By GENE HOWINGTON
I had in interesting argument the other night. Not interesting because of the content precisely. It was old ground about the rationale for being in Iraq and Afghanistan and this person took the position of the post hoc rationalization “to contain Iran” and that – and this was a new one, funny but new – that our reason for being there was based on our need as driven by the hostage crisis of the 70′s. It wasn’t a match against a skilled opponent. He was about as smart and skilled at argumentation as a house plant and that is really an insult to house plants. But what was interesting was when the topic turned to the idea of just wars and ethical relativism. I’ll summarize the just war argument to give some context and then show how ethical relativism came into the conversation because it got me thinking about ethical relativism (and its natural cousin moral relativism). Is it a good idea or a path to anarchy?
Summary of the just war argument:
A’s Primary Contention: We went to war in Iraq to contain Iran because we’re on a 70′s style revenge mission for the hostage taking. (Ed. Note: Seriously. That was the claim.)
B’s Primary Contention: The rationale given the public for invading Iraq was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In the end, there were no WMDs, no support of terrorism, and the Iraqis were a lot better off before we removed the only stabilizing force holding their secular country together and destroyed their infrastructure. The just war would have been to attack those who attacked us on 9/11, the Saudis with help from Afghani terrorist training bases. It would have given us the same benefits as invading Iraq (oil, common border with Iran) and come at a substantially lower cost to materials and troops when combined with an in and out strategy in Afghanistan (which history has proven to be fairly immune to long term occupation because of geographic and societal factors).
A: There is no such thing as a just war. Name one.
B: I can name two. American entry into WWII and the Revolutionary War come to mind, but there are other examples of just war through history.
A: We went to war to make rich men richer.
B: Really. And that is a reason to wage war that is just?
A: I haven’t heard the term “just war” since Medieval History class. You’re a (*#$#($*#head.
B: That’s all very interesting but I think you don’t know what a just war is. %$*($%$.
A: I know there is no such thing.
B: I can think of a couple of examples. Coming to the defense of your allies in the face of outside aggression, in defense of attack or in retribution of an attack by foreign forces.
A: There’s no such thing as a just war. Just depends on your perspective.
B: No. It doesn’t. There are some ethical absolutes.
A: No there aren’t.
B: Saying there aren’t and proving there aren’t are two separate things.
A: You *()$(#)($#) $)#$()#$ ()$#$!
B: That’s still not proving there aren’t, )($#)()@head. Are there are are there no ethical absolutes? Yes or no.
A: That’s a stupid question.
B: It’s not stupid just because you can’t answer it. It’s a simple question.
[Much back and forth of “stupid” and/or ($#_)#@$#% combined with a rebuttal of “non-responsive, try again”.]
A: People make ethical judgements all the time.
B: That’s not what I asked. Are there ethical absolutes or not?
A: Have your ethics changed over time?
B: Yes they have but that is irrelevant to the question here: are there ethical absolutes or not?
A: You’ve got nothing!
B: You saying I’ve got nothing is not the same as you proving I’ve got nothing. Are you an ethical relativist?
A: Give me an example of an ethical absolute.
B: Human life has value. Protecting it is a good thing.
A: That’s true, but I just want to see some people die.
B: Then you are an ethical relativist and we really don’t have much more to discuss.
A: You’re jumping to conclusions.
B: No I’m not. If human life has value except when you “want to see someone die”, then you are an ethical relativist.
The rest of the conversation was basically A drunkenly ranting about how I (B) didn’t know $*(# and that he had me just where he wanted me (on my knees) before he called me a little girl and proclaimed victory. I was very not impressed. I’d say it was embarrassing for him, but he proudly proclaimed that “ignorance was not a problem for him” and that he thought “retrograde drunken Neanderthal” was a compliment. But I digress . . .
It all got me thinking about ethical relativism though.
What is ethical relativism? It is the philosophical theory stating that ethics are relative to the norms of one’s culture; whether an action is right or wrong depends on the ethical and moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. There are no universal ethical or moral standards and the only standards against which a society’s practices can be judged are its own. The implication of this is there can be no common framework for resolving moral disputes or for reaching agreement on ethical matters among members of different cultures. We know from history that this is not the case. Some acts are considered to by universally wrong or right among the human species. Most ethicists reject ethical relativism because while the practices of societies may differ, the fundamental ethical and moral principles underlying these practices do not. Consider cultures where euthanasia is practiced like some Eskimo tribes when parents declare they are ready to die because of old age or illness, their families would kill them directly or leave them on the ice to die at the hands of nature. This would be frowned upon in our culture, but if you look at the underlying principle – taking care of one’s parents – both societies hold this principle as valuable.
