Criticisms of agent relativism don't refute relativism

I'm surprised at the way philosophers handle relativism. See this video here.

Nathan Nobis suggests that relativism would commit you to the view that if someone else thinks that an action is permissible, then the action is permissible, or that if all the members of a society think an action is right, then that makes the action right. Nathan then suggests that nobody thinks this.

However, this would at best only reflect a distinctive form of individual subjectivism and cultural relativism: these are forms of agent relativism. However, Nathan does not draw any distinction between agent relativism and appraiser relativism. Appraiser relativism is not subject to the concerns Nathan raises in the video. The puzzling tendency for critics of antirealist positions to focus on agent but not appraiser relativism is a topic I’ve addressed before (see here).

Agent relativism holds that actions are right or wrong depending on the standards of the agent performing the action. However, appraiser relativism holds that actions are right or wrong depending on the standards of whoever is appraising the action. Nathan’s implied objection to relativism only applies, at best, to forms of agent relativism, but these objections do not apply to appraiser relativism.

Appraiser relativism does not entail that if someone thinks it’s okay to kill other people that it is, in fact, okay to kill other people. It only entails that it is okay relative to that person’s standards, which amounts to little more than the fact that it is okay-according-to-that-person. That something is okay according to someone has no normative or attitudinal implications for those appraising their actions. If someone thinks that their own actions are morally right, that does not mean that you, as an appraiser relativist, must also think the action is morally right, nor does it entail that you must approve of the action, regard it positively, abstain from interfering to prevent the person from performing the action, and so forth. An appraiser relativist can act in accordance with their own moral standards.

What makes this omission especially puzzling is that it is hardly an extremely obscure distinction. This distinction is mentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral relativism. See this remark:

“[...] that to which truth or justification is relative may be the persons making the moral judgments or the persons about whom the judgments are made. These are sometimes called appraiser and agent relativism respectively. Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide). Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows.” (Gowans, 2021)

Note an interesting feature of this remark: Gowans indicates that appraiser relativism is the more common of the two and that it will be assumed in the article on relativism. I don’t know if it is the more common of the two (I don’t know of any data on that), but there’s something puzzling about Nathan opting to focus on agent relativism rather than appraiser relativism, and to not draw any distinction between the two.

I would like to suggest that a focus on agent relativism may be preferable because it is the easier of the two to criticize: one can readily portray relativism as implying that the proponent is committed to monstrous and absurd views (e.g., that one must think it’s morally right for someone to commit acts atrocities) if one is a relativist. However, an appraiser relativist is not committed to thinking it’s morally right for other people to commit atrocities so long as they think they are, so it is more difficult to leverage such objections against it.

Nathan ends the video by claiming that nobody actually endorses relativism. However, whether or not and to what extent people endorse agent or appraiser relativism is an empirical question. Facts about human psychology are not matters that can be readily resolved from the armchair.

As it happens, there is empirical research on this question. See this paper from Quintelier, De Smet, and Fessler (2014). In the paper, they draw a distinction between agent and appraiser relativism and then assess whether nonphilosophers are sympathetic towards either. Their findings provide some preliminary support that respondents may have sympathies towards or in some cases endorse agent relativism:

“We found that participants were more likely to consider the act as morally permissible when it was in accordance with the agents ’ moral frameworks than when it was not in accordance with the agents ’ moral frameworks. This suggests that agents ’ moral frameworks have an effect on lay people ’ s moral speech acts about the moral wrongness or permissibility of behavior: People are more likely to say that a behavior is morally permissible when it is in accordance with the agents ’ moral frameworks compared to when it is not in accordance with the agents ’ moral frameworks.” (p. 226)

They conclude on highlighting the importance of distinguishing agent and appraiser relativism and emphasize the need to disambiguate the two and test for both when studying how nonphilosophers think:

“Moreover, that people may employ divergent relativist forms of language indicates that researchers of moral relativism cannot make claims regarding moral relativism without first specifying the type of relativism at issue, nor can they attend only to appraiser relativism. Methodologically, researchers must take care in designing stimuli and queries in order to minimize ambiguity as to which type of relativism is made salient. Whether they be empiricists or theorists, researchers of moral relativism must take seriously the existence of agent moral relativism, and must consider the differences between it and appraiser moral relativism.” (p. 228)

More recent studies have also found that, across a range of participants, at least some populations consistently favor antirealist response options when given the chance to do so, and at least one study found that relativist response options were the most popular. See these findings from Pölzler and Wright (2020):

Figure 1. These are the metaethical positions people chose for abstract measures. This is from Pölzler and Wright (2020), p. 73.

Collapsing across both forms of relativism, relativism was also the most common response option (typically exceeding 50%) for all concrete moral issues. Every single one. Maybe the findings are invalid. Maybe these results don’t generalize. What we don’t have is compelling evidence that nobody endorses relativism, or even that almost nobody does. It’s an empirical question, and the data for such a claim simply isn’t there.

Nathan seems to infer that nobody is a relativist because of the implications of agent relativism. However, (a) whether people endorse a position does not necessarily turn on whether, from the armchair, the implications of a position strike as untenable. Ordinary people can and do hold views even if we think those views have absurd implications. It’s an empirical question, and (b) many people may be sympathetic to appraiser relativism.

Personally, I don’t think most people really do endorse agent or appraiser relativism. Rather, I think people don’t have determinate metaethical stances at all, and the appearance of relativism is really an unprincipled way of attempting to convey tolerance for people with different values. However, even if it turns out that most people are not relativists, it would not follow that most people are moral realists or that they endorse any other distinctive metaethical position (Nathan didn’t suggest otherwise, but I think that’s a takeaway many people viewing the video might infer from it anyway).

References

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 53-82.

Quintelier, K. J. P., De Smet, D., Fessler, D. M. T. (2014). Agent versus appraiser moral relativism: an exploratory study. In H. Sarkissian & J. C. Wright (Eds.), Advances in experimental moral philosophy (pp. 209-232). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.