moral relativism

[iambiguous]

Moral absolutism, moral nihilism, moral relativism
University of Notre Dame

The moral nihilist might respond to this challenge by pointing out that we quite often use language to do things other than describe facts. Consider the following examples:

“Get out of my classroom!”
“I declare you husband and wife.”
"Boooo!” (said while at sporting event)

These are all perfectly meaningful uses of language, but none is an attempt to describe some fact in the world.

On the contrary? It's not like out of the blue a teacher will just blurt this out. There is in fact a reason for it. And a man and woman are declared husband and wife because in fact they just completed the marriage ceremony. Same with booing at sporting events. There was a particular set of facts that caused it.

Where the moral nihilists might interject here revolves precisely around contexts in which the facts might be disputed. The teacher was thought to be wrong to order someone out of his or her classroom. Someone might raise an objection to a marriage. And while some are booing at sporting events what about those who are cheering the same play?

So perhaps the moral nihilist should say that our uses of ethical language, as in

“Stealing is wrong!”

are like these; perhaps the purpose of this sort of sentence is not to describe a fact, but to do something else. This raises the question: what are the purposes of our uses of ethical language?

The whole point of creating and then sustaining ethical language pertains to the fact that in regard to things like classroom behavior and marriage and sporting events, different people will respond differently to the same behaviors. So, here, in regard to conflicting goods, both our actions and our reactions can be challenged by others. Click, of course.

Whereby relating to school classrooms or wedding ceremonies or athletic events, both actions and reactions might be very different. Then the part where particular deontologists on particular One True Paths might be squabbling rather heatedly regarding either the optimal behavior or even the only rational behavior.

One promising answer to this question is: they are commands, like saying “Get out of my classroom!” Perhaps saying the above sentence about capital punishment is a way of saying something like this:

“Don’t steal!

Perhaps. But then the part where any particular set of circumstances comes into dispute. The part where in community after communitiy one or another rendition of might makes right, right makes might or democracy and the rules of law prevails

[iambiguous]

Moral absolutism, moral nihilism, moral relativism
University of Notre Dame

“Don’t steal!”

One apparent strength of this sort of view is that it explains an interesting fact about moral claims: that moral disagreements seem particularly resistant to resolution.

Your explanation or mine? And how exactly would we go about pinning down something like this in a world where there are literally hundreds and hundreds of moral objectivists among us all claiming they have already pinned it down. And some of them will tolerate no objections whatsoever. In fact, some will take those who do object and ship them off to reeducation camps or gulags or gas chanmbers.

Sometimes, of course, moral disagreements can be resolved; but other times, it seems possible for two people to, for example, know all of the relevant facts about abortion, and still disagree about whether it is sometimes morally permissible.

Though any number of times the "resolution" revolves almost entirely around this or that rendition of One True Path. God or No God, you either become "one of us" or else. Though for some you can never become one of them because you're the wrong color or the wrong gender or the wrong ethnicity.

By contrast, it does not seem possible for two people to know all of the relevant facts about the dining hall, and yet disagree about whether stroganoff is on offer.

Same with abortion. There are all the biological facts embedded in abortion as a medical procedure. But what are all the facts pertaining to abortion as a moral issue? In fact, even those able to perform abortions with considerable skill can't pin down when the unborn stop being just clumps of cells and become actual human beings.

On the present view, this sort of persistent disagreement would be explained by the fact that the two people are really not disagreeing about any facts about the world: they are, instead, simply expressing contrary preferences.

As though these preferences are not embraced by the moral objectivists in such a way that behaviors in any particular community are either prescribed [rewarded] or proscribed [punished].

Now, in regard to abortion, what behaviors ought to be either rewarded or punished?

However, even if this view seems plausible for sentences like “Stealing is wrong”, it does not fit other uses of ethical language as well. Consider, for example past tense sentences like

“The Athenians were wrong to put Socrates to death.”

could this really mean:

“Athenians, don’t put Socrates to death!”

or

“Don’t support the Athenians’ decision to put Socrates to death!"

Or, for that matter, Hitler ordering the death of all Jews? Even when the lives of millions upon millions of men, women and children are at stake, both philosophers and scientists seem incapable of accumulating the facts needed to establish an objective morality pertaining to...genocide?