How Shall We Justify Our Moral Judgments?
This is meant as summary material for discussions of whether moral relativism can provide a good answer to
the question above. Be sure to read through to and including the last section before writing on the final exam
questions.
We can, I suggest, get to this question by way of two paths: Some in the class have made comments about
morality being a private or subjective matter, which I suggested points toward the controversy between those who think
morality requires a set moral code or theory versus those who think it’s only cultural acceptance or individual
opinion–absolutism vs. relativism. The second way was by discussion of some examples which I put together. We
talked about the case of the man who wanted a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad. We will discuss the rape
case in old town Eureka and the comment regarding the victim, “Yes, but remember how she dresses and how she
carries herself,” and a little about the other cases like the cheating case. The other examples are also relevant here. The
things to watch are simple. Does the case raise any live moral issues? Are there any judgements you might make? Can
you separate the judgements which are justified from those which are not? –and then we are ready to compare that
work to the work we do which is not based on examples, but which is based on theories or on abstract lines of thought.
So I’m starting, in contrast, an abstract treatment of the question by presenting traditional answers to the title
question above, divided into the absolutist answers (divine command theories, utilitarianism, Kantianism, Aristotelian
virtue ethics, etc.) and relativist answers (cultural relativism and individual relativism)–and then suggested strongly that
there might be a third alternative visible already in our discussion of the examples. Here’s a summary of that abstract
treatment.
The standard alternatives for answering the title question have often been taken to point to the issue between
absolutists and relativists. That is, we can think of the question as an SAT multiple-choice question, but with only two
possible answers:
a) there is an absolute moral code which can serve as a decision-maker for us, all humans everywhere [this may be a list
of divine commandments, or it may be an ethical theory suggested to us by Aristotle or Mill or Kant, in which some
principles are suggested to us that we are to apply to moral decisions--this is all under alternative a]; or
b) No, no, no; there is only that moral code which we are taught by the culture in which we grow up, and that of course
carries the implication that what is moral for you might be different from what is moral for me–or, more radically, there
is only your own opinion and nothing more to justify moral judgments. Several of the class have come out for
relativism. I’m going to give what I think are the main arguments for relativism, and those who wish to side with it can
use these to help them out, but be sure you read the objections too.
We worked to sort out the arguments we needed to work with from those we did not. I won't go over all this,
but will mention two I thought were interesting from e-mails and my office hours. I tried to make a case that the
argument that we should be relativists because the age we live in is more permissive--that argument is circular in the
same way that the appeal to the infallibility of some scriptures is justified by quoting from the scriptures. That is, the
argument is a good argument only if the conclusion has been established, but that is what the argument is supposed to
be doing. Another student, with encouragement from friends, tried to claim that we should be relativists because it is
impossible to change peoples' minds. I drew a distinction between political or psychological truths about our reluctance
to change our minds and the truth of the matter, or when we should change our minds. That is, if we are all wrong and
we refuse to give in and admit it, that does not make us all right instead--that is a separate kind of step, in need of some
other kind of support.
Here I’ll try to boil down the important arguments for relativism into the following categories:
I. There are the obvious-examples arguments. We can use as sources both Oscar Wilde's epigram, "There is no right or
wrong; what's right's what's right for you," and a piece out of Plato's dialogue "The Theatetus" in which Protagoras's
example is the wind which blows cold on you but which feels not cold on me. Protagoras presses us then to admit we
have no grounds for saying one of us is wrong. There is nothing but the way the wind feels to you and the way the wind
feels to me. No further evidence is forthcoming which allows us to say one of us is right and the other wrong. Given
any of a fairly large number of examples, the fact that we do things differently does not justify us in saying that either is
wrong. The wind on the hill; differences in sexual tastes, perhaps including those we see in Mapplethorpe's photos; lots
of places where we talk about preferences. In these examples we have the beginnings or confirming cases for Oscar
Wilde's quote.
