UPDATE: WHAT IS A MORAL ORDER?

Why relativism?

Truth on one side of the Pyrenees,  error on the other.

--Pascal

The strongest form of relativism holds that ethical beliefs are personal tastes, akin to tastes in food, and that one person’s ethical principles have no authority over anyone else. A somewhat weaker, but still strong form holds that ethical principles are local to particular societies, and that the ethical principles of one society can have no authority over other societies. Both forms are sometimes  held to require tolerance of others, but are sometimes are further held to mean that “anything goes”, and that there really can be no moral judgment at all.

In his 1984 article "Anti-anti-relativism" (American Anthropologist 86: 263-278) Clifford Geertz doubts that anyone really believes either of these forms (except opportunistically or purely for the sake of argument), and certainly there is a contradiction in deriving a moral obligation  from what amounts to a debunking of morality itself.

Discussions of relativism normally seem to be conducted in a vacuum, and these strong forms of relativism are so easily disproven that it’s rather puzzling that the question ever arises at all, and in fact discussants often seem baffled by the fact that something so unnatural should ever raise its head.

But in fact, a high degree of relativism is institutionalized in secular societies, which are characterized by a separation between the order of law and the order of ethics. Secular society stands in contrast to more traditional societies (such as the Caliphate, or the Chinese Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or various smaller states) where the state was seen as, above all, a guardian both of religious faith and of morality. One of the defining traits of the modern age has been the withdrawal of state authority from the task of enforcing religious doctrine and, in part, morality. This produces a two-tier ethical world, in which those of stricter morality judge as  wrong many legal, widely-prevalent forms of behavior for which there can be no punishment. Ethics per se (when not written into law) thus comes to be thought of as “a purely private matter”, and in many respects secularization has the effect of reducing the scope and authority of ethics (just as it reduces the scope and authority of religion, which is often the primary ethical authority.)

Just as the liberal state is normally secular with respect to religion, it is also secular with respect to many ethical principles which were formerly of state concern. Fornication is one example, and there is a strong movement toward removing the state concern for any form of sexual activity that cannot be described as child abuse or violence. For another example, during the high age of laissez-faire capitalism, government allowed business an unprecedented freedom, allowing activities which had earlier been regarded as immoral and illegal -- usury being one example, and retail fraud another (the new legal principle being caveat emptor).

Institutions which recognize a degree of relativism include internationalism (the Westphalian multi-state system), federalism, secular government, limited government, individual rights, habeus corpus, and private property. All of these create situations in which what is wrong in one place is allowed in another, and which forbid either the state or private individuals to intervene even against universally-despised acts if they are not illegal.  In such cases, the public authority not only does not punish evildoers, but also forbids private individuals to do so: the obligation to tolerate evil has been created._[1] (The situation is quite different in non-secular states, where even such simple acts as wearing the wrong color of clothing can be punished).

The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” also enables a class of shameless offenders who flout public opinion and conventional standards except insofar as they are embodied in law, and who furthermore fight every legal case to the bitter end. The skillful and lucky ones often get away with it, and any moderately worldly person knows a successful, often quite respectable miscreant of this type.

Furthermore, much of modern life is dominated by corporate entities – specially-created fictitious persons which have legal obligations but no ethical obligations beyond that. While some corporate entities do claim to have ethical standards, market forces and even the law force most of them to restrict themselves to maximizing profits and growth; and many corporations are in fact shameless miscreants of the type just described, and by policy obey the law only when convenient -- using their legal departments to fend off lawsuits, and using political pressure to change the laws. Since many people spend the best years of their lives working for corporations, and since corporate entities have many ways of diffusing responsibility for corporate actions so that no one in the corporation  needs to know what’s really happening or who is responsible, the outcome is that an enormous proportion of human action takes place in a de-ethicalized realm. (The whole profession of law is itself likewise mostly de-ethicalized, as are considerable areas or retailing, public relations, and advertising).

Multinationalism and individual rights work rather similarly by spatializing ethics -- creating separated ethical worlds (states, pieces of property) within which activities can be carried on in accordance with the local ethics of the state or the property-owner – “minding your own business”.  The advantage of this is that conflict can be avoided if the distancing is successful. The disadvantage is that, when an activity can change from right to wrong and back again in the course of a ten-minute walk, a relativistic weakening of ethical conviction is one of the most likely consequences._[2]

Not only does international pluralism weaken the conviction of the universality of ethics, but when the international system breaks down and war erupts, soldiers are required to commit acts which would normally be completely forbidden; even the acts allowed by the laws of war are bad enough, but in every war the laws of war are frequently broken, often quite deliberately.

