The Shortcomings of Moral Relativism: Part 1
Introduction
“‘Is,’ ‘is,’ ‘is’ - the idiocy of the word haunts me,” says Robert Anton Wilson in Nature’s God. “If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything ‘is’; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”[1] This is easily the lament of every moral relativist, but without “is,” can we in fact make sense of the world, particularly morality? I believe that no, we cannot make sense of morality in a world that defines it by how something “seems to me at this moment.” Herein, I will paint with a large brush a brief history of moral relativism and what it entails. I will follow with weaknesses of moral relativism. Then I will make a positive case for objective moral values. Finally, I will demonstrate that objective moral values make sense when rooted in the God of Christianity.
What Is Moral Relativism And Where Did It Come From?
While only recently gaining prominence in the twentieth century, moral relativism has its origin in ancient Greece. The historian Herodotus and the sophist Protagoras, famous for his proposition that man is the measure of all things,[2] appeared to endorse some form of relativism.[3] The playwright, Euripides, addressing incest through one of his characters, “announces that no behavior is shameful if it does not appear so to those who practice it.”[4]
During the Enlightenment, “encounters with new peoples and worldviews spurred debates on universalism and relativism in early modern philosophy as they had done for the ancient Greeks and would do again for twentieth-century social anthropologists.”[5] Into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment and Romantic movements “introduced the idea that an understanding of cultural outlooks and norms is possible only within their historical contexts.”[6]
As we transitioned into the twentieth century, social anthropologists like William Graham Sumner, Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovits observed multiple cultures and discovered widely varying moral codes. From this, they concluded “that it was impossible to believe in universal moral values… The more ‘enlightened’ way of viewing morality was to allow for morality to be relative to the culture. Rather than being universal, morality was seen as relative to the cultural consensus.”[7]
From this brief history alone, it is fairly obvious what moral relativism entails. However, it will still benefit us to look more closely. Rather than a single cohesive moral theory, relativism is “several loosely interconnected doctrines developed and shaped in response to a variety of philosophical concerns, and unified more by what they deny - absolutism, universalism, and monism - than what they endorse.”[8] While there are several varieties of relativism, they are fairly consistent in their claims.
One claim relativism makes is that there are separate realms of facts and values. This is commonly referred to as the fact-value distinction or fact-value dichotomy. Science, specifically naturalistic science, gives us facts. Outside of science, particularly in ethics and religion, the best we can hope for are preferences, opinions and/or values, not objective truth. In fact, Bernard Williams goes so far as to say, “The only area in which I want to claim that there is truth in relativism is in the area of ethical relativism… ethical realism is false.”[9] He further removes the possibility of essences in morality when he says “there are nothing for ethical [examples] to be true of - though there are things for them to be true to.”[10]
Since objective morality does not exist, the relativist is left grounding his ethics in the prevailing culture. On this view, “one’s judgment is valid if, and only if, it agrees with the norms or code of one’s social group.”[11] It is likened to an act being legal or illegal based on the jurisdiction in which it takes place.[12] Thus, one is left in the incongruent position that an act can be both right and wrong at the same time. If, for example, society A holds that abortion is immoral and society B does not, they are both correct. The relativist expects us to recognize “that different commitments are equally justified.”[13] With no way to adjudicate between competing claims, sentiments like the following run rampant:
Among the plurality of ways of life that are equally worthy
of being chosen, one hopefully finds one’s own way of life,
or some appropriate modification of it upon critical re-
flection. If so, one aims to continue one’s commitment to
that particular way of life and yet act on the recognition
that other ways of life are no less worthy of being chosen.
[14]
We are therefore left with separate moral realms with different moral rules for their members. It is in this way the relativist hopes to avoid endorsing inconsistencies. Accordingly, “no one moral code is any truer, any nearer to the apprehension of an objective moral truth, than any other; each is simply the code that is necessitated by the conditions of its time and place, and is that which most completely conduces to the preservation of the society that accepts it.”[15]
The emphasis on pluralism combined with evolving philosophies on the nature of knowledge, specifically the mind’s relationship to objects and people, has contributed to the current philosophical bent toward postmodernism. Postmodernism goes further than claiming that we cannot know moral truth; it questions whether or not we can know reality. It “rejects notions of absolute truth and binding rationality as well as the notion that language can unambiguously communicate matters of ultimate meaning.”[16] While postmodernists often dislike the label “relativist,” their insistence that linguistic communities deter-mine truth for their particular societies[17] certainly makes moral truth relative in the same way any relativist doctrine does.
Next, we'll look at the weaknesses of moral relativism.
[1] Quote attributed to Robert Anton Wilson in Nature’s God. Available at: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/relativism> [Accessed 12/20/13]
[2] Protagoras, DK80b1.
[3] Chris Gowans, "Moral Relativism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available at: <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/moral-relativism/> [Accessed 12/20/13]
[4] Euripides, Andromache, in The Sophists, ed. W.K.C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 173-176, cited in Maria Baghramian, “A Brief History of Relativism,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, ed. Michael Krausz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 32.
[5] Baghramian, “A Brief History of Relativism,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, 36.
[6] Ibid., 38.
[7] Scott B. Rae, Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 84.
[8] Baghramian, “A Brief History of Relativism,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, 31.
[9] Bernard Williams, “The Truth in Relativism,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, 242, 252.
[10] Ibid., 252, emphasis mine.
[11] W.G. Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1940); M.J. Herskovits, Man and His Works (New York: Knopf, 1948), chap. 5, and Cultural Anthropology (New York: Knopf, 1955), chap. 19, cited in David Lyons, “Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Coherence,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, 287.
[12] Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 13.
[13] David B. Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (New York: Oxford, 2006), 228.
[14] Ibid.
[15] W.D. Ross, “The Meaning of Right,” in Moral Relativism: A Reader, eds. Paul K. Moser and Thomas L. Carson (New York: Oxford, 2001), 92.
[16] Douglas Groothuis, “Facing the Challenge of Postmodernism,” in To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview eds. Francis J. Beckwith, William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2004), 239.
[17] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Relativism, Power and Philosophy,” in Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, 416.