Instructors unjustifiably discourage metaethical relativism in the classroom

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I critique discouraging metaethical relativism in the classroom in this post. But I can’t read minds. I don’t know the intentions and perspectives of every instructor who discourages relativism. If you’re one of those instructors, I’d like to hear from you. Leave a comment or shoot me an email. I’d be happy to hear about or discuss your perspective without sharing it, or you’d be welcome to write a guest post, appear on my YouTube channel, or communicate in some other way. Since I don’t speak to most of you, I’m left largely with speculation. I’d rather hear about your perspective directly from you.

Also, if you are or were a student and have had experiences with instructors discouraging relativism or moral antirealism, feel free to get in touch and tell me about your experiences. More importantly, if you haven’t had such experiences or had the opposite: a teacher pushing antirealism/relativism, I would especially like to hear from you.

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1.0 Institutional bias against moral antirealism

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard students and former students describe classes in which instructors treated moral antirealism and moral relativism in particular with contempt, often actively seeking to convert students from relativism (and often to moral realism). I’ve seen instructional material that appears extremely biased against relativism and antirealism, often with lazy, poorly-argued objections, and I’ve seen instructors describe the way they teach the topic in a way that shows open hostility for relativism and an active attempt to suppress it in the classroom.

The objections raised against relativism and related views are often shallow, dismissive, and perfunctory, as if the author or instructor can barely stand to waste a minute having to dispense with moral antirealism. Antirealism is treated as an obstacle, a confusion, a naïve and immature view to be dealt with as quickly as possible, not a serious philosophical position and a respectable and perfectly natural inclination for students to have upon first engaging with metaethics.

I think this is a profound mistake on the part of these instructors, and I believe it may rest on an overconfidence in realism, an ironic misunderstanding of antirealist positions, and a frustration with metaethical perspectives that appears to impede class discussion and probably prevent instructors from presenting the material in their preferred way.

Rather than try to discourage students from engaging in moral philosophy given those preconceptions, I believe instructors are motivated to discourage students from endorsing antirealist views because they (the instructors) are moral realists and don’t like these views, and because they don’t want to put the effort into navigating a discussion about moral philosophy that doesn’t begin with their own dogmas and preconceptions in place. This is poor pedagogy and it does a disservice to students to try to browbeat the antirealism out of them. What’s worse, if students bend the knee and either adopt moral realism, shut up about antirealism, or at least pay some degree of lip service to moral realism or the alleged problems with relativism or antirealism, professors then herald this as vindication that they were right all along. A self-fulfilling prophecy!

Students want to earn a good grade. If you actively discourage a perspective, students may comply (or appear to comply) if for no other reason than that they prioritize getting a better grade over expressing a dissenting position. And if you, as an instructor, are biased against a view, you can foist that bias onto your students. Both of these facts should be obvious, but I worry instructors either fail to appreciate just how significant these considerations are, or worse, simply don’t care.

Even if they don’t have it out for antirealism, instructors may be impatient with or discourage relativism in the classroom, perhaps seeing it as an impediment to productive discussion. While there is room to clear up confusions and dogmatic or entrenched thinking among students, and to get students to challenge their preconceptions and reconsider alternative metaethical positions, instructors often appear convinced that:

• Most students aren’t or couldn’t plausibly be sincerely committed to some form of moral antirealism. Such commitments are presumed to be rooted in ignorance, misunderstanding, or social motives such as a desire to appear tolerant.

• It is the role of the instructor to disabuse students of these misconceptions by actively discouraging them from endorsing relativism.

The former may sometimes be true. Students appear to be taught that there is a distinction between “facts” and “opinions” but from what I’ve seen of how this distinction is characterized, the people describing it are totally confused and have no idea what they’re talking about. So students may be getting systematically misinformed prior to college, and professors may be having to reeducate students who were taught poorly. Teaching students why that distinction is misguided is a good thing. But this does not require also insisting on moral realism or insisting relativism is a non-starter.

I ran into a couple examples of this sort of thing recently. I don’t have anything like a survey of how metaethics is taught in universities, though that’d be nice. For now, my claims will be confined to something like “I think this is pretty common but all I have now are a smattering of examples.” I’ll present more examples as I get them, but for now, if you know of any examples (or evidence to the contrary) please share it in the comments or contact me.

