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what we have today in the world of moral and ethical thought is not a dictatorship of relativism, but, from a bird’s eye view, moral ambiguity and pluralism.
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The day before his papacy began, Joseph Ratzinger delivered a homily in which he made the oft-quoted observation: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” I disagree. At least, I disagree if we’re speaking of serious contemporary moral thought. With the claim that modern mass society is marked by egoism and intemperance, I’ve no quarrel, but I’d call this moral laziness or the absence of moral consideration, not a dictatorship of relativism.
, I don't think that all such pleas for more moderation should be granted. In particular, there is a tendency to advocate suspended judgment rather than definite opinion as the appropriate response to thorny ultimate questions.
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't*. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummt into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right. Western science, acting on good evidence that the moon orbits the Earth a quarter of a million miles away, using Western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams.
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This is not the first time I have used this knock-down argument, and I must stress that it is aimed strictly at people who think like my colleague of the calabash. There are others who, confusingly, also call themselves cultural relativists although their views are completely different and perfectly sensible. To them, cultural relativism just means that you cannot understand a culture if you try to interpret its beliefs in terms of your own culture. You have to see each of the culture's beliefs in context of the culture's other beliefs. I suspect that this sensible form of cultural relativism is the original one, and that the one I have criticized is an extremist, though alarmingly common, perversion of it. Sensible relativists should work harder at distancing themselves from the fatuous kind.
“[W]hen we are in a muddle about what the answer to a hard moral question is, we are in a muddle about what the absolutely correct answer is.” Why “absolutely”? Isn’t “correct” good enough? (Of course without “absolutely” the assertion is circular; you wouldn’t be looking for the incorrect answer.) “Absolutely” is there to insist that the answer you arrive at and consider correct must be backed up by the conviction that it is underwritten by the structure of Truth and by the universe. This is a demand that makes sense if you are doing philosophy, but if you are doing anything else, it is a demand you can safely, and without contradiction, ignore.
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Boghossian defines relativism (and I’ll go along with his definition for the purposes of this column) as the denial of moral absolutes. But the definition is insufficiently nuanced because there are (at least) two ways of denying moral absolutes. You can say “I don’t believe there are any” or you can say “I believe there are moral absolutes, but (a) there are too many candidates for membership in that category and (b) there is no device, mechanical test, algorithm or knock-down argument for determining which candidates are the true ones.”
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The person (and I am one) who takes this second position denies nothing except the possibility (short of force or torture and they don’t count) of securing universal assent.
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Relativism about morality has come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. To many thoughtful people, and especially to those who are unwilling to derive their morality from a religion, it appears unavoidable. Where would absolute facts about right and wrong come from, they reason, if there is no supreme being to decree them? We should reject moral absolutes, even as we keep our moral convictions, allowing that there can be right and wrong relative to this or that moral code, but no right and wrong per se. (See, for example, Stanley Fish’s 2001 op-ed, “Condemnation Without Absolutes.”)[1]
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A would-be relativist about morality needs to decide whether his view grants the existence of some absolute moral facts, or whether it is to be a pure relativism, free of any commitment to absolutes. The latter position, I have argued, is mere nihilism; whereas the former leads us straight out of relativism and back into the quest for the moral absolutes.
None of this is to deny that there are hard cases, where it is not easy to see what the correct answer to a moral question is. It is merely to emphasize that there appears to be no good alternative to thinking that, when we are in a muddle about what the answer to a hard moral question is, we are in a muddle about what the absolutely correct answer is.
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, Einstein showed that while the world does not contain simultaneity as such, it does contain its relativistic cousin — simultaneity relative to a frame of reference — a property that plays something like the same sort of role as classical simultaneity did in our theory of the world.
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Most moral relativists say that moral right and wrong are to be relativized to a community’s “moral code.” According to some such codes, eating beef is permissible; according to others, it is an abomination and must never be allowed. The relativist proposal is that we must never talk simply about what’s right or wrong, but only about what’s “right or wrong relative to a particular moral code.”
The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever. It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus. We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.
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The starting point for my discussion of what I will refer to as ethics’ “third way” is a recent thoughtful article published in The Stone, the New York Times’ philosophy blog. There, NYU philosopher Paul Boghossian does an excellent job at summarizing the perennial discussion between moral relativists and moral absolutists. Boghossian introduces an interesting contrast to make his readers think about the differences among moral absolutism, moral relativism, and nihilism. Consider first the ancient concept of witches. We (well, most of us) no longer believe that there are witches in the world, so we have dropped talk of witches altogether, engaging in what Boghossian calls “eliminativism” about witches (analogous, of course, to the much more debatable eliminativism in philosophy of mind proposed by Patricia and Paul Churchland).
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Now think of Boghossian’s second example: Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity, which teaches us that there is no such thing as absolute space and time. That did not lead us to abandon the concepts of space and time, but rather to substitute relative forms of those concepts in our ways of thinking about the world. We can still all agree about a particular space-time point if we have already agreed to use a given frame of reference. Change the frame of reference and you’ll have to rethink that particular point in space-time.
