Does relativism entail infallibility?
Twitter Tuesday #46
1.0 Bad Objections to Relativism/Subjectivism
Critics of relativism/subjectivism reliably present weak objections. These objections appear to me to be very low effort and don’t appear to even consider how a relativist/subjectivist might respond. Consider this one:
Let's suppose you are a cultural relativist such that whatever the dominant culture (most people) believe about morality is true within that society. Then you have a number of implausible things that follow from this. First, all moral questions could be solved forever with a poll. Second, all minority views are by definition wrong. Third, one can never criticize the population under any (imagine an extreme case) circumstances. Now if one holds this same view while shrinking it down to the individual - then all people are morally infallible, there is never good reason to change your mind (because there is no fact outside your opinion), and one can never legitimately be criticized ever no matter what. These are really improbable consequences which rule out the view for nearly all (if not all) professional ethicists.
Travis already responded to this here. I’ll summarize some of Travis’s objections and incorporate them with my own, but go check out Travis’s responses on Twitter, and if you’re on Twitter, give them a like and consider politely engaging.
2.0 Individual Subjectivism
2.1 Individual subjectivism does not entail infallibility
Subjectivism is the view that moral facts are made true by our moral standards. It is not an intrinsic feature of this position that we have infallible access to our own values. First, the subjectivist may hold that we do not have perfect introspective access to our own values. We could simply be mistaken. As Travis notes:
Even on the simplistic formulation where "X is right/wrong" amounts to "I approve/disapprove of X" though - it's not clear why one couldn't be mistaken about one's own attitudes.
Consider Dr. Seuss’s story, Green Eggs and Ham. In this story, Sam-I-Am hassles the protagonist, who insists they don’t like green eggs and ham, until they relent and try it. They discover they like it. Our preferences and values are often something we discover about ourselves. We don’t just have immediate, infallible access to our own values. This is something we literally teach children. Maybe you disagree, and think we do have infallible access for whatever reason. That’s fine: feel free to argue as much. My point is that this isn’t a built in feature of subjectivism. And, for what it’s worth, I personally find such a notion extremely implausible.
2.2 There are more sophisticated varieties of individual subjectivism
Subjectivists often think something like this:
Moral facts are those facts most conducive to achieving my moral goals.
Or this:
Moral facts are those moral considerations I would endorse under some hypothetical condition (e.g., in which I was free of biases and had adequately reflected).
Arguably, the latter is Humean constructivism, and not subjectivism proper, but even if we want to classify it by some other name, I almost never see critiques engage with this view and insist it’s stupid, wrong, or evil. Yet when they critique subjectivism and other antirealist views, they often treat their critiques as an implied case for realism.
Note that in both of these cases it would not make sense to suppose that people are infallible. People can be mistaken about which actions would be most conducive to their moral goals, and they can simply not know what moral standards they’d endorse under hypothetical conditions.
2.3 Infallibility would be trivially true and unobjectionable if critics were correct
Suppose you believe this:
Value infallibility: We have infallible access to our own values.
Now suppose that when people say things like “Abortion is morally wrong” this expresses their values, e.g., it expresses something like “I disapprove of abortion.” So we have a semantic thesis about the meaning of moral claims:
Semantic appraiser subjectivism: Moral claims express the values of the speaker.
If you endorse value infallibility and semantic appraiser subjectivism, then the fact that your moral claims are infallible is trivially true. Why? Because all this would amount to is the view that people aren’t wrong about what their own values are, so when they report what those values are they aren’t wrong about them. Not only isn’t this objectionable, it’s not clear how any sane person could find it objectionable in principle. It’s trivially true.
Critics who insist relativist views entail infallibility rely on an extremely misleading way of framing things. Their objections require the audience to not adopt semantic appraiser subjectivism, but to implicitly endorse value infallibility. As a result, when they consider the subjectivist position, it sounds bizarre: the subjectivist weirdly appears to think we can’t be mistaken about what’s morally right or wrong. But since we clearly can be, this is supposed to strike us absurd. But consider: if our moral claims expressed our values, and if expressions of our values couldn’t be mistaken (which you have to assume for this objection to work), then nothing about this should strike you as terribly implausible. So such objections are simply a misleading and roundabout way of duping audiences by tangling up non-metaethical positions (we can’t be wrong about what our values are) with metaethical positions in such a way that they would only find the metaethical position in question objectionable if they already independently found it objectionable, since, after all, the reason you’d reject subjectivism in this case is because you already don’t think moral claims express our subjective values. If you did, and if you endorsed value infallibility, there’d be nothing to object to!
