Relatively Relativistic
All this relativism talk. Velleman posts on relativism because he isn’t satisfied with what he sees. Me neither, even after reading Velleman. Allow me to ruminate.
The correct thing to say about relativism is that some version of relativism is true, and the correct thing to say about absolutism is that every version of absolutism is false. If you don’t think there is a BOOK OF RULES from the transcendent PLANE OF MORAL TRUTH, then you’re likely some sort of relativist. And that’s OK. Don’t worry.
Velleman’s use of “agent-relativism” is confusing. Generally agent-relative is contrasted with agent-neutral with respect to value or reasons for action. My reason to get a drink of water is agent-relative, because its MY thirst. My reason to go to dentist school is agent-relative because being a dentist is MY goal. Etc. Whether or not there are agent-neutral reasons, reasons not based in our individual aims, reasons we just have because we’re rational agents, or what have you, is a tricky question. (The answer is yes and no. You can have a reason to do something that is independent of your particular aims and projects. Your reason not to murder me is not agent-relative in the way your reason to go to scuba classes is. But agent-neutral reasons don’t get off the ground without the enterprise of coordinating agent-relative reasons.) Anyway, if you are sane, you are an agent-relativist in the sense that you believe there are agent-relative reasons. Some thing really are right for me and wrong for you, because you and I want different things.
Any non-transcendent moral standard is relative to SOMETHING, isn’t it. Aristotle, for example, is a species-relativist. What is right for me to do is relative to what natural kind I’m an instance of. In updated terms, you can be a genomic relativist. The right thing to do is relative to your genome. This is not, however, any kind of transcendent standard. The human genome, say, is a contingent kludge. Evolution could have taken a left and that species (not us) would have a different genome, and a different moral standard based in their “nature.” So, yes, if you believe in SCIENCE and believe in a human nature-based morality, then you’re a kind of relativist. But that’s not so scary, is it?
Utilitarians may seem like absolutists. But the right thing to do for a utilitarian is relative to contingent empirical facts about what does and doesn’t cause pleasure in sentient beings. (Am I just playing with words?)
The Pope I suppose, is worried more about cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is a little bit true, though. Being a member of one culture rather than another can give you a reason to do something that you wouldn’t otherwise have. There ARE culturally relative reasons. Is it morally OK to impale kittens on pikes because your culture says so? Probably not. To kill your sister if she is accused of whoreishness? No. Does anybody think so? (People who think its OK to kill their allegedly whoring sister don’t think its OK because its THEIR culture that says so. They think its OK because that’s what they think the transcendent BOOK OF RULES says.)
Actually, I don’t have any idea what the Pope is talking about. It actually sounds like he’s sort of longing for the days of moral hegemony that died with Luther, and confusing pluralism for relativism.
Anyway, here are some things my reasons are relative to: my genome; my capacity for sympathy and moral imagination; my personal goals and projects; my social and family commitments; other parochial allegiances; the conventional terms of social cooperation where I live; lots more. And yours too!
I meant to say something usefully clarificatory, but oh well. Coherence will return in future posts.
April 28th, 2005 13:28
Boy, if Velleman’s post was more confusing than this one, I’m glad I didn’t go read it.
What does your thirst or my desire to go to dental school have to do with morality? Nothing. People have different goals, so it’s rational for them to do different things to achieve them. It may be right for you to drink water to satisfy your thirst, but not *morally* right… right?
Perhaps Velleman is just talking about a standard definition of relativism, namely, that relativism is the view that the truth or falsity of moral propositions depends on someone’s perspective. (Maybe the speaker’s, maybe his culture’s if there is such a thing, etc.). That could be what he means by “agent-relative.” I dunno. But your post isn’t helping much!
April 28th, 2005 14:49
This post would make more sense if Will doesn’t think one can distinguish between moral reasons and non-moral reasons. That would motivate the discussion of thirst and dental school.