Secondly, it’s an important topic because a kind of ethical relativism is encouraged in law schools under the guise of giving all comers adequate representation and ensuring a fair trial. It’s also something you see more often now in public behavior than in the past: rationalizations of bad behavior based on personal desire rather than ethical or moral principle. “I wanted to feel what killing someone felt like,” said 17 year old killer of 9 year old Elizabeth Olten. Truly a sign of someone with a broken ethical compass probably based in mental illness, but it illustrates the first problem with ethical relativism. It injects ego into the equation.
Consequently and concurrently we cannot remove ego from the equation altogether. If the ethical rightness or wrongness of an action depends on a societal norms, then the logical implication is that to be ethical that one must obey the norms of one’s society because deviance would be unethical or immoral. This leads to an interesting conundrum. If a member of a society that believes that racial or sexist practices are ethically wrong but they are permissible within that society, then one must accept those practices as morally right. This view is both oppressive and narrow in promoting unthinking social conformity and leaves no possibility for ethical and/or moral reform or improvement within a society. Consider that a lack of uniform majority though on a matter may not have created an ethical or moral standard to follow with the members of a society holding different views. Consider the example of the United States. Need I say more than “abortion” or “animal testing” or “medical marijuana” to provide examples of such unsettled ethical questions?
One of the strongest arguments against ethical relativism comes from the assertion that universal ethical and/or moral standards can exist even if some practices and beliefs vary among cultures. In other words, it is possible to acknowledge cultural differences and still find that some of these practices and beliefs are wrong. Consider that although the Aztec had a society that was in some ways more advanced that their contemporary European counterparts, that their practice of human sacrifice is simply wrong. Just so, the barbaric treatment of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped by Nazi society is ethically and morally reprehensible regardless of the beliefs of the Nazis. Ethics are an intellectual inquiry into right and wrong through applying critical thought to the underlying reasons of various ethical and/or moral practices and beliefs. Ethical relativism fails to recognize that some societies may have better reasons for holding their views than other societies.
However, although ethical relativism has much going against it, it does remind us to examine and consider that different societies have different ethical and/or moral beliefs and invites us to examine those forces influence within our own culture. The only way to reach universal ethical truths whenever possible is through examining and challenging our own ethical systems by comparing them to other systems.
Can ethical relativism lead to anarchy? When everything is relative, there are no true stable standards, so I think the answer is yes.
Should ethical relativism be discouraged in our educational systems and society as a whole or do you teach it with the proper caveats and perspective to make it a useful tool instead of a dangerous tool?
Is ethical relativism a good thing or a bag thing?
Or is it like most tools dependent upon the user’s intent and application?
What do you think?
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I’m thinking it can lead to a revolution.
Hm. Pardon me for subscribing to both. I hope this makes sense, I don’t have much time to edit.
I think humans have, pressured by a natural urge to reproduce, evolved an innate sense of what is fair, and what is not. Unlike other social animals this helps us avoid being exploited (and therefore sidelined in reproduction like most dogs in pack or horses in a herd). We know when we haven’t gotten our fair share of the kill (literally or metaphorically), we know when somebody is unfairly favored by the strong, we know when bullies need to be punished, when subjects are mistreated by their kings, and on and on. I think that sense of fairness crosses all cultural boundaries, and is the absolute substrate by which behavior is judged.
However, many houses can be built upon the same foundation, and I think culture does build many such houses.
Just as body-language researchers have found some facial expressions universal, what triggers them is frequently heavily dependent upon culture. Some cultures find slapstick funny, others find it boring or even repellent to laugh at pain or injury.
The same idea applies to ethics; precisely what constitutes “fair” can depend upon education and understanding of short, medium and long term consequences. In a primitive culture the idea that gathering wood for a fire should be treated as a “theft” of property would be considered unethical, in a culture that honors land property rights, punishing such behavior can seem obviously ethical — even the garbage on a person’s land is not free for the taking without the owner’s express permission.
