—excerpted from Daniel Bonevac's text Contemporary Moral Problems, 4th ed., (2002)
This is a course about moral issues. What are moral issues? To answer this question, we need to consider the definition of philosophy if the word itself is any guide, philosophy is the love of wisdom. A simple definition of wisdom, in turn, is good judgment. Philosophy, then, is the love or pursuit of good judgment. Moral philosophy, or ethics, is the pursuit of good judgment about character and action-about what kind of person to be and about what to do. Ethics addresses questions about virtue and vice, good and bad, right and wrong.
Such questions, clearly, have varied answers; they are often the subject of controversy and debate. The moral issues considered in this book-abortion, euthanasia, pornography, capital punishment, affirmative action, and many others, are among the most controversial our society faces. Most of this book consists of moral arguments, in which a moral issue is considered and a particular position is supported or a particular conclusion is reached through reasoning.
How can we think through moral issues carefully and systematically? How do we develop arguments for ethical conclusions? These are questions that I attempt to answer in this introduction. I also consider an important objection to the idea of moral argument, namely, the view that different groups have different values and it is therefore impossible to argue logically about right and wrong. This position, known as relativism, is common today and poses a serious challenge to ethical thinking.
Allan Bloom began his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind with the statement, "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." This is especially so in philosophy courses and in ethics courses in particular. Ethics consists of principled reflection on questions such as, How should I live? and What should I do? It takes as its central tasks criticizing, justifying, and deciding on various answers to these questions. No one, of course, likes to be criticized, no one likes to think that his or her particular answer to the question, How should I live? is unjustified or just plain wrong. So it can be tempting to defang these questions by saying that truth in ethics is relative.
But relative to what? To an individual person? To a society, a culture, or the currently popular formulation, "interpretive community"? To humanity as a whole? The last, relativity to humanity, does not challenge the traditional project of ethics at all; Aristotle characterizes ethics as the search for the good life for man. Even the second, relativity to a society or a culture, has little effect on the discussions of contemporary issues in this book. The readings debate social problems in the context of affluent, technologically advanced societies such as those of the United States, Canada, and Europe. Problems such as welfare, abortion, and world hunger might look very different from the perspective of a poor developing nation. Relativity to a society or a culture does, however, have an impact on the theoretical discussions in the classic readings in this collection, which generally purport to say something about what is good for all human beings, not just residents of the United States, Canada, or Europe. And relativity to an individual makes ethical thinking absurd-what is good for me may differ so completely from what is good for you that ethical reflection and argument make no sense.
To be more precise, let us say that an ethical relativist believes that fundamental ethical truth-the basic truth about how one should live and what one should do-is relative to a group smaller than humanity as a whole. Something may be fundamentally right for one group but fundamentally wrong for another. A cultural relativist holds that fundamental ethical truth is relative to a culture; an individual relativist holds that it is relative to each individual person.
These definitions depend on the idea of fundamental ethical truth. Certain answers to ethical questions presuppose other answers to more basic questions. An ethical truth is fundamental if it does not depend on facts and derivative if it does. Disagreement over fundamental ethical truths is thus purely ethical-it does not stem from a factual disagreement. To say that something may be fundamentally right for one group but fundamentally wrong for another is thus to say that there may be different answers to the questions of how to live and what to do for these groups, even though the factual circumstances and the groups’ beliefs about the factual circumstances are exactly the same.
If we make no distinction between fundamental and derivative truths, individual relativism is obvious. Suppose that John has murdered someone and Mary has done no harm to anyone. Then John deserves to be punished and Mary does not. John should turn himself over to the police; Mary should not. John’s obligations differ from Mary’s because of the facts. Relativism is interesting only when it pertains to the most fundamental ethical truths, which are independent of facts. What these are, of course, is controversial. Different moral theories espouse different candidates. But it is at the level of fundamental truths—Maximize good, Treat others as ends, not merely as means, Treat others as you would want to be treated-that the issue must be decided.
Relativism is often motivated by toleration or openness. Since tolerance is a virtue, relativists see their own position as morally required. Bloom observes,
That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged-a combination of belief and indignation: "Are you an absolutist?," the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as "Are you a monarchist?" or "Do you really believe in witches?" This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. (1987:25)
But tolerance and relativism are not the same thing. I may believe that I am right and you are wrong, while still tolerating your behavior and respecting your right to be wrong. The traditional belief in freedom of thought and freedom of speech requires just such an attitude.