II. There is the set of political or psychological arguments against absolutism as leading to abuse, narrow-mindedness,
self-righteousness. Some of these are backed up with history: history of missionaries, and perhaps even grimmer
episodes from history such as the Crusades, wars, slavery, genocides. This argument winds up being the
longest-enduring and most troubling for us, and we need to come back to it. Here I only want to note that it is not meant
as a logic-tight generalization--not all missionaries have to abuse their power, as though it were part of the job
description. I suggested that this is where we might find an argument expressed in the rhetorical question, "Who are we
to judge?" and, "Who are we to set ourselves above people in another culture?" It takes some time to unpack that
question into an argument based on the history of abuse of Euro-American missionaries, such as our insistence that
Tahitians must wear more clothes, give up their origin myths, not have sex before a minister or priest says the right
words over them, and if they do any of those things they should then feel guilty.
Some of this argument or family of arguments, then, is bound up with objections to absolutism. If we can
refute the absolutist theories, then that is taken as support for relativism. The cannibal professor case who provides the
greatest happiness for the greatest number is an example of one refutation or attempted refutation of an absolutist
theory, namely utilitarianism. Besides the idea that any absolutism ought to provide support for the claim that it is a
better religion or moral code than any of the others, the idea that there is an absolute moral code which applies to all
everywhere and for all time, and that we somehow understand what it is, has several problems. It has led to abuses and
atrocities. It is implausible in the face of changes through history and disagreements over what that code is. Politically,
this is thought of as reaching out toward those who have been exploited by those whose moral claims were backed by
cruel or exploitive power. That is, this is an argument based on history and political concerns for abuse and atrocities. It
is also part of this argument that we endorse tolerance as a value--just how central a part we will have to take up again
later, but there is an opinion in the class that because we wish to be tolerant of diversity we had better not be
absolutists and had instead better be relativists.
III. There's Benedict's arguments. These are in her article, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” and her book, Patterns
of Culture. The crux is an appeal to how different cultures reveal two things: variety in human practices and variety in
the meaning of the word "moral." Different cultures show that some cultures accept practices which in other cultures
are not accepted, and there is a resulting discrepancy between what one culture counts as moral and what we would
count as moral. While she holds out the possibility of anthropology some day being able to supply some list of some
practices which all cultures accept, she maintains that at present our account of what is acceptable world-wide is little
more than guesswork, and likely to be overthrown by more anthropological study. In practice, though, people classify
people as abnormal or immoral in some cultures in almost exactly the opposite ways to how people in other cultures
make the same classification. This shows, she says, that what the word "moral" means in one culture is not the same as
what it means in another, and that what it means is culture-bound; roughly, the word "moral" means what is accepted
within a culture.
This is worth saying again somewhat differently. Benedict's argument is in part based on an analysis of the
meaning of the word "moral," and leads her to claim that we have no grounds for making moral judgments of any
practices which lie across any cultural boundaries. What is moral is what is accepted (or tolerated, or approved) within
a culture. Our temptation to apply a moral judgment across cultural lines, as when we are tempted to condemn the
potlatches or blind vengeance among the Kwakiutl and Nootka, or the "paranoia" she mentions in Melanesia. Such a
condemnation would, by definition of the word moral on her view, only be an expression of our culture's prejudices for
our own set of approved-of practices.
Remember our examples. One is a man who wanted a wife just like the girl who married dear old Dad. His mother was
brought from Korea by his father. That is, he wanted to marry a woman who would be subservient, who would
endorse all his interests and take his side in all his battles, who would raise his children, who would have no interests
separate from his and his family and his household. He traveled to a culture like where his dad got his wife (in the case
I’m building this from, the culture was in southeast Asia, but it could have been Amish Ohio), found a woman to meet
his needs, was straightforward with her about what he was after, she consented, he brought her back to his home town,
a town like Arcata, and she was/is happy and so is he. The only issue which has arisen was prompted by her
developing some interests, thinking about some possibilities and becoming aware of some abilities--she got interested,
through her kids’ homework, in science, especially biology, she seemed to be good at it, she briefly daydreamed about
going to college and becoming a nurse. She had friends and encouragement but decided not to pursue it. Her friends
were reluctant to give up the idea, and they tried to get her to consider it and asked her why not, and she said, “My
husband wouldn’t like it.” Those who knew him said she was right. We supplied other details in class. This was his
second marriage, and his first, he told people at the mill, did not last because, he said, “She was too fucking uppity.”
