University Place

Should We Be Moral Relativists?

[Paul Boghossian, Professor, Department of Philosophy, New York University]

Thank you very much. It is a wonderful day to be in Madison. And I just want you to know that when John was listing this very long list of things that I’ve apparently done, that it sounded like I was completely inconsistent with being able to attend to one’s family, but I assure you I have done that as well.

[laughter]

So, I want to start by considering a claim like Proposition 1, which is on the handout. Unfortunately, there isn’t very, very good correspondence between the sequence of things that are on the handout and the talk that I will be presenting. But but I will virtually everything I allude to will be on the handout, and I will make reference to that. The claim is, to take an example, it’s morally right that girls and young women get an education. Now, some people think that a statement like this is simply true, and that it is known to be true. Others, for example, I suppose the Taliban group in Afghanistan who, I should add, are very far of representing the view of the majority of the people from that country, think it is simply false, as we know from the famous case of Malala Yousafzai.

Both those who think it is simply true and those who think it is simply false I shall call absolutists about morality. They think that there are facts about which statements about morality are true and that it is possible to find out what those facts are.

Of course, in this case, there’s a disagreement about what those facts are, but there is agreement on the fundamental philosophical claim that there are such absolute facts and that it is possible to discover them. And so, one or the other person, a party to that dispute, is right and the other one is wrong.

By contrast with such absolutists, many people these days would describe themselves as moral relativists. Moral relativists are leery of the claim that there are absolute truths about morality, binding on everyone whether or not they agree with it.

Relativists hold that there are truths about morality but that these truths are always at best relative to a cultural or, if you like, at its most extreme version, individual perspective. And, in contrast, I will be going, I will be saying a lot more about what these views are as we go along, but I just want to introduce some of the main nodes in the opening.

In contrast with both absolutists and relativists about morality, there are what we might call moral nihilists who think that moral discourse is just a lot of nonsense and that we should stop using it. All that we can sensibly talk about, according to the moral nihilist, is what sort of world we would prefer to live in, ultimately as a matter of brute desire, and if there is a disagreement about those desires or preferences between two parties, there is no point in trying to figure out which view is correct. There is only negotiation and, if that fails, force.

On this nihilist view, there is really no point in talking about what’s right and wrong, even on a relativist view of right and wrong. There is just, as I say, preference, negotiation, and possibly force.

Now, nihilism is a very harsh view. I don’t actually know of anyone who really embraces it. And when we think about our own attitudes, it’s very hard to square them, I think, with a nihilistic view. So, when we think of steps that we regard as important advances in moral thinking, for example the realization that slavery is completely unacceptable, it’s very hard for anyone to think of that as a mere change in preference. We cannot help but think that abolishing slavery was some sort of advance towards what is true and right and not just the change in your preferences the way in which you might have a change in preferences about the flavor of ice cream that you will have.

On the other hand, there are very serious puzzles that attend absolutists views of morality. Puzzles that I will be discussing in a moment. So, when you look at this, you can see against this backdrop it can seem highly understandable why moral relativism has come to appeal to so many people nowadays. Unlike nihilism, it promises a way to hang onto moral discourse and moral truth in some form but without incurring the burdens of an absolutist view.

And the point of my talk today is to say that it cannot do this. There is no coherent position called moral relativism. Or to put the matter a bit more precisely, since anything can be called by any name people always argue about terminology. You can’t argue about terminology. You can only argue about substantive things. There is no coherent position that successfully satisfies the reasons that moral relativists give for being moral relativists.

In the end, the real choice is between absolutism and nihilism. There is no interesting halfway house between those two extremes that we can comfort ourselves with.

Now, the complaint that relativism is not a coherent position is a familiar one, but it’s familiar largely in application to the idea that all facts are relative. That is the view that we might call global relativism. Here the worry is a familiar one of self-refutation. If all truths are relative to perspectives, what about the truth of global relativism itself? Either it is itself only true relative to the perspective of relativists, in which case we non-relativists may ignore it, or it is itself true absolutely, in which case at least one truth is absolute, and global relativism stands refuted.

Now, powerful as this familiar worry is, it doesn’t apply in any obvious way to local relativisms. That is to relativistic views about particular domains such as that of morality. Since local relativistic views don’t commit themselves to all facts being relative but only those in the specified domain, the familiar thread of self-refutation does not apply. Nonetheless, I’ll argue that in the end it’s very hard to see how a relativistic view of morality, and I would of any normative domain but for now I’m just going to stick to morality, could be coherent.

Let me first start by asking about the motivations that people might have for a moral anti-absolutism. For recoiling from an absolutist view of morality.