Conversely, I may be a relativist, holding only that my opinion is right for me, yet show little tolerance for any deviation from my opinion. The intolerance of relativists is not only possible but common enough to have a label: political correctness. Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that the twentieth century would be a century of great wars, precisely because it would be a century of relativism. Without truth, Nietzsche understood, there is only power.
Bloom frets that his students cannot defend their opinions. But it is possible to think through issues in ethics, including ethical relativism, carefully and systematically, as mentioned earlier. This introduction provides you with some tools-the basic elements of reasoning-that will help you do this. It tells you how to recognize and evaluate arguments. The examples used are arguments for and against ethical relativism. At the end, you should not only know how to analyze an argument critically but also have greater insight into relativism.
Arguments are bits of reasoning in language. Frequently, we think of arguments as conflicts. In that sense, this book presents a series of arguments about issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and affirmative action. But philosophers and logicians primarily use ‘argument’ in the sense that one argues for a conclusion. An argument starts with some assertions and tries to justify a thesis.
Components of Arguments
The initial assertions of an argument are its premises; the thesis that the argument tries to justify is its conclusion. Arguments consist of statements, sentences that can be true or false. Almost every sentence in this book falls into this category. Statements are declarative, in the indicative mood; they say something about the way the world is, correctly or incorrectly
Here, for example, is a simple argument that some have advanced in favor of cultural relativism:
(1) Societies differ in their fundamental ethical beliefs.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
(This format lists the premises in the order in which they are given and then gives the conclusion.)
How can we recognize arguments? The premises of an argument are meant to support the conclusion. We can recognize arguments, then, by recognizing when some statements are offered in support of others. We can do this most easily, in turn, if we can distinguish premises from conclusions. But how can we pick out the conclusion of an argument? In English, various words and phrases can signal the premises or the conclusion of an argument.
Conclusion Indicators: therefore, thus, hence, consequently it follows that, in conclusion, as a result, then, must, accordingly, this implies that, this entails that, we may infer that
Premise Indicators: because, as, for, since, given that, for the reason that
Beware: These words and phrases have other uses as well.
Extended or complex arguments contain other arguments. Simple arguments do not. Because extended arguments are good only if the simple arguments within them are good, it is best to break extended arguments down into their simple components and analyze them separately
Validity and Soundness
To evaluate arguments, we need to ask, What distinguishes good from bad arguments? What makes a good argument good?
A good argument links its premises to its conclusion in the right way In a (deductively) valid argument, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. If the premises are all true, then the conclusion has to be true. Or, equivalently, if the conclusion of a valid argument is false, at least one premise must also be false. Consider, for example, the argument:
(2) All promises ought to be kept.
Your promise to Joe is a promise.
Therefore, you ought to keep your promise to Joe.
In any circumstance in which the premises of this argument are true, the conclusion must be true as well. It is impossible to conceive of a state of affairs in which, while all promises ought to be kept, and your promise to Joe is a promise, you nevertheless should not keep your promise to Joe. If it is false that you should keep your promise to Joe, then either there are promises that shouldn’t be kept, or your "promise" wasn’t a real promise.
Valid arguments are only one species of good argument. Others are inductively strong (or reliable). The truth of the premises of such an argument does not guarantee the truth of its conclusion, but it does make the truth of the conclusion probable. Consider, for example, this argument:
(3) Every generous person I’ve ever known has also been kind.
Therefore, all generous people are kind.
It is possible for the premise to be true white the conclusion is false. There may be generous but nasty people I’ve never met. So the argument is invalid. Nevertheless, the premise lends some support to the conclusion. The argument is inductively strong; how strong depends on how many generous people I’ve known, among other things.
In general, good arguments not only are valid or inductively strong but also have true premises. A sound argument is a valid argument with true premises. In any valid argument, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. So, a sound argument also has a true conclusion. A cogent argument is an inductively strong argument with true premises. In a cogent argument, the truth of the conclusion is likely but not guaranteed.
Three Arguments for Cultural Relativism
Logic develops precise ways of determining whether arguments are valid (although the most powerful ways of evaluating arguments are intuitive). An argument is valid if the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. To show that an argument is invalid, therefore, one needs to show that the premises could all be true while the conclusion is false.
There are two ways of showing that an argument is invalid. The first, the direct method, is simply to describe such a situation. That is, we can show an argument to be invalid by depicting a possible circumstance in which the premises were all true but the conclusion was false. Consider the argument with which we began:
(1) Societies differ in their fundamental ethical beliefs.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
To show that this is invalid, we might imagine a circumstance in which societies differ in fundamental ethical beliefs because one or both are wrong, not because ethical truth is relative.