2.0 Caleb Lee on discouraging relativism in the classroom

Here is one recent example:

I’ve done my best to transcribe Dr. Caleb Lee’s response to a question about how we determine right from wrong (with minor edits; see the video for an exact transcript but I removed superfluous “likes” and such):

A lot of times you’ll remember I’ll caution students against collapsing into some sort of nihilistic relativism about moral questions. I think what happens once students can kind of grasp that distinction I’m trying to make between say claims about what is the case and claims about what should be the case then they mistakenly think “Oh, I get it…this is like the fact/opinion dichotomy where you have on the one hand facts that could be settled by science which is like you know how much do things weigh, how big are things, what causes what, and then there’s opinions which are like “I find that pretty,” or “I like that,” or “I don’t like this” and so they mistakenly think that ethics must then belong to that realm of just opinion and I mean—oh sorry, we could go on and on about this. You know what? There are people who think that. There are people who think that ultimately think ethics is just a matter of opinion

The host jumps in to say:

Like moral relativism…type of thing?

Caleb continues:

Yea. There’s lots of different flavors of it, but since you brought up relativism, relativism would just be the view that what’s right or wrong is just determined by your culture, or determined by your background, or determined by your beliefs. You’ll remember that I’m not super persuaded by those kinds of views…

This is where things get interesting. The host then says:

In all my notes, it’s at least like four or five times I’m seeing don’t do moral relativism.

Caleb laughs and says:

Totally! And since now we’re in a more professional setting, right? You can let that go. I do that for pedagogical reasons. I try to sway students away from relativism because its too easy for them to, like I said, make the mistake of thinking that ethics is a matter of taste. That is one view. And now, now that you’re out of the class if you want to take that view, you’re free to and that’s fine, I won’t hold it against you…it’s just I also want students to pay attention to the fact that even if you can’t settle ethical questions about what’s right or wrong with empirical data from say chemists or physicists or biologists, there still are standards of reasonableness that are appropriate to moral claims, like just as a matter of argumentation […]

I believe most of these remarks (especially the bolded section) speak for themselves. I find this an alarming attitude for an instructor to take: to actively seek to cultivate a specific philosophical position among students.

I don’t think this is a good way to teach students about metaethics. The way Caleb describes the way he teaches this course is that he tries to suppress the inclinations some students initially have by repeatedly and actively discouraging these views. By saying he wouldn’t hold it against you if you held the view outside the class, he even implies he would hold it against you if you held such a view in the class!

Also, “I won’t hold it against you,” is one of those rhetorical remarks that can be expressed in the manner of a jest and may explicitly say one thing when in fact it pragmatically implies the opposite, much as if someone were to say “I’m not saying you’re stupid but…,” when a person says this, this is often a polite way of saying “you’re stupid.” By explicitly stating the opposite in a jocular tone, they would have plausible deniability. I suspect Caleb would hold it against someone if they endorsed relativism inside or outside the classroom. What do you think? (In all seriousness, I do want to know what you think: am I reading too much into this?)

3.0 Should instructors take a stance?

Ideally, instructors should typically try to minimize their bias towards particular views in philosophy classes, especially in freshman classes. I say “typically,” because I don’t always or uniformly think teachers should be completely unbiased or hide their perspective. I don’t know precisely how to navigate when and where it’s appropriate to reveal or even go out of one’s way to express a partisan stance towards one or another philosophical views, and I don’t know how Caleb handles the topic in the classroom with more detail, but I do worry that relativism isn’t being treated fairly. If you have a perspective on the matter, I’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re an instructor (though I’d be interested in hearing anyone’s perspective). When is it permissible (or good) for teachers to take a stance on instructional material when the topic in question is a matter of dispute?

Speaking for myself, I’ve taught a number of courses where the topic of moral realism and antirealism comes up, and I rarely share my views. I go out of my way to defend moral realism against misunderstandings and misrepresentations. When metaethics comes up, I don’t try to tell students which position they ought to hold in any explicit sort of way, and I certainly don’t hold it against them or say the sorts of things that would lead someone to write, repeatedly, in their notes, “no moral realism!” Quite the contrary.

One of my favorite students was an open and enthusiastic advocate of moral realism. Since many students weren’t, and the class focused heavily on discussion, the positions they took and the arguments they made served as an excellent challenge to other students. I respect and admire students who hold views contrary to my own, and I am especially delighted when I do express my own views and students disagree with me. Classrooms aren’t just about teaching course content. Students should be encouraged, not to be disrespectful, but willing to disagree with their instructors.

Even so, I can’t hold it against someone too much for teaching what they believe to be the case. If you genuinely believe a particular position is foolish or misguided or wrong, perhaps a degree of bias against that view is warranted, all else being equal.