Anthropology provided a second motive for relativism. During the early days of anthropology, anthropologists working for universities which were often Christian in foundation had to compete with Christians and others whose primary response to primitive peoples was either to send missionaries, or to militarily repress the dirty, lazy, lewd, and murderous savages. Anthropologists developed a version of relativism within the profession to justify their own indefinite deferral of moral judgment of their primitives, while outside their profession they used a mix of relativism and advocacy to defend these peoples as best possible._[3]

Third, and fairly recently, various sorts of sexual and cultural minorities within the civilized world adapted aspects of relativism as part of their drive to gain acceptance and normalize their statuses. Ultimately relativistic language became diffused enough that anyone who gets caught in the act nowadays is likely to adapt the relativistic “Who is to say?” defense.

The upshot of all this is that ethics in our society has a rather diminished position, even officially. Ethical principles unenforced by the state have a shadow existence, and those who commit themselves to ethical principles higher than the ambient standard often lead difficult lives (both because of the sacrifices required by their principles, and because of the requirement that they tolerate what they feel are immoral acts which are not, however, illegal). For many, ethics is limited to prudence – respect for the power of law and of public opinion – so that it’s even possible to suggest that in many respects we are living in a post-ethical society. Arguing about the universality and absoluteness of ethics is a quixotic considering the greatly diminished role ethics actually plays in our society.

Universalism and relativism

Ironically, in one sense absolutism itself has been the relativizing force. If it is believed that for an ethical principle to be valid it must be a universal law, and if comparative evidence appears which makes it doubtful that it is a universal law, then confidence in validity of ethics is weakened. Evidence for an ethical principle not being universal would be, for example, a case of an otherwise estimable individual from another culture or another era who routinely violates a particular ethical principle of ours.  If ethics can be particular, local, or relative, this is no special problem, and our own ethics remains intact. But if ethics is by nature universal, either we must doubt our own society's ethical principles, or we must condemn whole societies and eras out of hand -- and there are ethical problems with that kind of self-righteousness too.

The kind of relativism people normally end up arguing against is, in this sense,  an absolutized relativism. The belief that any valid law must be universal leads to an assertion that no law is valid. In a pluralistic world, for there to be any ethical rules at all, they need to retain their validity even if they are not universal -- but that is not universalism.

Within a pluralistic and relativistic world, it’s a useful principle to say something like “Be cautious about making moral judgments of different times or places”, but this is really just a caution or a heuristic in a complex, messy common-sense system -- it is not a law and does not apply to every situation. But the principle of universalism requires that this caution be made into a universal law, with inevitable paradoxical consequences.

Why do we talk about relativism?

At the moment, probably mostly for two reasons. First, many feel that the secularization of hedonistic forms of private behavior has gone too far. Second, various seemingly relativistic arguments are being used to argue that the United States should not intervene militarily to overthrow governments which the United States regards as oppressive.

Both cases really should come down to specifics – the general philosophical discussion of relativism doesn’t do much work here. In the first case, the question is “Where should the line be drawn?” What should be secularized, and what not?  This leads us to a slippery-slope problem, and slippery-slope problems are notoriously hard to solve except by conventional consensus – which unfortunately, is the very thing that we’re lacking on many issues. (For all its philosophical pretensions, ethical universalism usually just amounts to the fiat resultion of the relevant slippery-slope questions, either in accordance with the existing public consensus, or with the intention of imposing a consensus by force.)

The second case leads us to the reasons why the relativistic Westphalian multi-state system was established in the first place. The religious wars of Northern Europe were so bloody, and in the end so destructive of the religious values that motivated them, that both sides ended up concluding that the toleration of a degree of heresy and licentiousness would be better than continued efforts to impose goodness by force. (The religious players were encouraged to come to this conclusion by other players in this game, such as the skeptics and the “Anythingists” who declared themselves willing to practice any religion in order to be left in peace). So while I agree that the relativistic objection to a morally-motivated invasion is invalid, the prudential ones remain, and of course in this specific case the bona fides of the proponents of war are themselves at issue.

What does philosophy have to say about all this philosophical background in ethics?

