Moral Relativism Rears Its Ugly Head

Eugene Volokh asks whether liberals are moral relativists, and suddenly moral relativism is popping up everywhere. So I thought I'd chime in too. The quick answer is: no, there's no connection between being a liberal and being a moral relativist. For the longer answer, read on.

Volokh is right to say that moral relativism is not the view that what the right thing to do is depends, at least to some degree, on the situation. No moral theory that isn't completely absurd would say that what you should do has nothing to do with the situation: with what the likely results of some action are, what alternatives are available to you, and so forth. As Crooked Timber notes, whether it's wrong to use something depends on, among other things, whether you own it; and even such apparently obvious claims as "it is wrong to cut someone open with a knife" do not hold in all situations (e.g., if the person doing the cutting is a surgeon.) Think how odd it would be if, in the debate about whether it was right or wrong to invade Iraq, there were only two tenable positions: those that held that we should never invade any country no matter what, and those that held that we should invade all other countries all the time. Any more nuanced view will involve taking some features of the situation to be relevant to the morality of invading a country, and to call all those positions 'moral relativism' is, in my view, absurd.

Moral relativism also has nothing to do with saying that the right thing to do sometimes depends on the person. For instance, I think that in deciding what to do with my life, I should try to do something that in some way makes the world a better place. In my case, this completely rules out being, say, a novelist, since I am no good at writing novels. If I were George Eliot, however, things would be different. Nor, finally, does it have anything to do with thinking that when you do something wrong, the circumstances in which you do it might affect how much we blame you for what you did. Most people think that when you do something wrong after extreme provocation, or under duress, you should not be blamed as much as you would have been had you done it without any such extenuating circumstances. This does not mean that what you did is not wrong, but it does mean that we might blame you less for doing it.

So what is moral relativism? Suppose that we are considering some moral question, like what someone in a given situation should do. And suppose that we have described this situation as completely as you like, including all the morally relevant facts, whatever they are. Is there a right answer to this question? Some people say: yes, there is, and it's the same no matter who is asking. Some people say: no, there isn't. But some people say: for each person who asks this question, there is a right answer; but which answer that is depends on who is asking. The people who give this third answer are moral relativists. Some of them say that the reason why different answers are right for different people is that moral claims are true only relative to one's culture; others say that they are relative to the individual; in principle they might be relative to any difference between persons, though as far as I know no one has yet claimed that which answer is right depends on the height of the person who's asking. But they all say that the truth of moral claims is relative to the person making them.

There are philosophers who clearly understand this view and accept it. However, my sense (from teaching undergraduates) is that in practice, a lot of people who think they are moral relativists in fact think that there are no right answers to moral questions at all. This is due, in part, to the fact that when people talk about ethics, some of them seem to think that it makes sense to use "X is true for me" to mean "I believe X." This way of talking makes the existence of moral disagreement seem like conclusive evidence for moral relativism: if you think X is right and I think it's wrong, then it's "true for you" that X is right but "true for me" that X is wrong, and so the truth seems to depend on who's asking. We don't talk this way about other subjects: if I am really bad at geography, we don't usually say that it is "true for me" that Kansas is a country in Asia, nor does the fact that some people think that Kansas is in Asia imply that the truth about where Kansas is depends on who you ask. The right explanation of the fact that you and I disagree about where Kansas is is just that I am wrong; and saying that it's "true for me" that Kansas is in Asia serves only to obscure this possibility. Personally, I don't see why this way of talking makes any more sense in ethics than it does in geography, or why one obvious possible explanation of moral disagreement isn't that one side is wrong. And this point seems to me so obvious that the only way I can explain why significant numbers of smart and decent undergraduates seem not to have thought of it is to assume that they think that there are no right answers to moral questions at all. In any case, for the rest of this post I will assume that when non-philosophers talk about moral relativism, they mean the view that there are no right answers to moral questions that hold for everyone, whether this is because there are no right answers, period, or because there are right answers, but that different answers are right for different people.

Are liberals moral relativists? Well, some of us are, and some of us aren't. I assume the same is true of conservatives. But there is no reason why a moral relativist has to be a liberal, and no reason why a liberal has to be a moral relativist. On some issues, liberals and conservatives tend to hold different moral beliefs, or to apply them differently. Conservatives are more likely to think that abortion is wrong in all (or: all but a few) circumstances; liberals are more likely to think that it is permissible, though not desirable. But moral relativism is not a view about which moral beliefs one should hold; but about the status of those beliefs: can they be true, period? True for me but false for you? Or are they not the sorts of beliefs that can be true or false at all? There are, I think, some substantive views that are so abhorrent or unreasonable that it's hard to see how anyone who believed in morality in any sense at all could possibly hold them. But there is no obvious reason to think that either liberalism or conservatism is such a view. Personally, I have always found the idea that liberals must be moral relativists to be deeply insulting. And, like the assumption made by one evangelist I talked to in an airport that since I do not believe in God, I must spend my life flitting from one sordid sexual encounter to another in a desperate attempt to distract myself from the horrible emptiness of my meaningless life, it's a view that I think reveals more about the limited imaginations of those who hold it than it does about the people they're thinking about.