The second way to show that an argument is invalid, devised by Aristotle, is based on the idea of form and is known as the method of counterexamples. To show that an argument is invalid using this method, we must produce another argument of the same form with true premises and a false conclusion. This introduction is too short to present a detailed discussion of form. But Aristotle’s insight was that validity isformal in the sense that arguments can be classified into certain general patterns, or forms, of which individual arguments are instances. An argument form is valid if and only if every instance of it is valid. More to the point, an argument form is invalid if and only if some instance of it is invalid. To show that an argument form is invalid, then, find an instance with true premises and a false conclusion. To show that an individual argument is invalid, find an argument with true premises and a false conclusion that shares the specificform of the original argument: the most explicit form we can devise, displaying the most structure.
Let’s now consider and evaluate three arguments for cultural relativism: the argument from cultural variation, the argument from undecidability, and the argument from subjectivism.
The Argument from Cultural Variation
The argument from cultural variation is an extended argument consisting of several simple arguments in sequence:
(4) Ancient Greek society accepted infanticide.
Contemporary American society does not.
Therefore, societies differ in their fundamental ethical beliefs.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
To apply the method of counterexamples to (1) (which is a key step in the argument from cultural variation), we need to find an argument with the same specific form but with true premises and a false conclusion:
(5) Societies differ in their fundamental astronomical beliefs.
Therefore, astronomical truth is relative to culture.
Ancient Greeks believed that the sun revolves around the earth. We believe that the earth revolves around the sun. But nobody thinks that the truth of the matter is culturally relative; the earth and sun did not switch places at some point in the last 2000 years. Thus, the argument from cultural variation can be shown to be invalid.
The Argument from Undecidability
Another argument for cultural relativism is the argument from unclecidability, which insists that there is no neutral ground on which one might judge competing ethical claims.
(6) Ancient Greeks could not neutrally judge which society is right.
[Ancient Greeks will use their own society’s standards.
They will judge their own society to be right.
Their use of their own standards biases them.
Therefore, they could not neutrally judge which society is right.]
Contemporary Americans cannot neutrally judge which society is right.
[Contemporary Americans will use their own society’s standards.
They will judge their own society to be right.
Their use of their own standards biases them.
Therefore, they cannot neutrally judge which society is right.]
Members of other societies cannot neutrally judge which society is right.
[They will use their own society’s standards.
They will judge their own society to be right.
Their use of their own standards biases them.
Therefore, they cannot neutrally judge which society is right.]
Therefore, no one can neutrally judge which society is right.
The argument from undecidability is an extended argument containing an overall argument (6)a and three subarguments, one for each premise, all having a similar form (6)b:
(6)a: Ancient Greeks could not neutrally judge which society is right.
Contemporary Americans cannot neutrally judge which society is right.
Members of other societies cannot neutrally judge which society is right.
Therefore, no one can neutrally judge which society is right.
(6)b: Members of society X will use X’s standards.
They will judge X to be right.
Their use of X’s standards biases them.
Therefore, they could not neutrally judge which society is right.
As long as everyone is a member of some society or other, (6)a is valid. And if all Must use their own societies’ standards, which biases them, then none can neutrally judge which society is right, so (6)b is valid as well. One can certainly raise questions about the truth of its premises, of course. Remember that even if an argument is valid, it may not be sound; one or more premises may be false. Members of a society often use different standards, while people from different societies use similar standards, making the first premise of (6)b doubtful. Members of a society can judge their own society and its standards inadequate, even by its own standards—the standards themselves may contain norms of self-improvement. That casts doubt on the second premise. Finally, their use of their society’s standards may not bias them, if there is significant overlap between those standards and those of the competing society It may be possible to evaluate which society is right on the basis of standards that both accept.
Moreover, to use the argument from undecidability to support cultural relativism, one must make a further move:
(7) Nobody can neutrally judge which society’s fundamental ethical beliefs are right.
Therefore, ethical truths are relative to a culture.
We can combine the direct method and the method of counterexamples to show that this is not valid. Say that the Steelers and the Cowboys are about to play in the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh fans are convinced that the Steelers are the better team; Dallas fans feel similarly about the Cowboys. Before the game, there may be no way to tell who is right. But that doesn’t mean that which team is better is relative to a group of fans. This argument with the same form, then, seems to have true premises but a false conclusion in such a situation:
(8) Nobody can neutrally judge which fans’ beliefs are right.
