[MD] Relativism

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Platt, Marsha, Ian, (Matt, you already read this)

Here is another excerpt from a blog post of mine on relativism,
skepticism, and nihilism:

I am going to continue to discuss the issue of relativism and Jeffrey
Stouts's book, Ethics After Babel. Previously I explained that from an
essentialist’s point of view, the only way to avoid relativism is to
have a foundation. For the pragmatist, however, the best way to avoid
relativism is to deny foundationalism--deny the philosophical premise
from which the question "is it absolute or relative?" can be asked.
This question is pretty much the same as asking, "is it subjective or
objective?" Rather than referring to Cartesian ontological
distinctions between mental and material substances, pragmatists see
"subjective" as amounting to something like "things that are hard to
get agreement about" and "objective" as "things that are easy to get
agreement about." They don't see a hard ontological distinction
between subjective and objective so much as an epistemic continuum for
the possibility of inter-subjective agreement.


While some moral questions are easy to get agreement about, such as
the truth of the assertion "slavery is evil," others are hard to get
agreement about. The amount of disagreement on moral questions
explains many people's skepticism about the possibility of being
justified in believing that even such assertions as "slavery is evil"
are true. Jeffrey Stout, in Ethics After Babel, argues that there is a
practical limit to how much disagreement there can be on morals. He
says that disagreement on morals can never be total. "If somebody's
criteria of goodness were said to be completely different from ours,
we would then lack any good reason for concluding that we were in fact
disagreeing about goodness." At some point, people's disagreements
become so deep that neither party would even recognize what they are
disagreeing about as morals. So "disagreement in fact only makes sense
against a background of agreements to which disputants can appeal."


This limit on disagreement is also a practical limit for the notion of
relativism which says that justification of ethical assertions and
moral truth itself can apply only with respect to a particular group
that shares a set of fundamental beliefs. Relativism says that what
may be wrong for one group based on its fundamental assumptions may
not be wrong for another group whose moral reasoning is based on
different assumptions. Stout's limit on disagreement says that if
everything that is said to be evil for one group is said to be good by
another, perhaps the word "good" has been mistranslated as "evil." Two
groups that disagree on all the basic assumptions their moral
reasoning follows could not even be said to be disagreeing about
morals, so there must be at least some common ground that we can
appeal to in comparing the morality of two cultures. Relativism can't
go all the way down.


Though he argues that our situation can not be quite as hopelessly
relativistic as some claim, he would admit that the above argument is
not saying very much. In his book, Stout does not try to argue that
nihilism, relativism, and skepticism are false. Instead he takes on
the more modest task of arguing that we are not forced to be moral
nihilists, moral relativists, or moral skeptics. He denies being a
moral nihilist early on when he claims the he believes that there are
moral truths that can be known. He said “I hold that
slavery—understood as the coercive practice of buying, selling, and
exercising complete control over other human beings against their
will—is evil. This proposition hasn’t always been believed to be true,
of course, just as it hasn’t always been held that the earth is
roundish, but the truth of the matter is that the earth is roundish.”
He says this to make a point about moral propositions—that moral
propositions can be true or false and that believing them or not is
independent of their truth-value.


Stout also denies being a moral skeptic. This is to say that he not
only believes that there is such a thing as moral truth, he also
believes that it is possible to be justified in believing some moral
assertions to be true. In other words, it is possible to know at least
some moral truths to whatever extent we can know scientific truths. We
go about trying to discern moral truths and scientific truths in very
different ways, and we justify our beliefs about moral and scientific
truths in very different ways, but there is nothing very different
about how we use the word “true” when we apply it to moral assertions
or scientific assertions. Though the assertions "it is true that
slavery is evil" and "it is true that the earth is roundish" are very
different sorts of assertions, the word "true" functions in the same
way in both sentences.


But why is it that there seems to be so much agreement on science and
so much disagreement on morals? Is our epistemic situation when it
comes to so-called "subjective" moral assertions any worse off than
our epistemic situation is when it comes to scientific "objective"
assertions? Part of the issue that makes these situations seem so
different to us is probably that our conversations about morals tend
to be about our disagreements while our conversations about science
focus on explaining what has been agreed to within the scientific
community. However, within that community, we would find that the
conversations are more likely to revolve around scientist’s
disagreements, especially during times of scientific revolution, since
it is in such areas where the interesting most scientific work will be
done.


