I don’t believe everything is constructed and I don’t believe in most statements of moral relativism. However the people involved in the arguments generally favor some view of subjective truth and/or moral relativism, at which point why do they care?
(Similar to the question of: if people claim gender is a social construct how can someone be the wrong one?)
I think the solution is nothing new, it relies on going back to teaching a classical liberal definition of tolerance and the objective morality of empathy and compassion. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Sure, it’s a mistake to treat facts and beliefs as disjoint. But moral relativism is the only honest position—we do not know what’s morally right, nor do we know whether right things even exist, nor can we necessarily prove these things even though we believe them. So we pragmatically follow evidence and try to treat people decently in an ad-hoc fashion.
More to the point, if a teacher teaches kids any specific absolute moral system, many of their parents will be upset with it. So the school system only allows teachers to teach what is essentially agnosticism—the absence of a moral position.
The examples from the article can all be dismissed by simple descriptivism:
> If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged?
A person can be outraged for any reason they want. It happens that this kind of thing outrages a lot of people.
> If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity?
We can, and do, do so arbitrarily. It happens that a lot of people agree on what “crimes against humanity” entail.
> If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?
Humans are occasionally altruistic for some reason.
Isn’t it more interesting to investigate the reasons for why so many humans believe these things than to endlessly conduct the same debates about truth, provability, and knowledge?
It seems you grossly misunderstand ethics by portraying it as some kind of arbitrary system (or "framework" per your word choice, a word I've come to despise) imposed on people, or some kind of code voluntarily adopted but ultimately without ground. People may disagree about what is good, or what the correct moral principles are, but that does not mean there isn't a proper object of study and that that object is objective and universal. Cultures can be wrong. People can be wrong. People can be ignorant. Their moral intuitions and their ethical judgments can be deformed and at odds with the truth.
In any case, moral skepticism and moral relativism are not only worthless, but incoherent and untenable and nothing anyone of any philosophical sophistication holds to. It is the quintessential freshman philosophy student's position, a position born out of ignorance and teenage rebelliousness rather than the careful exercise of reason.
Moral relativists don't believe that all positions are equally valid, my position is the most valid obviously. They believe moral positions are subjective.
My issue with your participation in this discussion is that you think you are moving the discussion forward when you post a less-wrong link to support your statement about moral relativism.
And you maintain the same sense of correctness even as it is explained to you that your argument is regressive and unhelpful.
On another note, do you have any books or readings you'd recommend on moral relativism (?) or whatever your worldview is called? I imagine you came to this conclusion after a lot of thought and life experience, but is there anyone or anything you read or listened to that you'd recommend?
Maybe your objection works for a relativist who makes claims like "one ought to tolerate moral practices of other cultures". But I don't think all relativists are making that claim. Some are just rejecting any notion of objective moral truth.
My takeaway was that OP genuinely believes there are moral absolutes that are not the subject of consensus, they just are. Consensus attempts to build something stable from a variety of (hopefully) evidenced opinions, but it's not necessarily linked to some objective, absolute reality. He's not criticizing a lack of moral consensus, he's saying that relying on consensus as opposed to absolutes encourages amoral behavior.
I would agree with the author that children shouldn't be only taught relativism, but I hope we can forgive a lack of nuance in 2nd-grade curricula. Having wiggle room and nuance in these conversations is part of how civilization has progressed, and that's stifled by the idea that all morality is derived from some semi-knowable perfect absolute reality.
The language is tricky in this area; I'll try to be clear. There seems some confusion in your concepts; at least I'm confused about them. I don't claim to have this stuff all worked out; sorry if it's not helpful.
It sounds like, for you, 'subscribing to an objective morality' would involve feeling the need to make everyone 'adopt your position' - share your beliefs? do as you do?
I don't think there are actually many ethical or social relativists at all. Even the most self-proclaimedly relativist academics may talk like that professionally, but in their everyday lives have quite another standard, and evidently believe in objective ethics/morality/reality etc. That's the thing about ethics; it's not like favourite ice cream flavour, where you might think lemon is best, chocolate awful, but understand it's just your personal taste. Believing something is ethically wrong means it's not just 'wrong for you', but 'wrong, full stop.' It doesn't mean you go around forcing people to think/act the same. (Although probably means you wish they would.)
I think you have described tolerance, an understanding that people think differently, not everyone has the same values etc. But to go from that to thinking there is no right and wrong, good or bad - only right-for-you, wrong-for-you - well, that's an abysmal step. I suppose you don't mean that; I hope not. Well, even in your "I don't feel the need to compel all sentients in the universe to adopt my position" it sounds like you think it's simply a better way of acting than others who need to compel etc. Not just better-for-you, but better for anyone, better for everyone i.e. objectively better.
I do. Moral and ethical relativism does not protect you from having to stake a claim on a set of thoughts and values and standing by them.
You're more than welcome to think not of course, however this is definitely a more common thought than not. There's a larger shared set of values that people tend to hold even if it's not objective and I think you'd have to go to great lengths to prove me incorrect regarding those things being good to the majority, and even greater lengths that the opposite thought is good at all.
Moral relativism is simply accepting that there's no value system that is rooted in immutable laws of nature - it's all cultural. It doesn't mean that you can't prefer one value system to the other, and make judgments accordingly.
> "Moral relativism is incompatible with judgements that other's moral judgements are wrong."
Right or wrong have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can't, because without a universal morality any notion of universal "right" or "wrong" evaporates. This is about refusing to tolerate another culture not because "it is wrong" but rather because it is beneficial to you to do so.
Your problem here is that you seem to be assuming some sort of universal "respect the right of others to coexist" or "live and let live" morality, where you should not stamp out other cultures unless you have determined that they are "wrong". This sort of universal tolerance for other systems of morality does not exist. It really simply doesn't; history would be far less bloody if it did.
People that do not believe in universal morality are still very capable of acting only in their own best interests, at the expense of others. Egoism is not incompatible with moral relativism.
(Similar to the question of: if people claim gender is a social construct how can someone be the wrong one?)
I think the solution is nothing new, it relies on going back to teaching a classical liberal definition of tolerance and the objective morality of empathy and compassion. No need to reinvent the wheel.
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