"Penelope Reading A Letter From Odysseus" (artist: L. J. Lagrenee) 

                                                 Artist's conception of Ancient Greek daily life 

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

On a site that I visit, a young person asked what I thought of moral relativism. Here is my reply:

Moral relativism is a mistake. It is a philosophical stance that says that the ideas behind what we call “right” and “wrong” are illusions. There are no universal standards of right and wrong. Right and wrong depend entirely on the culture in which one is located at the time when one is making a moral decision. What was right in ancient Athens would not be considered right today. Even in a given era, like today, what is right in one part of the world, like West Africa, may not be considered right in another part, like Canada.

There is a lot of evidence in History and Anthropology to support the moral relativists’ position. We can see that it may have been useful for the ancient Greeks to use infanticide as a form of birth control. We certainly know they did it. A lot. Some men could not feed all of the babies that their women kept producing. On the other hand, the men’s appetites for sex were at least as strong as those of men today. So they solved their family’s surplus population problem by exposing unwanted babies in the forest to be eaten by wild animals. Today we would be appalled at such a practice, but it made sense to them in their times when they had no reliable forms of birth control.

It is also common in our own times for little girls in West Africa to undergo what is called “female circumcision” by its supporters and “female genital mutilation” by its foes. An old woman who travels from village to village has girls brought to her for the “operation”. While female relatives hold the little girl down, the old woman uses a small knife to cut off the girl’s clitoris and inner labia. There are several versions of the operation, but this is the commonest one. Is it useful to the tribe as a whole? Its proponents claim it is. It curbs girls’ sexual appetites and reduces the risk of their having clandestine affairs which might tear a tribe or village apart.

Thus, different tribes arise, and each has its own sets of morés, beliefs, and customs. When tribes interact, too often in the past the result has been war. Then the tribe with the more efficient beliefs and customs nearly always has the larger numbers and better weapons; it conquers the other tribe, then assimilates it. War, to the cultural relativists, is an inevitable trait of the human animal. They have no suggestions for reducing the odds of wars’ happening. They shrug when you say that the next full-scale, all-out war, if we have it, will very likely kill us all.

The mistake, it seems to me, is implicit in the very ways we discuss the mores and customs of other cultures. We always talk in terms of why the custom got established in the first place and whether it serves some purpose in the larger community to which those practicing the custom belong.

Implicit in this whole way of thinking is the assumption that our customs, ways, and morés must serve the needs of the larger community in some fashion or we would never have set them up and gotten used to them in the first place.

The part the cultural relativists are missing or denying (I’m never sure which) is that we all must survive in the same material universe in the end. While tribes may move from one environment to another occasionally, and face different challenges than those that they knew in their old homes, there are always fundamental laws of Science that can’t be evaded no matter where you move.

The most important of these are entropy and uncertainty.

As whole cultures, we humans have learned, by trials and errors that sometimes got whole tribes wiped out, to teach courage AND wisdom to our offspring so that they will face the omnipresent reality of entropy. More recently (the last 2000 years) we have begun to learn that we must teach freedom AND love to these same offspring so that they will effectively handle the uncertainty of life. (I went into these matters in much more depth earlier this year on this blog site, beginning on April 13.)

In short, morals and morés are not relative. They must program the people who believe in them to behave, as whole tribes, in ways that enable them to survive.

There is a lot of room for many different “ways of life” to be set up differently in any given environment. But the “ways” that people practice and the values and beliefs that underlie them are not arbitrary in the way that a roulette wheel is arbitrary. In an analogy from Biology, we can say that many different species of animals may live in each environment and all find their respective niches, but they still must answer to the laws of Science. There are millions of species in the Amazon basin, but there are no polar bears among them and for good reason. Similarly, many different tribes might settle beside a lake that has just formed since the volcanic eruption six years ago, but if the lake is teeming with fish, the odds are very good that whatever tribes settle there, with baskets or hooks or spears or nets or bows and arrows, they will very likely learn to fish. This move in their cultural evolution is not arbitrary.

It seems clear to me that we don’t have to settle for the moral relativists’ position that leaves us all paralyzed and helpless when disputes arise between different cultures. We could work out the theory of a maximally efficient culture, one that lent itself readily to periodic updates, and we could teach it to the children of the world.

An idealistic vision, you say? I ask you to consider the WWIII alternative, which is where we’re headed if we don’t get past this moral relativist ennui, and then look at your kids, and then …think again.

But in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.

   

        (circumcised) African mother with daughter whom mother says will not be circumcised 

                                            (credit: By DFID, via Wikimedia Commons)