Professional scientists at these times are like the political pundits,
seeming to disagree on just about everything, but their disagreements
only make sense within a context where they share enough beliefs in
common that they can agree that they are in fact disagreeing.
Likewise, the interesting conversations that we want to have about
morality will not be mostly about whether we should be honest, whether
murder is wrong, or whether it is good to be lazy, but about, say, how
our value of personal freedom should be balanced with the value of
human solidarity. If we didn’t already largely agree on the good of
such values, we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation about how to
balance them. We should compare the disagreement on issues like
abortion to scientificly unsettled issues like the origin of the
universe rather than to the shape of the earth.


A second issue comparing agreement in ethics with that of science is
who is expected to agree. We generally call scientific knowledge
“objective,” since scientists are in agreement on what is knowledge,
while the knowledge of an ethicist is called “subjective” when she
can’t get agreement with such hypothetical conversation partners as
“the Nazi” and “the sociopath” and “the Cartesian skeptic” who is not
sure whether he is a brain in a vat. Scientists aren’t expected to
have to answer for such bogey-men, while moral philosophers are.
Scientists are only expected to be able to convince other scientists
who have been acculturated into a narrow field with specialized
training. Kuhn pointed out that this training involves door-keeping
where only those who see things largely the same way get in at all, so
it is no wonder that they are in agreement on one another’s work. “The
Nazi” or “the sociopath” or a small child isn’t expected to be able to
go into a lab and evaluate an experiment that a scientist has just
performed to verify the truth of what the scientist has claimed. They
are not considered to be competent observers. Yet, in ethics, we have
been taught to demand a foundation for ethical arguments that will
make them so convincing as to convince even these moral incompetents
of their truth. We should stop demanding such a foundation for
knowledge in ethics if we are satisified in claiming knowledge using a
less universal standard in science.


Stout confidently deploys the concept of truth without feeling that he
needs a foundation in a theory of truth to back up his use of the
word. He thinks “truth” functions in language well enough without
having such a theory that explains what makes a moral proposition true
such as a correspondence to some Moral Law. He says, "I do object to
the idea that we can explain what it is for moral propositions to be
true by saying that they correspond to the Law, since the relation of
correspondence invoked by such an explanation doesn't seem clear
enough to explain anything…To say that a moral proposition corresponds
to the Moral Law doesn't obviously add anything more than a well-worn
figure of speech--anything of explanatory value--to saying that the
proposition is true."


If there were some way to "look directly, without help from variable
tradition-bound presuppositions, at the Moral Law and then back again
at our beliefs, surveying the relations for instances or failures of
correspondence" we would be better off for believing in a Moral Law.
But our epistemic situation is such that the existence or
non-existence of a Moral Law is of no consequence. So an absolutist
may be someone who believes in such a Law while a relativist is one
who claims that such a law does not exist. A pragmatist is neither one
of these. A pragmatist doesn’t see the point in arguing the issue
since even if such essences as the Moral Law exist, they don't get us
anywhere.


Stout has given a typical pragmatic argument against essentialism, but
he has not, as pragmatists are often accused of having done, given up
on the concept of truth or conflated truth with justification. He
says, “…my talk about moral disagreement makes sense only if I grant
that there is some truth of the matter in ethics to disagree over and
only if I am prepared to say of people who disagree with me over the
truth of a proposition that it is they who are wrong…if there are
flat-earthers, people who are wrong about important scientific truths,
why shouldn’t there be societies that are wrong about important moral
truths?”


Where pragmatists may be in some sense relativists is when they
assert, as Stout does, that deciding “…which moral propositions you
are justified in believing depends upon or is relative to where you
find yourself in culture and history.” So in this view, the truth of a
moral proposition does not depend on the culture within which the
assertion is made, but the practice of justification, on the other
hand, does depend on an epistemic situation which has a lot to do with
time and place and even facts about the specific person who is
justifying a belief. Saying so makes justification sound “just
subjective,” but these facts about the person are still facts
nonetheless.

