Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships available in Paperback
Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships
- ISBN-10:
- 0271022876
- ISBN-13:
- 9780271022871
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2003
- Publisher:
- Penn State University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0271022876
- ISBN-13:
- 9780271022871
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2003
- Publisher:
- Penn State University Press
Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships
Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780271022871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penn State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2003 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d) |
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Chapter One
Forms of Relativism
In this chapter I want to identify a usable definition of moral relativism. My effort will not be to bind the view in a narrow and arbitrarily confining definition. A narrow definition might hamper our efforts to work toward an understanding of what is right and wrong about moral relativism and its opposite, moral absolutism, and what attracts and repels our deepest intuitions regarding it and its opposite. Still, it will be useful to have before us a working definition, which, among other things, will serve to distinguish moral relativism from other forms of relativism, of which there are several.
Relativism, of whatever form, however, must be distinguished from other views with which it has a certain consanguinity. Skepticism is one. As Jack Meiland and Michael Krausz point out, although skepticism and relativism may both be a reaction to the same observations about diversity and the apparent lack of "an objective criterion acceptable to everyone," relativism, unlike skepticism, does not deny truth or deny that truth is knowable. Relativism of various forms allows that there are truths to be known. In particular, moral relativism allows that there is moral truth and that in many instances it can be known; however, it is a relative moral truth that may be different for different persons. Similarly, relativism—and moral relativism in particular—should be distinguished from nihilism, the view that there are no values.
Relativism in various forms has claimed adherents since antiquity. In "contemporaryculture," Meiland and Krausz observe, "relativistic attitudes are widespread and extremely influential"; and, they say, this is so "both in intellectual circles and in popular thought and action about moral and social problems." However, only a few years before Meiland and Krausz wrote these words, Philippa Foot observed that, though the view of moral relativism is a "natural philosophical thought" that occurs to many, for some years moral relativism has been the subject of philosophical neglect. Why so? she asks. Because, she suggests, most philosophers thought that the view could easily be refuted or that this had already been done. In the period she is reflecting on, many beginning philosophy students thought moral relativism to be true, but their teachers were dismissive of the view and did not make it a "central topic" in their classes or writings. Harman reports a similar experience during this time. As a student he thought moral relativism to be clearly correct and could not understand why his teachers set up and argued against misguided statements of the view. Moral relativism has always seemed a "natural thought" to many and has always been a current in popular thought; but by the end of the twentieth century, the pendulum of intellectual acceptance had swung, and relativism—moral relativism in particular, but other forms too—had regained influence in intellectual circles.
Not that relativism's victory is complete. The problem of moral relativism is not a problem to be once and for all resolved. Even if relativism has regained intellectual acceptance, deep intuitions that relativism is wrong abide. Paul Tillich expresses his concern about the resurgence of relativism in the different "realms of thought and life," and he names "scientific relativism," "ethical relativism," and an "increasing relativism in the most sacred and perhaps most problematic of all realms, that of religion." Sir Karl Popper, in expressing his concern about what he sees as the rise of irrationalism, wrote: "In my view one of the main components of modern irrationalism is relativism (the doctrine that truth is relative to our intellectual background or framework ...)."
Intractable intuitions exist on both sides of the issue of moral relativism, and the point can be extended to other forms of relativism, although, as we shall see, one can be one kind of relativist without being every kind.
I. Some Forms of Nonmoral Relativism
Cognitive Relativism
It can be argued that cognitive relativism, or relativism regarding truth and knowledge, may itself take several forms. However, it is not too much to say that the primary form of cognitive relativism is conceptual relativism. For this form of relativism, the truth of what we think or say is relative to our "conceptual schema," or framework of concepts. Such a conceptual schema constitutes a "world-view" for Joseph Runzo, who has recently formulated and discussed conceptual relativism. In his formulation, conceptual relativism is "the epistemological position that the truth of statements is relative to the conceptual schema(s) from within which they are formulated and/or assessed." It is this view of the relativity of truth that concerns Popper and that he addresses in the quotation at the end of the last section.