Well, there are plenty of strong reasons for this, so don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think it was a mistake to be interested in moral relativism. There is something mystifying about the view that an act can be simply right or wrong, that all you need to do is say which act is in question and then the world takes over and pronounces on its moral status as either right or wrong.

Why would that be mystifying? Well, the crucial feature of moral judgment, of course, is that they are normative or prescriptive. They judgments like one, about the education of girls, do not say how things are but rather how they ought to be. How it’d be right for them to be. Moreover, they’re not supposed to be conditional on some contingent aim of yours, as a prudential judgment, for example, might be. They’re not judgments like if you want to increase your GDP, then you should educate the girls as well as the boys. No, even if it turned out to lower GDP, it would still be right not to deprive half the human population of achieving its true potential.

However, it can seem mysterious how there could be these normative or prescriptive facts sitting out there. Where would they come from? Where do they reside? Contrast this with an ordinary factual judgment. Some people used to think that the Earth was flat. They turned out to be wrong. It’s spherical. We discovered this, but the fact was there all along, even before we discovered it. It just sat out there, so to say. But where do facts about the rightness or wrongness of acts sit? What can we point to to say: There, there is the wrongness of this act?

Furthermore, there seems to be a difficulty explaining how we might come to know what such facts are, assuming that they exist. By what sensory means might we access facts about right and wrong? Clearly, we can’t just see that something is right or wrong in the way that we can see that it is spherical. And why, if these facts are just sitting out there, is there so much disagreement about them out there in the real world?

Now, one way of responding to these puzzles that face an absolutist view, the real puzzles, is to think of moral truths as not merely sitting out there but as somehow or other grounded in the dictates of an almighty being. The facts don’t just sit out there, they’re God’s commands.

However, few philosophers who would otherwise be sympathetic to absolutist views would be willing to appeal to a belief in God these days in order to defend the existence of moral truths.

Moreover, if someone is so tempted, we would very quickly show that it would not be a very good defense. The point is that you dont want to end up saying that something that you regard as very wicked would have been good if God had simply willed it. The response to that would have to be that God, being essentially good, would never have willed anything wicked, but this answer presupposes and independent conception of whats good quite apart from Gods will.

Another way of responding to the puzzles is to think of moral truths as delivered not by the judgements of an almighty being, but rather by the judgements of a certain sort of idealized human judge. What is good or right is what a certain sort of, and here you have to fill in some conditions, ideal human being would say is good or right if they knew all the facts. David Hume has a famous theory of aesthetic truth that assumes this form and many have tried it in the case of moral truths.

But this sort of ideal judge view, as applied to morality, and even as applied to aesthetics, has turned out to be very difficult to spell out in a non-vacuous matter. You have to say what counts as ideal, and in doing so, you are constantly importing independent conceptions of what it is that you think the good or the right consists in.

So, absolutism about morality faces some very serious problems both of at metaphysical nature, if I may use this terminology, namely how could there be such facts, and of an epistemological nature, namely how could we know about them.

And against the background of these failed attempts to make sense of absolute moral facts, a relativistic view of morality can come to seem quite appealing. By relativizing moral facts to cultural perspectives, it seems to enable us to thread the needle between the extremes of absolutism, on the one hand, and nihilism, on the other.

But how exactly does a relativistic view of morality propose to do this? We need to formulate the view more precisely and then show that as formulated it has the advantages that are claimed for it.

So, lets start with the question of formulation. What does it mean to relativize the facts of a given domain? Well, science has provided us with some prominent examples in which a rejection of an absolute conception of a given domain in favor of a relativized conception of that domain has led to important advances in our understanding. For example, before Galileo we used to think that there was such a thing as absolute motion. Either an object was moving, or it wasnt. Galileo taught us, however, that there is no such thing as absolute motion but only motion relative to a specified frame of reference and that none of these frames is more privileged than any of the others. So, if you were standing on the platform and then the train coming through is moving relative to you, but is not moving relative to the people who are on board.

Of course, another famous example is Einsteins special theory of relativity, which showed that there isnt such a thing or as absolute simultaneity. We use to think that you could that either two events separated in space were simultaneous in time or they werent. And Einstein taught us that we should not think that there is any such thing as the absolute simultaneity of two events separated in space but only simultaneity relative to a variable spatiotemporal frame of reference and that none of these spatiotemporal frames of reference is more privileged than any of the others.