In that sense, ethics are relative to the norms of the culture, because as children we are indoctrinated with different views of exactly what is fair, and why, and we accept those as given or necessary. As presented, they sound like they meet the test of fairness, and most people do not hear and do not self-invent the logical counter-argument.
As one example, if one is raised in a culture that believes women are mentally inferior to men, and everywhere one looks they see only men engaged in intellectual pursuit and women abstaining from it, it can seem fair to believe that propaganda and treat women as subordinate to male rule. It just never occurs to most people that those roles are self-perpetuating and the result of a circular argument. Their ethics are a result of indoctrination since infancy. And relative to their culture, even though their innate sense of fairness remains intact; it is misinformed.
Add, “it is misinformed and produces an outcome a better informed culture would consider unethical.”
I think that there are ethical standards that are innately applicable to all humanity. That some standards change from culture to culture represents the confluence of many factors across the socio/economic spectrum. More importantly though, the problem seems to me to stem from the fact that we are the first animal to be able to control our own evolution. Mammals generally don’t kill members of their own species for instance, with innate instincts of surrender and acceptance ending contests of status. Our larger brain has gone past the stricture of this basic instinct and allows us to override them as can our cousins in evolution like Chimpanzees. Since evolution eventually “decrees” the continuance, or extinction of any species, we will either socially evolve enough to come to more or less universally agree on those ethical absolutes, or we will face extinction. I won’t define what should be transcendental ethical standards, but the will ultimately derive from the “fairness” of which Tony speaks.
Can’t imagine why you didn’t have this intellectually satisfying conversation with your “You’re a (*#$#($*#head.” acquaintance.
As to the Iran justification, remember McCain’s Bomb, bomb Iran mantra? If you do then you might also remember that his words were in response to an audience member’s question regarding military action in Iran during a campaign appearance in Murrells Inlet, S.C. in early 2007.
The Iran Hostage bell had been quietly rung by the Bush administration during the lead up to invading Iraq to appeal directly to that sense of revenge. Doesn’t matter if it made little sense, it was part of the very successful propaganda campaign that began within a week of 9/11. And, if the words of your acquaintance are to be believed, would still work today.
“Among the most elementary of moral trusisms is the principle of universality: we must apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, if not more stringent ones. It is a remarkable comment on Western intellectual culture that this principle is so often ignored and, if occasionally mentioned, condemned as outrageous. This is particularly shameful on the part of those who flaunt their Christian piety, and therefore have presumably at least heard of the definition of the hypocrite in the Gospels.” — Noam Chomsky, Failed States (2006).
“Rhetoric is always uplifting, and we are enjoined to admire the sincerity of those who produce it, even when they act in ways that recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that the United States was able to exterminate the Indian race … without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.” — Noam Chomsky, Failed States
” … war hysteria is continuous and universal in [the United States], and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners … are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” — George Orwell, from “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” in 1984
In the United States today, ethical judgments all depend on who does what to whom. Certainly relative and not the least bit universal.
Money makes Might and Might makes Right.
Or, as the Chinese say: “The quiet coughing of one rich man is louder than the braying of a thousand paupers.”
Ethical relativism explained.
First off: as a basis for debate, the verbal construction “… the rationale for being in Iraq and Afghanistan…” contains both a useful term — “rationale” — as well as a vapid euphemism – “being in,” which rather serve to cancel each other and muddy the intellectual water, so to speak.
“Rationale” certainly does describe the after-the-fact attempt to justify what has already happened, which dialectical gambit avoids the ethical and political question of whether it ought to have happened and/or should continue happening. But the gerund phrase “being in” says nothing of substance since it could apply to anyone actually in Iraq or Afghanistan for any reason whatsoever — like the people who live there, for instance. I suggest that the phrase “invading and occupying” would more clearly have delineated the relevant question as well as helped to identify the morally culpable actors. Henceforth let us speak clearly of “invading and occupying” foreign countries instead of blandly “being in” them. Similarly, let us speak of “killing” people instead of “taking them out,” etc.
As a matter of fact, as Daniel Ellsberg said long ago: “The United States invaded Iraq for three reasons: Oil, Israel, and Domestic Political Advantage.” Former Senator from South Carolina, Ernest “Fritz” Hollings put it even more bluntly: “The Unites States invaded Iraq to secure the state of Israel — and everyone knows it.” Yet the Bush/Cheney (or do I have that backwards?) administration attempted to justify invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan on completely specious grounds, none of which had anything to do with their real reasons; and although everyone in the U.S. government “knew” the real reasons, as Senator Hollings said, none of them actually stepped forward to mention those reasons to the American public. Why the bipartisan collusion in silence?
