Phil 152 – Spring 07 Two Bad Arguments for Moral Relativism
To start, we need some definitions (from Gowan in the Stanford Encyclopedia).
Descriptive Moral Relativism (DMR): It is an empirical fact that there are significant moral disagreements across different cultures.
Metaethical Moral Relativism (MMR): The truth or falsity of moral judgments is relative to a given culture.
Moral Objectivism (MO): There are some true universal moral principles or values that apply across all cultures. Obviously, MO and MMR are inconsistent.
First Argument: DMR is true.
Therefore, MMR is true.
Critique: The conclusion doesn’t follow. The premise only refers to a difference in moral beliefs among cultures but the conclusion implies a difference in truth of the moral judgments made by persons in different cultures. A belief, no matter how sincerely held, can still be mistaken.
An anlogy may help illustrate the mistake:
Different cultures have different beliefs about the correct way to treat a given illness.
Therefore, there is no objectively correct way to treat a given illness; it is relative to
the culture.
Critique: The conclusion doesn’t follow. Surely there are some illnesses for which there is one objectively correct treatment that would work for every culture if they knew about it. Scurvey, for example, is treatable by vitamin C no matter what the culture of the victim.
Second Argument: If MO were true, some cultures could be judged morally at fault even though they were acting in ways they sincerely believed to be proper.
Judging them at fault would reflect an attitude of intolerance, which is itself a moral fault.
Therefore, MO is false (or at least, we are better off regarding it as false than as true, given the likely consequences of intolerance).
Critique: The argument is circular. The conclusion follows only if one assumes tolerance is a moral universal that every culture should hold, i.e. an objective moral truth.
Secondly, judging another culture’s ways (or one’s own) as wrong is not intolerance in the morally faulty sense unless such judgments are made hastily and in ignorance of the perspective and circumstances of the subject culture. Nor does the mere act of judging another culture imply any endorsement of efforts to change the culture’s practices by coercion or manipulation.
Thirdly, note that it would be irresponsible to judge another culture, assuming MO is true, unless one knew what those objective values were. Not an easy thing to come by.