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Moral Relativism Explained
Gilbert Harman
1 What Is Moral Relativism?
According to moral relativism, there is not a single true morality. There are a variety of possible moralities or moral frames of reference, and whether something is morally right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust, etc. is a relative matter—relative to one or another morality or moral frame of reference. Something can be morally right relative to one moral frame of reference and morally wrong relative to another.^1 It is useful to compare moral relativism to other kinds of relativism. One possible comparison is with motion relativism.^2 There is no such thing as absolute motion or absolute rest. Whether something is moving or at rest is relative to a spatio- temporal frame of reference. Something may be at rest in one such frame of reference and moving in another. There is no such thing as absolute motion and absolute rest, but we can make do with relative motion and rest. Similarly, moral relativism is the view that, although there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong, we can make do with relative right and wrong. Paul Boghossian suggests a different comparison.^3 When people decided that there were no witches and no such thing as witchcraft, they did not become relativists about witches; they gave up their beliefs about witches. It would have been a mistake for them to conclude that witchcraft is a relative matter, so that someone could be a witch in relation to one witch framework but not in relation to another. An individual might be believed to be a witch by (^1) I believe that this type of relativism is different from the very interesting type discussed by Carol Rovane, e.g. in “Relativism Requires Alternatives, Not Disagreement or Relative Truth.” (^2) Gilbert Harman: “Moral Relativism,” pp. 3-5. (^3) E.g., Paul Boghossian, “The Maze of Moral Relativism.”
someone else, but that is not to say the individual is a witch relative to the other person’s opinion. In contrast, whether something is moving or not is relative to a spatio-temporal framework, not to anyone’s opinion about whether it is moving. Boghossian suggests that a morality is constituted by opinions about moral right and wrong, so moral relativism is like witch relativism. He concludes that the proper response to the thought that there is not a single true morality is to stop believing in moral right and wrong. The proper response is moral nihilism not moral relativism. But that response is too quick. There are other more relevant comparisons, with what we might call football relativism , legal relativism , and linguistic relativism. Football relativism is the sensible idea that there are different actual and possible versions of football with different rules; whether something deserves a penalty is relative to which version of football is being played. Legal relativism is the view that whether something is legal is relative to a legal system and there are different actual and possible legal systems. Linguistic relativism is the obviously correct view that the (linguistic) meaning, if any, of a certain sequence of sounds is relative to a language. (Davidson famously illustrates the point with the observation that the sentence “Empedocles leaped” does not mean in English what the similar sounding sentence “Empedokles liebt” means in German.^4 ) These comparisons are more illuminating than Boghossian’s comparison with witch relativism. The proper response to the discovery that there are different languages, different legal systems, and different versions of football is not to deny that that there are any linguistic principles, legal regulations, or rules of football. 2 Having a Morality Different groups of people may play different versions of football. Different societies may have different legal systems. Different people speak different languages. And different people may have different moralities. Moralities accepted at one time may fail to be accepted at another (^4) Donald Davidson: “On Saying That,” p. 163.
Differences in moralities among people I know include differences about vegetarianism, wearing leather, extreme utilitarianism, extreme egoism, what counts as plagiarism and whether plagiarism is wrong. There are also the moralities of those in certain gangs or “organized crime.” It is hard to believe that we all have the same morality at bottom. Compare with the question whether we all have the same religion at bottom. Someone I know was once asked by an immigration officer to specify his religion. He replied that he was an atheist. The immigration officer replied, “I haven’t heard of that one, but I guess we all worship the same god, don’t we?” Do we all have the same legal system at bottom? Natural Law theorists may argue that we do in that the basic legal system is the same. To be sure there are various local regulations concerned with details and specific circumstances. In this view, “laws” that violate the principles of natural law are not really valid. There can still be conflicts, however. For example, if two legal systems claim sovereignty over the same territory, whether a particular couple is married might be answered differently in the two systems. So, there is still the possibility of legal relativity even in a natural law framework. We might ask whether we all have the same language at bottom. Chomsky argues that there is a universal grammar that applies to all languages that children learn without instruction; there are merely “superficial” differences of vocabulary and word order.^5 But surely this isn’t really to say we all have the same language. (I will come back to this.) 4 What Are Moralities?
4 .1 Comparison with Languages
To believe in moral relativism is to believe there is more than one possible morality. But what is a morality? And what is it to have a morality? One way to answer these questions resembles David Lewis’ discussion of parallel questions about language. Lewis identifies a language with (^5) Noam Chomsky: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.
an abstract assignment of meanings (connected with truth conditions) to linguistic expressions and he identifies having that language with participating in a convention of truthfulness and trust with respect to that assignment. 6 Similarly, an explanation of what a morality is might have two parts: One part identifying a morality with certain moral principles, the other saying what it is for people to have a morality with those principles. There are several kinds of moral principles: requirements and permissions about what has to be done and what may be done, rankings of various things as better or worse, and specifications of morally virtuous or vicious actions and character traits. For a group to have a morality with such principles involves members of the group being motivated to adhere to the requirements, to rank things in accord with ranking principles of the morality, to assess actions and character traits as specified in the morality, to develop virtues and avoid vices, to bring up children appropriately, etc.
