Ethical Relativism

CULTURES DIFFER IN THEIR MORAL CODES

The idea of cultures differing in what they regard as the demands of morality is a familiar one today, and perhaps it always has been. What people have made of this fact has however varied.

Let us remind ourselves though of the sort of thing we are thinking about.

I don't think we will have any difficulty in imagining a culture with apparently different moral constraints than our own. For example, imagine a culture which practices infanticide. Solid citizens of that particular culture believe that there is nothing wrong with strangling a baby if it doesn't look quite right, or if you've already got too many. Or imagine a culture having no qualms about finishing off the old. (Logan's Run?)

It is possible to imagine that cultures might be different from our in these respects, and indeed Rachels in the Reader reminds us that anthropologists are used to reporting actual cases.

(Rachels' article in the Reader offers a beautifully clear and straightforward introduction to what relativism is and how it should probably be argued against.)

For example,

Rachels speaks of the Eskimo, and of early European contact with them. A person called Knud Rasmussen was chiefly involved.

Esquimaux woman Illustrations from John Franklin's Second Expedition (1825-27) Courtesy cd -academia books

As Rasmussen reported it, the Eskimo practised infanticide. A woman who had born altogether 20 children was reported by Rasmussen as having killed half of them at birth. The killing seemed to be at the parents' discretion, and female babies were apparently specially likely to attract this kind of terminal attention. This culture appeared to have the same businesslike approach to the old, too. Beyond a certain degree of dependence, the old were sent off into the snow.

WHAT DO WE MAKE OF THESE DIFFERENCES?

At certain points in Britain's cultural history we have taken it that there are backward people and moral benightedness is what you expect in backward people. If a culture thinks infanticide is morally acceptable, they have it wrong and steps must be taken to educate and enlighten. Sort of moral imperialism. It goes along with economic imperialism and it's not just Britain of course that is implicated historically in these attitudes. They seem to come quite easily to human beings.

But at other periods the reaction has been: if moral codes differ from culture to culture there can't be anything special about any one of them, and in particular there can't be anything special about ours.

It's this second reaction that often eventuates in the cluster of positions known as moral relativism.

This term can be used to mean quite a number of slightly different things, but let's begin with what I've just said, that different cultures have different moral codes, and ask what the implications of this fact are.

DOES THE APPEARANCE OF MORAL DIVERSITY CLOAK REAL MORAL UNANIMITY?

The proposition that different cultures have different moral codes may seem difficult to resist, with the accumulated knowledge we have now of cultures across the world and across time.

However, it is of course capable of being disputed. You might argue that if you study moral codes in the full context of the society they occur in you will find that in fact they amount to applications in different circumstances of general principles that are universal.

For example you might argue that seen in context the practice of pushing your old folk out in the cold might be an expression in harsh conditions of the general principle that you should make the end of life for old people as respectful as possible. Persuading them to merge with the environment before they fall to pieces mentally, or before they become an unbearable - unbearable to them - burden on tightly limited resources, might be the most respectful thing.

But for the time being I would like to proceed on the basis that there is real diversity of moral code among cultures.

THE FACT OF MORAL DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CULTURES MAY BE PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNDERMINING

If we grant it, what does it imply?

I have said that one reaction is to find the realisation that not everyone agrees with one to be unsettling. It is sometimes felt to be undermining of our confidence in our own moral outlook.

I encounter a culture that thinks there is nothing immoral about infanticide in circumstances when bringing up another child would be a real pain. Let us assume that this realisation of cultural diversity has in fact an unsettling effect on me. I begin to question my own moral conviction.

The question I want to pursue is the further question: ought it to?

What is the situation considered not psychologically but rationally? Does the fact that in another culture they approve of convenience infanticide give me rational grounds for thinking my own view, reflecting my own culture, is likely to be wrong?

BUT DOES DISAGREEMENT HAVE ANY RATIONAL BEARING ON THE TRUTH?

I think it 's wrong, they think it's OK. Does this provide evidence for me being mistaken?

(If it does I suppose it also provides evidence that they are mistaken as well…)

But does it?

FACTS ARE WHAT THEY ARE IRRESPECTIVE OF ANY BELIEFS.