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Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.
Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930’s, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, “You ought not to hit that child,” all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.
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Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.
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Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.
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whether the truth of a particular scientific claim is “demonstrable” is often a pretty contingent matter, depending on the state of technology, and on the forms of “proof” or “demonstration” your interlocutor is culturally conditioned to accept as valid. You expect me to trust your “telescope,” an obvious product of demon magic?
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to articulate a moral principle is precisely to acknowledge that we are not biologically constrained from acting otherwise. A species wired so as to be neurologically incapable of consciously lying would have no occasion to develop a concept of “honesty” or regard it as a virtue.
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I tend to think the “relative or objective” question is actually poorly formed, as I hint above: The interesting question is “relative to what, and in what ways?”
The recent events swirling about the ex-next-president of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has revived old tropes about how culture affects sex, including sexual violence. Before this scandal, many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their Puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chaud lapins: hot rabbits. The supposed difference consisted of not only a heightened sexual activity but an altered set of conventions about where to draw the line between benign sexual interaction and harassment. The French, many believed, drew that line differently.
One needs to be a cultural relativist to know when one is being hit upon.
The number of women speaking out in France post-scandal calls into question this easy embrace of relativism.
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The more thorny question is whether relativism is relevant to those domains we generally want to put in the non-benign category: harassment, sexual coercion, even sexual violence. Could it be that offensiveness is relative to the perspective of the recipient, based on her own cultural sensibilities? More troubling, could it be that our very experience of an encounter might be significantly affected by our background, upbringing, culture, ethnicity, in short, by what Michel Foucault called our discourse?
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date rapes, statutory rapes, and many instances of harassment can be subject to multiple interpretations, which has given rise to the new term popular on college campuses — “gray” rape. The writer Mary Gaitskill famously argued some years back that the binary categories of rape/not-rape were simply insufficient to classify the thick complexity of her own experience. In this netherworld of ambiguous experiences, can understanding cultural relativism be useful?
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Reason might not be able to arrive at moral truths, but it can push us to test and question the rationality of our values — a crucial part in the process that leads to the adoption of new, or modified values. The only way to reduce disputes about morality is to try to get people on the same page about their moral goals. Given the above, this will not be easy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be too optimistic in our ability to employ reason to figure things out. But reason is still the best, and even only, tool we can wield, and while it might not provide us with a truly objective morality, it’s enough to save us from complete moral relativism.
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Prinz’s basic stance is that moral values stem from our cognitive hardware, upbringing, and social environment. These equip us with deep-seated moral emotions, but these emotions express themselves in a contingent way due to cultural circumstances. And while reason can help, it has limited influence, and can only reshape our ethics up to a point, it cannot settle major differences between different value systems. Therefore, it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct an objective morality that transcends emotions and circumstance.
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As Prinz writes, in part:“No amount of reasoning can engender a moral value, because all values are, at bottom, emotional attitudes. … Reason cannot tell us which facts are morally good. Reason is evaluatively neutral. At best, reason can tell us which of our values are inconsistent, and which actions will lead to fulfillment of our goals. But, given an inconsistency, reason cannot tell us which of our conflicting values to drop or which goals to follow. If my goals come into conflict with your goals, reason tells me that I must either thwart your goals, or give up caring about mine; but reason cannot tell me to favor one choice over the other. … Moral judgments are based on emotions, and reasoning normally contributes only by helping us extrapolate from our basic values to novel cases. Reasoning can also lead us to discover that our basic values are culturally inculcated, and that might impel us to search for alternative values, but reason alone cannot tell us which values to adopt, nor can it instill new values.”
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no real evidence is ever offered for the original assumption that ordinary moral thought and talk has this objective character. Instead, philosophers tend simply to assert that people’s ordinary practice is objectivist and then begin arguing from there.
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If we really want to go after these issues in a rigorous way, it seems that we should adopt a different approach. The first step is to engage in systematic empirical research to figure out how the ordinary practice actually works. Then, once we have the relevant data in hand, we can begin looking more deeply into the philosophical implications – secure in the knowledge that we are not just engaging in a philosophical fiction but rather looking into the philosophical implications of people’s actual practices.
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t is often assumed that tolerating a religious belief is primarily a matter of refusing to make a negative judgment about the content of that belief. This cannot be so
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Should the classification of another’s beliefs as false be viewed as a case of intolerance? No. Religious toleration necessarily presupposes that we disagree with another person’s beliefs.” Tolerance is required precisely because we do disagree and because we consider another person's position to be false. But, we must still respect and love the person who holds beliefs which we consider false. To determine whether or not those who criticize others are intolerant, we need to examine instead their attitudes and actions towards the actual people with whose beliefs they differ. Simply to label a belief is false is not to be intolerant...
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Multiculturalism and Its Discontents
Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?
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I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights.
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The latest example of the Left’s blind spot on this issue is the antagonism of so many liberal reviewers toward Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent memoir, Nomad.
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