Bernard Williams' Attack on Moral Relativism as Vulgar Moral Relativism
Jeffrey Kaplan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uBbmuvW-Kc
Notes: Jeffrey Kaplan;This is a lecture explaining a brief section called "Interlude: Relativism" in his book "Morality: An Introduction to Ethics."
The basic idea that Williams has is that there is a tension between moral relativism and some kind of universal toleration principle.
These two view, which Williams believes contradict one another, however, are often held together, by the same people, as part of a view that he calls "Vulgar Relativism."
The problem with Vulgar Relativism, Williams claims, is that it is self-defeating or self-contradictory.
Bernard Williams’s Interlude: Relativism,
in his book Morality: An Introduction to Ethics.
In this brief interlude, Williams defines and attacks a view that we can call “Vulgar Relativism.”
Vulgar Relativism is really a view about the relationship between the following two claims:
A. Relativism - What is morally right or wrong can only be coherently understood as relative to the accepted moral code of a society.
B. Toleration - It is wrong for people in one society to condemn or interfere with the moral
code or values of another society.
Vulgar Relativism is, basically, the combination of these two. More precisely, it is the claim that A is true and that B follows from A, so B is true as well. Even more precisely, Williams defines Vulgar Relativism as the view that adopts each claim in a three-step argument that he lays out in the first paragraph of the reading.