Moral relativism

JLNobody

"Do NOT do unto others as you would have them do unto you--their tastes may be different."

I agree, so how does this jive with your support of rufio's statement?

>> In context, yes. But the contextual morality is based on a morality that is consistant regardless of context.<<

"Consistent" within an individual?

Individuals are constantly changing their views and positions, hell I used to be a materialist. Some people (hopefully) drop their homophobia replacing it with inclusiveness. Democrats become republicans, and vice-versa.

People eat dogs and cats in other countries, a habit they change when they move to another culture with different values. They come to think/believe that eating dogs is wrong because many of their neighbors have dogs and think it's apprehensible to eat them, to eat someone, something they have a deep emotional attachment to.

As a ego centered driven individual I am in constant competition with others. Once enlightened, where this ego centeredness all but vanishes my interactions and evaluations of others would radically change. After the transformation (yet no transformation) I may regard plucking a flower as immoral.

If there is a universal morality what sustains it? And where does it reside?

truth
Boy are you a nudge!

But what you call an "ideal moral" is merely something that humans have decided among themselves.

Being for or against abortion is a judgement call.

Being for or against the notion that "life is more important than anything else" is a judgement call also.

Or at least that is the way I read it.

Twyvel, I'm not suggesting that people don't change, just that the morals that they hold at any given moment aren't affected by material things or emotions.

Certainly, frank, morals are judgement calls. But the broad, general morals that translate themselves into more earthly opinions are universal judgement calls. All people think life is a good thing, and all people think freedom is a good thing. But those are abstract concepts, and life and freedom translate in different ways for different people. For some, abortion is a freedom issue, for other's it's a life issue. The differences come not from people having different morals but from people interpreting situations in different ways, and ranking those morals in different orders - you might see abortion as both a life and a freedom issue, but decide that one of these ideal morals is more important than the other.

Edit: So I probably should have said something like "life is good" or "murder is wrong" rather than "life is more important than anything" since the "more important" part is something that the individuals add to the moral, not something that is there implicit.

source of Planned Parenthood quote, help
Help. I am writing an academic journal article and need the bibliographic citation for the Planned Parenthood quote in the article above. Do any of you have it? Please help, thanks.

"In describing her view on morality, the President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America - the largest abortion provider in the nation clearly basis her case on relativistic thinking: "teaching morality doesn't mean imposing my moral values on others. It means sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as I do - and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves."

email me a reply if you can at [email protected]

I admit that I have only read the topic title, and did not bother to go through the seven pages of posts. However, I think this is significant.

Moral relativism is the most tempting application of Protagoras in the contemporary world. Suppose I believe that foxhunting is cruel and should be banned. And then I come across someone (Genghis, let us call him) who holds that it is not cruel, and should be allowed. We dispute, and perhaps neither of us can convince the other. Suppose now a relativist (Rosie) comes in, and mocks our conversation. ?'You absolutists,' she says, ?'always banging on as if there is just one truth. What you don't realize is that there is a plurality of truths. It's true for you that foxhunting should be banned - but don't forget that it's true for Genghis that it should not.'

How does Rosie's contribution help? Indeed, what does it mean? ?'It's true for me that hunting should be banned' just mean that I believe that hunting should be banned. And the opposite thing said about Genghis just means that he believes the opposite. But we already knew that: that's why we are in disagreement! Perhaps Rosie is trying to get us to see that there is no real disagreement. But how can that be so? I want people to aim at one outcome, that hunting be banned, and Genghis wants another. At most one of us can succeed, and I want it to be me. Rosie cannot stop us from seeing each other as opponents.

Perhaps Rosie is trying to get us to respect and tolerate each other's point of view. But why should I respect and tolerate another point of view simply on the grounds that someone else holds it? I already have my suspicions of Genghis: in my book he is already looking cruel and insensitive, so why should his point of view be ?'tolerated'? And in any case, I should be suspicious of any encouragement to toleration here. The whole point of my position is that hunting should not be tolerated - it should be banned. Tolerating Genghis's point of view is too near to tolerating Genghis's hunting, which I am not going to do.

Rosie has to avoid skating on thin ice. She has to avoid the Ishmael problem. Suppose she gets ruffled by what I have just written: ?'Look,' she says, ?'you must learn that Genghis is a human being like you; respect and toleration of his views and his activities, are essential. If you did not fetishíze absolute truth you would see that.' I, on the other hand, say that ?'toleration of Genghis is just soggy; it is time to take a stand'. If Rosie thumps on the table and says that tolerating Genghis is really good, then isn't she sounding like the fetishists she mocked? She has taken the fact that there are no absolute values to justify elevating toleration into an absolute value.