4 .2 Comparison with Games
Moralities can also be compared with games that are at least in part defined by their rules: football, baseball, soccer, golf, chess, bridge, solitaire. Often there are several versions of a game with minor differences in their rules. The rules of professional baseball change over time and differ in certain respects from the rules of other versions of school baseball, just as your language, your idiolect, may differ from mine in various respects: vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, or semantics. Some aspects of the rules of a game or a morality might be describable propositionally, but participants will not be able to provide full and complete descriptions. Roughly speaking, to be engaged in a particular game or morality is to be disposed or committed to acting in certain ways. (Of course, such dispositions or commitments may be overridden by other considerations in certain circumstances.) (^6) David Lewis: “Languages and Language.”
want to be treated yourself. Moral relativism denies that any view of this sort can account for all of morality. Possibly related are psychological theories of morality by Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan in terms of stages of moral development.^7 There are possible evolutionary explanations of aspects of moral motivation. Human sympathy or empathy might have such an explanation. Perhaps incest strikes people as deeply wrong because in the evolutionary past those without an aversion to incest were less likely to have healthy descendents with the result that almost everyone today has such an aversion. Some explanations appeal to moral conventions that people adhere to out of self-interest. In Hume’s version such conventions count as moral if sympathy or empathy with people affected by the following of those conventions leads to impartial approval of the conventions.^8 One or another version of the Golden Rule might be accepted in part for self-interested reasons and in part because of sympathetic approval of the results of general acceptance of that rule. Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments presents a sophisticated account of moral development that anticipates Freud. As a child you have a self-interested reason to do things your parents will approve of and avoid doing things your parents will disapprove of. You try to anticipate the reactions of others by imagining how they will react. You imagine being them with their inclinations toward approval and disapproval. In this way you acquire an internal impartial spectator or conscience (or superego) by internalizing the attitudes of external spectators and acquire their attitudes as those of part of your self. Smith suggests that the internalized attitudes tend to be idealized more impartial versions of the attitudes of external spectators. Nevertheless Smith’s general account is overtly relativistic with interesting discussions of how cultures differ.^9 (^7) Jean Piaget: The Moral Judgment of the Child. Lawrence Kohlberg: The Philosophy of Moral Development. Carol Gilligan: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. (^8) Hume uses “sympathy” in A Treatise of Human Nature and “benevolence” in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. (^9) I discuss this in “Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator.”
Contemporary anthropologists find certain themes or aspects that are used differently in different social moralities. Shweder, et al. discuss various roles that “The Big Three of Morality,” namely Autonomy, Community, and Divinity, play in various moralities. 10 Alan Fiske, who takes morality to consist in “relationship regulation,” finds four types of moral relation: communal sharing, authority ranking, quality ranking, and “market pricing” which different social groups use in different ways.^11 While many of the social aspects and relations discussed by Shweder, Fiske, and others occur to some extent among some nonhuman animal groups, divinity and market pricing do not. 6 Analogies between Linguistics and Moral Theory? I now want to say something more about analogies between morality and languages and how moral theory might be modeled on linguistic theory with possible implications for moral relativism.^12 Considering ways in which human languages differ from animal communication systems, it has seemed plausible to many linguists that humans have something like an innate language organ. Similarly, considering ways in which human morality goes beyond anything in nonhuman animals, it may be useful to consider whether there is something like an innate moral organ. It has been said that humans are the rational animals, where rationality is exhibited in human language and perhaps also in human morality. Indeed, perhaps language and morality are deeply connected. How did language evolve? Presumably something happened to some early humans that made it possible for them to think and communicate with each other in ways that other animals (^10) Richard A. Shweder, Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park, “The ’Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering.” (^11) A. P. Fiske, Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing. See also, Tage Shakti Rai and Alan Page Fiske, “Moral Psychology Is Relationship Regulation: Moral Motives for Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and Proportionality.” (^12) For a more extensive discussion of these analogies, see Erica Roedder and Gilbert Harman, “Linguistics and Moral Theory.”