Therefore, which team is better is relative to a set of fans.
An even better example is this: Say that two groups of paleontologists have competing hypotheses about how a certain species evolved in the distant past. Suppose further that no fossil or other evidence favoring one over the other will become available. The groups, moreover, appeal to rather different standards of paleontological research. Then the premise of the following argument may be true.
(9) Nobody can neutrally judge which hypothesis is right.
Therefore, how a certain species evolved is relative to a group of paleontologists.
But this conclusion is absurd. The species evolved however it evolved, no matter what contemporary paleontologists think.
The problem with the arguments from cultural variation and undecidability is that they support not relativism but skepticism. (in fact, they are classic arguments that skeptics have used to support the conclusion that ethical knowledge is uncertain, unjustified, or impossible.) In short, they suggest at best that there are problems about ethical knowledge, not about ethical truth.
The Argument from Subjectivism
A third argument for cultural relativism is the argument from subjectivism, the view that ethical truth is in the eye of the beholder. The argument from subjectivism is an extended argument consisting of a list of premises followed by several conclusions stated at once.
(10) Ethical truth depends on emotional reactions.
Emotional reactions depend on socialization.
What depends on emotion is subjective.
Whatever results from socialization is relative to culture.
Therefore, ethical truth is subjective.
Therefore, ethical truth depends on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
To evaluate this, we must distinguish three simple arguments, one for each conclusion.
(11) Ethical truth depends on emotional reactions.
What depends on emotion is subjective.
Therefore, ethical truth is subjective.
This argument certainly seems valid; it appears to have the same form as "Socrates is a man- all men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal." But the appearance can be misleading, because the premises are ambiguous. "X depends on Y" can mean that X depends on Y among other things, or that X depends on Y alone. It is tempting to read the first premise as asserting that ethical truth depends on emotion, among other things, but to read the second as asserting that what depends solely on emotion is subjective. In that interpretation, the argument is not valid at all. Compare:
(12) Life depends on the pumping of the heart, among other things.
What depends on nothing but the pumping of the heart is circulatory.
Therefore, life is circulatory.
So, we must distinguish two possible arguments:
(13) Ethical truth depends partly on emotional reactions.
What depends partly on emotion is subjective.
Therefore, ethical truth is subjective.
(14) Ethical truth depends solely on emotional reactions.
What depends solely on emotion is subjective.
Therefore, ethical truth is subjective.
These arguments are valid. But are they sound? Are the premises true?
Some philosophers, such as Hume, hold that ethical truth depends partly on emotional reactions; others, such as Kant, Mill, and Rawls, think that ethical truth can be given a purely rational foundation, This is a large issue that cannot be resolved in this introduction. Suffice it to say that many philosophers have thought that ethical truth does not depend even partly on emotion-, very few have held that it depends entirely on emotion. The first premise is dubious in (13), therefore, and even more dubious in (14).
The second premise of (13) is also questionable. Philosophers who have accepted the dependence of ethical truth on emotion, among other things, have often thought that people have an emotional "moral sense" that tells them right from wrong in regular ways by detecting and responding to real properties of actions and circumstances. In such a view, moral emotions are not arbitrary or subjective; they respond to real features of things.
The argument for the second conclusion appears to be valid:
(15) Ethical truth depends on emotional reactions.
Emotional reactions depend on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth depends on socialization.
Once again, however, these statements are ambiguous. If ethical truth depends on emotion, among other things, and emotion depends on socialization, among other things, then we can hardly conclude that ethical truth depends on nothing but socialization. So, we must distinguish two possible arguments:
(16) Ethical truth depends on emotional reactions, among other things.
Emotional reactions depend on socialization, among other things.
Therefore, ethical truth depends on socialization, among other things.
(17) Ethical truth depends solely on emotional reactions.
Emotional reactions depend solely on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth depends solely on socialization.
These are valid. But are they sound?
As we have seen, the first premise is controversial in both arguments and is especially so in (17). The second premise of (17) is also questionable. Many philosophers have held that at least some emotional reactions are biological, products of nature rather than nurture. The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius, for example, describes a situation in which an adult sees a child about to fall into a well. it is natural, Mencius says, for the adult to feel compassion and race to the child’s rescue. Mencius does not deny that socialization has effects on emotion; it may develop or stunt one’s natural reactions. But emotion depends at least as much on biology as on societya point on which Mencius and contemporary biology agree.
