The Normative Nuremberg Defense

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Metaethical relativism is a position on the nature of moral truth. A simplified version is that the truth of ordinary moral claims is indexical, such that the truth of any given moral claim can only be judged relative to one or another set of moral standards. This involves two theses:

Semantic thesis
When people make moral claims, those claims are propositions which contain an implicit indexical element. This indexicality allows the truth of those claims to vary depending on which set of moral values those claims are made relative to, e.g. their personal moral standards, those of their culture, etc.

Metaphysical thesis
Insofar as the meaning of moral claims is fixed by their ordinary usage, moral truths consist in the relation between these claims and the respective standards to which those claims are relativized.

Note that the claim that moral truth claims contain an implicit indexical element describes the world. It tells us what is the case. It doesn’t recommend, prescribe, or encourage us to adopt relativism.

Despite this, some critics of relativism (and of moral antirealism) moralize endorsement of relativism. Relativism is either true or false regardless of whether we want it to be true or prefer it to be the case. Ironically, whether relativism is true is itself not true in a relative respect. Unless, of course, you’re a relativist about relativism, but I doubt most critics of relativism are. It certainly isn’t part of metaethical relativism that it is itself only true in a relative sense.

This is why it’s very strange that even professional philosophers such as Jason Brennan have argued that endorsing moral relativism is evil. Specifically, Brennan argued the following in a Facebook comment some years ago:

1. It is evil to think that whether the holocaust was good or bad for you depends upon whether you like it or approve of it.

2. Some people subscribe to meta-ethical theories which imply that whether the holocaust was good or bad depends upon whether they like it or approve of it.

3. So some people are evil.

This makes no sense. Whether relativism is true or not is a matter of how ordinary people use words. Correctly recognizing how they use them couldn’t reasonably make you evil. This makes about as much sense as thinking it’s evil to think the word “motherfucker” is an insult.

A related line of objection psychologizes advocacy for relativism by proposing that there are incentives to adopt the view independent of a sincere and unbiased belief that it’s simply true. Christian Gonzalez has expressed such a view here:

@cxgonzalezascend #philosophy #spirituality

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It’s gotta be so nice to be a moral subjectivist. It just gets you off the hook. Like ‘No, the only thing that I should be doing is whatever I want.’ Like what in the 11-year-old ass philosophy is that. No like I want…I should have ice cream because I want it. Like dog, no. There’s some things that are good for you and some things that are bad for you and it doesn’t matter what you think about it.

Moral subjectivism doesn’t “get you off the hook” any more than realism does. Moral subjectivists have moral standards, and they can live up to them or fail to live up to them just like a moral realist.

Nothing about subjectivism entails that a subjectivist believes or is committed to thinking that you can do “whatever you want.” And in practice, this is almost never the case. People have principles they are stubbornly committed to. They can no more change these on a whim than we can change our food preferences, music preferences, or sexual orientation merely because we feel like it. Human psychology doesn’t work that way.

Preference doesn’t mean “under total volitional control.” It doesn’t mean “whim.” My values as an antirealist are not whimsy. I take them as seriously as realists do.

Furthermore, moral realism is vulnerable to the parallel charge that it can allow its proponent to get off the hook. Here’s how. A moral realist could hold absolutely atrocious moral views, but then insist that because those views are true independent of their own values and preferences, it’s not their fault morality is the way that it is. For instance, a devout Catholic may insist that eternal conscious torment in hell is a just and appropriate punishment. If you balk at this and insist ETC is evil, they can throw up their hands and say:

I sympathize, but it’s outside my control. I don’t endorse ETC because I like it, but because it’s true that it’s the objectively correct punishment.

Moral realism allows for what we can call the Normative Nuremberg defense. The traditional Nuremberg defense is to insist that you should not be judged (or judged as harshly) for actions because you were “following orders.”

A moral realist could endorse or even commit any atrocity, then insist that because it’s stance-independently correct, that therefore it simply doesn’t matter how horrifying you find it: the action was justified, even morally righteous.

Moral realists can thus likewise let themselves off the hook: they can always emotionally and personally distance themselves from their moral commitments, and thereby take no responsibility for them.

There are other issues with Christian’s remark. One is that it implies (without him outright stating) that perhaps people endorse subjectivism/relativism because it gets them off the hook. This is a tendentious and uncharitable empirical notion for which I doubt Christian has any substantive evidence.

Christian may also not endorse such a claim, but even if he doesn’t, he still has a responsibility not to say things that could reasonably be expected to cause his audience to draw such inferences, and I think this is a case of this. Making subjectivists out to be intellectually dishonest people who adopt positions to evade moral responsibility is not a very nice thing to do if you aren’t able or willing to back this suggestion up.

Disparaging the position as being childish is also usually not the best way to handle rival positions, unless you have a good case for the view being childish, which I don’t think Christian does.