If we put morals to one side and consider 'facts', what is the situation there?

Suppose I believe there is life on Mars. Does it make it more likely to be true if you believe it too? Does it make it less likely to be true if you don't believe it?

You may think: it doesn't. Whether there is life on Mars does not depend on my belief about it, nor on your belief about it. Whether we agree or disagree has no bearing at all.

ARE MORAL MATTERS MATTERS OF FACT?

If moral matters are like factual matters in this respect, the same should apply. If moral matters are like factual matters, what I, or you, or the Eskimo, or the Inuit come to that, believe about convenience infanticide has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong.

But you may say: moral matters are not like factual matters. With a factual matter we know where to look for an answer. A trip, or a probe, to Mars will help determine whether there is life there. But where do we turn to find out the truth on moral matters? It's much more difficult to say.

FOR AN ANSWER WE NEED AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT MORALITY IS ALL ABOUT, A THEORY OF MORALITY.

To answer the question of where to look for the truth on moral matters involves you in having a view about the nature of morality, a theory of morality if you like.

What I have argued so far is that the fact of disagreement between cultures doesn't seem to be evidence that either of them are correct or incorrect.

What I am wanting to ask now is whether the fact that cultures disagree on moral questions throws any light on the nature of morality.

Here is one consideration.

Disagreement between cultures on moral matters is evidence against what I am going to call the moral field-of-force theory. I will explain.

Just imagine for a moment what the situation would be if there was no disagreement. Suppose when it came to significant moral questions all cultures, across the world and across the ages, spoke with one voice. Would that tell us anything about the nature of morality?

CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND THE MORAL FIELD-OF-FORCE THEORY

Maybe it would do something for a theory of morality which thinks of the universe as somehow having a moral law built into it. Morality on this view is not human-made, not created by culture, and its not created by God. It is a structural feature of the Universe just as the magnetic field is a structural feature of the earth. Human beings didn't put the magnetic field there. But they have an instrument that detects it, and informs them about its direction. Wherever you are on the earth your compass will point to magnetic North. Whoever you are on the earth, your magnet will point to magnetic North.

Just in the same way, so some thinkers argue, the human conscience detects the Universe's moral field, and tells us its direction.

My point is only this: it would be a support for the theory that morality were a feature of the structure of the Universe if everyone's conscience pointed in the same direction - i.e. if there were cross-cultural agreement about what was right and what was wrong.

There is nothing very decisive here. You can still believe in the earth's magnetic field, and the usefulness of compasses, even if not every compass points in the same direction. But you have to be able to offer special explanations. You have to be able to say: this compass doesn't point in the direction my own points in because it's broken, or because there is a local deposit of lodestone, or because it's being operated near and electricity line, or something.

In a similar way, if people in different cultures are told different things by their consciences, it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't such a thing as a moral structure to the universe. You can always say some people's moral sense is undeveloped, in need of education, or benighted, subject to strong local pagan influences - and so on.

But still, if everyone's moral judgement across the earth were consistent, did point in the same direction, that would help the moral force-field theory.

Put it another way, the reality of moral disagreement does represent evidence - not decisive evidence - against it.

MORALITY AS A CULTURAL ARTEFACT

So much for the fact of the lack of moral consensus, as it is represented, across cultures.

Relativism says something more than just that different cultures sponsor different moral codes. It says that morality is a cultural artefact. It is a culture, or a society, which creates morality.

If this is true, the morality that holds sway within a particular culture has no legitimacy beyond its borders. If we take the view that it is a culture which devises a moral code for those who belong to it, then those who do not belong to that culture are surely not bound by it. Indeed once you take this view of the nature of morality, that it is the creation of the culture you belong to, you may not feel bound by it yourself ….

That is to move on to the paradoxes that the relativist view however. Let me first try and set out why one might think of a society or culture creating morality.

THE FUNCTION OF MORALITY

The version of relativism I want to explore is that morality serves a function, and that so long as it serves that function, the particular rules of morality may vary from culture to culture.

What are the plausible candidates for the function morality is needed to perform?

THE FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVE EXPLAINED

The FUNCTIONALIST conception looks on society as though it were a functioning machine.