Therein lies the real issue for debate, in my opinion. Why didn’t the Republicans just simply admit “We have this great plan to invade and occupy Iraq in order to smash another one of Israel’s Arab neighbbors, take their oil, and put the Democrats in an untenable political position of “unpatriotically” refusing to “support the troops.” I mean, if those reasons had anything to do with America’s genuine national interests, then surely the Republicans would have had no trouble publicly announcing and defending them. Equally bad, the Democrats simply caved in and uttered not a whimper of “opposition” to their own marginalization which effectively made them accomplices to a historic war crime. So they all lied and they all knew it.
One cannot base any system of ethics or morality on lies. We cannot debate an issue without clearly defining it. Consequently I suggest that we speak of Warfare Welfare and Makework Militarism, our Vaunted Visigoths, Dogs-of-War Mercenaries, Corporate Camp Followers, Manufactured Mendacity and Managed Mystification, etc. Start with the premise that our government lies — and everybody knows it. Start with the fact that our “troops” fight and die for those lies and not our “freedom.” Then force the identification of the real perpetrators, illuminate their actual intent, and expose the Orwellian destruction of language that they systematically employ to obscure the truth — i.e., the Reality — of things. As the ancient sansrit aphorism says: “Satyam Eva Jayati.” Only Truth Conquers. Let us start and stick with Reality as the basis for our political, social, and economic ethics and then apply those ethics universally to others.
MM: Money makes Might and Might makes Right. [] Ethical Relativism explained.
That has nothing to do with ethical relativism. Individual privilege or money or corruption is not the point, and was not the point in the discussion.
The point was whether our collective definition of right and wrong depends upon any absolutes, or whether everything in our collective definition of right and wrong is always up for grabs, depending on circumstances. Ethical Relativism is not talking about the weak ethics of some individuals or the strong ethics of other individuals.
MM says: One cannot base any system of ethics or morality on lies.
Sure we can. In fact, we pretty much have to do that, well over 90% are religious. By what reasoning should 5%, or 1%, or 0.01% of us impose upon others a system of ethics or morality based upon our perception of actual Truth?
For example: I claim Christ never existed as a human being, that He was the fictional hero of a story begun around 230 A.D. and set in the past, a story that was an amalgamation of several oral traditions reaching back about 4000 years, at the time. Yet fictional characters can make better sense than real people, because the authors, over many years, can perfect their responses, opinions and nuances of speech or behavior (all fictional) depending upon audience reaction.
The authors of Christ cribbed notes from stories told for literally thousands of years that had been refined and sharpened for human consumption to perfection. They wove those stories into a tale of one hero, and put them a few hundred years in the past (a common practice of novels of their era) and then claimed their hero was historical: A common intensifier still used today: “This really happened, it is a true story.”
What Christ says is not objectively true and cannot be objectively proven. But the fiction of Christ, a lie, can be the basis of an ethical system, because it has served (and still serves) as an excuse for debate.
MM says: We cannot debate an issue without clearly defining it.
Clear definitions are subjective also; they depend upon words that are not clearly defined, which depend upon words that are not clearly defined, ad infinitum.
What is “clear?” Is a “right to life” clear? How about for serial killers, do they have a right to life? What exactly is life? Can I render a criminal permanently unconscious and feed them with a tube until they die of “natural” causes (whatever those are)? Can I lobotomize them? Can I medically reduce their intelligence to the level of a two year old? Does effective death (but not literal death) respect life?
What is clear to you may not be clear to me at all.
MM says: Let us start and stick with Reality as the basis for our political, social, and economic ethics and then apply those ethics universally to others.
I don’t think that is possible, reality is ill-defined. What I as an atheist scientist have concluded to be reality is thoroughly rejected by over 95% of the planet. What they have concluded is reality is thoroughly rejected by me. Within my lifetime, Within any of our lifetimes, we will never agree on what reality actually is.
A mandate to start there, as if it is a defined point in mental space, is a recipe for failure. It is like a race in which everybody starts from wherever they may be standing, picks a direction and starts running like hell. The population of the planet will be re-arranged, there will be a billion people that claim victory, but there will be no consensus.
