Really, I’m not of the opinion that we’ve hijacked the thread at all. The presentation of what one thinks of as an absolute moral system is certainly a way to undermine relativism by countering the second point (ie no privileged system). Certainly we might be going deeper into TVAA’s system than is warranted, but where else is the discussion going to go? If he rejects the second point, we want to know why; for him to know why, he has to have such a privileged system, and demonstrate it.
The particular tack here is one of moral realism, ie there are moral facts. That’s not a problem for relativism (if it were, there would be no epistemological relativism, which there is).
Sticking with epistemological relativism (truth is relative to something or other), it is mostly rejected through the notion that reality exists in a knowable way ie through epistemological investigations. Of course, that’s a naive rejection; as philosophers of science soon recognize, mutually exclusive independent theories can explain the pregiven lifeworld(ie naive sensory world) and the data we collect from it. This presents people with a sort of paradox; on one hand, the privileged system exists by assumption ie the world is knowable, but on the other hand, we seem to know more than there is to know ie there is a plurality of incomplete theories and an inability to select between them either because of human limitations or otherwise.
And so it goes with moral epistemology as well, the naive assumption (and, perhaps I should note at this point that I am not using ‘naive’ in a negative sense, but rather in a sense of ‘first approximation’ ie as it seems without further investigation; no value judgment is implied; see naive realism for further ideas on the use of the word in this sense) that there exist moral absolutes. The source of this, in some cases, is quite clear: god, being the source of all knowledge or containing all knowledge, knows these moral facts and so they must exist. Other cases are possible, which TVAA suggests.
This other case would come from the unification of realist epistemology, just mentioned two paragraphs up, with moral epistemology. That is, a sort of deflationary conception of morality as real in the sense that this chair or desk is real, rather than a Moorean realism where such an equality of morality with ontology is a fallacy (see the naturalistic fallacy for more information). That is to say, moral facts are open to investigation in the same way facts about other things are, something we might say is moral naturalism. Moore mounts a pretty vicious attack against this (since, indeed, he considers it a fallacy) in The Principia Ethica by undermining hedonism, utilitarianism, and evolutionary morality (which, in fact, he showed to be logically reducable to various hedonisms) through this naturalism. The naturalistic fallacy is easily summarized as equating “good” with some natural property or properties. Why he considers this a fallacy is not a matter for this post, really, as it is more involved than I can do justice from memory alone, but the upshot is mainly that good is an unanalyzable concept, sometimes called atomic concepts, which other things are or have but which is not, itself, equal with anything ie it has its own unique conceptual identity.
What is important to note here is what, I think, most of us who aren’t TVAA have been trying to point out, that whether or not the existence of an absolute morality is assumed, its discovery is something altogether different. With evolution, the problem of limited means (an inability to enumerate the set, one might say, and lo someone has) and atavasism crush any hope of finding the final word on morality. The plurality of theories that “evolve” are, perhaps, able to be relatively compared (ie compared with respect to each other and from each other) but not known in any absolute sense, as such a sense is actually beyond our ken. Our method of comparison is then what relativism indicates in (1) in my OP: that which moral judgments are relative to, which is any one of the plural systems themselves.
I won’t elaborate on other paradoxes of absolutism (ie how limited means creates a plurality) since those have not actually come up in this thread.
To continue, then, I might illustratively deal with TVAA’s “absolute” in a sense he might be comfortable with, even if by analogy. General relativity is an example of relativism in a scientific sense, the notion that measurements of assumed real quantities are relative to the frame of the observer. There is no sense in which any measurement is more or less valid, except by way of referencing the frame, which in fact is never privileged ie no privileged frame of reference or measurement exists. The unspoken assumption of most scientific pursuit, that an absolute reality exists, is of little importance other than to provide us with a conceptual way to translate frames into one another via mathematical manipulations. Of course, that we may do so does nothing to create a privileged frame. An important point, I think.
The problem with this deflationary morality, however, is that to make the deflation complete, one must close the is-ought gap in order to make things that ought to be, be. Unfortunately, the survival criteria does not live up to this: that there are selective mechanisms does not in fact assure us that what ought to be will be in order to prosper. Like all eliminative methodologies, they suffer from the fact that we only know what is incorrect, never what is correct. This is not a huge problem unless one demands we consider something correct ie absolute. For the same reasons Popper never wants to say science proves anything, any eliminative methodology must conceed that only because of the assumption that there is a “correct” will we ever get to it by a process of elimination (word to the wise: teleological implications abound). The unspoken assumption here is that incorrect is also static ie absolute; no atavism can be the case, what is eliminated can never come back. We do not have that luxury on evolutionary models, however.
In an ideal deflation, we would enumerate the entire set of morals for the entire set of contexts (which are gleaned from our scientific pursuits). Since this is impossible, it is not clear that we will ever reach the fabled perfect moral system (which may or may not be guaranteed, TVAA admits). Also since this is impossible, it is not clear at any time that we’ve reached a good system. Since good changes contextually (it is mapped to selective pressures which are totally external to moral agents), and our only TVAA-valid method of judgment can only be used in hindsight,
- at any moment there are a plurality of moral systems that insist they work and
- none of them hold any authority over any other and
- the previous decimation of a population is not a guarantee of wrongness due to atavism and so
- the methodology is not something we can then actually use to select among the plural systems of (1) so
- relativism holds in evolutionary morality even though
- it is by [naturalistic] assumption absolute and objective.