This being said, however, I think that it might be true that more liberals than conservatives are moral relativists, not because there's a real connection between the two, but for a different reason. If you read, say, the comments to Kevin Drum's post on this subject, you will find a lot of very odd views about what not being a moral relativist would involve, many of which are, in my opinion, just wrong. Now: when you mistakenly think that X (an appealing view) implies Y (a view you want to avoid), you can draw either of two conclusions: (1) X is true and so, alas, is Y; or (2) Y is false and so, alas, is X. My sense (based only on personal observation) is that given certain initial mistakes about what the alternative to moral relativism involves, liberals are more likely than conservatives to respond by embracing moral relativism, at least theoretically.

Example: I have met people who think that if you are not a moral relativist, then you must believe not just that there are right answers to moral questions, but that you know what they are. If you think about it, there's no obvious reason why this should be true: in almost every other area, it's clear that we can believe both that there are right answers to questions and that we don't know what they are. (I mean: I don't know how tall Moe and von are, but that doesn't mean I don't believe that they have a determinate height.) Moreover, I have always thought that the more seriously you take the idea that some kinds of conduct really are right and others really are wrong, and that it matters to do the former and not the latter, the more seriously you should take the possibility that you might be wrong about which is which; and therefore that openness to the possibility that you might be wrong is actually required by morality, not opposed to it.

However, some people do seem to think that anyone who is not a moral relativist must think that she is right all the time. A person who thinks this faces a choice: does she (a) give up on the idea that there are right answers to moral questions that hold for all people, or (b) give up on intellectual humility? Offhand, I would think that liberals might be more likely to choose the first, and conservatives the second. (Note: neither group would necessarily live by their choice: it's not as though conservatives who make the initial mistake and then choose (b) never find themselves morally perplexed, and liberals who make the initial mistake and choose (a) notoriously maintain certain moral views, like the view that it is wrong to be intolerant and judgmental. This is, I think, what we'd expect if both sides were forced into their positions by initial errors.) Likewise, some people seem to think that if you deny moral relativism, you must think that your culture's values are correct. It seems to me possible that liberals who make this mistake might be more likely to respond to it by becoming moral relativists, while conservatives who make it might be more likely to give up on the idea that their culture might on occasion be wrong.

This attempt at armchair sociology might, of course, be completely wrong. If I'm right, though, it might turn out that liberals were more likely to be moral relativists than conservatives. But this would not be because liberalism actually involves moral relativism, but because given certain initial mistakes about what the denial of moral relativism involves, liberals are more likely to respond by becoming moral relativists than conservatives are. The right response, of course, is to reject the original mistakes; and this is important not just because they are, after all, mistakes, but because they harm both the liberals and the conservatives who make them. Liberals who make these mistakes and become moral relativists as a result lose the ability to argue that anyone is morally wrong. Conservatives who make these mistakes and have the opposite response come to equate intellectual humility and a willingness to question their own beliefs with moral relativism. As I said earlier, if you think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, and finding the right answers and acting on them really matters, then you have to take seriously the possibility that you might be wrong about what morality requires. Moreover, if my experience is anything to go by, there is nothing like really trying to be a good person to make the limitations on one's own grasp of morality, along with all one's other failings, abundantly clear.

Comments

[hilzoy]

Eugene Volokh has an expanded version of his original post here. It's very good.

[Slartibartfast]

I have no moral relatives. No one in my family does.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Volokh's post is good, but yours offers a more interesting, and in my view explanatory, discussion of why liberals often get hit with the 'moral relativism' charge.

My sense (based only on personal observation) is that given certain initial mistakes about what the alternative to moral relativism involves, liberals are more likely than conservatives to respond by embracing moral relativism, at least theoretically.

I think this is exactly right. I saw this in college all the time. Many people I knew wanted to reject portions of their cultural morality and did so by adopting a moral relativist pose often tied to the idea that each culture had its own morality and none was better than the next. But if pressed on racial discrimination in South Africa, they would admit that it was wrong for that culture to discriminate in that way. But this rarely led them to abandon their idea of relativism.

