| Ethical Relativism | |
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Recommended Reading |
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Rachels, J. (1999) The Elements of Moral Philosophy Boston:McGraw-Hill College. Pp. 20-36 Darwall, S. (1998) Philosophical Ethics Boulder, CO:Westview Press. Pp. 63-70 DeMarco, J. P. (1996) Moral Theory: A Contemporary Overview Boston:Jones & Bartlett. Pp. 75-82 Herodotus (tr. De Sélincourt) (1972) The Histories London:Harmondsworth
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Cultural Relativism |
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Scientific studies have demonstrated that 50% of all treatments of ethical relativism include a reference to this story from Herodotus’s Histories (Book III, sec. 38 (pp. 219 f.):
One might recall, in particular, an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’.
Herodotus was given the title of Father of History, but he is just as much entitled to the name of father of Anthropology. We are now all very familiar with the idea that the customs of different peoples are quite different from our own. Some people we know have the custom of polygamy while we do not. Some people eat with their fingers while we do not. Some people kill women who talk to strangers, while we do not. Some people practise infanticide, while we do not. (NB. Those who support abortion are not exceptions to this. They believe that there are no infants involved in abortions. This brings up an important point about beliefs that we’ll have to talk about later.) All of these differences are cultural differences we can’t always say that there is some immediately apparent reason why we should judge some of these ways to be better than other ways. This is the case even though many of those practices on our side we would claim are morally mandated – so, not just evaluable, but morally evaluable. Indeed the sociologists and anthropologists will typically say that cultural items are simply not the sorts of things between which evaluative comparisons – to say one is better than the other – can be made.
This observation has led many to believe that moral judgements – a particular type of evaluation – are not appropriate between cultures. In fact it’s probably the standard position of most of this audience. (Show of hands). Of course, that belief may be due not only to this sort of observation but also to an awareness of the damage done to other cultures by reformers from our expanding Western culture of recent centuries, using the rationale of moral necessity. We are now loth to admit that the rationale given for the interference then could have been just, and we simply avert our eyes from the rationales that were given. Thus, when the 1960s science fiction serial ‘Star Trek’ imagined an ideal version of our own society exploring outer space, it assumed that we would operate under a ‘Prime Directive’ which forbids us to interfere in other societies no matter what our moral judgements may be.
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The Argument |
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Up to a point this is a perfectly reasonable reaction to some patterns of historical events. We, however, are philosophers, so this type of origin or support for beliefs is of no use to us. Let us look more closely at the actual argument that is used to come to the conclusion that there are no legitimate inter-cultural moral judgements, and that custom should be king.
In each specific case the argument looks like this:
P1. This culture judges practice A to be good P2. Our culture judges practice A to be no good -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C1. There is no objective ground for our moral judgement respecting practice A.
Less often concluded is:
C2. There is no objective ground for their moral judgement respecting practice A.
In general these arguments have the following form:
P3. Different cultures make different moral judgements -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C3. There is no objective ground for moral judgements
Is this a good argument? Well, let’s see. That argument is just a less general version of
P4. Different cultures make different judgements with respect to X. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C4. There is no objective ground for judgements with respect to X.
This is not a deductive argument. What would make it absolutely obviously watertight? Clearly it appeals to a hidden premiss that states:
HP. If there is an objective ground for judgements with respect to X then different cultures will not make different judgements with respect to X.
So how would we evaluate the argument
HP (if A then not B) P4 (B) ---- C4 (not A)
It looks to be valid. So the conclusion will be true if the premisses are true. Are the premisses true?
The Hidden Premiss
Consider the hidden premiss HP first. Is it true in all
cases that where there is a real fact of the matter about some question
that all cultures will reach the same conclusion (presumably the correct
conclusion?) Obviously not. If we just consider past and present states of
Western culture’s physical knowledge we will see any number of
disagreements. There was a time when we thought the sun was a shiny
chariot galloping across the sky; then we thought the sun was a shining
perfect orb moving about the Earth on a celestial sphere; now we believe
that the sun is a ball of gas around which the Earth orbits. Just one of
these beliefs is true. The others are false. That sounds harshly
judgemental – and it
is, and it is entitled to be so. Not
long ago I read of some anthropologists claiming that the aboriginal
dreamtime stories are just as True as the stories that geologists tell about
Just so; if there is a fact of the matter about ethical questions there is no reason to think that we will always get it right, which is what the cultural difference argument for ethical relativism must assume. In that case it is perfectly possible for some cultures to have immoral ethical beliefs and practices. Of course, if there were no fact of the matter about ethical questions we’d be right to be relativists (possibly) but this is not an argument to prove that thesis: it’s an argument that uses that thesis.
