I think I’ve had a different path to relativism than the ones you mention. My relativism doesn’t need anyone to “say” what’s right and wrong, or a conception of “law”, or even rest on people’s “approval” of things. My relativism just falls out of boring old utilitarianism.
In your drawing of Frenchie and Lily Belle, you left out something important for the utilitarian. What’s wrong is not the bare fact that someone’s hands were in some place - it’s that some of the people involved *wanted* the hands *not* to be in that place. I think that what makes things right or wrong is whether or not they promote the interests of the people that are affected. But then there’s the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons. Even if everyone has their own utility scale, there doesn’t seem to be a fact of how units on one scale translate to units on the other scale. And *that’s* where the relativism comes in.
Every way of trading off utility increments on different people’s scales (where everyone’s scale gets positive weight) is a stance. Being right or wrong depends on whether the net result on the stance is positive or negative. There is nothing that makes one stance the objectively correct way to trade off the interests of the infinitely many beings in the universe that have interests.
This is an interesting view, but it's not relativism. There doesn't seem to be any stance-dependence going on; rather, there's just lots of indeterminacy. I'm inclined to think that it's false, but the reason I think it's false is not the reason I think that relativism is false. I think your view is false because I think interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible; I think relativism is false because it makes right and wrong depend on the speaker's or the agent's or the appraiser's stances.
I enjoyed the discussion about stance-dependence and independence but, while I’m sure you haven’t mistaken the definition of relativism, I just don’t think most “relativists” ascribe to that definition (they are averse to that sort of thing). I think people, most of them not glue-guzzlers, attempt when they are about five, when they first begin to think questions about other minds are trivial and hardly worth asking (false belief video), to define the world outside themselves by guessing, as it were, the crayons of good and bad in every box. Lots of things are simple. Behind the doors of one action, a world blood-red. Behind the garden gates, the verdant greens. Somewhere in the bottom drawer of a cubicle you have to search from 9 to 5, the musty green of paper money.
Lots of things in life have vibrant color, so we can see them clearly, not to say we always treat them rightly. These are the sorts of things moral theories start from. Perfect little tea parties.
People tend to grow out of that mode when they go through experiences so complex they just don’t know, standing there in the midst of it, neither by prediction or by hindsight, what to ascribe to that situation. Most of these situations are so resoundingly gray at every scale that the idea of moral color doesn’t even seem relevant. Crayons and candles are both wax. They make shit versions of each other, but one can imagine the other. Something you’ve said before describes the way people escape that moral paralysis is usually by innate reaction, acting say toward a drowning or injured person by rendering care immediately, rather than calculating the moral payout, probably taking on the character of their environment and personal experience more than any objective approach.
I think most relativists, though now I’m just speaking about people who might end a long vent with a friend with “well, you know, its all relative”, who as you say, have moral anxieties and “want to be agreeable and chill”, don’t really think about things in terms of stance-dependence but rather as an “I don’t know, who am I to say?” That stance is much closer to the distant meta theory they suggest. Although, you’re absolutely right that, wielded as a theory they want others to adopt, becomes normative, and when communicated, takes on this surface of stance-dependence as a way to coordinate its followers.
The different things in minds and cultures are not so different from crayons and candles. They make shit versions of each other, but one can imagine— it’s all wax. So people learn to let the one with the fairy wings wave the wand, and the one with the top hat go mad. And when they’re older they let those with structure pretend there’s some hidden objective order. And when they are older they see that, actually, yes, there is some value in that, and maybe morality isn’t much like money, where one can print out pleasure and punish all pain and by the log of all the frolic and flogging measure out just how right something is. That maybe life is a bit bigger than what we can understand, and that is exactly what makes it priceless.
