Any and all Relatavists...I Need a Hand

Great Debates
21

Fair enough, but as the OP put it: “I know some smart folks have believed such things, so I’m not saying there isn’t a…‘eloquent,’ in the very least…answer to this problem, but regardless, I still would love to hear it.” As far as I know, Hume’s statement on the matter is the most famous formulation, and Rand Rover’s statement appears significantly similar: that (a) neither has yet come across a sufficient reason to accept the assertion in question, sure as (b) neither explicitly rules out hearing a sufficient reason.

And you’re assuming, of course, that ‘the people who came up with it have a very good idea of why the “is” becomes an “ought”.’ Should we not so assume?

Why, what would it mean to live or think that way?

22

I don’t think Hume’s remark can be taken as a justification for relativism, only that moral reasoning is different from other kinds of reasoning.

23

Well, at the start, yes. But so long as there’s not yet a link between “is” and “ought”, the “ought” claims of moral reasoning are – as you say – reliant on first picking an assertion which lets you make a judgment about something; you’re pointedly not deriving them from “is” claims, but are instead proposing an “ought” claim or three and working out the assorted derivations from there.

And if that’s the basis for two chains of moral reasoning – each derived from such “ought” claims rather than “is” claims – then what are we left with, if not relativism?

24

Well, if not relativism then… Kant. Blech. :wink:

25

Yes, in the sense that “moral reasoning” is not reasoning at all. Morality is only emotion. “That action is immoral” means only “boo! I don’t like when others do that action, and I would feel bad if I myself did that action.” That’s it–there’s no reasoning there. There’s nothing absolute or objective or existent outside the mind of the speaker.

26

Are minds or the way they behave not objective in that sense? Are you a dualist?

27

I don’t see how your conclusion follows from your premise. Surely one can reason about emotion? We can almost certainly be rational: certain actions cause more pleasure than others. At least we can be honest: our approach to reality is based on the fallacy of simple enumeration. If you respond to this post, you cannot be absolutely certain that each key press will not cause you wracking pain. But if you had reason to believe that, you most likely would not respond to this thread unless you stood to gain more pleasure from the momentary pain it caused.

28

My response was simply noting that Hume missed the obvious there: that the people he was talking about knew perfectly well why. In fact, it boils down to “Good things are Good.” They wanted people to have and enjoy good things. You would find a difference between, say, an Epicurean and Stoic, or a Buddhist, or a Christian principally in the follow three areas:

(1) What exactly are the best good things?
(2) How can we get them?

And even that’s pushing it because to a very great degree they all had in mind the same things, just diferent ways of looking at it. If a human ultimately didn’t want any good things at all, then relativism itself could have no meaning. It would be like trying to

I don’t have to asume - I can see their arguments and follow them. That does not mena I need to aree with them, or agree with the premises. But they understand perfectly well why and when they turn “is” into “ought,” and it’s hardly a mystery.

To be blunt, I have yet to meet the moral relativist who was not remarkably judgemental, (blindly) emotionally attached to political or social views, and prepared to breathe hellfire and damnation about those who disagreed with them. They were charmingly, and often urbanely, fanatical. In fact, as near as I can make out, relativism is a philosophy which condemns anyone like you for not being like the foreigner of your choice (and usually, imagination).

29

Oh, normative relativism is where one would encounter the problem of making no prescriptions about people’s behaviour. It’s possible to reject that without being an “objectivist” though, one may be a consequentialist or a Peircean pragmatist (or pragmaticist).

Edit: Should note, I meant “certain people” should be removed from society through incarceration, namely those that cause unacceptable harm to society (murderers, rapists).

30

I’m just not sure what the word “good” is doing there. What happens if you remove it, and talk instead about what it would be like “if a human didn’t want any things at all” – after applying your “how can we get them?” question when asking what, exactly, are the things we really want? You’d be left with some terrific “is” points; where, precisely, would the “ought” come in?

Someone upthread mentioned Kant; I can of course see where you can get conditional imperatives from the “is” talk – you ought to stay in school if you want to be a doctor, that sort of thing – but how do you get a categorical “ought”?