For Runzo, conceptual schemas have an impact on our perceptual experience. He argues that "the possession of concepts is a necessary condition of all perceptual experience." A "consequence of this conceptualist thesis," Runzo says, "is that persons possessing sufficiently different conceptual schemas would live in their own 'perceptual worlds."' As long as our concepts are pretty much the same, we will perceive more or less the same things—trees and tomatoes and so on—but if they are sufficiently different, we will see different things: where one sees a tree, another may see an animistic colony. So for Runzo, it is not that our perceptions shape our concepts, but that our concepts, our conceptual schemas, shape our perceptions.
Clearly, as he readily acknowledges, there is a Kantian influence reflected in Runzo's conceptual relativism, as there is in cognitive relativism generally. Meiland and Krausz observe that those who developed modern forms of cognitive relativism retained the Kantian idea "that the mind provides basic concepts with which experience is organized and interpreted," but, in opposition to Kant, they allowed "that these concepts may change over time." In Runzo's language, there can be, and are, various "conceptual schemas." In a way, as Meiland and Krausz note, Kant's influence on the development of cognitive relativism is paradoxical, for "Kant gives every indication of being himself an absolutist of the strictest sort." What sort of absolutist was Kant? He is regarded as the paradigmatic moral absolutist.
It is to be noted that Runzo does not extend his conceptual relativism to morality, although this is not to say that he embraces Kant's deontological ethics. For Runzo there are "meta-criteria" that, he allows, can be applied to "any truth claims." These include "coherence, comprehensiveness [and] parsimony." Moreover, there are "general moral standards," like "cruelty is wrong," that operate as "trans-worldview standards." "Cruelty is wrong," then, is a trans-schema standard by which schemas can be tested and which, it seems, is true, but not by virtue of the concepts of some particular schema.
If we allow that cognitive relativism is the view that truth is relative to a conceptual framework, then it would seem that cognitive relativism should be thought to extend to moral truth and to make it relative to a conceptual framework. On this thinking, cognitive relativism would entail moral relativism. Such a construction seems straightforward. But alternatively, certain moral principles can be understood as true independently of conceptual frameworks, so that cognitive relativism does not entail moral relativism and allows moral absolutism.
Religious Relativism
We can distinguish several forms of religious relativism. One form is that of Joseph Runzo and is a special application of his conceptual relativism. For Runzo, religious truth is "relative and plural" in that it is relative to the worldview shared by a community of religious adherents. Again, there are implications for experience, in this case religious experience. "Corresponding to each distinct religious world-view, there is a different set of possible religious experiences. For what can be experienced depends on what can be real or unreal, and what can be real—i.e., what is possible—is determined by the percipient's world-view." Thus, the Christian worldview shapes the experience of Christians, and so too for other religious adherents with their worldviews. Nevertheless, in his religious relativism, as in his wider conceptual relativism, for Runzo, general moral standards operate as trans-schema standards and can be used to test religious worldviews.
Another form of religious relativism is to be found in the thought of John Hick. Hick is a major religious thinker who has done much in the last several decades to call to the fore the problem of religious plurality: How do the world's religions relate to one another? The resolution that Hick proposes and argues for is "religious pluralism." He does not label his view "relativism," and Runzo distinguishes his own religious relativism from Hick's pluralism. Nevertheless, Hick's view does amount to a certain kind of relativism, or, more circumspectly, contains a distinct strain of relativism. Hick's "pluralistic hypothesis" is that "the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real [the Real an sich] ... and that within each of them the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness is taking place." Following Kant and using Kant's distinction between noumenon and phenomenon in his own way, Hick suggests that "the Divine Reality is not directly known an sich" but is humanly experienced either as a personal God or as an impersonal Absolute, as one of a range of personae (such as the God of Israel, the Holy Trinity, Shiva, or Allah), or as one of a range of impersonae (such as Brahman or Nirvana). In each case, it is the Real that is experienced, but it is experienced differently in different religions. The "categories of religious experience" are "culture-relative," Hick says.