It views it as a system made up of a set of subsystems, each of which does a particular job in keeping the system as a whole working.

A running car would be a simpler example of something we can analyse functionally. There is a system to feed fuel into the cylinder, a system to keep the pistons positioned ready for each explosion, a system to transmit the up-and-down movement of the pistons to the wheels and so on.

In any particular car, each of these is done with a particular piece of hardware. The pistons for example might be aluminium in one model and steel in another. Different materials, maybe a different arrangement: but same function.

From the point of view of functional analysis, you could say that cars with petrol engines are all functionally the same. There are lots of differences in how in detail the functions are carried out., but carried out they are. If it is a petrol engine something has to feed the fuel into the cylinders. That is a function that has to be performed. And there are plenty of others - functions that have to be performed if the car is to keep running, but functions which might be carried out in a wide variety of different ways, using different materials, and different designs.

Morality, on a FUNCTIONALIST view, is one of the 'components' of a social machine that performs a vital function.

The functionalist theory of morality is a species of relativism because it accepts that the same action can be morally right in one culture but not in another, depending on what rule each culture endorses.

Each culture endorses a set of moral rules, and different cultures may have different sets of rules. But the function of the rules will be the same in each case.

What might be plausible candidates for the function morality is needed to perform?

What would happen if our own culture didn't have morality?

It is tempting to say: some kind of breakdown would occur.

You would have the law, backed up by sanctions. Would this be enough to enable society to continue?

We ought to have in mind what it would be for society to breakdown.

I am thinking of anarchy, in the conventional sense, I suppose. Everybody at war with everybody else. No understandings about what to expect others to do except that you can expect them to do for you: to do what they want to do and not to adjust their behaviour at all to take account of what you might want to do.

(This is the universe of selfish atoms that came to articulation at the beginning of the Modern period. The physical universe came to be seen as a scatter of atoms, which bumped into each other but otherwise had no intercourse, and individuals came to be seen in much the same light: social atoms pursuing their own interest.)

Would society breakdown in this sense if there weren't such a thing as morality?

Would the law backed up by sanctions be enough to hold society together?

WE WOULD STILL HAVE LAW, AND LEGAL SANCTIONS. WOULD THIS BE ENOUGH TO KEEP SOCIETY TOGETHER?

In our moral codes we have the rule I think that we should respect the law, and you might think that a good deal of the law's effect comes from that - it is a parasite on morality.

Try and discount that. Try and imagine the law and the sanctions we use to back the law up - fines and imprisonment mostly - on their own, not backed up by morality. Would they be enough to 'hold society together'?

The sanctions backing up the law are all 'external', and maybe that is why they would not be enough. What you need is something inside a person, guiding their behaviour, countering the impulse simply to do what you want.

(Here you have a model of morality which you may want to question. It's the idea that there is what I want to do, and then there are rules which restrict what I want to do. Morality is seen here as a set of restrictions. This may not be right.)

CRITICISMS OF MORAL RELATIVISM

Cultural relativism then is the view that what makes a thing right or wrong is one's culture. Somehow - through education perhaps - the culture lays down what is moral and what is not. And this is what establishes what is right and wrong for persons belonging to that culture.

Three arguments against it are these:

1. It makes cross-cultural criticisms incoherent

I am in British culture and I am looking at Eskimo culture.
They say convenience infanticide is morally unobjectionable.
I say it isn't.

But if an act is only wrong in virtue of being banned by the culture a person belongs to, I cannot say from outside that culture whether the act is right or wrong.

I can say
'it is right (or wrong) in my culture'
and I can say
'it is right (or wrong) in your culture.
But I cannot say
it is absolutely right (or absolutely wrong) independently of any culture.

Are there exceptions to this?

Are there some moral rules which any society must have in order to function?

James Rachels

Rachels says there are:

truth-telling
prohibition on murder

Without these, and perhaps some others, society, he says, couldn't exist.

If he is right, besides saying you need to have a morality in a culture you will also be able to say: and it must at least have the following rules in it (e.g. 'you should tell the truth').

The , even if I took the functionalist view I would perhaps be able to raise one kind of criticism of a society other than my own.