The third argument is also ambiguous:
(18) Ethical truth depends on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
To evaluate it, we must isolate two interpretations:
(19) Ethical truth depends among other things on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
(20) Ethical truth depends solely on socialization.
Therefore, ethical truth is relative to culture.
We have already noted that the premises are controversial. Turn, then, to the question of validity one problem with (19) is brought out nicely by this argument, which shares its specific form:
(21) Combustion depends on a spark, among other things.
Therefore, combustion is relative to a spark.
The problem is that, once a spark occurs, combustion proceeds independently; additional sparks don’t matter. Tossing lit matches onto a fire has no appreciable effect on the fire. To apply the moral to (19): Socialization may be needed to activate and develop a person’s moral sense, but it may be that the content of what is activated and developed is then independent of socialization.
Another problem is brought out by the following argument, which also has the specific form of (19):
(22) The properties of a triangle depend on its size, among other things.
Therefore, the properties of a triangle are relative to its size.
The point is that some properties depend on size, but some do not. Any triangle has three sides, for example, no matter how large it is. At best, then, (19) could show that some ethical truths are relative to culture, but not that all are.
Argument (20) may seem to be valid, though it has a dubious premise. But an argument with (20)’s specific form shows that this is not so:
(23) The design of a house solely depends on the architect.
Therefore, the design of a house is relative to the architect.
The problem this brings out affects (19) as well as (20). Even if the architect has total control over the design of a house, it may be that all houses have certain design functions in common, because architects are trying to solve similar problems with their designs. People need shelter; they need places to cook, eat, sleep, and so on. So, even if ethical truth depends on nothing but socialization, ethical truth may contain some universally accepted fundamental truths because socialization may have some universal features. Every society, after all, faces the same problem: how to raise its young to lead successful human lives.
We have been considering traditional arguments in favor of relativism. There are also traditional arguments against relativism. They are the argument from error, the argument from change, the argument from interaction, the argument from inconsistency, and the argument from intolerance.
The Argument from Error
The first argument against relativism is the argument from error, originally articulated by Plato:
Protagoras . . . says that man is the measure of all things, and that things are to me as they appear to me, and that they are to you as they appear to you.... But if Protagoras is right, and the truth is that things are as they appear to anyone, how can some of us be wise and some of us foolish? (Cratylus 386a, c)
The essence of Plato’s argument appears to be:
(24) If ethical truth is relative to an individual, no way of living is better than any other.
But some ways of living are better than others.
Therefore, ethical truth is not relative to an individual.
It is easy to adapt the argument to cultural relativism:
(25) If ethical truth is relative to a culture, no social standards of conduct are better than any others.
But some social standards of conduct are better than others.
Therefore, ethical truth is not relative to a culture.
The key premise is the second, that some ways of living and some social codes of conduct are better than others. For Plato’s argument to succeed, we must be justified in saying that some people and societies are wiser than others. It must be possible, in other words, for people and societies to make moral mistakes, i.e., to do wrong.
Can people make moral mistakes? The mind leaps to examples of moral horror: the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews, a quarter of them children, were murdered; or Stalin’s induced famine, which killed over 30 million Ukrainians; or the centurieslong enslavement of Africans in the New World. These are crimes so enormous that they are hard to comprehend. (As Judith Miller has said, "We must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million. It was one plus one plus one.") Easier to contemplate, perhaps, are individual acts of immorality-two teenagers raping and then murdering a young mother, for example, or a thug breaking into a house and killing the occupants. To suggest that no patterns of conduct are better than any others in the face of such examples seems itself an example of immorality.
The Argument from Change
The argument from error suggests a second argument, the one from change. People change their minds; societies reform. Sometimes these changes respond to changes in circumstances. But often people change because they come to think that their opinions are wrong. The abolition of slavery and the protection of civil rights exemplify this sort of moral reform on a social level. The relativist seems committed to saying that, relative to our society, discrimination used to be permissible but is now wrong. If the change was not in the situation but in our convictions, however, this sounds very strange. We changed our minds; discrimination did not change its moral character. Indeed, we now think not only that discrimination is wrong now but that it was wrong then.
The Argument from Interaction
A third argument is from interaction. Say that what is right is relative to the society under consideration.