4.0 Teaching relativism poorly

My main issue is not that people are biased against antirealism/relativism or teaching students that antirealist/relativist views are wrong. It’s that typically I think their reasons for thinking this are quite bad. Moral relativism, and antirealist positions in general, are routinely misrepresented and frequently the target of what you could call “first wave” or “initial” objections, which are framed without any acknowledgement that antirealists can and do respond to these criticisms. What I mean is this. Take some view like metaethical relativism. There will be a kind of opening salvo directed against the view:

(1) Relativism is counterintuitive.

(2) Relativism can’t explain moral progress.

(3) If relativism were true, then moral reformers like abolitionists or MLK were doing something immoral.

These objections might work. How might relativists respond? Students often won’t know, because instruction ends here. They’re simply told that these views are wrong, have glaring and obvious objections, and that it’s time to move on.

These are initial objections. Initial objections are the opening salvo in ongoing dialectics. The standard first moves, like your typical openings in chess. Even if you have a very strong opening, there are defenses available. Sometimes these are also standardized. When this occurs, presenting just step 1 is a bit misleading. There’s already an established, choreographed dance between opposing sides, and you’re only showing one side’s dance moves. In other cases, it takes only a bit of imagination to consider how a critic might respond, even if it hasn’t become part of the canon. Here’s a response to objections (1)-(3) above.

Response to (1): Relativism is counterintuitive

This claim lacks specificity. Counterintuitive to who? Some people may very well find moral relativism intuitive, or at least not find moral realism intuitive. This may be best construed as an empirical question, and, if so, we should go have a look at the empirical data. Incidentally, if lots of students are reporting an initial inclination towards relativism/antirealism, it’s a bit odd to insist it’s “counterintuitive” to them. The opposite may be true.

As it happens, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people have “realist intuitions.” I’ve been over this on my blog so many times I won’t even bother to reiterate the same points. You can find ample articles covering this topic on my blog if you’re interested. Here’s the tl;dr: I’m a moral psychologist that has spent the past decade focusing primarily on the psychology of metaethics, and in particular the question of whether most people have realist intuitions. There’s a growing number of studies that address this question. We have yet to find any compelling evidence most people are moral realists or have realist intuitions and the best available studies lend little support to such notions.

Response to (2): Relativism can’t explain moral progress

This is only true if one construes “progress” to mean “progress with respect to nonrelative standards.” As a relativist, moral progress is possible relative to a moral standard. If you’re an agent cultural relativist, you can make moral progress by better aligning your own actions in accord with the standards of your culture. If you’re an appraiser individual relativist, you can judge people and societies as having made more or less progress by the degree to which their standards conform to your own moral standards. Progress is not a challenge for relativists/subjectivists to deal with; they can simply offer conceptions of progress consistent with relativism.

If this seems like a stretch, consider how we already employ the notion of progress in relative terms all the time. People set their own goals, such as exercise goals, educational goals, getting better at playing a musical instrument, and so on. Can you make progress on these goals? You bet. But whether your music or art or cooking is “better” is a matter we might readily think of as depending on our subjective values or the values of those around us. There are better and worse ways of cooking food and playing the guitar, and while there are objective facts about what factors cause people to appraise food and music as better, the ultimate standard of what constitutes good or bad food or music is our preferences. Philosophers love to point out what’s obvious or intuitive. Is it not obvious and intuitive that we can make progress in these domains? And if we can make progress in relativistic terms outside of morality, why would we insist it’s somehow impossible to do so in morality unless we make an exception for morality by presupposing that progress would only be possible if nonrelative? And wouldn’t that just beg the question against the relativist? And wouldn’t it just trivialize the claim that progress isn’t possible for relativism? After all, it would amount to saying:

“Views according to which moral facts are relative cannot consistently maintain that changes could occur whereby people or societies’ actions are more in line with nonrelative moral facts.”

Well, obviously not, because such views deny that there are nonrelative moral facts. But this is trivial. It’s a logical entailment of relativism. This is no objection, any more than it’s an objection to triangles to point out that they don’t have four sides.

Response to (3): If relativism were true, then moral reformers like abolitionists or MLK were doing something immoral

The idea behind this objection is something like this. If morality is determined by the predominant values of a society, then whenever subpopulations within that society challenge or attempt to overturn the values of that society, they are encouraging moral values that are at odds with the established moral standards of that society. And since the established moral standards of that society determine what is right or wrong, any moral standards that conflict with those standards are themselves immoral.