31

I am not an expert on Kant, but with that caveat, the process is as you describe. You turn an instance by hypothesis into a categorical and demonstrate that this would not lead to a contradiction or other kind of irrationality. Think of it kind of like mathematical induction, if you’re familiar with it. Things get more complicated because Kant was also big on duty, that an action cannot be moral if it was not done out of a sense of duty. But anyway, a principle so elevated would, if it did not have problems, have the force of an obligation we should meet independent of our own desires. (Again—this is my understanding of Kant.)

32

I can only add my own thoughts as I understand. Selfish thoughts and actions rule the world. As long as there is an absolute truth, a moral standard selfishness is limited. And selfish people hate being told no.

33

Moral relativist, here. erislover has already laid out the structural elemnets quite nicely. I can;t really add anything to that. I woul dlike to add a little depth to his second proposition: there is no way to know whether a system of judgment has a privileged position.

This is the heart of my own ethical understanding. I make no claims about whether there is or is not an “absolute/best morality”. I only admit to myself that I would have no way to recognize such a system if it did exist. My understanding is limited. My certainty in this realm can never be absolute. Therefore I create for myself an obligation to render judgment without the comforting fiction that I have an absolute foundation from which to throw my stones.

34

Well, that’s the thing about people who claim that they have access to the absolute truth. How do they know? I mean, God came down from Mt. Sinai and told you, I guess. But how does believing God told you so make it so? How do you know God was right to tell you so?

Or put it another way, if you’re up on Mt. Sinai, and God hands you the stone tablets, and you look at the tablets, how do you judge those tablets? Are you not allowed to say, “Yep, these look pretty good.”? If God is the ultimate arbiter of morality, and humans are fallible, how do you know that the entity handing you the tablets is really God? What if it’s Satan up there on the mountain? How do you tell the difference? Using your innate moral sense? How do you know that your innate moral sense works?

Or to put it another way, suppose you were an always chaotic evil creature, like an orc. You have an innate evil nature. Would you be able to realize that you were evil, or would evil seem good to you? So God hands you the tablets, and they seem good to you, but if you’re totally depraved you aren’t in any position to judge the goodness or badness of this system of God-given absolute morality.

And contrariwise, if you’re not totally depraved but merely fallible, if you really can judge this God-given absolute morality as good, then aren’t you relying on some innate ability to tell good from bad? How do you judge this innate ability?

Thing is, we don’t start out with first principles, choose moral axioms, and create moral systems from those principles. We start out as ferillized eggs of a particular species with a particular evolutionary history. We develop, we grow, we live, we die. We never start at the beginning, we always must start in the middle, because before we can even begin to talk about morality and logic we’ve had to have already learned and judged without knowing what we were doing.

And so, to anyone who believes in absolute morality or absolute truth, the questions is: how do you know? And your neighbor over there who also believes in absolute truth, how does he know, and did you notice that despite both believing in absolute truth the two of you don’t agree on what that absolute truth is?

So what to you appears like some logical contradiction of absolutely declaring that there are no absolutes is really simply epistemological humility. We’re here trying to live our lives according to our innate desires. We didn’t choose our desires, they are thrust upon us because we are the kind of creatures we are. I can’t choose to prefer the taste of dogshit to the taste of sugar, because I’m a human being, not a housefly. There are a million facts about me that I have no choice over, because I’m who I am, and not something else. And so I am compelled, because nothing else is possible, to muddle along as best I can. And the only difference is, you’re in the same boat even if you claim that God handed you those tablets. Clinging to those tablets is just your way of muddling along.

I don’t state that I know for a fact that your absolute morality is wrong, I just say that there’s no way I can judge whether your absolute morality is right or wrong, because I’m a fallible finite human being. And so are you. And I recognize that there are been lots of people throughout history who had ideas about truth and morality, and I think a lot of those ideas were nonsense. So where does that put us?

35

  1. As I understand it, moral relativism is typically trashed in freshman philosophy[sup]1[/sup], probably because a mushy tolerance is popular among a certain high-school set. I see there are more sophisticated versions. My question is, “What bright lines separate the sound variants from the popular, naive or bogus kinds?”