Very interesting. So I think seeing morality in terms of shades of gray and thinking "I don't know, who am I to say?" isn't itself relativism, but your point, if I'm reading you right, is that this is the kind of attitude that often leads people to accept relativism, or that gets expressed as acceptance of relativism. That's good! (Or, rather, your point is good; relativism sucks ;-) I do think this happens a lot in philosophy -- that certain views are easily statable and understandable, and they tend to be stronger "attractors" for people with more nebulous intuitions than theories which are a little harder to grok.
Really sharp dissection of the normative vs meta-ethical confusion. The forground/background hypothesis rings especially true, relativism gets coded as meta-ethical precisely becuase it operates at the level of discursive norms that people take for granted in debates. The college seminar dynamic you describe captures exactly why people default to it without examining whether it actualy solves any philosophical problems.
Excellent question! Non-naturalism has normative implications -- centrally, the one you mention, and this very fact has made it a target for criticism by philosophers like Max Hayward and Matt Bedke. But it's ALSO a meta-ethical theory, because it takes a stand on the metaphysics of moral properties, the reference of moral concepts/terms. Relativism needn't do that. It says nothing about the nature of moral properties or the reference of moral terms. There can be non-naturalist relativists, naturalist ones, expressivist relativists, quietist ones, etc.
You say that relativism doesn't say that approval is wrong-making. Yes, I grant that in the post. I think that this is a distinction without a major difference. There might similarly be a Scanlon-style contractualist theory that says that the only principle one couldn't reasonably reject is utilitarianism, and that utilitarianism is the theory that tells you what makes actions right or wrong. But I don't think that means that the contractualist part is therefore a meta-ethical claim. Or again, just have a look at the rule-utilitarianism --> deontology example in the post.
The manner of explanation of the dependence of rightness on the non-natural property of rightness is very different. The explanation here isn't a domain-specific, ethical one. It's a domain-general truth-making explanation -- "A is wrong" is alleged to be made true by A's having the non-natural property of wrongness, just as "A is red" is alleged to be made true by A's having the property of redness. I can say more later...in a bit of a rush now.
I think I’ve had a different path to relativism than the ones you mention. My relativism doesn’t need anyone to “say” what’s right and wrong, or a conception of “law”, or even rest on people’s “approval” of things. My relativism just falls out of boring old utilitarianism.
In your drawing of Frenchie and Lily Belle, you left out something important for the utilitarian. What’s wrong is not the bare fact that someone’s hands were in some place - it’s that some of the people involved *wanted* the hands *not* to be in that place. I think that what makes things right or wrong is whether or not they promote the interests of the people that are affected. But then there’s the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons. Even if everyone has their own utility scale, there doesn’t seem to be a fact of how units on one scale translate to units on the other scale. And *that’s* where the relativism comes in.
Every way of trading off utility increments on different people’s scales (where everyone’s scale gets positive weight) is a stance. Being right or wrong depends on whether the net result on the stance is positive or negative. There is nothing that makes one stance the objectively correct way to trade off the interests of the infinitely many beings in the universe that have interests.
This is an interesting view, but it's not relativism. There doesn't seem to be any stance-dependence going on; rather, there's just lots of indeterminacy. I'm inclined to think that it's false, but the reason I think it's false is not the reason I think that relativism is false. I think your view is false because I think interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible; I think relativism is false because it makes right and wrong depend on the speaker's or the agent's or the appraiser's stances.
I enjoyed the discussion about stance-dependence and independence but, while I’m sure you haven’t mistaken the definition of relativism, I just don’t think most “relativists” ascribe to that definition (they are averse to that sort of thing). I think people, most of them not glue-guzzlers, attempt when they are about five, when they first begin to think questions about other minds are trivial and hardly worth asking (false belief video), to define the world outside themselves by guessing, as it were, the crayons of good and bad in every box. Lots of things are simple. Behind the doors of one action, a world blood-red. Behind the garden gates, the verdant greens. Somewhere in the bottom drawer of a cubicle you have to search from 9 to 5, the musty green of paper money.