Imagine there was a society in which the code against murder seemed on the slide. Murders were increasing alarmingly, say, so people were less outraged by them, so they came more easily, so people came to accept them even more- and so on. (Moss Side? )

From outside I would be able to say: if they come to believe there is nothing at all wrong with killing people, their society will collapse.

Here I am from the outside of a culture making a criticism of it.

Notice though what kind of a criticism this would be. It would be a kind of engineer's criticism. It would be saying: if you want a continuing society, you must repair this component.

It doesn't sound like a moral criticism at all.

It is not saying: killing is wrong, and a society which forgets it is doomed.

It is saying if the social machine is to continue working, a prohibition against indiscriminate killing must be in place.

That's different isn't it from making a moral criticism of a society.

Yet often it is a moral criticism that we are tempted, sometimes driven to try and make.

Take the abuse of minorities for example.

Where a society's moral code appears to make it all right to discriminate against a minority group within it, we often want to say, from the outside: that's wrong. And where this kind of discrimination is carried, as it sometimes is, to the point of ghettos, persecutions, and pogroms, people from other societies, looking in on this, will be driven to say: this is very wrong and cannot be tolerated.

If the functional theory of morality were correct though, such outside criticism would not make sense. If the functional view of morality is right, there would appear to be no basis for moral criticism of the moral codes of other societies of the kind we probably all the time want to make.

The functional view of morality is just an example of a relativist view. The point here holds for relativism in general: if moral relativism were correct, criticism from outside a society or culture would not make sense.. Because on the relativist view a moral code is the creation of the society it occurs in and there is no basis for trying to apply it outside.

If this is a really damaging criticism of moral relativism, it gets worse.

2. It makes moral criticisms of current moral rules within a culture incoherent

Sometimes - often even - I want to criticism the moral code that seems to be enshrined within my own culture - my culture now, not someone else's.
We have already bumped into the way in which our culture seems to think it's OK to treat animals. Some of us want to say our moral code is deficient if it legitimizes great cruelty to sentient creatures in the name of say skin cleanser or after shave.

Some of us want to say that the ban our moral code puts on euthanasia is misplaced.

But if it is my culture that makes the moral rules, on what basis can I raise moral criticisms of them?

Moral relativism would seem to make incoherent the kind of moral reforms that we often look back on as kind of improvements in our social order.

The moral code which kept women in a socially inferior condition for example seemed to be indefensible to reformers.

The moral code which sanctioned slavery was campaigned against by reformers who maintained that such a moral code was wrong.

But by what standard could reformers say these things were morally wrong? If moral relativism in some form is correct there is no standard apart from the moral code society has constructed for us.

So the charge is: all moral reforming criticism within a society would be groundless, baseless, a confusion, if morality was created by society.

There is even worse.

3. Moral relativism destroys morality

Here is the really serious thing. Doesn't moral relativism pretty much destroy morality altogether?

Let us work an example using the functional theory of morality, as our example of moral relativism.

Suppose I believe, so far from sending them off into the snow, that you should look after the aged parents when they get old and decrepit.

And then I come to believe that this is a moral rule which is there in order to keep society functioning smoothly. Suppose I come to believe there is nothing more to morality than this: society constructs a moral code in order to keep itself functioning.

Would I then begin to feel differently about what I had thought was my duty to look after the aged?

That is one question: would I feel differently about looking after my parents if I became convinced that the origin of moral rules lay in culture and in what a society needed if it was not to collapse.

The interesting question lies beyond that however. It is: would I be justified in feeling differently?

If morality is just a construct of society, does it really have any hold over me?

Do I really have any moral obligations or duties? Or in adopting this theory of the nature of morality have I actually magiced true morality away?

Is this theory of morality really a theory of non-morality?

If the moral code is only there to keep society holding together, does it have any hold on me? Do I have any real obligation to follow it?

Suppose I had reason to think no-one else would cotton on to this true account of morality, so I could count on everybody else following the moral code. What would be wrong with me ignoring it? What reason would I have not to ignore it? Society would go on as before. If the moral code were just society's device for maintaining itself, what reason would I really have for following it?

END

Return to top


Menu of VP's 100/200 presentations

Compass pic Courtesy Oregon Trail Mercantile