We didn't get to talk about the final section of chapter five concerning the insidiousness of relativism. On the handout I made, I only had two questions:
1. Is relativism insidious?
2. Does relativism promote tolerance?
I can throw out some ideas of my own that loosely tie into these questions.
Prinz remarks that some objections to relativism are due to a concern that if relativism is true, all moral debates will be spurious. If we understand that no one has a wrong morality, then relativism provides the framework for tolerance. I'm right and so are you. There's no need for me to force my morality upon you. In fact, Prinz thinks that relativism is more compatible with tolerance than absolutism, because all absolutism has is epistemic uncertainty.
I think Prinz is mistaken in this claim. The absolutist can be tolerant for other reasons. In fact, if the absolutist is completely certain (somehow) that his morality is correct, he can still be tolerant of another's morality. I am still tolerant of those who reject evolution as true even though I am quite certain myself that it is true.
Prinz admits that relativism does not entail tolerance, but he is fairly certain relativism promotes tolerance. I don't think relativism alone can promote tolerance, however. Prinz acknowledges that on 213. We have to have another value that inflicting morality on others is bad if we don't have any more claim to the truth than others do. But it still seems to me that there are persistent moral disagreements and tensions that relativism will have a difficult time addressing. Prinz tries to show that we can and maybe should intervene in cases of female circumcision, because if it goes against our value system, we can be justified in acting. But this is not tolerance. Why would the relativist be opposed to female circumcision? Sure, it's wrong for us, but it's right for them, and they want to do it, so what business do we have to intervene? I don't see how we can step in and be tolerant at the same time. It may be in our value system, or right for us, to intervene in others' affairs when we don't have a truer morality, but that conflicts with tolerance, which requires us to think it bad to intervene in those cases. Unless I'm missing something, either we accept that no one's morality is truer or better than anyone else's morality and keep to ourselves (being tolerant), or we impose upon others with the idea that our morality is better even though we know (or think) that all morality is on equal footing when it comes to truth value (which isn't tolerance). Neither option looks too attractive to me.
So it looks like the tolerance in itself might be part of the insidiousness of relativism. Are we forced to tolerate genocides because we don't have access to a better truth system than other bloody regimes? That certainly doesn't sound right. Even if relativism does promote tolerance, I'm not sure some things should be tolerated. But I have this conviction because I think that some moral values are better than others. The relativist can't make this move. Doesn't it seem an important option to have though?
Of course, none of this disproves relativism. If it is true, we would have to accept that it is true, along with its consequences. But I don't think relativism is as sunny as Prinz would have us think.
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5 comments:
I think part of the problem is clarifying what we mean by tolerance. Do we show tolerance toward individuals, or toward societies? The implications would sometimes be quite different. For instance, showing tolerance toward individuals might consist in intervening on behalf of oppressed groups in other societies, while tolerance toward societies would consist in the opposite. For that matter, what about subcultures - for instance, Buddhists living in a predominantly Christian nation. Or, to take another example internal to a society, is it more tolerant to have unrestricted freedom of speech, or to limit expressions of racism, sexism, etc? Further, I do not know of anyone who truly values tolerance above all else.
In the post, kgfritz presents this dilemma:
"either we accept that no one's morality is truer or better than anyone else's morality and keep to ourselves (being tolerant), or we impose upon others ... even though we know (or think) that all morality is on equal footing when it comes to truth value (which isn't tolerance). Neither option looks too attractive to me."
I think the best move for a relativist to make is to accept the dilemma's second horn. Relativists needn't be tolerant. The fact that a certain practice is permissible relative to one set of values does not (by itself) provide people with different values any reason to tolerate it.
David Wong has proposed a substantive moral principle which, when combined with relativism, would demand a certain amount of tolerance. However, relativism by itself does not demand this.
I think this fact is important to emphasize because it defeats the allegation that relativism requires a morally unacceptable degree of tolerance. A good response to this charge is that relativism does not require any degree of tolerance. If moral relativism were widely accepted, people could go on as before, condemning other cultures and working to exterminate their traditions. The difference that relativism would make to this process is that such people would now believe that their condemnation has its basis in their subjective feelings of disapprobation rather than in an objective source of morality.
It is possible that this realization could prompt a different charge of insidiousness: that relativism justifies too much imperialism. One way to answer this charge is to repeat the point made previously: relativism has no implications for tolerance. Whether tolerance is morally required in a given case will be determined by people's substantive moral commitments, not by the truth of relativism.
yes, guest, I think that's right. I suppose the crucial background assumption regarding the relation between relativism and tolerance is that people will tend to favor what they regard as morally right and avoid what they regard as morally wrong. Relativism will in virtue of that promote tolerance only if it promotes the idea that tolerance is right. But why should it do that? It certainly doesn't logically follow from relativism that tolerance is right.