We talked about the possibility of the happiness being difficult for us to swallow, but I recommended you accept the
example as described as much as possible, though you might want to note your qualms if you write about this.
Another is of a rape. A woman my wife knows from classes at College of the Redwoods has been raped, and
the story includes some stuff we have heard from friends who know the man who raped her. This was a recent case in
Humboldt County--the woman is a skateboarder, a bleached blonde who wears very pale makeup and short skirts, a
student at CR, and the man is three years out of high school, unemployed (laid off from his job a few months before), a
bit of a cowboy. His friends and he were reported to do lots of woman-bashing talk, and he was about to have his
pickup repossessed because he is behind in paying for it. He stopped beside her as she was going home from work at a
restaurant after he and friends had been drinking in a parking lot in Old Town, and she told him, to clean it up a little,
to get lost. He went around a couple of blocks, came back, got out and ran her down and at knifepoint forced her into
the truck, drove over north of the mall, raped her and then drove her back to where he had picked her up and let her go.
Helping us raise issues about moral judgments, one of the women who was discussing the case in a group with my wife
made a comment which seemed to imply that the woman should bear part of the blame for getting raped, namely, "Yes,
but remember how she dresses and carries herself." Some in the class thought that was a mistake, suggesting there
might be some moral judgments for us to discuss in connection with this example. If you have some, note your support
for them.
I’ll mention another: the example of cheating in one of our last classes at the university.
These foregoing arguments and examples should help us locate our reflexes and temptations: Remember
that we are interested in some values as well which have perhaps not been reflected adequately in our arguments. Some
of those might need to be argued for, or perhaps their justification is that they are obvious. That is, we are interested in
justifying a value we have; we know it is better to tolerate diversity and to be slow to condemn others. That is still a bit
wimpy--we feel it is a strength or a virtue to be tolerant of other peoples' ideas and practices.
We might also be tempted by some ideas of consent and cultural tolerance. The idea that consent makes
practices moral has a couple of advocates in the class. I tried unsuccessfully to suggest that we have to be careful about
making this idea circular, since we will quickly separate real consent from uninformed, immature, incapable (and so on)
consent. That is, we have to be careful to separate consent from being able to reach the morally right decision--they are
not the same thing. We can consent to do things we should not do. Therefore consent does not entirely take care of the
question of what is moral.
We do, of course, not identify every "yes" with consent. Children cannot give consent to having sex, and
having sex with them is therefore statutory rape. The same goes in many states for the mentally retarded or mentally ill.
But some cases still seem problematic: can I give the class permission to copulate with my corpse after I die? Does a
shepherd's sheep have to give consent for sex, though not for shearing or slaughter? If we in a thought experiment about
female genital mutilation make a couple of modifications among tribesmen in the Sudan, such that there is still
complete compliance with the practice of clitorectomy and infibulation but the women go through it voluntarily at
whatever age you like and with whatever information you like--does that consent make the practice okay? I tried to
suggest that it may not, partly leaning on the idea that we can give consent when we should (and that’s a moral should)
withold.
I invite you to consider whether there are other arguments for relativism we should lay out. These seem to me
to be the main ones, but I may have been absent-minded about this. Please remind us, and e-mail me, if something has
been left out. It may be, for instance, that our motives can be acknowledged or used in other arguments than those
above.
Now here are the arguments against relativism. Those fall under three headings: claims that Benedict-style
relativism fits some examples better than others but that some examples show her analysis of the meaning of "moral" or
"ethical" is too narrow, and just wrong; claims that the Protagoras-and-Oscar-Wilde position is self contradictory; and
claims that the alleged relation between relativism and tolerance is an illusion or worse. I'll summarize each.