Hick's pluralism is relativistic, then, regarding religious experience. Various forms of religious experience may equally be of the Real an sich, but different religious-cultural categories give, and must give, different phenomenal forms to these experiences. However, his pluralism is not relativistic regarding religious truth. Hick does not say that what is true religiously is determined by a conceptual schema, as Runzo does. In fact, although he does not think it is likely, he allows that it is "logically possible that some present set of dogmas (Catholic or Protestant, Mormon or Seventh Day Adventist, Sunni or Shia, Theravada or Mahayana, advaitist or visistadvaitist) will turn out to correspond precisely with reality." For Hick, eschatological experience (experience in a life to come) will decide which religious claims are true, and he sketches in possible experiences in the eschaton that would verify theism over atheism and that would verify advaita Vedanta. At the same time, Hick's "pluralistic hypothesis suggests," he says, that a number of dogmas or "transhistorical beliefs"—such as the Buddhist belief in rebirth or the Christian belief that Jesus was the Son of God—may turn out to be true only as "myths," that is, as stories that help and inspire adherents to come to an appropriate "relation to the Real," although, as he says, his pluralism does not entail that any specific belief is of this kind.
Hick's pluralist view, though it contains a religious relativism, rejects moral relativism. Hick allows that religions can be "graded," and the "basic criterion is the extent to which they promote or hinder the great religious aim of salvation/ liberation," which is the state realized in "the transition from self-centredness to Reality centredness." Also we can morally judge the long traditions of the great world religions as systems of salvation by considering the "good and evil" they contain (i.e., the virtues of love, compassion, and forgiveness they espouse in contrast to the violence, war, oppression, exploitation, slavery, and more that they have occasioned). Finally though, Hick concludes that "we cannot realistically grade the great world religions as totalities [f]or each ... is so internally diverse, containing so many different kinds of both good and evil, that it is impossible for human judgement to weigh up and compare their merits as systems of salvation." And so we ought to say, "So far as we can tell, they are equally productive of that transition from self to Reality which we see in the saints of all traditions." In Hick's thinking, however, this state of affairs arises from the complexity of the heritages of the different world religions, not from an inapplicability of the categories of good and evil, understood nonrelatively, to grading religious traditions.
Cultural Relativism
We turn now to a form of relativism related to those just discussed but distinguishable from them. Inspired by an appreciation of cultural diversity, cultural relativism is associated with anthropology and protoanthropology going back to the observations of Herodotus. John Ladd refers to cultural relativism as an "anthropological theory." Understood one way, cultural relativism is a methodology. Mari Womack says, "Anthropologists have advocated the principle of cultural relativism, which has been widely interpreted as adopting a nonjudgmental framework toward the people being studied." As a methodological recommendation, cultural relativism would not entail moral relativism. However, Womack goes on to say, "Historically, cultural relativism contains elements of both a methodology and a value system."
In formulations that are not purely methodological, cultural relativism is closer to moral relativism. The anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits characterizes cultural relativism this way:
Cultural relativism is in essence an approach to the question of the nature and rule of values in culture. It represents a scientific, inductive attack on an age-old philosophical problem, using fresh, cross-cultural data, hitherto not available to scholars, gained from the study of the underlying value-systems of societies having the most diverse customs. The principle of cultural relativism, briefly stated, is as follows: Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation.
In this statement cultural relativism does not seem to entail moral relativism. Nevertheless, it is often understood as implying moral relativism. At the very end of her Patterns of Culture, reflecting on the "recognition of cultural relativity," Ruth Benedict looked forward to our "accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence." Meiland and Krausz say that "cultural relativism is the position that begins with value relativism," and I. C. Jarvie observes that cultural relativism is "conventionally divided into cognitive relativism and moral relativism." For that matter, Herskovits himself goes on to affirm as continuous with cultural relativism a societal form of moral relativism: "Cultural relativism is a philosophy that recognizes the values set up by every society.... The relativistic point of view brings into relief the validity of every set of norms for the people who have them, and the values these represent."