Lots of things in life have vibrant color, so we can see them clearly, not to say we always treat them rightly. These are the sorts of things moral theories start from. Perfect little tea parties.
People tend to grow out of that mode when they go through experiences so complex they just don’t know, standing there in the midst of it, neither by prediction or by hindsight, what to ascribe to that situation. Most of these situations are so resoundingly gray at every scale that the idea of moral color doesn’t even seem relevant. Crayons and candles are both wax. They make shit versions of each other, but one can imagine the other. Something you’ve said before describes the way people escape that moral paralysis is usually by innate reaction, acting say toward a drowning or injured person by rendering care immediately, rather than calculating the moral payout, probably taking on the character of their environment and personal experience more than any objective approach.
I think most relativists, though now I’m just speaking about people who might end a long vent with a friend with “well, you know, its all relative”, who as you say, have moral anxieties and “want to be agreeable and chill”, don’t really think about things in terms of stance-dependence but rather as an “I don’t know, who am I to say?” That stance is much closer to the distant meta theory they suggest. Although, you’re absolutely right that, wielded as a theory they want others to adopt, becomes normative, and when communicated, takes on this surface of stance-dependence as a way to coordinate its followers.
The different things in minds and cultures are not so different from crayons and candles. They make shit versions of each other, but one can imagine— it’s all wax. So people learn to let the one with the fairy wings wave the wand, and the one with the top hat go mad. And when they’re older they let those with structure pretend there’s some hidden objective order. And when they are older they see that, actually, yes, there is some value in that, and maybe morality isn’t much like money, where one can print out pleasure and punish all pain and by the log of all the frolic and flogging measure out just how right something is. That maybe life is a bit bigger than what we can understand, and that is exactly what makes it priceless.
Very interesting. So I think seeing morality in terms of shades of gray and thinking "I don't know, who am I to say?" isn't itself relativism, but your point, if I'm reading you right, is that this is the kind of attitude that often leads people to accept relativism, or that gets expressed as acceptance of relativism. That's good! (Or, rather, your point is good; relativism sucks ;-) I do think this happens a lot in philosophy -- that certain views are easily statable and understandable, and they tend to be stronger "attractors" for people with more nebulous intuitions than theories which are a little harder to grok.
Really sharp dissection of the normative vs meta-ethical confusion. The forground/background hypothesis rings especially true, relativism gets coded as meta-ethical precisely becuase it operates at the level of discursive norms that people take for granted in debates. The college seminar dynamic you describe captures exactly why people default to it without examining whether it actualy solves any philosophical problems.
Thanks! Yeah, I knew that my time interacting with other human beings would pay off...eventually. ;-)
Excellent question! Non-naturalism has normative implications -- centrally, the one you mention, and this very fact has made it a target for criticism by philosophers like Max Hayward and Matt Bedke. But it's ALSO a meta-ethical theory, because it takes a stand on the metaphysics of moral properties, the reference of moral concepts/terms. Relativism needn't do that. It says nothing about the nature of moral properties or the reference of moral terms. There can be non-naturalist relativists, naturalist ones, expressivist relativists, quietist ones, etc.
You say that relativism doesn't say that approval is wrong-making. Yes, I grant that in the post. I think that this is a distinction without a major difference. There might similarly be a Scanlon-style contractualist theory that says that the only principle one couldn't reasonably reject is utilitarianism, and that utilitarianism is the theory that tells you what makes actions right or wrong. But I don't think that means that the contractualist part is therefore a meta-ethical claim. Or again, just have a look at the rule-utilitarianism --> deontology example in the post.
The manner of explanation of the dependence of rightness on the non-natural property of rightness is very different. The explanation here isn't a domain-specific, ethical one. It's a domain-general truth-making explanation -- "A is wrong" is alleged to be made true by A's having the non-natural property of wrongness, just as "A is red" is alleged to be made true by A's having the property of redness. I can say more later...in a bit of a rush now.