I want to point out one thing that may be causing interference here. This is that the move from objectivism to relativism may tend to be *accompanied by* other changes which promote tolerance. In particular, I believe that often when people become relativists they do so in light of a greater awareness of ways in which the elicitors of moral attitudes fundamentally and systematically vary. (By "systematically" I have in mind cultural patterns.) This could occur because awareness of these variations prompts reflections which lead to acceptance of premise (9*) in the argument against objectivism I discussed in class. But whatever the reason, if becoming a relativist tends to be accompanied by a greater appreciation of cultural variations in moral attitudes, and that tends to foster tolerance, then it would make sense that people would associate relativism and tolerance, even if there is no logical connection.
I think appreciation of cultural variations can foster tolerance. Suppose you find a community of people for whom some behavior (like infanticide) fails to elicit their moral con-attitudes, as it does ours. If you think that fundamentally their moral con-attitudes have the same elicitors as ours, then it follows that one of us is seeing infanticide incorrectly (i.e., has false nonmoral beliefs about it). Presumably one will think that it is them. If so, then infanticide really does conflict with their deepest values; they do it only because they are unaware of this. Thus, by coercing them into refraining from infanticide, we are forcing them to act in accord with their own deepest values. If they really saw what was going on, they'd approve. This sounds much more justifiable than forcing people to act against their deepest values, or manipulating them so that their deepest values change. That's what we would be doing if their acceptance of infanticide is not due to mistaken beliefs about it but to fundamental differences in their attitudes. Thus, accepting fundamental variations in moral attitudes might foster tolerance.
Also, if they have mistaken nonmoral beliefs about infanticide, one must ask how they arrived at those mistaken beliefs. A possible answer is that they have been deceived by some powerful individual or institution for its own interests (e.g., perhaps powerful members of the group wish to retain their ability to kill their infants so they don't have to expend resources taking care of them). If so, then part of intervening to get them to oppose infanticide is liberating them from a kind of indoctrination (which causes them to act contrary to their own deepest values). This casts an even more positive light on intervention. If we think that their acceptance of infanticide stems from fundamental differences in moral attitudes, the issue of whether they are the victims of deception just doesn't arise, depriving intervention of this justification.
Eric here,
kfritz presents this dilemma:
"either we accept that no one's morality is truer or better than anyone else's morality and keep to ourselves (being tolerant), or we impose upon others with the idea that our morality is better even though we know (or think) that all morality is on equal footing when it comes to truth value (which isn't tolerance)."
I just want to put in my two cents here and claim that the dilemma of whether to be tolerant or not is unrelated to relativism. Whether or not one should "impose upon others" is a matter for normative ethics, not what they think the truth status of their ethical code is. Whether or not to be tolerant is in the domain of one's ethical code, not that of metaethics.
Counter to this, Prinz says one can reason to tolerance on the basis of relativism thusly: "Since there is not a single true morality, I will refrain from imposing my morality on others, because it has no claim on them."
However, this reasoning simply will not go through if the ethical code one follows demands, for instance, that one be intolerant. One may have an 'interventionist' morality or a morality in which proselytizing is a virtue. That one's code has no claim over others may be true, but if it has a claim on you, and its contents instruct you to interfere with others, then relativism is no help.
This notion, that one's values are one's own regardless of relativism, is used by Prinz to fend off the objection that relativism undermines (proper) conviction. On 211, he says "we embrace our values because they are our values... The fact that others do not value what we value is entirely moot unless our valuing something depends on the assumption that the value is universal." I think Prinz is correct here, but that this very reasoning undermines his previous argument that relativism promotes tolerance. If one's own values treat tolerance as a virtue or vice, then that factor is the operative one in judging whether intervention, proselytizing, etc are good or bad, not one's metaethical beliefs.
Good points abound in these comments.
I am curious as to where people come down on the issue of tolerance vs. intervention in cases such as (but not limited to) female genital mutilation. Probably most or all of you think that it has to be considered on a case-by-case basis and that there are few helpful general principles in the more interesting cases. But what do you tend to regard as the default? When you learn of practices in other cultures which strike you as less than ideal, and it occurs to you that there are ways outsiders could intervene to change things in a way which would strike you as an improvement, where does your reaction fall on the spectrum from extreme distrust of intervention to being rather blase about it or even favorable to it? Perhaps this way of framing it is unhelpful, but I do think there are different general attitudes about intervention, even if in practice those attitudes get expressed in complex ways.
If anyone wants to weigh in on this I'd be very interested.
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