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... ons of deaths, that it impoverishes the country in which it is adopted, and that it greatly restricts people's freedom. I think that is a good argument. It certainly is not some kind of simple logical fallacy, as the concept of 'the naturalistic fallacy' would presumably imply, since I am deriving a moral judgement from other, non-moral judgements. It might be, and standard is, replied that the argument presupposes certain implicit moral judgements, that life, prosperity, and freedom are good. I think there is something wrong with this, but it would take us too far afield to consider.
Suffice it to say that if that is the case, then these suppressed premises that life, prosperity, and freedom are good are simply immediate intuitions. There is no difficulty in this proposal, since there are numerous examples outside ethics of synthetic, a priori judgements apprehended by intuition. 3. 4 The political argument Perhaps the main motivation for relativism among contemporary intellectuals is the appeal to the virtue of tolerance. In essence, the argument is this: objectivism leads to intolerance because it makes us think that we are right and other people who disagree with us are wrong. This causes conflict, chauvinism, and subjugation of some people by others, which is bad. The only way to ensure a desirable attitude of toleration on our part is to posit relativism as a moral postulate, which will reconcile us to the equal legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of all value systems and thereby enable people with different values to live in harmony, provided they accept the postulate. The first obvious reply to this political argument is that it is a non sequitur - that is, even if true, all it shows is that it would be advantageous to somehow convince people to believe relativism; but it does not show that relativism is actually true.
Second, since this kind of argument would only move people who believe in the value of toleration anyway, it would seem at least as reasonable to simply postulate tolerance as an objective value, as to postulate general subjectivism, if we are interested in promoting tolerance. Third, there are both theoretical and empirical grounds for believing that the opposite relation between objectivism and toleration from the one urged would exist - that is to say, it is objectivism that leads to toleration and subjectivism that leads to intolerance - for my view encourages an objective and rational attitude towards public policy and other moral questions (Cf. above, section 3. 3), whereas subjectivism naturally tends towards an unreasoned and arbitrary approach (Cf. section 2), and it certainly seems that reason would counsel us to avoid destructive conflicts and respect the rights of others, whereas, for example, a purely emotional value system might lead, as it usually has in the past, to fanaticism, xenophobia, etc. If only we could get warring peoples around the world to listen to reason, one is inclined to hope, perhaps they could be convinced to resolve their disputes through negotiation rather than violence - but not if they are convinced that rational argumentation about whatever issues they disagree about is inherently futile.
The connection I suggest is supported by examples: John Locke's political theories, which have probably led more than any others to democracy and respect for universal human rights, are a good example of the kind of conclusions that a serious attempt to identify objective moral values usually leads to. In contrast, the ideologies associated with the two major forms of tyranny of the twentieth century - namely, communism and fascism - have hardly exemplified objectivism. Orthodox Marxism holds that moral values are not objective but are mere fictions invented by the ruling class to further its class interests (much like religion). The German Nazis held that all values are determined by one's race, that the right was just what accorded with the will of the people, and that moral values thus had no objectivity.
It scarcely need be pointed out that the subjectivism that these ideologies embraced did not induce toleration on the part of their followers. Instead, it carried the implication that since reason was inapplicable to moral questions, conflicts of values could not be resolved except by the conflicting groups fighting it out. 4 Several versions of relativism refuted In section 1. 4 I delineated three ways in which relativism might be true, and in 1. 5 I listed six versions of relativism (each presumably satisfying at least one of those three ways) (see above). In this section I try to drive relativism into a dilemma or series of dilemmas. I will show in turn that each of the possible versions of relativism is false, for different reasons. First, then, consider the six versions listed... 4. 1 Value judgements as universally false This theory is really quite outrageous. It implies, among other things, that it is not the case that people generally ought to eat when hungry; that Hitler was not a bad person; that happiness is not good; and so on.
I submit that this is simply absurd. I feel much more confidence in those denied judgements, as I think nearly everybody does, than I can imagine feeling in any philosophical arguments for relativism. At least, I think it would take an extremely strong argument to shake my confidence that happiness is preferable to misery, or the like. And there does not seem to be any argument at all with that import.
It is hard to see how there could be. This discussion makes me feel like G. E. Moore, who refuted skepticism about the existence of external objects by making a certain gesture and observing, "Here is one hand, " and, making another gesture, "and here is another. " For just as Moore pointed out that no premises of any philosophical argument could possibly strike him as more obvious and certain than the proposition that "Here is a hand, " I find it inconceivable how any philosophical premises could be more obvious and certain than the judgement that happiness is desirable, or numerous other similar value judgements I might make. I doubt that anybody actually holds this view. Even arch-subjectivism David Hume remarked that "those who have denied the reality of moral distinctions, may be ranked among the disingenuous disputants" (3) (4) 4. 2 Moral judgements as expressions of sentiment Sometimes Hume talks as if he thought moral statements were expressions not of judgements but of emotions.