John Ladd regards cultural relativism as a "descriptive theory" of anthropology. He finds that it consists of two distinguishable theses. One, the diversity thesis, "asserts that there is a diversity of moral opinions from one society to another and hence that there is no consensus gentium concerning morals: what is regarded as right in one society is regarded as wrong in another." The second, the dependency thesis, "maintains that the character of people's moral opinions is to be explained by cultural and social factors of some sort, such as linguistic structure, economic determinants, psychological conditioning, psychoanalytic mechanisms, historical factors, or the unique pattern of culture of the society in question." For Ladd cultural relativism is "neutral as far as evaluations are concerned," although he allows that it may be "relevant to ethics and evaluations in general."
In another discussion of these two theses, Ladd characterizes them differently. There he says that the dependency thesis "asserts that the moral beliefs, rules, and practices of a society are necessarily and invariably dependent for their validity on other facets of the culture—for example, its institutions, its language, or its cultural pattern." Here his language is that of Ruth Benedict, and the thesis states that the "validity" of the moral beliefs and rules of a society depends on societal or cultural factors. In connection with this formulation, Ladd says that "cultural relativism implies ethical relativism." In the other formulation the dependency thesis said only that moral opinions are to be "explained by cultural and social factors," and the diversity thesis said that what is "regarded as right in one society is regarded as wrong in another." So formulated, neither of these theses, nor both together, seem to imply moral relativism (since explanations of moral opinions need not justify them, and what one regards as right may be wrong and conversely).
Perhaps what appears to be Ladd's ambivalence about the implications of cultural relativism for moral relativism simply reflects the present intellectual status of cultural relativism. Clyde Kluckhohn, who was an anthropologist with strong reservations about moral relativism, observed some years ago: "Few anthropologists would today defend without important qualifications Ruth Benedict's famous statement: '... the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has carved for itself from the raw materials of existence.'" He goes on to identify what he regards as the "central and dominant anthropological view": "The simplest self-contained unit of conduct, which can justify or render intelligible a final moral judgment, is a way of life as a whole, or at least a very substantial part of such a way of life."
Assuming that this "anthropological view" is a formulation of cultural relativism, then—because of the disjunction, "justify or render intelligible"—this expression seems to allow us to regard cultural relativism either as implying moral relativism or as not implying moral relativism. As Kluckhohn says, "[Cultural relativity] has been employed by anthropologists in importantly different senses," although he also insists that "no anthropologist ... doubts that the theory of cultural relativity is in some sense forced by the facts and meaningful." Yes, in "some sense." What emerges, then, is that cultural relativism may or may not be conjoined with moral relativism in a cultural relativist's approach; in some forms cultural relativism may entail moral relativism, but not in all.
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is not itself a form of relativism, and, depending on how it is formulated and unfolded, it may be in opposition to relativism. In fact, I think that most often ethnocentrism is regarded as opposed to relativism in such a way that relativism is its antidote, although there are other ways to understand ethnocentrism. A fairly typical formulation of ethnocentrism presents it as "the belief that our ways, because they are ours, must be closer to truth, goodness, and beauty than are the ways of others." In the face of such an expression of ethnocentrism, it is understandable that in their classes anthropologists might be "eager to raise to consciousness that presumption and to banish it through schooling," as Richard Shweder observes anthropologists have been eager to do. Herskovits' characterization of ethnocentrism is similar: "Ethnocentrism is the point of view that one's own way of life is to be preferred to all others." Given such definitions of ethnocentrism, it is not surprising that Geertz would refer to an "ethnocentric bias."