  2. The classic argument invokes [del]Hitler[/del] I mean Stalin! Stalin had an elaborate system of morality which justified sending millions to the Gulag and worse. Surely there are a lot of moral schemes deserving privileged positions relative to that. Or is the proposition merely claiming that we don’t know which system is best, but we may know which systems are worse? ETA: Ah, I see the .pdf on Death and Furniture addresses this.
    [sup]1[/sup]One example is in chapter 1 of Philosophy through Science Fiction.

36

I think the problem is that the “high school set” relativism is just used without a particularly deep analysis. It’s not that they’re wrong, in my view, it’s that they’ve never had to formulate or defend their position to find the nuances. The problem a relativist like me has is that it invariably leads people to dismiss my position out of hand because they’ve only ever had to manage with the high school set. (Youth is more and more precocious, I guess. I always considered this the philosophy 101 relativist. :D) The “everything is valid” critique is particularly devastating and causes people to reject relativism out of hand. If this actually were fair view of relativism it would be a sort of tool in the skeptic’s toolbox like solipsism rather than a defensible position.

I think there are better moral systems than those revealed by Stalin’s choices. I say this because I value a free and open society. But I have no way to say that free and open societies are unquestionably better.

Death and Furniture is a great read, hope you enjoyed it. A bit deconstructive for my tastes but that is the level to which discussions sink when people start appealing to mass murder and hitting inanimate objects to make their point.

37

“All is permitted” (in one form or another) is a very standard argument used against moral relativism. Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot are all popular actors in the straw suit, but sometimies it is formed in the direction of “ethical paralysis”. The key flaw in both formulations is the idea that without an absolute framework one is incapable of making a decision. That is no more true for a moral judgment than it is for deciding whether I can cross the street before the bus hits me.

Moral relativism carries no mandates. It puts upon me the obligation for finding my own reasons why I object to mass slaughter (or whatever “dilemna” someone wishes to proppose).

As a short hand, moral relativism does not speak ot the particulars of any ethical choice or system. In fact, a moral relativist could live by a standard that was completelly indistinguishable (externally) from any arbitrary absolute morality. The only difference is that the moral relativist understands that his system/judgment may not be correct, and he has only his own level of confidence to rely upon.

I think what confuses some people is the idea that a human being cannot make a decision without enjoying perfect cofidence. In fact, that is all we can ever do. Some of us just like to pretend otherwise.

38

Those who are not moral relativists (and I am not) do not necessarily believe that they always know the right answer in every situation. What they have, is some sort of guidelines as to what the morally correct answer might be, and some confidence that others, working on the same guidelines, would roughly agree.

39

This account of relativism appears more like a sort of debating-society parlor trick: it is useful insofar as it is a technique for critiquing the motives of others, but provides nothing of substance.

I read the paper "Death and Furniture: the rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism ", and it seems that again and again the authors are making the point that to define someone elses’ argument as “rhetoric” and “against inquiry” is to “win” the debate (with lashings of purple prose). The Conclusions:

My favorite bit is “In its tropes of Death and Furniture we see a rhetoric that refuses to acknowledge its own existence; a politics that can claim a critical-radical credibility only by the selective use of its opponents’ analytic tools; and a theology which is deeply conservative and seeks nothing less than the death of disruptive, disturbing inquiry.”

Dunno how this can be convincing to anyone who does not already believe in it.

40

As a subjectivist, I like to think of it in terms of rulers. We agree that “there is length”. We can select a social system which enforces a kind of quantification of length—like meters. And we can agree that individuals will have a preference for lengths of couches. The expression of this preference may or may not be supported by additional bits of facts, like the size of their living room, or their height, or family size. But these additional facts, or the fact of the “existence of length” as it were, are insufficient to determine the appropriate length for this individual, unless we include the individual and his judgment. And his judgment doesn’t require meters at all, except possibly as a means to express his judgment to others, or quantify it to his own satisfaction. The collection of facts around length and around the individual are insufficient to determine the preference of the individual.

So I can agree that there are actions which are/are not moral. And I agree broadly to the semantics of “good”, “bad”, and so on. And I even agree that we have some social systems which can stand in for an individual’s judgment (like laws, religion, or community standards for example). And these social systems can help an individual express his own inclinations. But in the end, the individual is left to his own devices to decide which laws he’ll support, which religious codes are worth following, and which community standards he will adhere to, as well as decide on a host of behaviors not really covered by the above.