What happens when societies interact? Imagine yourself as Cortes, horrified by the spectacle of mass human sacrifice at an Aztec temple, or, to take an example of current significance, as an Ohio police chief who discovers that recent African immigrants in the community have been practicing female genital mutilation. Bloom asks a similar question: "If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?" Bloom complains that his students have no answer. Sidney Hook, in response, reports,
My students would have replied, "Of course the administrator should have tried to stamp out the barbarous practice ... but not if the attempt was to result in communal riots and violence by fanatics resulting in widespread loss of life. The timing is important and it might be better to work through the Hindu religious authorities, not all of whom approved of the practice, even when it was really voluntary As it is, it took the British almost fifty years before declaring the practice illegal."
In short, when cultures interact, complicated moral problems arise. It is far too simple to say that they should not try to impose their values on each other, but it is also too simple to say that they should, or even that one of them should. Imposition of certain moral beliefs might be unwarranted, while imposition of others might be vital. Tolerance is a primary motivation for relativism, but it is not always a virtue. There are things that should not be tolerated. The argument from interaction might then be summarized,
(26) If ethical truth is relative to a culture, then, when cultures interact, one should not impose one’s own values on people of the other culture.
But sometimes, when cultures interact, one should impose one’s own values on people of another culture.
Therefore, ethical truth is not relative to a culture.
The Argument from Inconsistency
This argument suggests another, the argument from inconsistency. Consider the first premise: "If ethical truth is relative to a culture, then, when cultures interact, one should not impose one’s own values on people of the other culture." To what is that "should" relative? Presumably, it is meant to hold no matter what cultures are under consideration. In short, if relativism is supposed to imply tolerance, there seems to be at least one universal moral prescription-tolerance itself. But that refutes relativism.
(27) If ethical truth is relative to a culture, there are no universal ethical truths.
If ethical truth is relative to a culture, then, when cultures interact, one should not impose one’s own values on people of the other culture.
But the preceding premise expresses a universal ethical truth.
Therefore, ethical truth is not relative to a culture.
The Argument from Intolerance
Finally the argument from inconsistency suggests another, the argumentfrom intolerance. Say that relativism does imply tolerance. Waive the point about inconsistency Should one be willing to tolerate intolerance? There are intolerant people and societies. The Soviet Union had the Gulag Archipelago, a vast string of camps for political prisoners throughout Siberia; China has the Laogai. In only a few of the world’s nations are political opponents and dissenters accorded rights. Relativism seems to imply that one should tolerate such intolerance, but that seems to violate the concern that motivated relativism in the first place.
(28) Some people and cultures are intolerant of dissent.
If ethical truth is relative to a culture, then, when cultures interact, one should not impose one’s own values on people of the other culture.
When cultures interact, one should support tolerance for dissenters of the other culture.
Therefore, ethical truth is not relative to a culture.
As we have seen, it is possible to attack an argument by showing that one of its premises is false. Even if the argument is valid or strong, such an attack shows that it is not sound or cogent and undercuts its conclusion. To apply this to our initial argument, (1), one might contend that societies share the same fundamental ethical beliefs. This might seem implausible, given the diversity of the world’s beliefs and practices. But there are striking similarities in moral codes across the globe. Prohibitions against killing, stealing, committing adultery, and lying are common to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions.
When societies appear to differ on infanticide, for example, one could argue that the disagreement is not a matter of fundamental ethical truth but a matter of fact. Perhaps the Greeks thought that it was wrong to kill persons, for example, but that infants are not persons. Or perhaps the Greeks recognized that infanticide was wrong; they left deformed babies on mountaintops to die rather than killing them, so that the gods could save the infants and would share the blame if they did not-but that endangering others by devoting scarce resources to trying to save them was worse.
Behind this is a more general point. Moral arguments typically have both moral and factual premises. Some statements are factual or descriptive. They say how the world is. Other statements are evaluative, prescriptive, or normative. They say how the world ought to be; more generally, they evaluate how the world is, characterizing it as right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, delightful or dismal. They include specifically evaluative terms. A moral argument is an argument with an evaluative conclusion. People who reach opposite conclusions may differ in moral principles, but they may also differ in factual assumptions. One of the chief purposes of a contemporary moral problems course is to teach people how to disentangle moral from factual issues. The distinction matters, because factual and moral conclusions require different kinds of support.
Consider a simple example:
(29) You promised to sublet the apartment.
You should keep your promises.
Therefore, you should sublet the apartment.
The first premise is factual. Whether you promised to sublet the apartment is a matter of fact. If it is disputed, we may ask about the facts: What exactly did you say? Is there any agreement in writing? Did you sign anything? Was it really this apartment? The second premise, in contrast, is evaluative. it speaks of how things ought to be, not how they are. Consequently, no amount of inquiry into the facts can help us determine its truth or falsehood. To justify it, we must appeal to more general moral principles.
