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CHAPTER 1
RELATIVISM: COGNITIVE AND MORAL
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing."
NIETZSCHE
Relativism is an inherently controversial topic. The very word inspires polemics that are sometimes passionate and often hostile. Relativism seems to be a threat to intellectual certainties, on the one hand, and to moral seriousness, on the other. Here are just two examples. Pope Benedict, on the eve of his election, proclaimed that we are "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." And in his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, the late Allan Bloom wrote that "relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life."
Both these statements suggest that what their authors call "relativism" has already secured wide appeal, and both focus on moral relativism, which certainly does seem plausible and attractive to many people, even if they don't use, or even reject, the label. What is it that causes those who denounce it such concern? In this book I shall try to clarify just what is at issue here. What exactly does a relativist assert, and what is distinctive about moral relativism? What is it about moral relativism that both attracts and repels? What is defensible in it and what should be rejected?
First we need to distinguish between relativism about knowledge, or cognitive relativism, and moral relativism, on which we will focus our attention.
Cognitive Relativism
Is what we can know determined by a world that is independent of us, or is it, in some sense, "up to us"? Immanuel Kant maintained that we cannot step outside the human standpoint — the circle of our own conceptions, theories, and reasonings — to a bare world as it is in itself, independent of them. Kant's philosophy was built on this unnerving thought, but Kant sought to defuse the threat. He used "we" inclusively to mean all of us human beings, together with any other being that humans could understand. So "we," in this inclusive sense, are all in the same boat with respect to knowledge and reason. Moreover, there is no cause for alarming uncertainty about what we can know and how we should reason. After all, the only knowledge available to us has to be intelligible to us. So it must be framed within the pregiven categories (such as space, time, persons, and objects in causal relations with one another) that shape our thinking and make it possible. And since we are rational persons, how we reason is not up to us but set by the requirements of Reason (with a capital R).
But Kant's reassurances were gradually swept away and the thought became more unnerving. Friederich Nietzsche made a first major breach by advancing what is sometimes called "perspectivism" — writing that there is "only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'" — according to which what we know is guided, shaped, even constituted by our desires, our passions — in short, ourinterests. There is no "true world" that is really objective but unknown to us humans. There are indefinitely many possible perspectives from which knowledge is to be had, and there is no prospect of their being brought to converge within a true, comprehensive theory of the world.
This thought becomes fully relativist when the idea of perspectives is tied to particular groups within humanity. Now the idea is that potentially all our ideas and theories are to be seen as local cultural formations, rooted in and confined to particular times and places, and that there is no independent "truth of the matter" to decide among them. This may in turn suggest that we as human beings have no shared standards on the basis of which we can understand one other. Now there are multiple "we's," each with "our" own standards of truth, reasoning, and morality. The term we is no longer inclusive but contrastive: it picks out us as opposed to others. As this idea spreads, Bernard Williams writes,
[m]oral claims, the humane disciplines of history and criticism, and natural science itself have come to seem to some critics not to command the reasonable assent of all human beings. They are seen rather as the products of groups within humanity expressing the perspectives of those groups. Some see the authority of supposedly rational discourse as itself barely authority, but rather a construct of social forces.
In a further turn, reflections on this situation itself can lead to a relativism which steps back from all perspectives and sees them all at the same distance, all true, none true, each of them true for its own partisans.
Not all relativists travel the full distance of this reckless and giddy journey. Those who do often insist on "the socially constructed and politically contested nature of facts, theory, practices and power." The very phrase "social construction" — and, worse still, "the social construction of reality" — has, for a while, had an intoxicating effect on thinkers in various social scientific disciplines. The effect was not to refute social scientists' theories and explanations or to unmask ways in which their findings can serve socially or politically powerful interests, but rather to undermine the very idea that scientific explanations are superior to others. So, for example, an archaeologist working for the Zuni Indian tribe, who believe that their ancestors came from inside the earth into a world prepared for them by supernatural spirits, writes that science "is just one of many ways of knowing the world" and that the Zuni worldview is "just as valid as the archaeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about." Another archaeologist, Dr. Zimmerman of the University of Iowa, explicitly rejects "science as a privileged way of seeing the world." And the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo views social scientists' claims to "objectivity, neutrality and impartiality" as "analytical postures developed during the colonial era" which "can no longer be sustained": they are "arguably neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors."
The way for such assertions was prepared by, among others, three thinkers, who raised questions about the objectivity of science itself in its very heartland, namely, natural science. One was Paul Feyerabend, self-described "epistemological anarchist," who famously wrote in Against Method that "science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits." A second was his fellow historian-philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose enormously influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions challenged the standard textbook picture of scientific progress cumulatively evolving toward the truth, suggesting instead that science proceeds through a succession of "incommensurable" paradigms, seen as constellations of group commitments. And the third is Bruno Latour, who engaged in anthropological studies of scientists' "laboratory life," claiming, for example that "nature" can never explain how a scientific controversy gets settled and proclaiming that "[i]rrationality is always an accusation made by someone building a network over someone else who stands in the way." No space here, it would seem, for the role of factual evidence or of reasoning in settling disputes or advancing scientific knowledge. (Interestingly, Kuhn never licensed and both Feyerabend and Latour subsequently distanced themselves from the extreme relativist conclusions others have drawn from their writings.)
