moral relativism

Often demonized by conservatives as being responsible for all of the bad things of society today.

The belief that no action is, on its own, good or bad, but that it depends on what it effects.

Does require something to be chosen as a fixed moral belief, so that all others can be deduced from it.

See: moral objectivism

There are many different forms of moral relativism, ranging from the well-thought-out, defensible position, to the "liberal reactionary opinion," as I like to call it.

I'm sure you've all seen this before, the LRO -- you mention some bizarre fact about some obscure culture, and someone says, "I think that's disgusting, but who am I to judge them?"

I've seen this a lot in my "Philosophies of Love and Sexuality" class. We were talking about Ancient Greece, and their tradition of pederasty. Almost half of the class said, "Ugh, that's wrong, it's child abuse, it's statutory rape," without even considering the pedagogical dimension, without even thinking that the reason the practice was perpetuated for so long was because they liked it. I mean, hell, we're not talking about prepubescent boys here, we're talking mid-teens. That's old enough to make decisions, and the case could be made that they were, as a culture, at least as "psychologically healthy" as us.

But almost another half of the class said, "It's wrong for us, but it was right for them." What the hell? Why? What's to stop you from going that extra inch and saying, "It's right for child-molestors, but it's wrong for me"? It doesn't matter that we can't go back in time to "punish" them; it only matters that one day, we say, "Yuck, that high-school teacher touched his male student, let's make him our new villain, what a dirty old man he is," etc., but at the same time, we say, "Hey, some of our greatest cultural heroes, Hellenes all, were raging and rampaging sodomites of teenage boys -- but we can't judge them for it."

You know what this kind of thinking implies? That modern pederasts are not villains because of what it is they do; they are villains because they do something they are told not to do. We don't put them in jail because they damage children, we put them in jail for disobeying arbitrary conventions. The Greeks happened not to have these conventions. This is silly.

Common challenges against moral relativism include the straw man fallacy ("Obviously there are some things that are objectively true, regardless of opinion; therefore moral relativism is wrong") and the appeal to consequences ("If there are no objective standards of right or wrong, murderers and rapists would roam the street, preying on your children").

The straw man fallacy is easy to burst. Relativists do not necessarily believe that there are no such things as facts. That would lead to quite a reductio ad absurdum -- "it's a fact that there are no facts." What relativists argue is that the set of moral judgements is not a member of the set of facts. So saying, "There are facts," is quite beside the point.

The appeal to consequences is more interesting, because it betrays an assumption about the nature of power which is implicit in the objectivist's objection.

The realist believes that the relativist will be forced to admit a flaw in their reasoning because, if they can't morally condemn murderers, they can't restrain them, either. I say, How so? Oh, it'd be wrong to lock someone up in a prison, it'd violate their rights, unless you had a moral reason! But this is obviously circular reasoning. The entire concepts of rights or justice are based on realist principles, which is what relativism challenges in the first place.

A relativist can simply answer that restraining a murderer can be done on the same principle as restraining a tiger. The tiger isn't wrong, per se, for wanting to eat little children. And we aren't "justified," per se, in locking it up, or at least keeping it away from our major population centres. It's just what we do to survive a world with tigers in it. And jail is what we do to survive in a world with murderers in it, regardless of whether murder is right or wrong.

Moral relativism has been a cornerstone of American academia since the civil rights movement of the 1960's. This movement forced our society to acknowledge egalitarianism as a social ideal; race and gender equality entered the realm of possibility. Many social reformers went even farther than this - if all people have been created equal, don't all people equally have the right to determine morality?

This question is the root of moral relativism. Sociologists and philosophers have noticed for thousands of years that there is a great range in social mores among world cultures. Relativists use this fact to claim that there is no objective moral truth; morality is a tool used to protect and foster human interaction. As such, an individual's moral standards are either formed by the society that the individual operates within, or by the individual's conscience. These differing ideas on the source of morality produce two forms of moral relativism - cultural relativism and individualistic relativism.

Individualistic relativism, or subjectivism, is the more radical of the two forms. Subjectivists propose that every person has a unique moral code, created and maintained by that person - a conscience. This conscience in no way has to conform to society's norms. A person's morality can only be judged against his conscience, no matter what that entails. Every person sets up a standard of morality to be judged by.

Cultural relativism is somewhat more conventional, at least on initial analysis. An individual can only be judged within the context of that individual's society. All Americans are to be judged according to American morality, and all Canadians according to Canadian morality. Relativist Americans cannot judge Canadians according to the American system of morality, but according to the Canadian system. The advantage of this method of study is that it seems to provide an external moral standard without resorting to an objective one.

Further analysis, however, shows this not to be the case. The term 'culture' is so amorphous that attempts to nail down any individual's external culture are impossible. What is the minimum size for a culture? What happens when a person is a member of two different cultures, which conflict on a certain matter of morality? Inevitably, after many such attempts to better define culture or society for an individual, the only applicable definition would be a society of one - the individual, and only the individual. Therefore, cultural relativism reduces to subjectivism.

Relativism, then, reduces to a single idea: I can't judge anyone's morals except by that person's own standard of morality. This means people such as David Koresh and Jim Jones are completely justified in destroying other people's lives, as long as that action is consistent with their personal conscience. The inverse, however, is not true. Relativists cannot expect others to conform to their ideas. Non-relativists can be as judgmental as they want, but a relativist must abide by the dogma of individual morality and honor their moral decisions.

I disagree with the theory of moral relativism, as its framework contains multiple assumptions. Many of these assumptions were mentioned within the text, but were not accompanied by coherent support or explanation by the featured relativists. The most critical of these was the assumption of cultural equality.

Relativists assume that every human culture (or individual, in the case of subjectivism) has the same capacity to study and dictate morality. This seems to be the definition of relativism itself, but it is an inherent assumption integral to its defense. This can be seen in Pojman's description of the argument for ethical relativism:

1. What is considered morally right varies from society to society, so that there are no moral principles accepted by all societies.
2. All moral principles derive their validity from cultural acceptance.
3. Therefore, there are no universally valid moral principles . . . (Pojman 240)

This problem is exacerbated by the propensity of many relativists to assume that a difference in moral application reflects a difference in moral principle. Herodotus, when speaking of the differences between cultures, contrasts the burial rituals of Greeks with the cannibalist rituals of Indians (Herodotus 208-9). Although these two applications of morals are greatly different, the basic principle is the same: certain rituals are to be used to honor and respect the bodies of the dead. Many relativists hold Herodotus's account up as the perfect description of moral relativism, although it actually supports a non-relativist view of moral principle.

What would happen, then, if certain societies were given lesser weight when researching objective morality, and the researcher acknowledged that moral principle, rather than application, should be used as the meter stick? I believe that certain basic moral principles would be proven universal: The killing of another human without reason is wrong. Respect should be given to those in authority. Members of a family unit have responsibilities to one another. These principles, and certain others, form the basis of any functioning society on Earth.

Bibliography

Sommers, Christina, and Sommers, Fred. Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers. © 2001.

Pojman, Louis. "Who's to Judge?" Sommers pp. 237-50.

Herodotus. "Morality as Custom". Sommers pp. 208-9.