Just as the speaker of a language has a somewhat different way of speaking (dialect) with different people (family, business associates, friends, etc.), a particular member of a group may have different moral relationships with different people, different moral dialects or I-moralities. Just as the unit of study in Chomskean linguistics is an I-language, the unit of study of a morality might be an internally represented “I-morality.” Core I-morality might be determined by certain principles and parameters for example indicating what things are included under divinity, autonomy, and community and what aspects of social relations involve communal sharing, authority ranking, equality ranking, and market pricing. Perhaps, acquiring a dialect of the local morality is a matter of setting a few parameters. It would follow that a typical child would not need to be taught the local morality. The child would easily pick up morality from others. Or better: the child would acquire an I-morality that is influenced by the local morality. So, just as there are various different mostly mutually incomprehensible languages, there may be various different mostly mutually incomprehensible moralities. 7 Why Believe There Is Not a Single True Morality? The main reason to believe there is not a single true morality is that there are major differences in the moralities that people accept and these differences do not seem to rest of actual differences in situation or disagreements about the facts. It is hard for me to believe that all disagreements rest on different opinions about the facts or confusions of one or another sort—disagreements about abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, vegetarianism, homosexuality, egoism, and utilitarianism. Differences in attitude and practice about these issues occur among people within the same larger society. There appears to me to be no objective way of settling these disagreements. That yields an argument for moral relativism that is similar for arguments for relativism about rest and motion, football, law, and language. However, I doubt that such an argument will be persuasive for anyone who is not already a moral relativist.
8 Final Remarks
8.1 Moral Relativism is not a linguistic or conceptual thesis
This sort of moral relativism is not the thesis that there is a hidden parameter in the syntactic or semantic structure of a moral judgment that picks out one or another morality framework. It is also not the thesis that ordinary moral judgments are false or lack a truth value. The relation between truth conditions and syntactic or semantic structure is not straightforward. Compare moral relativism again to motion relativism. We often take ordinary judgments about motion to be true if they are true in relation to a framework salient to the judger even if the judger is unaware of motion relativism. In the dispute between Galileo and Bellarmine as to whether the earth moves, the dispute seems explicitly to presuppose that there is such a thing as absolute motion and rest and to concern whether the earth is absolutely at rest. So, in that particular case we might count them both wrong because of this false presupposition. Or we might count Galileo as right because we see him as “more right” than Bellarmine.
8.2 How might moral relativists assess the moral judgments of those who are not moral
relativists
Moral relativists might take the judgments to be true if they are true in relation to a salient moral framework. If the judgment in question explicitly presupposes that there is a single true morality, moral relativists might count it wrong because of its false presupposition (in a way parallel to the Galileo/Bellarmine case). In any event, moral relativism is not directly about this issue. Moral relativism denies that there is a single true morality. Moral relativism asserts that there are facts about what is right or wrong in relation to one or another moral framework This should be uncontroversial!
accepts morality N. They may say that they disagree about whether D is right. But they may also be clear that their disagreement does not consist in any disagreement about what’s true. Presumably they disagree in attitude. One is morally in favor of D , the other is morally opposed to D. But that is not to say that suppose that some sort of non-cognitive analysis is appropriate for ordinary moral judgments, any more than it is appropriate for understanding the rules of football, laws in a legal system, or principles of the grammar of a language. To repeat: Moral relativism is the theory that there is not a single true morality. It is not a theory of what people mean by their moral judgments.
- Conclusion I do not pretend to have provided support for moral relativism that would convince someone who is not already a moral relativist. I have only tried to explain the view and show how someone who accepts it would respond to various objections. References Boghossian, Paul: “The Maze of Moral Relativism,” in: New York Times. July 24, 2011. Chomsky, Noam: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000.
- : “Some Simple Evo-Devo Theses: How True Might They Be for Language?” in: Richard K. Larson, Viviane Déprez, and Hiroko Yamakido (eds.): The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 45-62. Davidson, Donald: “On Saying That,” in Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (eds.): Words and Objections. Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1969, pp. 158- 1 74. Fiske, A.P.: Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing. New York: Free Press 1992.
- and Rai, T.S.: “Moral Psychology Is Relationship Regulation: Moral Motives for Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and Proportionality,” Psychological Review 118 (2011) , pp. 57-
Gilligan, Carol: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982.
Harman, Gilbert: “Moral Relativism,” in: Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson: Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996, pp. 1-64.
- : “Moral Agent and Impartial Spectator,” in Gilbert Harman: Explaining Value. Clarendon Press: Oxford 2000, p. 181-195.
- and Roedder, Erica: “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” in: The Moral Psychology Handbook. Edited by John Doris and others, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 206-245. Kohlberg, Lawrence: The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper and Row
Lewis, David: “Languages and Language,” in: Keith Gunderson (ed.): Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Volume 7: Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1975, pp. 3-35. Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan: “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” in: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2011), pp. 57-111. Piaget, Jean: The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: K. Paul, Trench, Truner 1932. Rovane, Carol: “Relativism Requires Alternatives, Not Disagreement or Relative Truth,” in: Steven D. Hales (ed.): A Companion to Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell 2011, pp. 31- 52. Shweder, Richard A., Much, Nancy C., Mahapatra, Manamohan and Park, Lawrence: “The ’Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,” in: Allan Brandt and Paul Rozen (eds.): Morality and Health. New York: Routledge 1997, pp. 119-169.