The claim that there are not grounds for condemning a cultural or sexual practice from outside fits some
examples better than others, but relativism is not a sometimes thing--if relativism is true the claim should fit all
examples just as well as it fits any. Some examples are not troublesome. Regarding sexual practices, we might invoke a
kind of relativism regarding tastes: if I am a breast man and you are a leg man or a woman with a preference for
Wrangler butts, you and I do not have thereby any grounds for saying that one of us is wrong, any more than if one of
us prefers raspberries and the other strawberries. Some cultures do not share our obsession with breasts, though some
cultures do (India in 9th, 10th, 11th Century), and so perhaps here is an example in which one culture also lacks
grounds for saying another culture is wrong even though their practices differ. Relativism also fits some other kinds of
cases; if the wind feels cool to you and not to me, such that you say it is cool and I say it is not cool, then Protagoras is
right, and we are mistaken to think that there is some further reality of which one of us is mistaken. And of course there
may be some cases which are borderline or troublesome, just as it may be difficult to tell when day gives way to night:
you have a taste for sex with lots of strangers and I am interested in sex only with people I like a lot (or vice versa). Or,
one of us likes sex to involve some pain and in the past has nailed your/my penis to a board in order to build up
excitement, while that idea leaves the other of us cold. And so on.
But other examples are not so easy to pass over. Instead of strawberries and raspberries, our tastes may run to
or involve different effects on other people's lives. It might be that you like watching kids on playgrounds, and I like
talking them into having secret sexual relationships with me. If you are tempted by relativism, you may not find that
example strong enough, but this argument is an invitation for you to do some self-analysis, to ask whether there are
some sexual practices you might consider as not okay even after you have imagined that they could be accepted by a
culture. Try rape, or female genital mutilation, or sexual slavery. Those do exist and reportedly can be accepted by
victims and perpetrators alike. I am thinking here of cultures like some of the Eskimos in which men offer their wives
to guests to have sex with, whether the wives wish to do so or not. The wives may protest but the typical response
reportedly is just to keep quiet mostly out of rear of reprisal.
The argument is that we have shown (by the difference in how easily relativism fits different kinds of cases)
that there may be more to the meaning of "moral" than acceptance or approval within a culture. With that background,
it seems that Benedict has left something out of her argument--she offers no evidence or grounds to suppose that moral
just means approved or accepted. And of course (this is another set of arguments against her position coming up here)
moral questions and moral dilemmas and moral problems can exist, and in those her analysis of the meaning of the
word doesn't fit. Literature, history, and our own experience can provide us with examples of people who try to be
moral though they have to stand alone to do so. If Benedict is right and moral means accepted by a culture and someone
whose behavior is not accepted is because of that fact immoral--if that is right, then there is no way to make sense of
cases in which moral heroes condemn their culture on moral grounds, or cases in which cultures make moral progress
or regress morally or cases of moral villains who are loved by a culture but are villains nevertheless. But we can make
sense of those cases, so Benedict cannot be right. Moral must mean something different, something more, than
Benedict thinks.
Next, regarding individual relativism, I provided you with my version of a Platonic dialogue, two lines long:
OSC: There is no right or wrong; what's right's what's right for you.
SOC: Is that right?
The idea here is that the position destroys itself, and Socrates is pointing out to Oscar that if he is right, then he is not
right too, or that those who disagree with him about whether he is right are just as right as he is. And if he (Oscar) is
not right, then of course there could be right and wrong. But if he is right, then there must be right and wrong for him to
be right. (We need to set this to some country-western music.) Again: the position holds as long as there is not any
disagreement or any issue. But as soon as I disagree with you, Oscar, you are endorsing my view as well as your own,
even when I say that you are wrong (for me). If all is just opinion, then the claim that all is just opinion is also just
opinion, and there is no reason to take that claim any more seriously than there is reason to take seriously those who
wish to claim that God last night personally dictated a new set of commandments for the world through the fillings in
their teeth.