In both of these famous cases, we start out with an absolute predicate, moves or is simultaneous with, which we believe we can truly apply to the world. We become convinced, for good scientific reasons, that nothing in the world answers to that absolute predicate, and that the most we can claim is that a close relativized cousin of the predicate applies. Moves relative to F or is simultaneous relative to F. And so, we recommend, when you look at what what the move to a relativized conception of motion in simultaneity consists in, we recommend that people stop talking in terms of the absolute predicate and start talking only in terms of its higher degree relativistic cousin.

These are all under on the handout now under two. Roman numeral two.

These so, moves, the predicate moves, gives way to moves relative to F and is simultaneous with, gives way to, is simultaneous relative to F. And, we add, none of these Fs is more privileged than any of the others.

Now, these cases seem to provide us with a template that we can apply to the moral case in order to generate a coherent moral relativism. Thus, to formulate a relativism about morality, we take the predicate is morally right or is morally wrong and we replace it with is morally right/wrong relative to F. For example, instead of saying it’s right to educate girls, we would have to say it’s right to educate girls relative to F, some variable.

What is F going to be in the moral case? We know what we were relativizing to in the case of motion and simultaneity, but what are we relativizing to in the case of morality? Here there are two importantly different options, and they determine two very different types of view.

On the first, we relativize to some moral code or other. That is, to some person’s or some community’s background set of moral values. And, we add, and none of these moral codes is more privileged than any of the others. On this view, which I will call, for reasons that will emerge, a thorough going relativism about morality, we replace talk of X as morally right with X is morally right relative to moral code M.

This is the most common formulation of a relativistic view of morality, and I think that there’s a deep reason why it is the most common formulation, a reason that I will come to later on.

On the second option, which I will call, again for reasons that will emerge, an absolutist relativism, like the oxymoronic name, we relativize not to background moral codes but to the circumstances broadly conceived in which the act is performed. On this view, we replace X is morally right with X is morally right relative to its circumstances C. And where these circumstances are to be conceived very broadly, any fact that might be relevant to the moral status of the act can be included in them.

Now, when people talk about moral relativism, they sometimes mean the one view and sometimes the other, often not distinguishing between them, but they’re very different views.

Let’s look first at what I’ve called absolutist relativism. The relativization to circumstance. Given what I said at the start, you may be surprised to learn that I think that there is nothing incoherent about this view. More than that, I believe that sometimes moral claims that are relativized to circumstances in this way are actually true. For example, if we ask, Proposition 3: Should I stop to help a motorist who has broken down on the side of the road? The answer is not a straight Yes or a straight No. The correct answer is it depends on the circumstances. You know, if it’s the middle of the night and it’s brutally cold, you have nothing pressing else to do, and the person will perish unless you stop, then, yes, you ought to stop. But if it’s the middle of the day, there are lots of friendly people around, you’ve got a pressing medical emergency, then the answer is no. It depends on the circumstances.

There are lots and lots of other examples of true circumstance relativized moral claims. For example: Should I leave someone who has served me a tip? Well, it depends on the local customs. In some places it might be considered insulting to leave a tip, and, if that’s true, you don’t. Should I eat noisily or quietly? It depends on the cultural setting that you’re in. Okay?

These are these are examples here, these last two, of etiquette. And etiquette is a source of a great number of circumstance relative moral truths. I think the fundamental norms that govern etiquette are in the end moral. They have to do with not offending your hosts. But what they say is that you ought to adjust your behavior depending on the cultural setting that you find yourself in, with respect to a certain range of behaviors, not with respect to everything. You know, if it’s the local custom to abuse children for fun, it doesn’t follow, there is no norm that says you can’t offend your host, you have to go along with that. No. But with respect to a very narrow range of things, table manners and so forth, the correct moral norm says that you should adjust your behavior in accordance with the cultural setting that you find yourself in.

So, I’ve been citing examples of circumstance relativized claims that are true. We can also, of course, cite examples, as I was just doing, of such relativized claims that, while coherent, seem false. For instance: May I abuse children for fun? I think the answer can’t be, it depends on whether you will get caught. May I kill an innocent person in order to harvest their organs and save a large number of people, a larger number of people? It depends on how important the person in question is. That doesn’t seem right.

Finally, there are examples of circumstance relativized claims that are controversial, and people argue about them even as we speak. For instance: May I torture someone to obtain information? And some people think that a correct answer might be it depends on how large a calamity is at stake. Whereas other people think there are no circumstances under which it would permissible to torture someone to obtain information even if, as it were, there is an enormous calamity that is in the offing.