April 28th, 2005 15:09
Oh, I do think one can distinguish between moral and non-moral reasons, dammit. But some moral reasons are agent-relative instrumental reasons. Morality is not indifferent to self-regarding pursuits. Part of a moral life is having meaningful pursuits, and one can therefore have self-regarding moral reasons to go to dental school. (Getting a drink of water, not so much.) However, I think, by and large, moral reasons are rooted in conventions that cooordinate individual action and facilitate social cooperation. Coordinative moral rules are in some sense agent-neutral; whether these rules provide you a reason doesn’t depend on superficial facts about what you happen to want just now. But they couldn’t be coordinative rules unless they facilitated the achievement of individual ends in general, and so their normative authority is ultimately based in instrumental practical reason.
One reason why I am a relativist is that different sets of coordinative moral rules can coordinate the pursuit of individual ends equally well. So each set of such rules will be on an equal justificatory footing. However, one set of rules may create moral reasons that another doesn’t. So, something that is morally obligatory in society A may be morally optional or morally forbidden in society B. So moral reasons can be relative to a set of coordinative rules. But the sets of rules, taken as a whole, are morally equivalent.
This is one reason that stories of people caught between two societies or cultures can make for great literature. It is possible to be pulled in different directions by the different rules of the societies one is bridging, and it may be normatively binding in both directions, so that whatever one does, one does something wrong.
April 28th, 2005 15:33
(People who think its OK to kill their allegedly whoring sister don’t think its OK because its THEIR culture that says so. They think its OK because that’s what they think the transcendent BOOK OF RULES says.)
Isn’t their interpretation of their Book of Rules a part of their culture? If you are referring to Islam, Christianity or Judaism (”peoples of the book”), isn’t their culture derived directly from their interpretation of those texts?
April 28th, 2005 15:37
Will,
Protestant fundamentalists understand faith as a book of rules but I believe the Catholic Church has always regarded its rules (the Magisterium) as matters of interpretation. What I think the new Pope is trying to state is (1) the proposition that there are facts as well as opinions, so as to defend (2) the proposition that the central tenets of Christian faith are facts and not opinions.
The purpose of this defense is to oppose the notion that all facts reduce to opinions. But what I think challenges the second proposition is the direction of modern factual knowledge itself, particularly in medical science and technology.
In the recent Florida case, religious conservatives asserted the moral need to keep hospitalized people alive in body, if death is not imminent and the means to keep them bodily alive are available. However, if enforced, this demand will hold the right to die hostage to evolving medical technology. If the means to prolong biological existence indefinitely become available, the moral imperative to preserve life will collide with what used to be the prerogative of God to decide how long a person’s natural life ought to be.
Attacks on relativism do not address this kind of situation, which is created by evolving facts and not by the ebb and flow of opinion.
April 28th, 2005 20:20
When the Pope, and everyone else other than you and Vellman, refers to “relativism,” they mean the idea that there is no fact of the matter when it comes to moral propositions.
I don’t think the Pope means that there are never any moral decisions where the norms of your culture are relevant. But I think he would say there is a distinction between “A is wrong” and “A is disapproved by my culture.” And he’s quite right about that.
So, it’s morally right to drive on the left side of the road in England, but not in Maryland. But driving on the wrong side of the road isn’t wrong because Marylanders disapprove of it; it’s wrong because it could kill innocent people.
Where the Pope’s off is his Thomist views about the purpose of sex. And drugs and rock ‘n roll too.
April 28th, 2005 20:22
Will,
I’m interested. Do you think that internalism about reasons is true? That is, do you think that there is some necessary connection between people having best reasop to do something and it being morally right?
The reasons that I ask is that you focus on what we have reason to do without explicitly talking very much about what’s morally right (or wrong). So I’m thinking that you might think that if we have reason to do something (or best reason to do something, more likely), then that action is morally right.
Is that your view? Is it even close to your view?
April 29th, 2005 00:22
Relativism: true?