Ethics are related to Rights in this respect. They do not depend upon reality, they depend upon agreement, which in turn depends upon emotion informed by logic and rationality.
Logic does not depend upon reality, either. It depends upon coherency, which is an abstraction invented by man (as are rules to consciously follow themselves). If we review the rules of logic, we find that what is illogical is what results in incoherent contradictions; that when one violates the logical rule one can argue that two or more mutually exclusive states are all simultaneously true. The rules of logic let us construct, not “truth,” but coherent arguments and internally consistent systems of arguments, meaning the arguments do not contradict each other.
The only “reality” we can base ethics upon is the commonality of some emotions; the few things we can count upon the vast majority of people to regard as clearly repugnant or clearly desirable. It is people that declare potential behaviors or outcomes right or wrong. Reality doesn’t give a crap, it is a blindly brutal and unfair machine without a care.
The point of ethics is to counter reality, to mitigate the brutality and unfairness of nature, at least the manifestations of its horrors that are due to our own human decisions. The point of ethics is to create a new reality. We may not be able to always defeat death, maiming, destruction and despair, but we can minimize the human contribution to it.
Tony C.,
In the first place, as I pointed out with my quote from Noam Chomsky above, only universality –i.e., applying the same rules to ourselves as we apply to others — constitutes a true basis for ethics or morality. However, since the United States as a nation considers itself “exceptional” and not bound by the same ethical or moral rules it applies to other countries, then it seems merely a trivial and commonplace observation to note that ethical relativism rules the land and its collective population.
In the second place, as Glenn Greenwald points out in his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, the wealthy and priviledged elites arrogate one set of ethical standards — infinitely permissive — for themselves while imposing another set of eithical standards — vicious and vindictive — on the poor and underprivileged. Again, this domestic “exceptionalism” certainly counts as ethical relativism as far as I understand the meaning of the words “ethics” and “relative.” Ouite obviously, our society, economy, and politics manifest stark differences in what people consider ethical at any one time and at different periods in time. Certainly, if one bases one’s ethics entirely on the basis of self-interst and not the common good, then many different individuals and classes of society would consider their own behavior ethical while condemning the ethics of other individuals and classes of society whom they see as getting in the way of their own goals and desires. The wealthy elites do not have a monopoly on ethical relativism, of course, just the geatest proportion of it.
In any event, absolutes do not exist in the real world, only approximations. Nothing exists alone and free of relationship to other things or we could not possibly know of it nor could it know of us. The true question, then, does not concern the relative nature of ethics, which we must take as a given, but rather the illusion that static, unchanging absolutes exist in a dynamic world. They don’t. Injustice always reigns and always has. The only question in any particular case involves its degree and our collective willingness to tolerate it. We could certanly insist on a lot less injustice — and a greater degree of fairness — if we collectively wanted to, but right now ethical relativism both at home and abroad seems perfectly acceptable to the American population as a whole. I really don’t see how one could argue ottherwise.
MM: I do not believe either you or Noam Chomsky. As I pointed out, what you believe is true and what I believe is true (and what Chomsky believes is true) do not necessarily form a coherent set of beliefs.
What do you mean by “others?” Does that include other animals, like us? Does it include the severely mentally disabled? Does it include the mentally ill? Does it include psychopaths?
What Glenn Greenwald describes is one instance of a class of people declaring themselves special and entitled to impose their version of the “truth.” Hm, who else does that? You?
The question is not about what rules the land, the question is about whether ethical relativism should rule the land.
MM says: The true question, then, does not concern the relative nature of ethics, which we must take as a given,
No we don’t. Nothing compels us to take ethics as inevitably relative at all. The true question asked in the post is precisely about the relative nature of ethics, and whether there are absolutes. You are taking precisely the position of the Cabbage called “A” in Gene’s post, that by your assertion alone ethics is always relative, end of discussion. You’re saying it so, over and over, does not make it so.
MM says: Injustice always reigns and always has.
No it doesn’t. Injustice has always existed, that does not mean it “reigns.” I would argue it is not the overwhelming determinative factor in most American lives, and does not have to be in most people’s lives.
MM says: I really don’t see how one could argue otherwise.
And I do not see how one could seriously argue that the Sun and planets all revolve around a stationary Earth, but that was never the argument or the subject of the post. Yes, much of our ethics does appear to be relative, but the question wasn’t about current events, the question was about the philosophy of ethics in the first place.