The idea that facts, or indeed "reality," are socially constructed is an intoxicating mix of three distinct ideas, as Ian Hacking has made clear in his book The Social Construction of What? Each of these ideas is heady enough, and the first step to sobriety is to consider the plausibility of each in particular cases. (There is a difference, after all, between claiming that, say, quarks are socially constructed and claiming that attention deficit disorder is.) The first is the idea of contingency: the thought that our explanatory theories could have been quite otherwise — so that, for example, there could have been an equally successful alternative physics in no sense equivalent to existing physics. The second is the idea of nominalism: the thought that our categories and classifications are not fixed by the structure of the world but by our linguistic conventions. And the third is the idea, sometimes called externalism, that we believe what we do, not because of the reasons that appear to justify what we believe, but because of factors such as the influence of the powerful or of social interests or of institutional imperatives or of social networks. This last idea lies at the origins of the discipline called "the sociology of knowledge."
The classic founders of that discipline were reluctant to travel any significant distance down the relativist road. So Marx and Engels and later Marxists never supposed that their knowledge of history and the dynamics of capitalism was merely "local knowledge." It was, they thought, scientifically warranted. Ideology, by contrast, was distorting and deceptive (as opposed to objective, truth-tracking) thinking, rooted in and serving class interests. Emile Durkheim, French founding father of sociology, and the Durkheimians likewise trusted the rules of sociological method to guide one to results warranted by adequate evidence and well-formed theories — including the result that cosmologies and ways of classifying the natural world reproduce features of the social structure and that our most basic categories are born out of social experience. Karl Mannheim, Hungarian founder of the sociology of knowledge, claimed that "the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character," but he nevertheless repudiated "the vague, ill-considered and sterile forms of relativism with regard to scientific knowledge" and came to think that undistorted thought could be attained by "socially unattached intellectuals." As Robert Merton, the distinguished American sociologist, observed, Mannheim's view was that intellectuals "are the observers of the social universe who regard it, if not with detachment, at least with reliable insight, with a synthesizing eye" (a view hard indeed to square with the unremitting partisanship of intellectuals in the political and ideological battles of our times).
Various influences from different quarters subsequently impelled thinkers to speed further and faster down the road. From linguistics and anthropology came the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which "[w]e dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. ... [T]he world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds." So Sapir wrote: "The 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
From anthropology (about which much more in the next chapter) came the notion of divergent cosmologies and ways of reasoning — a notion that has intrigued a succession of philosophers. So the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl speculated that "the reality in which primitives move is itself mystical" and their reasoning "pre-logical." Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, the great Oxford anthropologist, in his study of Zande witchcraft, oracles, and magic, sought to scotch this idea, noting that tribal peoples, living close to the harsh realities of nature, cope and survive by observation, experiment, and reason and that their mystical thought and behavior is mainly restricted to ritual occasions. Evans-Pritchard contrasted mystical with commonsense and scientific notions and had no qualms about judging Zande witchcraft beliefs as mystical, unfalsifiable, and illogical. Magical beliefs formed a mutually supportive network riven with contradictions and so ordered that they never too crudely contradicted sensory experience. The British philosopher of social science Peter Winch boldly contested Evans-Pritchard's assumption that in matters of witchcraft "the European is right and the Zande wrong": the Zande were not seeking "a quasi-scientific understanding of the world," and it was the European, "obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not naturally go — to a contradiction — who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande." Winch drew from this critique the relativist-sounding conclusion that "standards of rationality in different societies do not always coincide" and that "what is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has." In this Winch was deeply influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had also reflected on anthropological examples, notably Sir James Frazer's classic The Golden Bough and, indeed, Evans-Pritchard's study. So, Wittgenstein asked in On Certainty, is it wrong for "primitives" to consult an oracle and be guided by it?: "If we call them 'wrong' aren't we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs?" But, Wittgenstein continues, aren't we offering them reasons?: "Certainly, but how far would they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives)." In a famous metaphor, Wittgenstein writes elsewhere that when I reach this point, justifications run out: "I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"
This debate continues. Most recently, two anthropologists have fiercely disagreed over the question of whether or not the Hawaiians who killed Captain Cook believed he was the embodiment of one of their gods. Gananath Obeyesekere is sure they did not, because they are as rational as we are. He is concerned to contest European "myth models" of the savage mind and opposes the idea of a "radical disjunction between the Western self and society and those of the pre-industrial world": what "links us as human beings to our common biological nature and to perceptual and conceptual mechanisms that are products thereof" is "practical rationality." Plainly, he maintains, the Hawaiians were capable of making the discriminations necessary to prevent them from mistaking Cook for a god. Marshall Sahlins disagrees. He disputes the relevance to the Hawaiians' world of the appeal to what he calls "Western logic and commonsense." This "Western" viewpoint "constitutes experience in a culturally relative way" and misleads us when we try to make sense of alternative cosmologies, epistemologies, and systems of classification, which are "completely embedded in and mediated by the local cultural order" and at odds with scientific classifications that purport "to be determined by things in and of themselves." To apply our "commonsense bourgeois realism" to the interpretation of other cultures is "a kind of symbolic violence done to other times and other customs." And so Sahlins proclaims: "Different cultures, different rationalities."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Moral Relativism"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Steven Lukes.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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