So, given that I started out saying that I was going to argue against the coherence of moral relativism, how can I say that this sort of relativization to circumstance is not only coherent but even sometimes true? The answer is that, while it may be perfectly legitimate to call this a type of moral relativism, as I said relativism is a technical term so you have a lot of leeway in how you get to use it, it’s not the sort of moral relativism that can accommodate the metaphysical and epistemological motivations that motivated moral relativism in the first place and which I outlined at the beginning of the paper.

Why would relativization to circumstances not be capable of meeting the original epistemological and metaphysical concerns? The reason is that such a relativism does not escape a commitment to absolute moral facts. For what a statement like four, if circumstance are C, then you ought to stop and help the broken down motorist, but if they are C-star, then you are permitted to keep on going, what that says is it is binding on everyone that he/she ought to help if circumstances are C and binding on everyone that he/she is permitted to carry on if circumstances are C-star. Okay? That’s just an absolute normative claim. And if you were worried about how there could be such absolute facts, you should be just as worried about a claim of the form it is never permissible to do X as you should be about if circumstances are C then you ought to do X, but if they are C-star, then you are permitted to do something else. They’re just there is no epistemological or metaphysical difference between those two of the kind that we were worried about at the very start.

A lot of people, when they think about absolutism, they think it has to do with these unconditionalized claims. You know, it is never permissible to abuse children for fun. But an absolutist claim of the kind that generates the worries we had can take the form of these conditionalized claims just as well.

Every absolutist would have to recognize that sometimes the objectively correct answer to a moral question is it depends on the circumstances. Now, this helps explain why a prominent moral relativist like Gilbert Harman relativizes not to a person’s circumstance, of X circumstance. You could you could play with that in a lot of different ways. But rather to his or her background moral code, while adding that none of these codes is any more privileged than any of the others. That’s the form that Harman’s relativism, and Harman is, I think, a very insightful philosopher.

With this relativization, which I call a thorough going relativism, we have a real chance of getting away from a commitment to absolute moral facts of the kind that we were worried about. For when we say that the only moral facts there are are facts of the form eight according to moral code M, one ought to do Phi if C, while insisting that none of these codes is any truer than any of the others, we really do seem to get away from the idea that there are absolute facts about morality. For if we now ask, if C, if circumstances are C, ought we to do Phi? Im using all these everybody’s happy with these variables C and Phi they’re just stand-ins for circumstances and acts. The answer will have to be that depends. According to moral framework M1, yes, and according to moral framework M2, no. There are only facts about what your background moral values tell you to do, and none of these sets of values is any truer than any of the others. Though, there doesn’t seem to be there any problematic commitment to an absolute normative claim.

Now, naturally, no one will want to deny that people have background moral values or that some normative claims follow from those and other don’t, and since that is all that a thorough going relativist is committed to, it looks as though we have finally formulated a relativistic view about morality that is responsive to the concern about the metaphysical strangeness of absolute moral facts.

The problem, though, is that this is not so much a relativism about moral judgment as what I earlier called a nihilism about it. Since any trace of normativity in the so-called relativized moral judgments has been lost, if all I can say are things like nine, it’s right to educate girls according to my moral code, and, ten, it’s wrong to educate girls according to the code of the Taliban, then I’ve only said things with which everyone can agree no matter what their moral perspective. I agree with nine, but I also agree with ten. It’s precisely because I agree that according to the moral code of the Taliban it’s wrong to educate girls that I have a problem with that moral code. So, in relativizing to moral codes in this way, I’ll put this point a slightly different way, once you relativize moral judgments to moral codes, all you get are merely descriptive statements about what particular moral codes do and do not allow. Statements with which, in principle, everyone can agree no matter what their moral outlooks. And the upshot is indistinguishable from a nihilism about morality.

I recall relativism was supposed to be distinct from nihilism. Relativism was supposed to be a way of retaining moral discourse while evading its naive commitment to absolute moral facts, accepting only a relativized version of those facts. But if what I’ve said is right, then real relativism, one that has a prima facie chance of evading commitment to absolute moral facts, does not do that at all. Rather, it ends up eliminating moral discourse and replacing it with purely descriptive remarks that are ill-suited to play anything like a normative role.

If you were content with a nihilism about morality, you could arrive at that view very quickly. One could just say, this discourse is committed to absolute moral facts, there aren’t any, so we should just get rid of this discourse in favor of descriptive remarks about the sort of world we would prefer to live in. Now, I’m not now arguing that we shouldn’t be nihilists about morality. I’m just making the point that relativism about morality was supposed to be something distinct from a nihilism about it, but so far, we have not found a formulation of relativism that manages both to retain moral discourse and to evade a commitment to absolute moral facts.

