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Moral Relativism
Ran put together an excellent comment on my most recent Ken Wilber piece, about moral relativism. It reads in part:
What does “relative” really mean? It doesn’t mean meaningless or valueless — it means you determine the value by examining the relations. This is not the same as the radical relativist position that you can’t evaluate something because it’s all meaningless, and it’s not the same as the conservative position, that you can’t evaluate it because we already assigned it an absolute inherent value. We have the power/responsibility to evaluate every behavior, every idea, every tool on our own, by looking at its whole web of relations.
Yet another action-packed analysis from Ran, cutting through a lot of ideological red tape to the core issue. I often find myself with his arguments being like, “Oh right…” as if they were something I’d been thinking but hadn’t put into words. I think this is a great topic for debate because in the increasingly conservative society, we hear louder and louder shouts of the dangers of “relativism”, but we almost never hear any good solid defenses of it. What’s your take on this? Is moral relativism crazy? Is Ran crazy? Or is he just crazy in relation to somebody else?
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:22 pm
So, how about evaluating the value of a relationship? We look at the web of relations in which we find this relationship, and - presto! - we’ve created another “level” of relationships! Now, we have to evaluate the relationships in this next level, which means we create a still higher level… and finally, we find God. Supersets forever, amen. Or maybe I’m just molesting reality with language.
I’m not just being silly with this. I was going somewhere, but I forgot where that was. Probably for the best.
And, I think we’re all crazy. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Unless it gets boring, which it shouldn’t(?).
…
I’m going for a walk.
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:08 am
There is a difference between moral relativism and what is relative with respect to morality. You can’t derive the “ought” from the “is”, all attempts to do so, no matter how clever they may seem, can eventually be dissolved into philosophical incoherence. You can make an observation like “humans are capable of great compassion and empathy” (is), but if you want to make the cultivation and indulgence of this capacity the center of your moral system (ought), you have to CHOOSE to do so. It’s a judgement call where you start, there is no way around it, but once you make that choice, then the movement from general principle to specific ideas about right and wrong has an internal logic - the specific follows from the general, it is relative to that particular general.
But the other move you can make is to just observe that you can’t get the ought from the is, and then stop. This is moral relativism, which is another way of saying there really is no such thing as morality, it is all just personal preference and psychology with an illegitimate imprimatur tacked on. This is what so-called conservatives, especially of the religious variety, are accusing liberal-minded folk of doing… but it seems pretty clear this is a false charge, a straw man, that (with perhaps a few radical postmodernist nihilist exceptions), most who call for a less absolutist approach understand that the selection of the general principles that form the foundations of any moral system cannot be separated from the observational perspectives of those who are making the selections, and ideas about what crops are best to harvest from the garden of potential ethical delights are bound to differ by culture, peer group, disposition, etc.
For the concept of morality to have any meaningful objective grounding, it has to be understood ahead of time that priorities must be chosen up front, they don’t just thrust themselves upon you and compel you to obey. Everything from then on is indeed relative, but this kind of relativity is the glue that holds an ethical system together. As long as you understand this, the idea of relativity in morality is redeemable.
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:36 am
moral relativism is not the problem. most morality is relative. the problem is when objective observations and functional facts are turned into ‘opinions’.
when you were little you didn’t have the capacity for certain kinds of thinking. you could look at two glasses, one talller and slimmer, but both with the same amount of water. when asked, children below a certain age will always say the taller glass has more water. that’s neurological, not socially imposed.
another is the third person perspective: not everyone develops this abilty, even in our culture, to see a situation from the perspective of someone who is not yourself, or the other. that is more developed capacity than a lower level of cognition.
you can measure the awareness in all kinds of ways. people unfold these capacities in one direction and seldom fall back short of serious injuries to the brain. there’s nothing moral about it, but in functional terms certain capacities are built on earlier ones and encompass a wider scope of ability.
using these thing as criteria for value judgements is a fallacy but just because some people use them that way doesn’t make it untrue.
are we more sophisticated than animals? hard to say. depends on the animal. are we more sophisticated than bacteria? yeah i thinks so. are bacteria more complex than rocks?
as for true qualitative absolutes the only recourse for that is the infinite. true unconditional love in the sense of cosmic eros is an absolute. truth itself is an absolute. the reality of the godhead is an absolute. you can debate it if you’ve never glimpsed it, but you see what i’m saying…
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:41 am
What a cool paradox: the only true absolute is the infinte!
It reminds me of vector mechanics. Every point can be related to any other point by choosing some datum and building a vector matrix from the datum to each of them. The datum (and susequently the two original points) can then be related to another datum but the math just gets incredibly tedious. Our little brains can’t manage it all so we simplify. We need the datum because infinity is waaay beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, we are where we are, whether we can do the math or not.
July 24th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
though there are mathmaticians who think that if you can`t do the math you are somehow insubstantial.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
[…] are inclusive and have previous ones “nested” inside of them. For somebody who criticizes relativism in other places, this is very much a relativistic stance - s […]