There is an objection that is
often made to the analogy I used above. It is said that the sort of
knowledge that is involved in moral judgements is different from the sort
of knowledge that is involved in physical judgements, and that this makes
the analogy a bad one. But it’s hard to say exactly why this is so. It
may be claimed that physical judgements are about simple matters of fact
about the world, and that we can, with some effort, establish rules of
evaluation for such matters that allow us to be certain that one or other
judgement is correct – or, more likely, that one or other is incorrect.
It is, by contrast, apparently not
the case that we can agree on rules of evaluation for moral judgements, so
that we can never be sure that some one is incorrect. In that case we
should wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about correct or
incorrect judgements. This is certainly an objection worth making, but it
is hardly powerful. Strictly speaking it commits the fallacy of argumentum
ad ignorantium: because we don’t know of any way to make an
uncontroversial evaluation of the judgement it must be the case that there
is no way to make an
uncontroversial evaluation of the judgement. Obviously, that’s not a
good argument. Another way to make the
objection is to claim that moral judgements are just not the sorts of
things that admit of hard and fast answers, but I’m afraid that that is
just begging the question. We will see in later lectures that there are
indeed ways of getting answers. The question is whether these are the
correct ways and whether they give the correct answers. To object at the
outset that that there are no correct answers to be had (and no correct
methods) is to assume a conclusion about ethical matters without doing the
hard work of arguing for it. But let’s move on.
The Premiss Concerning Cultural Differences & Moral Differences
Now consider the main premiss: the one that states that different cultures have different ethical systems. The evidence for this is that there are many cultures some of whose practices are the sorts of things that we would judge to be immoral if they were done by us. But some have questioned whether there is really such a great deal of difference between cultures in their ethical beliefs as these sorts of comparisons suggest.
1. One classic example is the apparent acceptability of infanticide amongst some nomadic peoples This is the case for Eskimoes, Bushmen, and Aborigines, for example. (I’m talking about when they were nomadic peoples, of course. Not after they’ve been settled into towns). But does this mean that human life is held to be cheaper in those societies that in our own. Possibly not, because there are very good reasons why the number of children in a nomadic society must be strictly controlled. Those children are not just unproductive, but are a serious burden upon the women who have to look after them while the men are hunting. It is simply not possible to maintain very many children in any nomadic group and the attenpt to do so would put the entire group at risk. So one way to look at what they’re doing when they are doing away with their children is defending the wider interest of the group and choosing the lesser of two evils. Their respect for life is not necessarily less than ours, but the circumstances in which they exist are much stricter than those in which we thrive.
2. Another sort of example we might see in the Pythagorean injunction not to eat beans. We, on the other hand, do not see bean eating as a moral issue. But look more deeply. Why do the Pythagoreans forbide bean-eating? Because they believe that the souls of deceased people may inhabit those tasty legumes, and it is wrong to eat people. In this case, then, we might say that our cultural difference does not point to a moral difference – we both believe that it is wrong to eat people – but to a differnce in beliefs about what constitutes a person. Their class of person-objects includes beans, our does not.
2. Again, if we think back to the example of the Greeks and Callatians, the difference in behaviours could be looked at as a disagreement on the best way to honour your ancestors, and that is a purely cultural difference not a moral difference. Both Greeks and Callatians are agreed that it is right – morally right – to honour your ancestors, and the way your culture dictates that this honouring be done is really neither here nor there.
So there are ways in which the obvious cultural differences which look at first glance as if they are the consequence of moral differences are not really evidence of any such thing. But that doesn’t mean that we need to deny that there really are moral differences between societies. It might, however, be taken as some evidence that the differences are not so great or so common place as they appear. On this subject, we might finally note that there has been some research into the variety of ethical beliefs that are actually held in different cultures, and the results seem to indicate that there are a large number of beliefs that count as ethical that are extremely common amongst cultures. There are even taken to be a non-trivial number of moral laws that are universal. (Wilson, E. O. (1979) On Human Nature Bantam. Pp. 22 f.) Without even opening an anthropology textbook, we can imagine the sorts of rules these will be; they are the sorts of rules that are necessary for the survival of any reasonably-sized autonomous group.