Tony C. (January 9, 2014 at 7:09 am)
You make so many assertions with which I disagree that it will take me some time to address each of them in turn. But since I value your opinion, I will try and address your remarks with the thoughtful consideration that they deserve. First of all, though, since you consider yourself a scientist, let me quote something that the American scientist/philosopher/logician Charles Sanders Pierce said about the nature and ethics of science:
“Facts are hard things which do not consist in my thinking so and so, but stand unmoved by whatever you or I or any man or generations of men may opine about them. It is those facts that I want to know, so that I may avoid disappointments and disasters. Since they are bound to press upon me at last, let me know of them as soon as possible, and prepare for them. This is in the last analysis, my whole motive in reasoning. Plainly, then, I wish to reason in such a way that the facts shall not, and cannot, disappoint the promises of my reasoning. Whether such reasoning is agreeable to my intellectual impulses is a matter of no sort of consequence. I do reason not for the sake of my delight in reasoning, but solely to avoid disappointment and surprise. Consequently, I ought to plan out my reasoning so that I evidently shall avoid those surprises. That is the rationale of the English doctrine. It is as perfect as it is simple.”
Now, near the end of your remarks, you seem to acknowledge the existence of Reality, and yet you characterize it as “a blindly brutal and unfair machine without a care [that] doesn’t give a crap.” How, I ask, does gravity treat you or me brutally or unfairly? How does magnetism constitute a machine and not a universal force? In fact, how does anything that “doesn’t give a crap” about us adopt any attitude towards us at all? How does indifference constitute “bruatlity” or “unfairness”? Pardon me for saying this, but you seem to have a rather confused and anthropomorphic misunderstanding of Reality. Again, as Peirce said in his paper “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” :
“The question, therefore, is how is true belief (or belief in the Real) distinguished from a false belief (or belief in fiction). Now, as we have seen in [“The Fixation of Belief”], the ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the experiential method of settling opinion. A person who arbitrarily chooses the propositions which he will adopt can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his determination to hold on to his choice.”
Truth, or Reality, belongs to everyone equally; and since Reality doesn’t change or adapt its functioning because of any opinions that we humans hold about it — as you acknowledge — for just that very reason we should base our beliefs and behavior upon this foundation that we all can agree upon, and not some primitive figment or fiction that supposes an animistic world alive, conscious, and accutely anxious to please and care for us. Lying to ourselves does not create a “new” reality — and I assume that by “new” you mean “an alternate” — so it makes better logical sense, as Peirce said, to take Reality into consideration so as not to get run over by it.
I’ve exhaused my available time now, so I’ll have to get back to your remarks with more from Peirce’s classic paper on “The Fixation of Belief,” or how people program themselves to behave in certain ways upon certain occasions, which I believe amounts to the same idea as “ethics.”
In asserting that something is relative there must be an absolute by which it is judged. How can something be relative to an absolute if one considers that absolute to be non-existent?
Can ethical relativism lead to anarchy? (Gene’s question in which I’m going to assume that his definition of anarchy is not Kant’s) In answer I could suggest the Crusades but will, instead offer up our own Manifest Destiny movement.
MM says: How, I ask, does gravity treat you or me brutally or unfairly?
Really? By killing you. Is it fair for a child that doesn’t know better to fall and be killed? Is it fair for her mother’s momentary lapse of attention, because she sliced her finger with a knife, to suffer a lifetime of grief and sorrow that her mis-prioritizing some minor bleeding resulted in catastrophe? I don’t know how you define “fair,” and perhaps that is the problem, but I do not consider the death of a child a “fair” outcome for what would truly be an unremarkable error in all but a million to one circumstance.
I do not define something that unfolds according to the laws of physics as inherently fair; if I did the word “fair” would lose all meaning, because as far as we know everything unfolds according to the laws of physics. “Fair” requires roughly equal outcomes for roughly equal inputs.
MM says: How does magnetism constitute a machine and not a universal force?
Again, really? Is the cooling fan in your computer a universal force, or a machine? It uses magnetism to turn the blade, you know. “Machine” is used as a metaphor; a machine does what it does without thinking or planning or choosing anything. In the same sense of Newton’s “clockwork” universe, he did not think the universe was really a watch. The universe does what it does without thinking, without intent, without choice.