The reasons and evidence that we now use to justify our belief that
the world is roundish were not available to, say, the ancient Hebrews.
These arguments were developed over thousands of years of human
history. The ancient Hebrews who did not have the benefit of this
reasoning could have been justified in saying the earth is flat even
though they were wrong. People in ancient times were then
“epistemically” blameless for asserting that the earth is flat.


By the same token, some culture at some time in the past may have been
blameless in thinking that slavery was not evil. They were wrong, but
they may still have been justified in thinking that they were right
because the evidence and arguments that we can apply today did not
exist in their time. One of the great shames of American history is
that, according to the historical evidence, some of the Founding
Fathers actually did have access to good arguments that oppose
slavery, and should have recognized that slavery is wrong, yet they
owned slaves anyway. The arguments that these Founding Fathers
deployed in support of slavery weren’t good enough in their epistemic
context considering the available counterarguments. Their belief in
the morality of slavery was both false (assuming slavery actually is
evil) and unjustified, so they were not blameless at that time. In
fact, the culture of the American South in the 19th century that held
slavery to be justified was blame-worthy and needed to change because
slavery was not justifiable at that time and place even though the
culture held it to be moral.

This argument depends on making clear distinctions between the three
terms of Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief."
We need to see the difference between our belief right now that
"slavery is evil" is true, our being justified in believing that
"slavery is evil" is true, and the issue of whether in fact "slavery
is evil" is actually true. Whether or not slavery actually is evil, we
are still justified in believing that it is evil right now and
therefore justifed in thinking that the ancient Hebrews were wrong
then. But maybe they were actually right and we are wrong now. If so,
it is no problem for the point that we can retain the concept that
there can be some truth to the matter as to whether slavery is either
evil now as well as then or not evil now and as well as then in the
same way that there is truth to the matter as to whether or not the
earth is flat. In both cases the truth of the matter is independent of
whether or not anyone believes it. The difference is only that
"slavery is evil" could not be true if there were no people for it to
be true about. The difference is not that someone needs to believe one
of these statements to make it true while the other is true
independent of belief. Truth in both cases is thought to be
independent of justification and belief.



Though I don't think it is true about slavery, I think it is also
possible to think that some practice may have been evil in the past
but not evil now (or vice versa_ in the same way that the truth about
the shape of the earth would change if the earth changed shape. Also,
many moral truths are true about one culture but not about another,
but this is still not a problem for the possibility of moral truths
anymore than it is a problem to think that the question of whether
there are any moral truths that are true about every culture right now
and throughout history can be an open question without making the
moral nihilist's denial of the possibility of there being a truth to
the matter about any moral assertions. And if we can at least keep the
question open, we also deny relativism which claims that it is
impossible for there to be such moral truths that apply to all
cultures and conflates the notion of how beliefs can be justified
without respect to a cultural context with the question of whether
there can be any truth within a cultural context that is independent
of justification.

The point is that though justification is relative to a cultural
context and though moral truths always depend on facts about the
culture we are applying the question of truth to, we are not
relativists, at least in my book, if we believe the truth of the
matter is only dependent on such facts and not on whether or not a
belief can be justified. Unfortunately, by many people's use of the
term "relativists," we are still relativists to them if we don't think
that such truths are a matter of correspondence with the Moral Law,
whatever that means.


Stout has made a case for viewing justification in both science and
morality as relative to one’s epistemic context. This context includes
the availability of reasons and evidence. Stout’s description of
relativity of justification to epistenic context in no way carries
over to moral or scientific truth. If Stout’s view is a form of what
people mean by the term “relativism,” it is not the sort of
relativism--the kind used as a pejorative--that takes ethics to be the
arbitrary preferences of individuals or even of entire cultures. Stout
is in fact willing to condemn entire cultures for having evil
practices if the people of the culture are not justified in believing
these evil practices to be morally permissible. What he is unwilling
to do is blame a culture for the misfortune of existing in a time and
place where its people believe in the good of a moral practice that is
actually evil when their mistaken belief is explained by the fact that
the evidence and arguments that could convince them that it is evil
were not available to them. Such people would simply be ignorant of a
moral truth rather than deserving of condemnation.