Well, that’s ONE way to look at it….
Who’s to say?
April 29th, 2005 02:33
I found Velleman’s use of the term ‘agent-relativism’ entirely clear. I did not think he meant to use this term to refer to the view that there are only agent-relative reasons. Also, I take agent-relative reasons to be reasons that make reference to particular agents (or the particular agent that has the reason). My reason for going for a run might be *because it is healthy for me*; but my reason for not littering might be, in part, *because littering is bad*. I don’t think the distinction need have anything to do with whether or not an agent’s reasons for action are always generated by her desires.
I dig what you say about the core of morality involving principles and rules of social coordination; this does imply a kind of relativism, simply because there is often more than one way to effectively coordinate action consistent with everyone having a decent shot at achieving what is naturally, humanly, rationally important to them. I also think you are right that agent-relative reasons are basic: if nothing were important or mattered to individual agents, there would be no point for us to take the individual and social attitudes that we do toward, say, people keeping their agreements.
But I take morality to involve (public) obligations to others, not simply (private) reasons for action. Which is to say: if A is obligated to phi with regard to B, B has the authority to command A to phi; and everyone else values A and B, or anyone else, taking just these attitudes toward each other in just those situations. (Think of my stepping on your foot and you telling me to get off. And think of how we might teach Johnny not to whack Sally and take the toy he wants; and Sally how to stick up for herself.) This would seem to be the “normative form” of at least many of our most important principles/rules of action-coordination. Though you do not make this clear in your post, I take it that we rationally place a high degree of intrinsic importance in doing what we are obligated to others to do (and more broadly doing what is morally right). You are right that, though there is a core universality to this, some bits are society-relative.
And you are right about lots of other stuff! You are right that not all moral reasons are agent-neutral; I have more reason not to break agreements that I have made than I have to prevent any old agreement from being broken. An essential bit of the obligation-with-correlative-authority-to-command social normative “structure” involves just this agent-relativity (hence, the association in the philosophical literature between deontology or duty and agent-relative reason for action). Folks who think morality is about maximizing agent-neutrally valuable items — i.e. consequentialists — are about as wrong as wrong can get. (Check out Stephen Darwall’s recent work on this “second-person” aspect to morality. Really interesting stuff, though not sure how much is in print yet.)
You are also right that some not-so-social moral goodness, rightness, and virtue (e.g., being courageous) does not involve the coordination of action. But I suspect that one’s reason, say, to be courageous is a specifically *moral* reason precisely because it is appropriately something of importance to all of us, when seen through the lens of coordinating action and achieving the mutual and common good. There may be good public reasons for wanting people to be a certain way even when this certain way does not always involve treating others some particular way.
April 29th, 2005 09:42
Gareth, There are Thomist views about Rock n’ Roll?
April 29th, 2005 10:02
My suspicion is that “relativism” and “absolutism”, in these contexts, refer to general attitudes rather than to philosophical positions, The absolutist point of view is that there’s a long list of things that are Always Wrong and can’t be justified by competing moral imperatives or prudential concerns. For Catholic orthodoxy, that list would include the use of contraceptives, abortion, non-marital sex (remember that same-sex marriages aren’t really marriages), remarraige following divorce without annulment, and murder generally (although the last is somewhat circular, since if killing is justified it’s rarely if ever “murder”).
The “relativist” attitude being argued against sees the appropriate approach to moral problems not as checking the list of things that are Always Wrong, but as asking what is “right for you” or something like that. Again, this isn’t a carefully thought-out position so much as an attitude. A paradigmatic example would be the line that the decision to have an abortion should be between “a woman, her doctor, and her God”.
April 29th, 2005 11:42
Yeah, liking anything that came out after the Thomist went to seminary is a venal sin.
April 30th, 2005 14:30
The correct thing to say about absolutism is that every version of absolutism is false.
Is that because self-referential paradoxes are fun?