this and which aren’t? Is “good-looking” flexible like this?)

(5) Foot distinguishes between uses of “true” or “false” or “correct” that are “substantial”,
and those that aren’t. We use such label substantially, she says, only when there is, at
least in principle, some possibility of proving or showing that one view rather than
another is in fact the true one. She says “relativism is true in a given area if in that area
all substantial truth is truth relative to one or another set of possible standards.”

(6) Foot thinks it follows from this that emotivists are committed to a form of moral
relativism, since they deny that there are any objective criteria by appeal to which
differences between individuals with radically different basic moral principles can be
resolved. (Question: does emotivism, which seems to be (perhaps) a form of meta-ethical
relativism, lead to normative moral relativism – that is, to the view that it might be okay
for one person to do something its wrong for another person to do, without there being
any more basic moral principle that applies to them both that explains why there’s this
difference? Our answer here will be different, I think, depending on whether we ask it
from the perspective of an emotivist making a normative judgment – he would surely
make the same judgment about both cases – or an emotivist assessing the “correctness”
of such judgments without making a normative judgment himself – from this perspective,
it seems like an emotivist would have to concede that the judgment of one person, who
judges she acted permissibly in having an abortion, is just as “correct” as the judgment
of another person, who judges she acted impermissibly in having an abortion, although
there is no more fundamental normative moral principle that explains this difference in
standards.)

(7) Foot considers two claims about MR made by Stace: first, that a relativist must allow
that the very same action that is right in one country or at one period may be wrong in
another. Foot says a relativist is not committed to this view. Moral relativists are
relativists about the truth of moral judgments, just as taste-relativists are relativists about
the truth of taste judgments. A relativist doesn’t claim that the same person who is goodlooking
in Ancient Mexico would become ugly if he came here, but rather that the same
person might be good-looking-by-ancient-mexican-standards and ugly-by-our-standards
(in all times and places). Correspondingly, the statement “X is good-looking” might be
true-by-ancient-mexican-standards and false-by-our-standards. We should interpret MR
as making the same kind of claim: we can’t emply two sets of standards in one breath.

(8) Stace’s second claim: a relativist is committed to the conclusion that if someone things
something is right, then it’s right for him, or alternatively, that someone who acts in
accordance with his conscience always acts rightly. Foot thinks a relativist may have to
accept this conclusion. Foot thinks we need to distinguish between two similar claims:
the claim that it is always wrong to act against our conscience, and the claim that it is
always right to act in accordance with our conscience. She follows Aquinas in thinking
that the former may be true (indeed, she goes so far as to say that it “cannot … be
denied”) even though the latter is false. (This is because acting in accord with one’s
conscience may be necessary but not sufficient for acting well, just as, e.g., being wormfree
is necessary but not sufficient for being a good apple.) So: an erring conscience
binds but it does not excuse. It follows from this that someone who has an erring
conscience cannot act well. Foot argues that this is a plausible conclusion only if we
think we can be at fault for having erring consciences. We cannot be in a “moral trap”
through now fault of our own. But MR, she points out, leaves no room for the idea of an
erring conscience, because according to MR, there is no universal truth out there to be
discovered, which the person with the erring truth fails to discover. So if a relativist
wishes to make room for the idea that someone with an erring conscience might not be
able to act well, whatever he does, she must allow that someone could be in that situation
through no fault of his own. But that’s implausible. So a relativist will be forced to
conclude not only that someone who acts against his conscience always acts badly, but
also that someone who acts in accord with his conscience always acts well. (Question:
is the thesis that someone cannot be in a “moral trap” through no fault of his own itself a
moral principle? Is it one a relativist must accept? Perhaps Foot thinks this is one of the
rules for the application of moral concepts one must accept to count as employing moral
concepts at all…)

(9) Would the truth of MR make it impossible for us to hold on to any moral judgments, or to
“put our weight behind” any of our moral judgments, since we must acknowledge that the
only substantive truth they can have is local, and not more generally defensible? Foot
claims that acknowledging this would not threaten our ability to make such judgments or
to throw our weight behind them (by, e.g., living in accord with them and trying to
persuade others to do the same). She notes that we can acknowledge the localness of the
truth of our taste judgments without thereby feeling we must give up on the idea that
Nureyev is good-looking, oysters are delicious, and blue and green go well together.
(Question: But might morality be different? It seems like it might. After all, at least
about some kinds of taste judgments, and perhaps precisely the ones about which we’re
most likely to be relativists (e.g., oysters are delicious), we’re not expected to justify our
judgments – in fact – they’re just reactions. But we are expected to justify our moral
judgments – to provide reasons for them. I won’t stop hating peanut-butter just because I
can’t provide any reasons for it. But I should perhaps stop holding a moral view if I
can’t provide any reasons for it.)

B. Should we accept MR?

So far, Foot has just been asking what relativism implies, and has used the analogy to taste to
argue that it doesn’t entail some of the counterintuitive things that have often been held
against it. Now she wants to assess the form of relativism she has described to see whether it
seems as plausible or as defensible as relativism about taste.

(1) Remember that Foot claims that for relativism to be plausible about an area of discourse,
we must be able to know that we’re talking about the same thing as others who differ
greatly from us in their applications of the relevant concepts. Foot argued that this was so
about at least some very general taste concepts. She thinks it is not true of even general
moral terms like “right” or “ought” or “good”. Unlike in the case of some taste
judgments, she thinks we cannot apply moral concepts in just any way and still count as
making a moral judgment. You must be inclined to follow certain rules to count as
employing moral concepts at all (otherwise, we’re just making the same sounds, without
using the same concepts – e.g. chair and bale of hay example). So Foot thinks that any
culture that appeared to use moral concepts to, e.g., argue that the killing of millions of
innocent people (by Hitler) did not need any justification would not count as using moral
concepts – this is a view she says it is “impossible, logically speaking” to argue for. (We
wouldn’t think of such people as mistaken about what right, but rather as not talking
about what’s right at all, despite appearances.) Examples from other papers: the
insistence that we walk around trees counterclockwise, or that we clasp our hands three
times an hour, couldn’t plausibly count as fundamental moral principles of anyone’s
morality.

(2) But Foot thinks even the limitations set by proper use of moral concepts might leave
room for some irresolvable disagreements between cultures, and so for some moral
relativism.

(3) How much relativism remains, Foot thinks, cannot be determined without first
investigating much more deeply that we have such concepts as happiness, human nature,
and human flourishing, which, she thinks, must be central to any conception of morality.
Morality is essentially about human good. And until we know much more about human
good that we do now, we won’t know how much wiggle room the proper use of moral
concepts allows us. (Question: are all systems of norms we’d properly call moral
concerned with human good?)
Julia Markovits