I have met people who think that if you are not a moral relativist, then you must believe not just that there are right answers to moral questions, but that you know what they are. If you think about it, there's no obvious reason why this should be true: in almost every other area, it's clear that we can believe both that there are right answers to questions and that we don't know what they are.

This is a huge problem and I typically try to address it with an argument that I shamelessly stole from C.S. Lewis (though now I don't now remember which book)and then elaborated on. Imagine a piece of paper with a very complex shape drawn on it. There spaces which are clearly interior space (moral) there are spaces which are clearly exterior space (immoral) and there are complicated border issues which would have to be researched very carefully in order to find out if they were interior or exterior spaces. This would represent the complexity of understanding moral judgments in an ideal state. Now imagine that the intensely complicated shape had been free-hand-drawn by a competent but not excellent draftsman on hundreds of copies. This would introduce a number of errors on each copy, and each copy would have different errors. These copies were distributed to each culture as a morality map. Furthermore, each individual member of each culture copied it again and used it as their own personal map. Some people copied well and got very close to their own cultural map. Some didn't do so well. But we can still identify a huge number of common understandings that refer to the ideal state. Arguments about poor copies and the exact locations of the boundaries shouldn't distract from the fact that we can still locate a large number of things as interior or exterior. Differences in copies shouldn't fool us into thinking there is no right answer, though it should clue us into the idea that none of us have the completely right answer.

Hmm. This analogy works better when I can actually draw it on paper.

This issue has an almost exact parallel with judicial interpretation questions. (Hmm I promised a post on interpretation and I haven't done that yet).

[kenB]

Interesting post (as was Volokh's). I think the comparison with factual questions is inapt but illuminating. We can agree that statement X is right and statement Y is wrong only if we already agree on the framework we'll use to validate the statements. Having already agreed on what we mean by the terms "America," "Asia," and "Kansas," it's possible to assign a truth value to the "Kansas is in Asia" statement. However, if I were to argue strenuously that the continents were misnamed and that North America was in fact Asia and vice versa, then you and I couldn't reach agreement on the truth value of the statement except (perhaps) by retreating to other definitions on which we do agree.

It seems to me that disagreements over morality usually turn on just what framework should be used, rather than what the right result is within an agreed-upon framework.

So, does this make me a relativist?

[kenB]

But if pressed on racial discrimination in South Africa, they would admit that it was wrong for that culture to discriminate in that way. But this rarely led them to abandon their idea of relativism.

Why should they? I don't think that being a relativist means that you can never tell anyone else what to do. It just means that in doing so, you can't appeal to any authority other than your own sense of right and wrong.

[hilzoy]

kenB: I think it all depends on what you mean by a framework. One possibility, suggested by some of what you say, is that we just need to agree on the meanings of the terms involved in moral claims. This, I think, we already do, at least with respect to relatively straightforward moral claims like "killing is wrong". The need to agree on language does not, in my view, make one a relativist.

Another possibility, suggested by the term 'framework', is that you think that we need to agree on some set of basic moral principles within which more specific claims about e.g. the morality of a particular action can be justified. Here, I think that whether you're a relativist depends on whether you think that any such set of principles can be justified: if so, you're not a relativist, if not, you're a relativist in at least the popular sense (whether you're a relativist in the technical sense would depend on whether you think that moral claims were true or false relative to a given framework, or that this relativity, combined with the impossibility of justifying any one framework, means that moral claims are neither true nor false.)

You're right about South Africa -- a relativist can say that racial discrimination is wrong, she just say that other people might not be as fully justified in saying it's right. (That it's wrong might be 'true for her' but false for someone else.)

[Serena Chirico]

When you add flesh to ideas of morality, it just seems to become pointless.

Lets say there is an ethical situation and I observe another human acting against that situation. Ethical standards are meaningless unless we observe people acting contrary to them.

I can now judge that person. I can call that person names. I can make myself and others like myself angry at that person. I can feel superior to that person. Just maybe I and others like me can coerce that person to change.

One problem is that when I observe another person acting contrary to my ethical standards, there are practically always other reasons for our different behaviors.

One example is that for better or worse, I've never felt the urge to have sex with another person of my sex. It is cheap and silly for me to create an ethical system that proclaims the actions of others with different urges immoral.

Another example is that the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, people who have never been in a position to do that can cheaply assert that this violates some ethical standards.

If a society punishes, say, murder and stealing for purely practical reasons, the ethics on the whole just seems superfluous at best.

At worst, ethics seem to be a way people use others to boost their own self images with overall net harmful results.