It doesn’t give a crap. That is not an “attitude,” that is a literal statement; it has zero emotions and therefore is incapable of caring or choosing or making any moral judgment. As far as being “brutal,” that is not an attitude either, it doesn’t choose to cause pain, misery, and despair. But that is the outcome of much physics, and I characterize it as brutal.
MM says: more from Peirce’s classic paper on
Please, do not. I have zero interest in reading what you read, if you have an argument make it, do not think that appealing to an authority sways me in the least. Classic or not, recognized or not.
MM says: for just that very reason we should base our beliefs and behavior upon this foundation that we all can agree upon
Except we cannot agree, that is my point! Your perception of reality is different than mine. Mine is different than a woman’s in Pakistan. Hers is different from an executive’s in Tokyo.
MM says: and I assume that by “new” you mean “an alternate”
No, I mean “new.” If we operate by the rules of some ethics, for whatever reason we choose to do so, we create our own reality in which human-on-human predation is diminished, by modifying our environment because that is the “right thing to do” we can create a reality in which disasters have less impact, disease and infant mortality are diminished, fewer people die because of crime, or infection, fewer people starve. That is not an alternate reality, it is the reality we live in now, and exists because we have ethical concerns. Does it matter if those are based on some fictional savior, or some belief in a fictional afterlife? I don’t think so. We can all arrive in Rome by different roads. (Another metaphor, “Rome” standing for an ethical society; and playing on the aphorism “all roads lead to Rome.”)
Blouise said, “How can something be relative to an absolute if one considers that absolute to be non-existent?”
Exactly. That is where ethics as a search for the universally applicapble principle comes into play. Even a soft rule utilitarian recognizes that some rules must be hard rules or the framework has no actual structure, just an ever shifting set of relationships without a substantive footing. That is why Tony was nearly on the same path as my own thinking in noting that both are true; some ethics are relative and some are not. For example, the basic posit of humanism – that all human life has intrinsic value – in an absolute. It either is accepted as true or it isn’t. But that can become relative by circumstance. Is the life of one more important than the lives of 10,000? The answer to that depends on a weighing a lot of variable in the given situation and dealing with uncertainty as much as possible. All things being equal, 10,000 are worth more than one. But what if that one held the key to something really important? Say the ability to end a war? Cure cancer? Cold fusion? The answer becomes less certain and must be weighed and weighted to greater precision to ascertain the answer. However, that would be impossible without the initial principle being accepted as true; that all human life has intrinsic value.
Personally, I think ethical reletivism is just another tool and its utility is based upon both the skill of the user and the situation. Like any tool, misusing it can lead to disaster and possibly anarchy if it is taken to an extreme. In its most extreme form, everything is relative and the only absolute become the ability to rationalize away any given action. This effectively voids all other principles and has no substantive value other than to play CYA when caught doing really horrible things. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes the hard call needs to be made and there is no good solution, but if you act constrainted by a reduced primary principle, you can make the “less horrible” decision. This kind of triaged thinking provides a tool for not only minimizing damage in choices of action but it allows for you to mitigate uncertainty to varying degrees.
There is no replacement for principle based thinking.
The key is to select the right priniciples.
Perhaps the key is to stop looking for an absolute ethical principle, and start looking for a meta-principle: An absolute we can use to describe valid relative ethical principles. i.e. stop trying to ground them all from some absolute we cannot find; instead find absolute characteristics of “good” ethical principles, perhaps including the limits of their relativity.
Just an idea I had. I don’t have time to pursue that, I have an annual checkup. But feel free to wrestle it if you like it…
From “The Scientific Attitude and Falliblism,” in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler (1940; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955):
“All positive reasoning is of the nature of judging the proportion of something in a whole collection by the proportion in a sample. Accordingly, there are three things to which we can never hope to attain by reasoning, namely, absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, absolute universality. We cannot be absolutely certain that conclusions are even approximately true; for the sample may be utterly unlike the unsampled part of the collection. We cannot pretend to be even probably exact; because the sample consists of but a finite number of instances and only admits values of the proportion sought. Finally, even if we could ascertain with absolute certainty and exactness that the ratio of sinful men to all men was 1 to 1; still among the infinite generations of men there would be room for any finite number of sinless men without violating the proportion. The case is the same with a seven-legged calf.”