The above strikes me as me as a pretty good rough description of today’s actual ethical situation with particular reference to relativism. The description is certainly not a perfect one, but at least it could serve as a starting-point for discussion. Yet when I’ve tried to present this interpretation to anyone with a philosophical background, the virtually universal response is simply to ignore what I said (in one case, rather insultingly). If anyone deigns to resond, it will be explained that I have confused two similar concepts, or that I have brought in irrelevant issues – though these arguments beg the question, since it has been my deliberate decision to put ethics in a larger historical context, interpret relativism in the context of secularity, describe the motives for  relativism, and so on. The gist of the philosophical response is usually that my discussion is not a properly philosophical one, and that I should have followed the established professional protocols for the discussion of ethics. But are there any strong reasons why these protocols should be followed  -- except for their institutionalization within the profession?

As far as I can tell, the professional discussion of ethics has become entirely autonomous and completely detached from the kinds of facts and concerns which make up the substance of ethical life. Ethicists study a  given body of texts and their commentaries and critiques, from time to time inventing imaginary examples in order to test the various doctrines, or producing formalizations of the various ethical principles, or even sometimes attempting to apply ethics to some actual problem. But apparently neither a concern for the actual historical context of the ethical evolution we’ve seen over the centuries, nor for the current state of ethical practice in the actual world, is of any concern to these specialists, whose concern is for something entirely different.

This is, of course, a familiar case. Ethicists are professionalized experts working according to agreed-upon standards which the layman cannot be expected to understand. This kind of specialization often works. I feel no resentment when  physicists studying fluid dynamics, for example, use terminology I don’t understand or make statements that I have trouble believing. By and large, physics has proved itself. Linguistics likewise – while linguistics is a form of human behavior, most of language is unconscious to the user, and thus linguists understand the way  I  distinguish the “p” and “b” phonemes, for example, much  better than I do.

However, I have trouble figuring out what the advantage of a technical, specialized study of ethics is supposed to have been. It would seem that ethics only exists at all if it is present and is understood in people’s conscious minds. Fluid dynamics goes its way whether people believe in it or understand it or not, and language goes its way whether or not people understand its inner workings or not, but gut reactions are not really ethical, and it seems that ethics exists only if it is intelligibly diffused in a community.  So if the ethics which ethicists talk about is really as threatened as I claim it is, it seems that that would be of concern to them. (This seems rather more serious than the extinction of a species would be to a zoologist studying it, since zoologists never claim that individual species are universal truths, whereas ethicists often do make that claim for their object of study.)

Kantians and Platonists did make ethics into a transcendent entity independent of history and actuality, but this was thought to have the effect of making ethical principles absolute, unassailable, and universal. The kind of universality in which ethical principles exist as pure formal entities, even though most people ignore them, is a bad kind of universality. Since it’s essential to the nature of ethical principles that they be known and respected, this sort of ethical autonomy – ethical truths which have only a limited effect on actual behavior -- puts us into a fundamentally immoral world of populated by people who are amoral or morally lax at best.

Specialization should have a payoff. In any science truth is important, but so is power. A good scientific theory tells us important, surprising things we couldn't otherwise have known, giving us a better understanding of the object of study – usually, a much better understanding. In the cases of linguistics and physics mentioned above, there’s no doubt whatsoever that this has happened. What was the payoff for the professionalization of ethics?

Professional ethicists tend to divert ethical discussions to meta-ethical discussions which by continual steps of analytical refinement move the discussion farther and farther away from the original concrete ethical issue (which might well have been a meaningless imaginary case anyway). Insofar as professional ethics has any effect in practice, it is to defer the ethical decision indefinitely – not what most would call a good effect. Individuals who understand philosophical ethics do not necessarily understand better the ethical situations in which they find themselves, nor do they better understand their own moral obligations, nor do they necessarily behave more ethically. If an introductory study of professional ethics has any effect, it will most likely to give the student a feeling of meta-ethical superiority over those whose ethical beliefs are theistic, conventionalist, naively utilitarian, etc.

I think that a real philosophical discussion of ethics would understand ethics in its political and historical context, with particular attention to the limitations of the scope of ethics that have been seen over the last several centuries, and as a result would find relativism as an unsurprising historical reality rather than as a starting point for sophisticated philosophical argumentation. A more meaningful ethical discourse would use real cases instead of fictional ones as heuristic examples, and thus would require taking the ethical issues seriously and actually trying to resolve them. It would also recognize that ethics, rather than simply being a body of truth-functional ethical statements to agree to, has to be integrated into the ethical agent’s identity by a self-transformation in order to be real.

Addendum (March 22, 2005): I would be interested in knowing whether anyone agrees or disagrees with what I've said. Or are concerns of this kind not really worth bothering with?

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