Rosie has to avoid that contradiction (and we gave her space to do so, above). So perhaps she needs to say that she has her truth (tolerating Genghis is good) and I have mine (tolerating Genghis is bad) and that's the end of it. But that amounts to bowing out of the conversation, leaving Genghis and me to go on arguing exactly as before. In practice, Rosie's intervention hasn't helped at all. She hasn't made foxes, or those who hunt them, look one jot more or less likable. Her intervention seems just to have been a distraction.

Perhaps Rosie wanted to stop the conversation: she is like someone asking, ?'Will you two just stop bickering?' This can be a good thing to say. Some conversations are pointless. If you and I are in an art gallery, and I say Rembrandt is better than Vermeer and you say Vermeer is better than Rembrandt, and we start bickering about it, the best advice may well be that we stop. Perhaps we can agree to differ, because nothing practical hangs on our different taste. It is not as if we have enough money to buy just one, and I want it to be one and you want it to be the other. (On the other hand, it does not follow that our conversation is useless. We might be forcing each other to look closer and see things we would otherwise have missed, or to reconsider what we find valuable about art in general.)

But however it may be in the art gallery, in moral issues we often cannot agree to differ. Agreeing to differ with Genghis is in effect agreeing to tolerate foxhunting, and my whole stance was against that. Moral issues are frequently ones where we want to coordinate, and where we are finding what to forbid and what to allow. Naturally, the burden falls on those who want to forbid: in liberal societies, freedom is the default. But this cannot be a carte blanche for any kind of behavior, however sickening or distressful or damaging. It is just not true that anything goes. So conversation has to go on about what to allow and what to forbid. Again, Rosie is not helping: she seems just to be a distraction.

So why do people like to chip in with remarks like ?'It's all relative' or ?'I suppose it depends on your point of view'? What you say of course depends on your point of view, and whether another person agrees with it depends on their point of view. But the phrase is dangerous, and can be misleading. The spatial metaphor of points of view might be taken to imply that all points of view are equally ?'valid'. After all, there is no one place from which it is right to look at the Eiffel tower, and indeed no one place that is better than another, except for one purpose or another. But when it comes to our commitments, we cannot think this. If I believe that O. J. Simpson murdered his wife, then I cannot at the same time hold that the point of view that he did not is equally good. It follows from my belief that anyone who holds he did not murder his wife is wrong. They may be excusable, but they are out of touch or misled or thinking wishfully or badly placed to judge. I have hit a bull's-eye, which they have missed.

It is only if I do not hold a belief at all, but am just indulging in an idle play of fancy, that I can admit that an inconsistent fancy is equally good. If I like fancying Henry VIII to have been a disguised Indian, I am not in opposition to someone who enjoys fancying him to have been Chinese. But that's just the difference between fiction, where the brakes are off, and history, where they are on.

If relativism, then, is often just a distraction, is it a valuable one or a dangerous one? I think it all depends. Sometimes we need reminding of alternative ways of thinking, alternative practices and ways of life, from which we can learn and which we have no reason to condemn. We need to appreciate our differences. Hence, in academic circles, relativism has often been associated with the expansion of literature and history to include alternatives that went unnoticed in previous times. That is excellent. But sometimes we need reminding that there is time to draw a line and take a stand, and that an alternative ways of looking at things can be corrupt, ignorant, superstitious, wishful, out of touch or plain evil. It is a moral issue, whether we tolerate and learn or regret and oppose. Rosie the relativist may do well to highlight that decision, but she does not do well to suggest that it always falls out the one way.

We can put the matter in terms of our hidden dark forces. It might undermine either me or Genghis to remind us that we are the products of dark forces in our genetic and cultural environments. It might undermine us to the point that we give up the debate. But there is no reason for it to do so. For even if we accept that this is what we are, there is no reason yet to suppose that my dark forces are worse than Genghis's dark forces. No doubt by luck and by forgotten or unknown pressures in my background, I have got to be like I am, and the same for Genghis. But then the question is: should we be proud or ashamed of how we have turned out? If for a moment we took our eye off the original issue, and started instead to discuss whether the dark forces that lead Genghis to approve of hunting are more or less worthy or admirable than the dark forces that lead me to disapprove of it - well, we are no further forward. To decide which dark forces were the ones to be proud of is pretty much the same as deciding whether foxhunting should be banned, and back we go to the original problem. Once more, the relativist intervention was just a distraction, and the issue remains the issue.