1. Thou shalt not kill (people in your own group): Any society in which it is allowable to kill without compunction and without regulation is going to be extremely unstable. You will find that the society is unable to defend the interests of its members – principal among these interests being to stay alive. In such a society you will find subgroups being formed in response for the protection of the lives of their members. But when that happens the injunction not to kill people in your group has been invented.
2. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour: In a more general sense we should not lie. We depend upon communication for the proper operatin of society. If it was not normative that communication was intended to convey truth, there would be no point in even attempting to do so. Why should I ask a question of you if there is no expectation that you will tell me a true thing in response.
3. Thou shalt not steal: The reasons are obvious. This is an interesting one though, in that in some societies the injunction against theft could be modified. Spartan youths were encouraged to steal. They could not eat without doing so. But they were encouraged to do so in order to train them for warfare and to exercise their skills and ingenuity. They were not given a licence to steal: if they were caught they were punished severely.
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The Conclusion |
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So the argument itself is a bad one. But that doesn’t mean that the conclusion is false. It just means that if we’re going to believe it we’re going to have to find some new reasons to believe it. But should we even think that it’s a reasonable conclusion? How does it measure up against the other intuitions that we have about ethical questions? Not too well, actually. And we can see this by considering what are the obvius consequences that follow from the thesis that nothing is good or bad absolutely but only good or bad in a particular society.
1. In the first place, the intended consequence of the theory, the consequence that is taken to be its best advertisement is not at all uncontroversial. We are supposed to believe that we cannot look at the practices of another society and proclaim them wrong. Who believes this? Do we really think that we can’t look at slave owning societies and say that what they’re doing is wrong? Are you prepared to say that protesters were wrong to condemn apartheid in South Africa? In India the British put down Thuggee, the dacoits, and suttee.
“A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by
the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on
her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the
custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing.”[1] Was that wrong? Were they wrong even to say that those practices were immoral? It rather seems that we feel ourselves justified in making many, many, adverse judgements about the morality practised in other cultures.
2.
Secondly, and this is a related objection, when some people make
the claim that we cannot look at the practices of another society and
proclaim them wrong, they seem to be claiming that it’s an absolute
moral fact: that it is true for everyone, everywhere that moral judgments
ought not to be made of alien practices. But this is simply
self-contradictory. The Relativist may hold that it makes no sense to make
these judgements, but he simply cannot hold that it is morally wrong to do
so – that is, without introducing a special clause about the one and
only moral universal being that we should not judge others, which might
seem a bit ad hoc.
3. What's more, we’re prepared to make judgements about the moral practices in our own society. Probably, none of us believe that our own cultures are morally perfect. But if the one and only criterion for whether something may be judged morally good is whether it is approved of by our culture (or, worse, just that it is a practice in our culture) then in order to determine whether practice is good or not all we have to do is ask whether that practice is accepted in our society. Thus when William Wilberforce asked himself whether slavery is wrong, all he had to do was observe that it was an accepted practice in his (and every other society) and he would discover that yes, slavery is good. Should women have the vote, wonder Susan B. Anthony and Emily Pankhurst? They look around and they discover that women don’t have the vote anywhere and they conclude: Ah ha. Women should not have the vote.
4. Of course, if that were the case then there would simply be no question of moral reform because there is nothing we can say against practices that we disapprove of but which others don’t. Vegetarians cannot make a moral case against meat-eating, abolitionists couldn’t make a case against slavery, feminists can’t protest against FGM. And so on. There is no role for the moral pioneer, one of the most respected figures in any culture, because he/she must always be judged to be a bad person. So much for Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, Francis of Assissi, William Wilberforce, Gandhi, Lao De, and so on. All very unfortunate. Anyway, nothing that they could achieve would count as progress, because the idea of progress depends upon the notion of an objective measure by which two states may be compared, and relativism denies this. So why would they bother?
For reasons such as these most people, after they have considered relativism for a short while, give it up.
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M. Steyn |