On this view, "x is good" is comparable to "Congratulations, "Hurray, "Ouch, " and other non-assertive utterances. That this is false can be seen readily from four considerations. Call the first the appeal to introspection. The making of a normative judgement is experienced as just that - making a judgement: i. e. , as a matter of good phenomenology, when one considers a moral issue, it seems clear, one is engaged in that mental process known as judgement; one is not primarily engaged in imagination or memory or perception or feeling (though those may accompany the process of judgement, of course). And I think that everybody can see this if they think about it - that is why moral judgements are, after all, called "judgements." If someone reports that when he introspects he does not ever detect a process of judgement going on where morals or practical matters (meaning matters of what to do) are concerned, then in the first place, I won't believe it, and in the second place, if I did then I would conclude that the unfortunate fellow is simply unable to grasp moral concepts and is therefore unable to think about them - I would conclude that he is moved by emotions and instincts rather than reason and morality.
Moral concepts and arguments are as a rule highly abstract, and the existence of such people as cannot understand them is certainly not inconceivable. Animals are most likely all in that position. One point of distinction between judgement and feeling is of activity versus passivity - that is to say, judging is something one does, whereas having a feeling is something that happens to one. Therefore, I am saying that deciding, e. g. , what is right, is something that one does (as deciding always is) and not something that one just undergoes. I think the merest introspective reflection will bear me out on this.
Second, moral judgements can properly be called "true" or "false." If somebody says something that is not an assertion - such as "Ouch!" , then you cannot 'disagree' - that makes no sense. But if someone says "We should do such-and-such, " you can disagree. You can call someone's value judgements true or false in the way you cannot call "ouch!" true or false, which shows that there must be some proposition the value judgements express. Third, it's pretty obvious that, linguistically, prescriptions take the form of statements, and we all recognize them as such. They use the indicative mood, containing a subject and predicate, &c. And I don't see any special reason for thinking that there is something deceptive about our language (and presumably virtually all others).
Fourth, normative judgements can stand in logical relations to other propositions. For instance, the statement, "I should return this book to the library" straightforwardly entails the admittedly objective statements I can return this book to the library. I borrowed this book from the library. This book exists. I have not returned this book to the library. etc.
That these descriptive judgements follow from the normative judgement should be uncontroversial. Additionally, the statement, "I should return this book to the library" is correctly said to be in contradiction with the statement, "I should not return this book to the library. " But logical entailment and contradiction are relations between propositions. If moral judgements did not assert anything, then one certainly could not deduce anything from them or call them "contradictory" to anything. Therefore, moral judgements express propositional contents. 4. 3 "x is good" as synonymous with "I like x" This theory would have to be expanded to include (re-) definitions of all other evaluative terms as well, of course; however, we can refute this line of approach already. It makes sense to say, "I like it, but is it really good?" but it does not make sense to say "I like it, but do I like it?" nor "It's good, but is it really good?" One often thinks that one likes something because it is good, but one does not think it is good because one likes it (unless one is very egocentric).
Therefore, some thing's being good must be different from its being liked. More simply, though, this should be immediately evident, since the statement that any given person has any given psychological state is a descriptive statement, whereas the statement that some thing is good is, of course, normative. The former denotes an empirical matter of psychology. The latter expresses a value judgement.
In short, this theory is a simple instance of the naturalistic fallacy. I would lump together with this view any view that identifies good, virtue, and other moral qualities with the tendency to cause some psychological state. 4. 4 "x is good" as a synonym for "x is ordained by my society" The same thing might be said about this theory: namely, to call something good is to express a value judgement, but to say something is ordained by society is to offer a descriptive judgement of anthropology which could be confirmed or refuted purely by observation. This is another case of the naturalistic fallacy. It is possible to doubt whether what society ordains is good but it is unintelligible to doubt whether what is good is good or whether society ordains what it ordains. Therefore, 'the good' must be something different from 'what society ordains. ' It is also common for society to ordain something because it is good. That makes perfect sense.
But it does not make sense to say that society ordains something because it ordains it, or that something is good because it's good. 4. 5 Moral judgements as projection To begin with, it strikes me that confusing one's emotions with physical objects is an extremely childish error to be accusing virtually all humans, including some of the profoundest philosophers, of committing. Strangely, though, it is an error from which, seemingly, animals, small children, and dimwitted and uneducated people are exempt, inasmuch as, I believe it is commonly agreed upon, they fail to use concepts of morality, although they too experience emotion. If this be errancy, it is a form of errancy that is most curiously correlated with intelligence and education. Second, this kind of theory could be proposed for any quality. That is, for any property that we seem to sense in objects in the world, it could always be asserted that we are projecting our subjective mental state out into the world, and it would be difficult or impossible to refute the assertion.