However, Richard Rorty, who has been regarded as a relativist, embraces ethnocentrism and hardly regards it as an ethically deplorable "bias." He identifies three views that are "commonly referred to by [the name 'relativism']." One is that "every belief is as good as every other." Another is the view that "'true' is an equivocal term, having as many meanings as there are procedures of justification." And the third view is the pragmatist's ethnocentrism, which affirms "that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures which a given society—ours—uses in one or another area of inquiry." Rorty rejects the first two views but, as a pragmatist, accepts the third. However, he argues that the pragmatist's ethnocentrism should not be called "relativism." It is wrongly called relativism by "realists"—those who seek to ground "solidarity" or agreement in "objectivity" and "construe truth as correspondence to reality," indeed, "correspondence ... to the intrinsic nature of things." But it really is not relativism, for the pragmatist holds no "theory ... that something is relative to something else."
For Rorty, we face a "dilemma formed by ethnocentrism on the one hand and relativism on the other." And he says that "we pragmatists must grasp the ethnocentric horn of this dilemma" and acknowledge that "we must, in practice, privilege our own group." "To be ethnocentric," Rorty continues, "is to divide the human race into the people to whom one must justify one's beliefs and the others." The first group, "our own group," is one's ethos and consists of "those who share enough of one's beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible." Everybody in actual practice does this—makes this division—as Rorty sees it, so "everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate."
It seems that for Rorty, and for anthropologists like Herskovits as well, there is, to use Rorty's term, a "dilemma" between relativism and ethnocentrism: one must choose one or the other, and to choose one is to reject the other. Of course, in practice, "in actual debate," we are all ethnocentrists for Rorty; so at the practical level, Rorty sees ethnocentrism as unavoidable. Herskovits and other anthropologists see ethnocentrism as nearly unavoidable—Herskovits says that ethnocentrism "characterizes the way most individuals feel about their own culture." But this is before the lessons of anthropology are learned. Thus, there is room for the anthropological effort we noted to "banish" ethnocentrism. Moreover, Herskovits and Rorty have different attitudes about ethnocentrism.
For Herskovits and other anthropologists, the time has come to cease judging other societies by our standards, for each society has its own set of valid "norms." For Rorty, the time has come to recognize that "fruitful conversation" is possible only with those in our own ethos. For Herskovits and others, ethnocentrism is to be rejected in favor of relativism. For Rorty, relativism is to be rejected in favor of ethnocentrism. For Rorty, "there is no truth in relativism, but this much truth in ethnocentrism: we cannot justify our beliefs (in physics, ethics, or any other area) to everybody, but only to those whose beliefs overlap ours to some appropriate extent."
Relativism comes in for Herskovits when he affirms societal moral relativism, as we have seen he does. Rorty, like Herskovits, opposes ethnocentrism to relativism, and he chooses the ethnocentric horn. But is he right that he has avoided relativism? Perhaps not. Relativism would come in for Rorty if he affirmed that there are people to whom we cannot "justify our beliefs" because their "beliefs" do not "overlap ours to some appropriate extent," but they can "justify" their beliefs to themselves by appealing to their background beliefs. If the different background beliefs of those outside our "group" cannot be addressed and evaluated by us (and cannot be evaluated by others in other "groups"), then there is in Rorty's background thinking the counterpart of Herskovits' equally valid but different sets of "norms"—and if some of these beliefs are moral beliefs, then there is moral relativism in Rorty's background thinking.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moral Relativism Moral Diversity & Human Relationships by J. Kellenberger. Copyright © 2001 by The Pennsylvania State University. Excerpted by permission.
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1 | Forms of Relativism | 11 |
| 2 | Are There Universally Accepted Moral Values? | 31 |
| 3 | What Would the Existence of Universally Accepted Moral Values Signify? | 43 |
| 4 | Some Proposed Root Bases of Morality | 61 |
| 5 | Pluralism, Monism, and Relativism | 75 |
| 6 | Moral Diversity and Relationships | 91 |
| 7 | Moral Diversity and the Person/Person Relationship | 113 |
| 8 | What Is Right/Wrong About Moral Relativism? | 171 |
| 9 | Diversity and Morality | 201 |
| Works Cited | 225 | |
| Index | 233 |