This might work as a decent objection to very crude forms of cultural relativism. However, there are a number of problems with this objection.

First, note that a common objection to moral realism is the argument from moral disagreement: we observe lots of moral disagreements, and we seem unable to resolve them. This suggests that there may be no way to resolve them, which can be explained by the hypothesis that there is no single, stance-independent fact of the matter about what’s morally right or wrong.

One response realists often make is to argue that many apparent moral disagreements are actually the result of disagreements about nonmoral facts. For instance, we may come across a society that executes people for witchcraft. We might regard this as immoral, but why? Suppose the common belief in this society is that witches cast curses that cause famine, leading to thousands of deaths. If this were true, executing witches becomes a far more understandable practice. But if witchcraft isn’t real, then the people in this society would be executing people for no reason. It could be that the people who want to stop them only do so because they don’t think witches are real, while the people carrying out the executions only do so because they think witches are real. If both parties could agree about whether there were witches or not, they’d both agree on what to do: execute, or not execute. These societies don’t disagree on what we morally should or shouldn’t do in abstract terms; they just disagree on the nonmoral facts and thus disagree on how to comply with the same set of moral standards.

Realists who make such arguments may be right. I’d hesitate to say they are right or are making a good point, because I don’t know the extent to which moral disagreements are the result of differences in moral values, or are instead the result of differences in nonmoral beliefs. As I never get tired of saying, that’s an empirical question.

Why did I digress to address this objection to realism and a common realist response? Because that same response can equip proponents of relativism to respond to criticisms of their views. The moral reformers can make the following point:

We are not proposing a change in the fundamental moral standards of our society. Instead, we are pointing to inconsistency, hypocrisy, and mistaken beliefs about the nonmoral facts. The bigots in our society who mistreat women, or racial minorities, do so out of mistaken beliefs about the differences between these groups and themselves. In showing that they are mistaken about these nonmoral beliefs, we are trying to get them to realize that their bigotry and mistreatment of others is not the result of a difference in moral values, but ignorance on their part.

In other words, the reformers could argue that they are operating within the shared moral values of the society they are in, and are arguing that the oppression, mistreatment, and so on that they object to isn’t primarily the result of different moral values but false nonmoral beliefs.

How persuasive is this? I don’t know. Probably lots of people do just have repugnant moral values. At least I think they do. My point isn’t that this response decisively rebuts the moral reformer objection to moral relativism. My point is that moral relativists have a reasonable intellectual space in which they can maneuver in response to objections to their position.

Moral relativists could also point out the following:

(1) These objections only apply to certain forms of cultural relativism, but don’t apply to relativism at the individual level.

(2) These objections don’t work very well (if at all) against appraiser relativism. Critics of relativism often only focus on agent relativism, but fail to mention the agent/appraiser distinction or even address it.

As such, the reformer objections only provides a very narrow critique of certain kinds of relativism, anyway, even if it were an effective objection. But I suspect you’d be unlikely to be told this in a classroom. Cultural relativism and individual relativism are often smashed together, with little if any discussion of the agent/appraiser distinction or other nuances one might take when it comes to endorsing a relativistic view of morality.

5.0 Conclusion

Some may doubt that objections to relativism are this bad. I am confident that they often are. If you want an example of poor handling of relativism, see this post where I discuss how relativism is handled by an academic book on bioethics that dives into metaethics. I believe this is a systemic problem that occurs in textbooks, articles, classrooms, and elsewhere.

I suspect that there’s a general and unjustified animus towards relativism and moral antirealism and I think this has resulted in a self-perpetuating cycle: students are taught that relativism is stupid and terrible. This impacts how they themselves perceive metaethics. Those inclined towards such views are, I’d predict, less likely to pursue careers that would put them in a position to teach metaethics, or are persuaded early in their careers by instructors who aren’t laying out the metaethical landscape fairly but are taking a biased, partisan, and even openly hostile stance towards relativism and moral antirealism.

I’ll be going over other examples in subsequent posts. I’m not yet in a position to conduct an empirical study to evaluate the frequency with which this sort of thing occurs, but it’d be nice to do something like that as well. For now, I’ll have to rely on the examples I see and, hopefully, the examples others who come across this and other posts provide.

Whether you agree or disagree with what I’ve said here, I would really like to hear from my readers on this one. Do you agree or disagree with my claims? What have your experiences in college been like? If you teach and moral relativism comes up in your classes, how do you handle it?