The last goes like this. It is fairly clear that most of us in the class who wish to endorse relativism do so partly
out of a concern about bigotry and abuse of power by one culture over people whose cultures lead them to act
differently than we do. In short, the motivating force for being a relativist is a desire for tolerance. The arguments
which are brought in which show this motive most plainly are those which focus on abuses of power in the past or
which show how easily people do become self-righteous exploiters--David Koresh, the Crusades, Tahitians before the
missionaries of the last century, our treatment of Native Americans, colonialism in general. And yet if one is a
relativist, one cannot do anything to actually increase tolerance. The reasons are as follows:
Suppose that I am a bigot whose condemnation crosses cultural lines--I hear about the Mangaians or the
Tahitians last century, who have many fewer prohibitions regarding premarital sex, sex with strangers, polygamy, sex
with other than one's living partners, and so on, and whose sex lives are lively. I am not in that culture, do not know of
any actual individuals or anything about their ways of life, their humor, generosity, worries. I think they are no better
than animals, nasty, immoral, awful, and that it ought to be stopped. Now suppose that my culture agrees with me. That
is, suppose that all of us in this hypothetical culture think that they are awful and ought to be stopped. (Perhaps this
hypothetical culture has existed or still exists.) If Benedict is right, my condemnation is thereby perfectly moral or
ethical. She has missed something. Her analysis of the meaning of the word "moral" seems to have been motivated by a
desire to keep us from condemning peoples or cultures we do not understand, because she thinks we embody in our
moral judgments no more than our culture's approval. And yet she thinks we ought not to do that, and the ought is a
moral ought from which she has cut herself off any possible grounds of justification. In other words, if intolerance is
culturally accepted and moral means culturally accepted, then intolerance is moral. Relativism gives cultures a license
to be bigots rather than doing anything to reduce it.
We can consider some other problems about relativism. Many of the arguments turn on the idea that we have
been facing a dichotomy, a choice with only two alternatives. If absolutism is wrong, then we must be relativists, and if
relativism is untenable, then absolutism must be right.
Notes Toward a Third Alternative
Let's consider this for a moment; The idea here is that if relativism is wrong, that commits us to absolutism, so
absolutism must be right. That is, if it is false that what is moral is what is accepted within a culture, then it must be
true that there are some moral rules to be found which hold for all. At this point, the arguments for tolerance get
refreshed, get a grip again. That is, if absolutism is true, it seems to lead to abuse and atrocities, at least if we are
confident that we are the ones with the right keys to the right moral code. And I'd like to raise the worry how, if we
think that morality is neither given in some set of commandments nor given to us by our culture--how, in that case we
have any grounds for condemning obvious moral transgressions or making moral judgments. I invite consideration
again of the stories. How will we back up our claim, if we are inclined to make it, that we should not blame the woman
student for her being raped?
Consider the basics of the third-alternative answer to this. It is not spelled out often by people in ethics, and I
am not sure how the details go, but it is basically that when we do act in some way which is morally bad, the claim that
we have done something bad can be explained right there in the example without appeal either to any rules or to what
the culture accepts. What people do is grounds for moral evaluation of what they do. Perhaps the rapist cannot
understand that his rape is a bad thing, but that is evidence that he is even more morally bankrupt than those who do not
have to have it explained. If a person asks what the man did wrong, we explain that he raped a woman. If that needs
explaining, we can go into detail. If we are talking to a Martian or someone without feelings, we still have some things
we can say, to the effect that the woman raped suffers because of it in a great many ways which can be made clear by
talking to her, that sex can be otherwise and rape is a terrible parody of what sex can be, that the man was stupid,
violent, and unfeeling in raping her, that interviews with rapists show us people who are morally and emotionally and
empathetically disabled, often because of terrible traumas, that an interview with him will supply a great many bits of
evidence that what he did was terrible, and so on. That is, we do not need commandments or an absolute moral code,
nor do we need to be a relativist. We certainly do not need to appeal to some such rule as, "Well, in this culture rape is
just not done, and we don't tolerate it, so it is wrong."