2.4 The notion that there’s no good reason for subjectivists to change their minds is false
Waller says:
[…] there is never good reason to change your mind (because there is no fact outside your opinion) […]
This is false. Even simple subjectivism allows for us to be wrong about nonmoral facts that are entangled with our moral positions. For instance, suppose you’re a subjectivist and you oppose any actions that you believe cause harm to individuals or society. You also believe that homosexuality is wrong because you think it is harmful in some way. But then suppose you learn more about gay rights and realize you’re an ignorant bigot who never had any good reason to think this. As a result, you stop opposing homosexuality because you no longer believe it is harmful. Humean constructivism likewise easily allows for us changing our mind: the more closely we are able to reflect on what we’d endorse in the relevant hypothetical circumstances, the more we have reason to change our mind accordingly; indeed, that’s the whole point of the view.
Now, if Waller were to clarify that there’s no good reason to change your mind about your fundamental values or preferences, well, so what? Why would there be? And why, exactly, is this objectionable? Would it make any sense to object that I have no good reason to change my preferences about my favorite color or music? What are you going to do, appeal to my other preferences? Or just stomp your feet and insist on aesthetic realism? Many of these objections amount to a surreptitious insistence that the problem with subjectivism is that it isn’t some form of non-subjectivism.
2.5 “Legitimate criticism” is too ambiguous to evaluate as an objection
Finally, Waller says:
[…] and one can never legitimately be criticized ever no matter what.
It’s not clear what “legitimate’ criticism is. Suppose I and everyone else is a subjectivist. Someone else has different moral standards than me. What I cannot do, consistent with subjectivism, is insist that their moral standards are stance-independently mistaken. This is trivially true. If this is all Waller is claiming, then this is a trivial objection that would amount to saying that one of the problems with subjectivism is that it is inconsistent with non-subjectivism.
But a subjectivist is under no obligation to grant that the only “legitimate” objections to other people’s moral standards require the view that those standards are inconsistent with the stance-independent moral facts. I can simply object to other people’s moral standards because they conflict with my own moral standards. What’s illegitimate about that? I don’t have to object on the grounds that the person is stance-independently mistaken. I can simply object, and act accordingly (to stop them, etc.).
For comparison, I don’t think there are stance-independent facts about what music is good. Does that mean I cannot legitimately object to someone playing terrible music, like Drake? Suppose you order a salad at a restaurant and the server brings out a plate of gooey, rotting lettuce covered in maggots. They swear it’s delicious. Since taste is subjective, you can’t legitimately object.
Do you see how silly this is? Legitimate objections can and do often depend on other people acting in ways that conflict with our subjective standards. I believe most people, perhaps virtually all people, already act in such a way that we consider certain acts at odds with our subjective preferences to be legitimate grounds for objection. I’ve already given examples. Philosophers love their intuitions, so here’s a thought experiment:
It would be legitimate to object to someone serving you food that you found disgusting even if taste preferences are entirely subjective.
If you agree, great. Now copy and paste that to morality. Maybe you don’t think this is true of morality, but my intention here is to illustrate that I simply don’t think subjectivists are saying something obviously outrageous or nonsensical about morality. If critics want to criticize subjectivism, they’re going to need to do better than this.
3.0 Cultural Relativism
Waller initially began by mentioning cultural relativism:
Let's suppose you are a cultural relativist such that whatever the dominant culture (most people) believe about morality is true within that society.
This particular comment is not a defense of the position in question, since this appears to be about agent cultural relativism, which I find just as repugnant as realists do. I do want to nitpick a bit though:
Dominant culture ≠ most people.
Cultural relativists do not necessarily think that the moral standards that apply to a culture is determined by what most people in that culture believe. The dominant traditions may be imposed by those in positions of power, even if they are a minority. For instance, Spartan territories were mostly populated by helots, but helots were kept as slaves. The Spartan rulers were the dominant cultural force and it’s likely their standards that a relativist would believe determined what was right or wrong in that society. If anything, this is even more of a reason to dislike agent cultural relativism.
Even so, at least one of Waller’s objections doesn’t work so well:
First, all moral questions could be solved forever with a poll.