So, this the core of the argument that I wanted to present. If it’s sound, we face a dilemma. We can either relativize moral claims to circumstances or relativize them to background moral codes. On the first option, we get credible results but nothing that evades commitment to absolute moral truths. On the latter option, we evade commitment to absolute moral truths, but we preserve nothing of the original subject matter of morality. We may as well simply be nihilists about it. So, all this suggests is that it’s in the very nature of a normative prescriptive subject matter that if there are to be moral judgments at all, they have to be meant in an absolutist sense. And so, our choice is between moral absolutism and moral nihilism. There is no interesting halfway house between them that we could call moral relativism. As I say, once again, the point is not about terminology.

Okay, but someone might might say to me, look, given the very deep puzzles that you outlined at the beginning for moral absolutism, doesn’t that mean that we have been pushed all the way to moral nihilism, a position that itself seemed deeply unpalatable? Of course, this is a standard philosophical situation where you end up in a paradox in which no position seems fully satisfying. In fact, in this case, very far from satisfying.

Obviously, to arrive at a satisfactory solution to our quandary would require showing how to solve the puzzles for absolutism with which we began, and you may you won’t be surprised to hear that that’s a very large topic and that I’m not about to embark on it now.

[laughter]

But I do want to make some brief remarks, not so much about the actual solutions but about why I’m confident that, as between absolutism and nihilism, the latter of which I find completely impossible to embrace, I have confidence that the puzzles for absolutism can be solved. And, of course, there’s already a tremendous amount of very good work about that.

First, the metaphysical question: how could there be impersonal absolute normative facts sitting out there? One possible reply is that the facts are not impersonal after all, that they are constituted by the verdicts of a certain sort of ideal human judge. I did say at the very beginning that I don’t hold out much hope for such theories, but they have not been definitively ruled out. But even if we cannot make such theories work, I think we have no choice but to acknowledge at least some absolute normative facts, regardless of what you’re ultimately committed to concerning their metaphysical nature.

The absolute facts that we don’t have much choice about acknowledging are not necessarily facts about morality, but rather facts about rationality. Facts about what you ought to believe given the evidence available to you, rather than facts about what you ought to do, which is the domain of morality. Facts about rationality are normative facts just as much. They are facts about what you ought to believe. For example, right now you ought to believe, given the evidence available to you, that you are sitting in this lecture room listening to me. It’s conceivable that some of you have some well-founded background evidence that, in fact, your senses are misleading you at the moment, but most of you won’t. And if you don’t believe that you are sitting in a lecture room listening to me, there would be something wrong with you. We would be in a position to criticize you for that. This would be an example of something normative going wrong.

Now, why do we have no choice but to believe that there are facts about rationality? Well, because facts about rationality are presupposed by any judgment, including the judgment that one ought not to acknowledge facts about rationality. If you say facts about rationality should be rejected since, if they existed, they would be problematic normative facts, you are tacitly presupposing that there are facts about rationality since you were claiming that the rational thing to believe given your arguments, is to reject facts about rationality. So, we can’t but acknowledge some normative facts just as a condition, as it were, of thought and inquiry itself. Since we can’t but acknowledge some rationality facts, and according to me to acknowledge some normative facts necessarily entails acknowledging some absolute normative facts.

What about the epistemological problem of knowing absolute moral facts? Once more, of course, there is a huge amount to be said, but the point to observe for the moment is that we are here in the domain of what the philosophers call the a priori. That is, the domain of judgments that are known not with the use of the senses so much but through the use of reason. And, of course, the example of logic is an example of a priori. The example of mathematics is an example of a priori. The domain of rationality, the principle of governing rational belief, are known a priori, in fact could probably only be known a priori. And so are the principles of morality. You don’t do experiments in order to figure out that it would be wrong to abuse children for fun.

So, when it comes to the a priori, morality is in some pretty good company. Not only moral principles known in this way but, as I say, logic, mathematics, and rationality, aesthetics as well, are in that same boat. And once we figure out exactly how it is that we know things about the principles of logic, mathematics, and rationality through the use of reason, and there is plenty of good work, including work by John Bengson, who’s here, there is absolutely no reason why those same that same those same stories would not apply equally well to the case of morality. There there there is no reason why there shouldn’t be a unified epistemology of the a priori that would encompass not just these uncontroversial subjects, like logic and mathematics, but also the case of the moral. All of this is what leads me to be confident that we will be able to solve these deep philosophical problems and so we should not be afraid of at least some measure of normative absolutism.

So, I’ll stop here.

[applause]