Now let’s think about where this leaves us. The debate between relativists and absolutists has to be a
knock-down, drag-out battle to the death in which the last position left standing wins all the marbles--only if there is
not a third alternative. But in fact there is a third alternative, namely that we justify our moral judgments (and know
that we are right [or don't know whether we are right if we don't know]) by appealing to the relevant arguments in
particular examples. This third alternative is not relativist because the relevant arguments justify condemnations or
praise regardless of what the persons in the case believe, or whether persons in the case agree with those
condemnations, no matter where they were raised, and it is not absolutist because it does not appeal to any code or
theory that is supposed to apply to all everywhere. The judgments emerge with the arguments out of cases, and are as
merciless as absolutism and as tuned in to circumstance as relativism. Not only that, this is in fact the way that we do
justify our moral judgments when there is an issue to think through. The three examples we looked at in class, with the
reminders above, might give rise to debate about how to judge the people involved. How we make progress in that
debate is not by appeal to an absolutist code or theory or to a cultural practice or our own opinions. Instead we dig deep
to see whether our gut reactions or our opinions have some support, and we lay those out for others to agree or to
answer. We argue.
This is not a claim that all of us _can_ use arguments to justify our moral judgments. Instead it is that when
there is a possible disagreement we _have to_ use arguments to make any progress, and that under our
intuitions/feelings/reflex judgments there either are arguments or there are not, and that the relevant arguments are
relevant. If we cannot figure out what our arguments are, then we are left with no choice but to trust our training (or
trainers) and our intuitions and our gut feelings, but history shows us lots of cases of people whose intuitions and
training (or trainers) and gut feelings were not things that should be trusted. Of course, an examination of the
arguments might provide support for particular intuitions too.
This approach is a lot less easy than just going with our first reaction. Also, we do not always have to be able to
give reasons for our judgments just because it is not always the case that our judgments are at issue. Is rape bad? Well,
good grief, who would ask about that? A Martian or a small child or someone who does not know English, maybe. Or a
philosopher, which does not speak well for philosophers. For those people you answer mostly by explaining what rape
is, and that takes care of it. For the Martian perhaps more is required, and that is how we get into some of the reasons
we gave in class. That rape is a terrible thing is understood by us as soon as we understand some other things about sex
and how sex can be and what it is to get along with other people without trying to do damage to them in terrible and
lasting ways. That's why the quoted line of the woman in that example was important--it raised something that was
more like a real issue, namely should the woman be blamed in some degree for what happened?
That, as it turns out, is a live issue among the members of the class. So are a number of other huge social issues
about our culture. Is this, as Rachel Powell claims, a rape culture (that is, one that promotes attitudes toward women
which make rape more likely)? Do we cloud our own fears by distancing ourselves from victims and by blaming them?
To what extent is rape about sex and to what extent about power? Is what the woman said something that makes it
worse? How do we make progress in answering those questions? Not by appeal to culture or to John Stuart Mill or
divine commands. Instead, we work to figure out our reasons for our positions and we trot them out and argue. As to
whether these reasons change, there is a way in which this might be right, in that the extent to which different
arguments apply will change depending on which example we are talking about--you can tell this by working to sort out
answers to each relevant argument based on what happens in each example. It may be we do not have enough to decide
some of what we wish we could decide. If that is so, we may want to say, We cannot decide . . . . That might be better
than deciding when we don't have good grounds. Adding in more information, such as the fact that the young woman
never walked home alone but this night her usual way home was unavailable and she had been advised not to show fear
if in danger but to come on strong, sometimes makes a difference in our judgments. But if the example stands still, if
we are talking about one example and we can get the example clear, then the reasons do not change, and they do not
depend on the culture’s acceptances or approvals, and they do not depend on what we want to be true, and the relevant
arguments justify what they justify. It’s not relative to culture or to our beliefs, and it’s not absolute because it’s not
based on rules allegedly applying somewhere else. We justify our moral judgments and we make moral decisions
properly when we do it as usually we actually do do it. Absolutist stories and relativist stories wind up being
irrelevant–unless they can take the form of relevant arguments, and then they become a part of the third alternative, the
worry method.
--jwpowell
relativiB.pdf