U.S. president, Ronald Reagan and Soviet chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev 

                                       (at bilateral talks, Iceland, 1986) 

                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Again, Moral Relativism

There are many people out there in cyberspace, some of whom read my blog, who are unclear about what moral relativism is and why I consider it to be such a dangerous philosophy for our society to be following. And it’s worth saying again that our leaders are almost all educated people; they have been to the universities and in at least some of their courses, most of these leaders learned moral relativism and the worldview called postmodernism that moral relativism is usually said to rest on. (Ayer, Derrida, Foucault, Boaz, Benedict, etc.)

Moral Relativists say that there are no such things as right and wrong and that a so-called moral value is only valid when you are inside the culture that believes in it. The only overarching principle that covers all moral codes in all places and times is the one that tells us when we are in Rome, we should do as the Romans do and respect what they respect.

In some parts of the world today, a man may be heartsick for weeks before he can finally steel his nerves and make himself do what he must do if he is to restore his family’s honor: he must kill his 15 year old daughter. She dishonored her family. She lost her virginity to an 18 year old boy who is far beneath her socially, and she even was caught sneaking away to meet him after her father had forbidden her from ever seeing him again. She has lost her good name in the community, and seriously damaged her family’s good name. Her father has no choice, and he will do the deed though it grieves him sorely.

We in the West can’t understand such a value system, but inside the culture that does believe in it, moral relativists say, that action is right.

For moral relativists, values are really just preferences, like my favoring roast pork over beef steak or frozen yogurt over ice cream. Tastes. But no more. They aren’t somehow grounded in any arguments or evidence in the physical world that we all can see and touch. Therefore, there can never a moral “science”. The laws of science can be demonstrated to all who wish to see by experiments that can be replicated by any researcher who has the means to get the materials needed to do the experiment. That’s what science means: testable. No moral code, say the relativists is anything like that provable. 

The moral relativists say that the moral codes out there in the world right now not only aren’t grounded in evidence in the physical world; they can never be grounded in such evidence. Many educated people who took even a little Philosophy during their university years quote Hume here and say confidently that you can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. You can never get a moral code out of evidence in the real world.

Where do people get their moral beliefs then? Moral relativism says from traditions. Customs. And sacred texts. But there are hundreds of these, a dozen or so major ones, and they aren’t always compatible with each other.  

Science-minded atheists often find the criticism that they have no moral code hard to answer. They don’t want to sound amoral. But they believe their view of the world is just honest – not cruel, just honest. Some will go further and tell you the hardness of the moral relativist worldview is just the way the world is and has always been. Some even go over to the offense and argue that there are no “facts”, anyway, only different culture’s takes on what happens.

In some countries, a woman is sexy if she is quite hairy; in the West, not so. And some people need fish sauce on practically all of their meals. And in some places, there are ghosts everywhere, and they are all evil and cruel. In some places, when you are introduced to a man, and you are a man, you shake his hand for at least ten minutes. Show you are sincere. Real men do. In that culture.

Customs, morés, values, and even concepts differ from place to place, culture to culture, and era to era. The Spanish have two verbs for the English verb “to be”. Both the Germans and the French have two verbs for the English verb “to know”. Different ways of thinking in different cultures. For me, I admit cultural relativism is indisputably real. But that does not mean moral relativism is the conclusion we must come to when we see that cultural relativism is real. Just because no people in earlier times were able to work out a logical base for a universal moral code, that does not mean that no such code ever could be worked out. A universal moral code, grounded in arguments and evidence in the material world. The one that is clearly there for us all. Hard, but not impossible. 

And it’s the hazard hidden in moral relativism that troubles me most of all.

To cut to the chase, how would moral relativists advise the leaders of the world to settle disputes between nations? If Russia, and that means Russians in big majority, feel that their fellow Slavs in Serbia are being bullied by a bigger nation, are the Russians entitled to intervene? In fact, how can any dispute between cultures or nations be settled in a moral relativist world except by war?

Some moral relativists shrug at this point. They see evidence all through history and all over the world that war is the only way that a dispute between cultures can be solved. What people like me who are troubled by this fact need to do, they say, is get over our squeamishness. That’s how it is. Suck it up, Buttercup.

I reply that while war is still a fact of our world, and it has been for a very long time, what has changed is that our weapons have gotten bigger. In these times, we can’t do another full-scale world war. It could end us. And then they shrug and tell me again, “Suck it up, Buttercup.”

So many in these times turn a blind eye to this basic flaw in the way the humans of the earth are going. More and more are falling into a private, quiet despair. “We are going to off ourselves,” they tell me.

I feel very certain that we don’t have to do that. We can change. By reason.  

I believe there are ways in the real world to get past the barriers between cultures and to enable whole cultures strange to each other to negotiate and compromise and get along without going to war. In my view, smart people who love their fellow citizens of the world, should be trying to find and explain to others more and more clearly what those ways are and how we could teach the kids all over to use those ways of thinking and talking so that they learn to get along – even with other people from other cultures strange to them.

A new, more inclusive, respectful, democratic set of values can be shown to be grounded in evidence in the material world that all can see and touch. In short, we can derive ought (a code of right and wrong) from is (the observable facts of the real world) and teach a new moral code to the children of the world.

And that is what my whole blog is about. Deriving ought from is. But if you really want to see the complete case for the opposite of moral relativism, namely moral realism, you’re going to have to read my book. The argument is complex, and it can’t be explained in a line or two. But …yes. It is possible that we could prove the validity of a new moral code for us all and then teach it to the kids …so that we keep reducing the odds of a full blown, global war happening until those odds have dwindled to almost nothing.

To me, it seems the lines on the graph in my head are coming together. If they touch, we will cross the line into nuclear madness.  

Only a new, effective moral code for all could save us. No sacred texts, no gurus, no biological or chemical or economic solutions. They’ve all had their chances. They’ve all struck out too many times. We have to gamble on something new.

Hang in there, ladies and gents. We can still do this.

 

 

 

(If you are interested in the whole argument for moral realism, and an outline of a new moral code, start on Mar. 2, 2021 of this blog. The whole case is here.) 

    

    

                                  Diversity conference (credit: Wikimedia Commons)