It could, for example, be claimed that colors don't really exist and we merely confuse our subjective sensations with external objects. Arguably, Bishop Berkeley proposed this theory for all physical objects. But it seems to me that if someone is going to propose a theory in this general vein, which implies that people are constantly falling prey to a simple error, then the burden is upon him to produce some powerful evidences to prove his theory. Third, the theory is highly implausible purely on phenomenological grounds.
There isn't anything like a single feeling I have when I contemplate each of the things I consider to be good, as the theory would appear to predict. I think Newton's work on the calculus is extremely good, but I don't feel emotional about it at all. It appears to me that I make evaluations on intellectual grounds. Of course, it is possible to make them on emotional grounds, but then it is possible to believe in God, in the afterlife, and any number of other things on emotional grounds, without that rendering the issues thus treated intrinsically subjective.
Moral evaluations are subject to rational argument. And if someone asks me why some course of action ought to be taken and I report that I have a certain feeling, I think everybody, myself included, will find my answer quite inadequate and irrelevant. Fourth, if this theory is true, then why doesn't everybody wind up with a moral code that says he may do whatever he feels like and other people may only do things that he likes - or rather, at least, one that picks out the same things as being good as happen to be liked by that individual? The fact is, we don't have theories like that. Quite to the contrary - a great many people, one might say even a vast majority of people, have moral codes that frequently pick out as wrong things that they would otherwise enjoy (fornication is the most obvious example of such a thing).
Fifth, it is usual for a person to have a positive sentiment towards something because he believes it to be right or to have a negative sentiment because he thinks it is wrong. That is the way we normally seem to experience the connection between evaluations and emotions. That is why a psychologist would attempt to eliminate a patient's guilt by means convincing him that he is not a bad person, and not the other way around. The theory in question reverses the causal direction. Finally, the acceptance of this theory would presumably cause us to lose the inclination to moralize, for once we see the truth of it, we would see that all moral statements are intrinsically confused and, therefore, false or unintelligible. But I have said above (section 4. 1) that the denial of all moral judgements is absurd and that I do not see how any philosophical premises that could be used to justify the theory in question could be more evident than certain value judgements (indeed, more probable than the disjunction of all possible value judgements).
The claim must be either that when we judge something good we are attributing our emotions to it and therefore attributing consciousness to it, which is patently false - I said that Newton's work on the calculus is good, but I certainly don't think it has any feelings - or that somehow there is no intelligible thing that we are attributing. I just don't believe the latter. I think that the concept of a thing's being good makes perfect sense. 4. 6 Morals as a matter of convention It is crucial to note here that the theory I am considering under this heading says that morals in the objective sense are a matter of convention. I think it is perfectly possible for morals in the subjective sense to be established by convention.
But it makes no sense to speak of establishing morals in the objective sense by convention. A couple of hypothetical questions should demonstrate this. The existence of money and what counts as currency are literally established by convention. Imagine a situation in which the United States government changes our currency. It begins to print money with new kinds of pictures on it to replace the old money. A law is passed saying that the old money is no longer legal tender, and the citizens go along with it.
We all start using the new money and nobody uses the old ex-money anymore. Now in that situation, would these green pieces of paper I have in my wallet with pictures of dead presidents still have monetary value? The answer is no. They would literally cease to be money in virtue of the conventions we established.
If right and wrong were established by convention, then we should be able to say something similar about them. We should be able to imagine a situation in which our society establishes different conventions and, in virtue of that fact, things that are presently right cease to be right and things that are presently wrong cease to be wrong. What would that be like? Suppose Americans were to decide that the communists were right after all and start electing socialists to government offices.
Suppose that we adopt new laws and change the Constitution. The government turns socialist and, of course, becomes repressive, executes dissenters, and starts to drive us into poverty. But most everybody goes along with it. Suppose that there is a general consensus on the desirability of the new form of government. Now what I want to ask about this situation is, would communism be a good form of government, or would it still be bad? Surely this would be a case of establishing conventions according to which communism is good, if there were any such thing? (I could have imagined society turning genocidal or Nazi, etc.
The point would be the same. ) Yet here communism would still be just as bad as it always was. The fact that something is generally practiced, obviously, does not make it right; that is why it always makes sense to doubt whether current practices are right. It always makes sense to try to establish better conventions, to find conventions good or bad, and so on, which it could not make sense if there were no possible standard of value independent of the conventions themselves. Note the contrast: because what counts as money is a matter of convention, a change of how we behave will make things that are presently money cease to be such; but a change of how we behave will not make what is wrong cease to be wrong. Therefore, what is wrong cannot be established by convention. This theory, furthermore, is simply another instance of the naturalistic fallacy.