Sorry, I havn't read the forgoing. I will soon. But I just want to say that moral ABSOLUTISM requires that morals be infallibly deduced from some natural law or the existence of a law-giving diety. In my judgement neither is the case. Morals are the products of human social development; and they may/do vary with the diversities of cultural systems. Hence, I am a moral RELATIVIST, not because I like, or prefer, such a perspective but because I see no alternative. But let me note that when it comes to cultural conventions like African clitorectomies, female infanticide, head hunting and human sacrifice, I cannot help but respond AS IF they were abominations of absolute standards for behavior (which, of course, they are not).

A great topic with some quality discussion and contributions. Glad this was revived so I had a chance to read through. In your example above JL, would it be reasonable to suggest you really do "respond as if they were abominations of absolute standards for behaviour", based, internally, rather than externally? So, we can't help but place certain standards and expectations on ourselves, it makes little sense in our conception of a human being to do otherwise, indeed we aren't capable of anything else.

Good qustion, Ashers. Like Kant, you are suggesting that morals are inherent qualities of the human psyche? While I might agree that, as with Chomsky's grammar, we have an innate disposition to create moral judgements (which only incidently serve as the moral codes of social systems), those morals do differ from society to society. Hence our innate disposition is not to have the particular morals of some religion or culture but just morals in general.
By the way, although I "absolutely" (i.e., without qualification) abhor human sacrifice, that does not mean it is, in fact, absolutely or non-problematically wrong. Aztecs considered it to be the highest of moral obligations.

I think we should distinguish between moral values and moral judgments.

Moral values being the innate values of people (such as pain is wrong, being hurt or taken advantage of is wrong), and moral judgments being the application of that value.

Thus, I think that moral judgments may be different in people because of certain information missing or a fault in logic, but moral value is not.

For example, let's say you meet a slave-owner, you ask him if it would be right if he were to be a slave, he'd say no. Yet, he thinks it's right to enslave others... In that case he's ignoring the fact that the slave is also a person.

I think that moral relativism is a bunch of hypocrisy because you hold a moral stance, something that you believe is an absolute truth, yet you believe that others have as valid a moral stance as you even though theirs might be different.

Basically, I can't accept moral relativism. It's based on an inference that because different people have different opinions on something, then all of those opinions are correct.

Like JL said...morals are relative...whether people like Ray accept it or not.

One may not like that...but there is no alternative.

Ray, you misunderstand me MASSIVELY. First, I did not say that my rejection of human sacrifice reflects my adherence to an ABSOLUTE MORAL TRUTH; I said I reject it absolutely, without qualification, as MY subjective stance, not as an objective truth. Moral relativism does not argue that all moral positions are equally valid; it maintains that all moral positions are equally invalid if taken as absolutes; they are cultural constructions, and even though I "feel" that some of my moral values are not open to negotiation, that does not imply that they are absolutely valid, only personally critical for me. I think that your hypothetical slave owner would more likely say that slavery is good and that he is LUCKY not to be the "kind" of person that belongs to the (perhaps sub-human) slave class.
You say that moral truths or values exist apart from judgements and that while peoples of the world often hold different moral values, that is a reflection of their lack of information or lack of logical behavior. The implication of that is that people who do not share YOUR moral truths/values are your moral inferiors, at least to the extent that they are ignorant and illogical. And you call moral relativists hypocrits?
Your misunderstanding was entirely predictable. Absolutists CANNOT possibly, in my experience, psychologically open themselves to the "threats" of the ambiguity and complexity of reality.

That's not what I'm implying at all. People often make mistakes, and persistent mistakes often integrate itself in time into what a society thinks to be true. Inferiority or superiority is not part of the argument. It's simply evaluating what is right and what is wrong.

By your argument, moral relativists think that their position is superior than mine or anyone else's that disagree with them.

Can you really sit back and say that a group of people who believe that they're the only one who should live have grasped the right moral concept?

That's not tolerance, that's indifference.



Oh no, that I understand perfectly. What I don't understand is how you can argue for your subjective stance of what something ought to be when it is not a possible objective truth.