Since cultural relativists don’t necessarily think that majorities are what determine what’s right or wrong, this may not be the case. Though you could presumably poll whoever was in a position of power or who constituted the appropriate dominant cultural force.
Incidentally, and perhaps a bit ironically, most people today are fans of democracy and in practice we base a lot of legislation on votes, including moral issues like abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Furthermore, most people likely favor enfranchising as many people in possible. So in practice, laws enforcing particular moral standards roughly approximation the imposition of the majority, and most people seem to me to nominally be in favor of this. I grant, of course, that the relationship between law and morality is complicated. People may think that abortion is morally wrong but that it is also a necessary evil that we live in a democracy in which people may vote to grant abortion rights. Even so, I’m not sure why this is supposed to be such a dig against relativism. I suspect a lot of people might actually find this quite appealing.
Second, all minority views are by definition wrong.
This might be true for crude and unsophisticated forms of cultural relativism, but it is not necessarily true.
Just as with subjectivism, members of cultures can be mistaken about the nonmoral facts or fail to recognize and appreciate how their own actions, attitudes, and institutions are inconsistent with their deepest moral values.
For instance, cultures may share certain fundamental moral standards like that “all people are created equal.” But societies may fail to live up to those standards in practice by denying certain minorities their rights. Those minorities may then appeal to these shared principles to argue that society has been suppressing them in a way that is inconsistent with its own values. Cultures can have complex sets of standards, practices, and values that are internally inconsistent or at odds with one another, and those societies may be fundamentally predicated on core values they fail to abide by. So you may have a society whose members mostly share the ideal that all people should be treated fairly, but due to prejudice and personal moral failings they fail to live up to this standard. Minorities can draw attention to this and prompt the dominant culture to enter a state of cognitive dissonance that eventually resolves in them coming to better align their practices and attitudes with the shared moral standards of that culture.
This is, in fact, how many minority groups fighting for their rights have argued in practice. They didn’t appeal to altogether fundamentally different moral values. They appealed to the better angels of the very people who were oppressing them.
Cultures may also just be wrong about the nonmoral facts in a straightforward way. For instance, suppose there was an entire culture committed to utilitarianism. They also practice capital punishment, and regularly execute people. But then a minority group argues that capital punishment doesn’t maximize utility. Everyone argues and examines the data, and the minority group ultimately makes a convincing case that capital punishment doesn’t maximize utility. As a result, the society abandons the practice.
What does this illustrate? Once again, it shows how our moral values can be entangled in nonmoral facts. Minority groups can share the exact same moral values but disagree about the nonmoral facts. In doing so, they can argue against the prevailing cultural practices and institutions of their society in a way that is not inconsistent with cultural relativism.
Waller also says:
Third, one can never criticize the population under any (imagine an extreme case) circumstances.
I’ve already shown how this would be addressed above. Yes, you can criticize the population:
If you’re an appraiser cultural relativist you judge (and criticize) other cultures by the standards of your culture, not theirs. So Waller’s objection only applies to agent cultural relativism.
If you’re an agent cultural relativist you can criticize the population for hypocrisy, failing to act in accord with its own moral standards due to mistaken nonmoral beliefs, and so on.
4.0 Conclusion
Do I think these responses rescue cultural relativism? No. But I want to illustrate that criticisms of cultural relativism are, to put it bluntly, completely lazy. Critics of individual subjectivism and cultural relativism virtually never appear to even consider the kinds of vigorous defenses proponents of these views could offer. They just throw the weakest possible objections at these views, declare victory, and go home. This is unfortunate, because Waller is probably correct about this:
These are really improbable consequences which rule out the view for nearly all (if not all) professional ethicists.
This is an indictment of these professional ethicists, not cultural relativism and individual subjectivism. So if Waller is correct—and I suspect he is—I am apparently going up against the majority of the profession. That’s fine. Majorities can be mistaken. After all, truth isn’t determined by the majority!
There seems to be a strong and unfortunate trend of contempt towards relativism among contemporary analytic moral philosophers. This contempt, often coupled with dismissiveness and impatience, leads to weak objections with little or no serious engagement. Evidence of this trend can be found here:
A Critique of Nathan Nobis's Subjectivism Entry on 1000-Word Philosophy
Instructors unjustifiably discourage metaethical relativism in the classroom
Insofar as this contempt is rooted in weak objections to these positions like those Waller raises, this says more about the poor state of the field than it does about the poor state of metaethical relativism.
These are my favorite types of articles