It may seem like a contradiction to say that the very same sentence can be true in one place but false in another, but actually it’s a familiar phenomenon. As I pointed out in class, “I am hungry” is like this. That sentence may be true as uttered by Jones but false as uttered by Smith, if Jones is hungry and Smith isn’t.
More to the point, sentences like “smoking marijuana is illegal” or “Jones is attractive” seem to be like this as well. As discussed in class, those sentences can be true in one context but false in another. The sentences don’t make explicit reference to a particular community. But when we use them, we seem to have such a community in mind. Usually it’s clear from the context. For instance, typically when we talk about what’s legal or not, we mean according to the legal code which has jurisdiction over the action we’re talking about. If we’re talking about a type of action which can occur anywhere it’s still usually obvious from the conversational context where we’re interested in. If we’re talking about a trip we’re going to take to Morocco and I say “smoking marijuana is illegal”, you know that I’m talking about there without me having to say it. Similarly, when we talk about what’s attractive, we usually know without having to say it who we’re talking about (i.e., attractive to whom).
So judgments about legality and attractiveness are in this sense relativized to particular communities or groups. The idea behind the version of moral relativism we’ve been exploring is that that’s true of moral judgments as well. When we say “infanticide is immoral”, on this view, we’re implicitly relativizing our comment to a particular community’s moral code, usually our own. As suggested in class, the idea is that sentences of the form “x-ing is immoral” mean something like “x-ing is of a type which violates the [typically, our] moral code”. Or, spelling it out a bit more, “x-ing is of a type which is the object of widespread, non-ulterior con-attitudes” (con-attitudes of the sort we discussed on the first day).
I talked about various pros and cons of this relativistic theory. The pros were:
1. It predicts at least pretty well the moral judgments we make (e.g., why we judge it wrong to hurt people, break promises, defraud, and so on).
2. It explains why we make moral judgments in the first place (although it doesn’t explain why we have moral attitudes).
3. It explains why there is a correlation between moral judgments and moral attitudes (= moral emotions and moral motivations).
The potential cons I mentioned, following Rachels, were:
1. It seems to imply that we can never appropriately or correctly judge other cultures as inferior. [I argued that this isn’t true. For instance, we can truly say that the actions their moral code endorses as morally good are actually evil. That is to say, those actions violate our moral code. Of course, they can truly say the same about us – this may be a problem, but if so it’s a different problem – which I will discuss later.]
2. It seems to imply that there’s no such as moral progess. I should note that “moral progess” could be understood in one of two ways. It could mean that we’re getting morally better. Or it could mean that we’re gaining a more accurate view of which things have which moral statuses (e.g., what’s morally right, wrong, etc.). Rachels seems to be understanding it in the former sense, and that’s how I was understanding it. [In reply, I argued that we can judge our own society’s past judge as much as we can judge other societies. Relativism implies that slavery was evil – which means it’s a type of action which violates our moral code. Perhaps it didn’t violate their moral code, but we don’t have to make judgments relativized to other people’s moral codes, just as we don’t have to judge the attractiveness of people according to the standards they accept.]
3. It seems to imply that we can’t criticize our own culture’s current moral code. [This I suggested is a much more serious worry, although we considered two ways in which we might be able to do this. First, we might criticize shallower parts of our moral code by relying on deeper parts. For instance, our moral code seems to allow factory farming which involves causing great pain to animals for the purposes of profit and pleasure. But a deep part of our moral code is against causing great pain to innocent beings for reasons like profit and pleasure. This could be used to criticize factory farming practices. Someone who was around when slavery existed could have criticized its acceptance by calling upon the deeper part of the moral code which favored liberty for ordinary human beings. Second, we might criticize the moral code of a broader group by calling upon the moral code of a narrower group, including at the limit our own personal moral code. I suggested that someone who has very high standards when it comes to helping those in need might criticize our society’s moral code when it comes to people who have great wealth allowing people to suffer from lack of basic needs.]
Tomorrow we’ll consider further worries. Prominently, we’ll consider the worry that relativism implies that moral codes determine the moral truth. This is problematic because moral codes consist in attitudes and practices. That is, if we’re against something (in the relevant way, in our emotional and motivational opposition to it, and in the social practices underwritten by those attitudes) then that is a fact about our moral code. The problem is that in principle it seems that our attitudes and practices could be misguided. Not just other people’s attitudes and practices but our own. The mere fact that I and everyone else is against some action doesn’t seem enough to show that it is morally wrong.
Suppose for instance that our moral code had developed differently. Here’s an example. Suppose that racists had won either the Civil War or WWII and taken over the world (just pretend). Suppose they had inculcated racist attitudes in children and kept doing this so that now the world is filled with people who approve of racism and are against treating race as fundamentally irrelevant.
If that had happened would racism have been morally good? Intuitively not. The right thing to say about that scenario is not that racism would have been good but that we would have been morally worse. Our moral code would have approved of something bad.
But the relativist theory we’ve been looking at seems to imply that in that scenario racism would have been morally good. Similarly, in the scenario described, certain things would have been legal which aren’t legal, like discriminating on the basis of race. Or if our history had gone very differently different things might be attractive.
The point can be made in a way that’s a bit more logically rigorous, although I’m going to leave out some of the details for simplicity. Suppose that “x is morally good” means “x is favored by our moral code”, where “favored by our moral code” means “is the object of widespread, non-ulterior pro-attitudes”. If so, then “x would have been morally good” means “x would have been favored by our moral code”. But if so, then if racism had been favored by our moral code, racism would have been good. That’s just a matter of plugging in the definition of “morally good”.
This seems to be a problem for the theory. And it’s not obvious how the theory can avoid the problem. It doesn’t help to distinguish between one’s own personal code and the social code. Because in the scenario described, we can suppose that each of us would have had a pro-racism moral code. So even if “x is morally good” means “x is favored by *my* moral code”, it still follows that if I had been raised in such a way that my moral code favored racism, then racism would have been morally good. But isn’t that untrue? How could the way I (or anyone else) was raised make racism morally good?
Again, the right thing to say about these scenarios is not that racism would have been good, but that our moral codes would have favored something bad. And that seems to be a problem with relativism.
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