It is likely to be the case that the slaveowner would treat the slave as somewhat "sub-human," as we see from Kant's rationalization of his own immoral view toward the blacks. If he were to consider the blacks as human (and that he has to understand what it means to be human), he would not have viewed that the blacks should be slaves.



So moral relativism does not argue that all moral positions are equally valid? Then if there is a moral position that is more valid than another,
your position against sacrifice may be more valid than the Aztec's position. Then it would be safe to hold that as a universally valid viewpoint unless you have a more valid viewpoint that would disprove it.



So I'm sure the person who thinks that slavery is abolished even though his culture thinks it to be alright is acting because of cultural constructions.

I'm sorry, but I just cannot for the life of me, accept a view that I think to be utterly meaningless and useless.

People may have different moral positions than another, that is obvious. But to conclude from that, that no moral stance is more universally valid than another, is stretching it.

People also sometimes change their moral view when they obtain new insights and hold that their previous view is wrong.

Sorry, Ray, but I can't even begin to deal with your frame of thought. Your third paragraph is just too much.
You say that you cannot for the life of you accept the moral relativist position. That's what I said. You've expressed your point and I mine. Fine.

Okay. No hard feelings Jl.

Arguments against moral relativism:

According to moral relativism, there is no objective standard of goodness that can be made. Thus, rights and wrongs are therefore only relative to certain cultures. That means, that things such as slavery, rape, or torture is not really "wrong", but it is only wrong for our culture, and it is right for another culture just because that culture thinks it's right, so we have to disregard everything as to "why" we think it's wrong, even though that culture's viewpoint ignores the experience of the victims, and even though the people within that culture who committed the acts themselves would not like or find it "right" for them to be acted upon in such a way.


The change argument:
"Sometimes our view about the moral status of some practice changes...When a person's moral views change in this fashion, the do not merely drop one moral belief in favor of another. Typically, they also hold that their previous moral view was mistaken. They take themselves to have discovered something new about what is morally right. Likewise, then the prevalent moral belief in a society undergoes a significant change, as in the civil rights movement, we are inclined to see this as a change for the better. But the relativist cannot account for changes in our moral beliefs being changes for the better. This is because the relativist recognizes no independent standard of goodness against which the prevalent moral beliefs after a change can be judged to be better than the prevalent moral beliefs before a change."

source:
http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/wpayne/Moral%20Relativism.htm


"Not only does moral relativism entail that we cannot make legitimate moral comparisons of different cultures, it also entails that we cannot make legitimate moral comparisons of a single culture across time; we cannot judge whether a changing society is getting better or worse. Generally, though, we do think that we have made moral progress. Moral relativism, arguably, cannot make sense of this."

source:
http://www.moralrelativism.info/moralprogress.html
A case for an objective morality:

The Great reformer argument:

"A final argument against cultural relativism is that cannot account for the existence of great moral reformers. When we consider those people that have helped to bring about those changes that we take to constitute moral progress, e.g. the abolition of slavery, or granting the working classes and women the right to vote, we generally think these reformers are moral exemplars, excellent people.

According to cultural relativism, though, these great reformers were bad people. According to cultural relativism, moral goodness consists in acting in the ways prescribed by the values of one's own culture. Those who seek to change those values, then, are bad people. Martin Luther King, Emily Pankhurst, and Gandhi, all of whom opposed existing values and sought to improve them, must all be judged by cultural relativists to have acted immorally. Those who we tend to think of as heroes must, if cultural relativism is true, be condemned."

source:http://www.moralrelativism.info/greatreformers.html


Objective Morality:

An objective morality is a standard of morals that transcends an exclusive subjective preference. It means that everyone must be considered of equal value. This is what many of us think of when we think of morality.

JL...

...I think I'd better take this opportunity to agree with you 100%.

It doesn't happen all that often...and it is a pleasure to acknowledge it when it does.

I think Ray is a decent person who is simply missing the thrust of your argument...and you quite correctly pointed out that he now seems to be doing so purposefully.

Argue for your limitations...and they are yours!

Yes, it's significant. That's why I said the same thing about two-and-a-half years ago on this thread. I also said it in about one-fifth of the space.

You're wrong.


That's because you've begged the question.


Your "as if" standard has no moral weight, even in a system of moral relativism. At best, your expression of moral condemnation is no different from your expression of visceral distaste. As I have mentioned before, your morality is little more than an esthetic judgment.