[MD] Marsha's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Marsha, DMB,

Do you believe that moral assertions can have truth-value? For example, 
do you see statements like "slavery is evil" as either true or false in 
the same way that assertions of fact such as "2 is the smallest prime 
number" is either true or false?

If you take X to be some such proposition, do you see any of the 
following to be problematic?
(1) Bob is justified in believing X given his context, but X is not 
true.
(2) X is true for Bob but not true for Rich
(3) I used to be justified in believing X, but X is not true and never 
was true.
(4) I am now justified in believing X, but X may turn out to be false

I would say that if you see no problem with any of these, your view 
would typically be called relativism. I think that anyone who objects 
to 2 but sees nothing wrong with 1, 3, or 4 is using the usual 
understanding of truth and it's relationship to justification but may 
still be called relativism by some. If so, I would call this second 
version of relativism the good kind and the first version the bad kind.

The bad kind of relativism says that a proposition can be true to one 
person and false to another while the good kind admits that belief in a 
proposition may be justified for one person but not justified for 
another but holds that truth is another matter entirely. The cure for 
the bad kind of relativism may simply be to say, "If you think that a 
statement like 'slavery is evil' can be both true and false at the same 
time depending on who makes the assertion, then I don't think we both 
mean the same thing when we use the word 'true.'"

Best,
Steve