That something is good is a value judgement, but that any given society performs any given set of practices and has any given set of conventions is a purely descriptive (and empirical, anthropological) judgement. They can't be the same. 4. 7 The argument generalized The six versions of relativism I have just considered may not be the only ones. New relativist theories are constantly springing up. However, all relativist theories must fall into one of three categories, as laid out in section 1. 4.
Since objectivism states that moral judgements correspond to facts about the objects to which the judgements are applied, subjectivism must say (1) that moral judgements are not judgements at all and do not have propositional contents (that is, don't represent genuine claims) or, if they do, (2) what they claim is always false, or, if it is true, (3) it represents something about the subject making the statement rather than the object the statement purports to be about. That these are the only three alternatives possible can be demonstrated from two trivial axioms, namely, the law of excluded middle and the correspondence theory of truth. For if moral judgements represent claims, then we know from the law of excluded middle that they must be either true or false. That is just basic logic. And if they are true, then we know from the correspondence theory that that means they correspond to reality. And, finally, if they correspond to reality but they don't correspond to the nature of the object then they must correspond to the nature of the subject.
But each of these three views is surely false. The first has been refuted above in section 4. 2, in which I presented four arguments to the effect that a moral statement is a proposition. The second runs contrary to patent observations that virtually everyone can see, such as the prefer ability of happiness to misery, the impermissibility of murder, etc. And the third view, which usually leads to commission of the naturalistic fallacy, can always be refuted by simple thought experiments, the general point of which is to hold the nature of the object constant and vary assumptions about the nature of the subject, and notice that the moral qualities remain unchanged. For instance, supposing that we all liked Nazism, yet all the same, it wouldn't make Nazism right; supposing that we had certain emotions, it would not justify genocide; et cetera. Most versions of relativism involve a reinterpretation or redefinition of moral judgements.
What is common to all of the redefinitions of moral concepts is that they leave out everything moral. The very essence of the concept of rightness is that something's being right is a reason to do it. But to say that I like something is not to give a reason for doing it - if somebody said, "Why should we do A?" and I said, "Because I like it, " this would not give him a reason. To say that my society approves of something is not yet to give a reason for it either.
To express one's emotions does not give anyone a reason for action. Et cetera. But something's being good or right is a reason for doing it (indeed, in the latter case, an absolutely compelling reason). 5 Summary I have tried to show that, like most false philosophical theories, moral relativism dissolves under clarification. In order to evaluate relativism and objectivism in ethics, we must first give each of these theses a clear meaning. I have defined objectivism as the view that some moral properties appertain to objects in virtue of the nature of those objects. This confined subjectivism, defined as the denial of objectivism, to three possible circumstances under which it could be true: (1) if there were no moral propositions, (2) if moral propositions were universally false, or (3) if the truth of moral propositions depended on the subject who judges them.
Although moral subjectivisms are usually equivocal vis-a-vis which of these alternatives they mean to assert, we have found that the positing of each of them is flawed in its own way, leaving the relativist no logical space in which to stand. In understanding the issue, it is thus essential to distinguish the different sub-alternatives discussed and pin any given version of relativism down to one of them. I have also considered some arguments that relativists advance. Whereas one might initially have thought that relativism, being by no means intuitively obvious, would require some pretty compelling arguments to have so firmly convinced such a large majority of the intellectuals of our society, the forthcoming arguments are typically disappointing. The existence of disagreements, by no means unique to ethics, does not imply the absence of facts about which to disagree, and I have explained this disagreement otherwise. The epistemological problem about ethics is paralleled by epistemological problems that could be raised about mathematics, metaphysics, or any other a priori discipline, and should be resolved in the same way, by appeal to the general intuitive cognitive faculty that we humans seem to have.
And the appeal to the virtue of toleration, we found, constitutes a better argument for objectivism than for subjectivism. These relativist arguments must be admitted to be at best inconclusive, if not clearly unsound. Finally, recall that I argued that the acceptance of relativism would undermine all morality. Although the apparent undesirability of this consequence does not prove the theory to be false, if our initial, intuitive confidence in our moral theories is greater than the prima facie plausibility of the arguments offered on behalf of relativism, as certainly seems to be the case, then it would be irrational to reject to former in deference to the latter. For all of these reasons, I conclude that relativism is both pernicious and logically untenable.
NOTES 1. Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Viking Penguin Inc. , 1977) pp 16, 106. 2. Nicomachea n Ethics I. 3, 1094 b 24 - 28. 3. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section I. 4.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section I.
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