The general pattern of moral arguments for particular conclusions is thus:
(30) Factual premise(s).
Moral premise(s).
Therefore, the Moral conclusion.
This is utterly familiar. You ought to return those books to the library. Why? You borrowed them (factual premise), they are due (factual premise), and you ought to return what you borrow when it is due (moral premise). Or, you may take vacation the last week of April. Why? it won’t cause your coworkers any inconvenience (factual premise), and you may take vacation whenever it won’t cause your coworkers any inconvenience (moral premise).
Arguing for a Moral Principle
(30) is a pattern for arguing to a particular moral conclusion. But how can one argue for general moral conclusions, such as the moral principles on which such arguments rely? How, in other words, does one support moral premises such as You ought to keep your promises, You ought to return what you borrow when it’s due, or You may take vacation whenever it won’t cause your coworkers any inconvenience?
In essence, there are two ways to argue for a moral generalization: from above and from below. To argue from above, appeal to a more general moral principle. John Stuart Mill, for example, would argue as follows for the generalization, You ought to keep your promises:
(31) You ought to follow the rules that will maximize human happiness. Following the rule.
You ought to keep your promises will maximize human happiness.
Therefore, you ought to keep your promises.
Immanuel Kant would justify it differently:
(32) You ought to treat others as ends, not merely as means.
Keeping a promise to someone treats that person as an end, but breaking one treats him or her as a means to your ends.
Therefore, you ought to keep your promises.
Philosophers who prefer justifications from above tend, like Mill and Kant, to search for a single, very general moral principle that can justify other principles.
Moral principles may also be justified from below, by appeal to their instances. One could try to argue that it is wrong to break promises, for example, by generalizing from examples of particular situations:
(33) Say someone promises to marry you but doesn’t show up at the altar; that would be wrong.
Say Frank borrows money from you, promising insincerely to repay it, and then absconds; that would be wrong.
Say the doctor makes an appointment to see you and then goes to play golf instead; that would be wrong.
Say Joan agrees to pay you $ 1,000 for landscaping her yard, you do the work, and she refuses to pay; that would be wrong.
Therefore, breaking promises is wrong.
or more specific kinds of situations:
(34) Someone who agrees to marry someone on a particular day should show up for the wedding.
Someone who borrows money ought to repay it.
Someone who makes an appointment ought to keep it.
Someone who signs a contract ought to fulfill it.
Therefore, breaking promises is wrong.
These arguments are not valid, but they are inductively strong if the examples are numerous and diverse enough.
The readings in this book contain many arguments for moral principles, some from above, some from below. Arguments from above are important, for they say something about why the moral principle holds. Kant’s argument for promise keeping, for example, not only concludes that promises should be kept but indicates that they should be kept because breaking them treats others as means to your own ends. Mill’s argument, similarly, indicates that promise keeping is obligatory because it maximizes human happiness. Arguments from below are also important, for they link principles to particular cases about which we have strong moral intuitions. The more abstract and general a moral principle is, the fewer intuitions we have about whether it is correct. Moral theories therefore rely on both kinds of arguments.
How does one argue against a moral principle? One tries to find a counterexample: an instance in which the principle seems to give the wrong result. is it always right to keep promises, for instance? One can try to find examples of promises that should not be kept. Recall that, in a valid argument, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion, or, equivalently, the falsehood of the conclusion guarantees the falsehood of at least one premise. One can construct a valid argument from the principle to a false conclusion:
(35) One should always keep one’s promises.
Therefore, if Herman promised to murder the entire city council, he should do it.
The absurdity of the conclusion shows that there is something wrong with the premise.
Many philosophers have objected to Kant’s opinion that lying is always wrong by constructing a similar argument. Suppose that a distraught child runs to you begging for help. A homicidal maniac is chasing her. You hide her in a closet. The maniac bangs on your door and asks whether you know where she is. Surely you should not tell the truth.
This example illustrates that most moral principles have exceptions. Most moral principles are true other things being equal (in Latin, ceteris paribus), but not universally Plato recognized this about promise keeping and telling the truth:
... are we to say that justice or right is simply to speak the truth and to pay back any debt one may have contracted? Or are these same actions sometimes right and sometimes wrong? I mean this sort of thing, for example: everyone would surely agree that if a friend has deposited weapons with you when he was sane, and he asks for them when he is out of his mind, you should not return them. The man who returns them is not doing right, nor is one who is willing to tell the whole truth to a man in such a state. (Republic, 331c)
Although Keep your promises and Tell the truth are good moral rules in general, they can be overridden or defeated by other moral considerations. For that reason, they are called defeasible. Normally, you ought to keep your promises. Normally, you ought to tell the truth. But sometimes there are good reasons to break a promise or to lie, and then you have a moral conflict.
Philosophers often analyze such situations of moral conflict in terms of prima facie duties. W D. Ross defined "prima facie duty" as a "characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g., the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant." A prima facie obligation, that is, holds under normal circumstances; it holds all other things being equal, becoming actual; an obligation all things considered, or, in Ross’s terms, "a duty proper"; unless some other moral consideration intervenes.
Prima facie obligations offer a way to explain the force of rules while allowing for exceptions. The idea, in essence, is that a prima facie rule applies unless some other rule conflicts with it. John Stuart Mill’s secondary principles are paradigms of prima facie principles: They dictate obligations unless they come into conflict. In that case, Mill stipulates, the principle of utility, the sole rule in his system that has an absolute rather than prima facie character, resolves the conflict. This indicates a key difference between actual and prima facie obligation: Prima facie obligations can conflict, whereas actual obligations cannot. If a homicidal maniac asks whether you know where an innocent child is hiding, there is a moral conflict: You have a prima facie obligation to tell the truth and another to tell a lie. Only one can be actual-what you ought actually to do in that situation, all things considered. Saving a life is more important than telling a lie, so your obligation to lie is actual, overriding your obligation to tell the truth.
Let’s revisit Plato’s puzzle about returning weapons to a friend who is out of his mind. Because unconditional statements of actual obligation cannot conflict, this pair is inconsistent:
(36) You have an actual obligation to return the weapons.
You have an actual obligation not to return the weapons.
You cannot be obliged, actually, all things considered, both to return the weapons and not to return them.
Because unconditional prima facie obligations can conflict, this pair of statements is consistent:
(37) You have a prima facie obligation to return the weapons.
You have a prima facie obligation not to return the weapons.
In general, you have a prima facie obligation to do something whenever the circumstances trigger a defeasible moral rule. In Plato’s case, there are defeasible rules that you ought to keep your promises and that you ought to prevent harm. Your promise gives rise to the prima facie obligation to return the weapons; your friend’s madness gives rise to the prima facie obligation not to return them.
Here are some basic reasoning patterns involving prima facie obligation and defeasible rules:
Default Modus Ponens. Inferences such as (38) count as acceptable if no other moral considerations apply
(38) If you make a promise, you should keep it.
You promised you would go.
Therefore, you should go.
They are not deductively valid, but they are inductively strong. They are legitimate default inferences; we may draw the conclusion if no other rules intervene. We may infer actual obligations from prima facie obligations in the absence of moral complications.
Conditional Conflict. In cases where conditional prima facie principles conflict, we can generally draw no conclusions. Consider Plato’s puzzle:
(39) If you promised to return the weapons, you should return them.
If returning them will cause mayhem, you should not return them.
You did promise.
Returning the weapons will cause mayhem.
Therefore, ????
Should you return the weapons? This is a substantive moral question; no obligation follows as a matter of logic. We must look at the situation and the importance of the conflicting considerations.
Specificity. More specific prima facie obligations take precedence over less specific ones. To return to Plato’s puzzle: Add the premise that results from reflecting on the competing values at stake in the situation. Lives are more important than promises. It follows that you should not return the weapons.
(40) If you promised to return the weapons, you should return them.
If returning them will cause mayhem, you should not return them.
You did promise.
Returning the weapons will cause mayhem.
If you promised to return the weapons but doing so will cause mayhem, you should not return them.
Therefore, you should not return the weapons.
But it is important that the last premise requires independent moral reflection. We cannot infer it from the other premises. Indeed, moral conflicts such as those Plato describes have spurred philosophers to devise moral theories to help us compare different kinds of moral considerations and resolve conflicts generated by them.
Seeing that moral considerations can come into conflict helps to dissolve some of the motivation for relativism. In morality, it is often true that one person or culture sees things one way and another sees them quite differently. But even within the view of a single person and culture, there are many different perspectives, which it is the task of morality to relate, evaluate, and, in particular situations, reconcile. Reasonable people can differ on how to reconcile them. That is what makes a book like this both possible and important.