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s theory of relativity (special and general), and Plank’s quantum mechanics, for example, do not constitute “reduced principles” because of their acknowledged inexactifude (within specified tolerances) and fallible susceptibility to further future refinement. Rather, they constitute fundamental scientific truths tested and validated by nearly a century of scientific observations, and we now make good use of these principles with increasing technological sophistication. Uncertainty and relativity do not constitute deviations from reality, but the very foundation of it. As the general semanticist Robert Pula liked to say: “Not things changing but change thinging.”
Certainly, the age-old desire among some people for the “security” of the static and changeless motivates them to postulate without proof the existence of never-observed absolutes of one sort or another. Nonetheless, we as a society and world have irrevocably moved beyond that obsolete and dangerous conception of metaphysical absolutes and need to adjust ourselves to dealing creatively and productively with what we actually can know, however imperfectly, and can prove by our works — and not our dictionaries — that we really do know from whence we speak.
MM,
I’m quite familiar with the mathematics of uncertainty, but in the topic of ethics, the approximation of absolutes, i.e. something so probable as to have a maximal confidence interval and for practical discourse considering their absolute certainly is simply a way to put boundaries on the system. I’ve known certainty was impossible since I first read Gödel in the 7th grade. But here for the purpose of discussing ethics? Too much regression makes the topic unwieldy. The Law of Identity breaks down (among other side effects) if you have the kind of boundlessness that invites.
When I first read Gene’s essay, I pretty much disregarded the anecdote he provided of an “argument” with a drunken ignoramous. That seemed to me like use of a straw man to set up an absurd and easily demolished point of view. Usually, in debating any proposition, we would want to engage and defeat the strongest possible opposing argument, because if we can do that, then we have disposed of the weaker arguments as a matter of course. As Charles Sanders Peirce put it: “The best hypothesis, in the sense of the one most recommending itself to the inquirer, is the one which can be the most readily refuted if it is false. … [For] if a hypothesis an quickly and easily be cleared away so as to go forward leaving the field free for the main struggle, this is an immense advantage.” Consequently, I would rather have had Gene attack and demolish the “arguments” in favor of torture, for example, made by the highly educated and lavishly compensated legal advisors to the Bush II and Obama administrations. This Gene did quite well when he reviewed the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.” But since the purported “arguments” by our government “justifying” these immoral and unethical acts remain “secret,” I suppose that neither Gene nor we have much to go on except to maintain that “secret” arguments constitute no argument at all and hence we can dismiss them out of hand as dishonest and therefore unethical.
Towards the end of Gene’s anecdotal conversation, however, I had to laugh at his intoxicated and belligerent interlocutor’s boast that “ignorance was not a problem for him’ and that he thought ‘retrograde drunken Neanderthal’ was a compliment.” That put me in mind of the notorious Christian theologian Tertulian who once proclaimed: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it is absurd”) which prompted H. L. Menken to quip: “Tertullian is credited with the motto ‘Credo quia absurdum’ — ‘I believe because it is impossible’. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer.” It appears that we now have to update that fallacious arugment from ignorance with today’s administration lawyers proudly braying: “I believe because it is secret!” What utter and complete bullshit, but unfortunately accepted without question by America’s ludicrous excuse for a judiciary. Inustice not only reigns in America, but it grows and prospers with each succeeding administration.
Sadly, MM, that wasn’t a literary contrivance, but a summary of an actual argument (such as it was) with a real live person who is unfortunately the friend of a very dear friend. I only wish it had been contrivance so I wouldn’t have had to sit through it the first time asking myself “Why does she hang out with this simpleton?”
Moving on past Gene’s illustrative anecdotal conversation, I noted his definition of ethical relativism: namely “the philosophical theory stating that ethics are relative to the norms of one’s culture; whether an action is right or wrong depends on the ethical and moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. There are no universal ethical or moral standards and the only standards against which a society’s practices can be judged are its own. The implication of this is there can be no common framework for resolving moral disputes or for reaching agreement on ethical matters among members of different cultures.”
While a good enough definition in general, it does not go far enough in my opinion in that it fails to acknowledge and emphasize the different notions of ethical behavior that exist within each society and culture, depending on wealth, social status, political connections, level of education, racial characteristics, employment status, gender identity, and previous or current condition of servitude, etc., etc. In fact, if one simply begins to enumerate the obvious and multiple examples of ethical relativity that one can see right in front of one’s nose — if one cares to look and observe the real world around us — then it becomes intuitively obvious that relativity constitutes the real foundation of ethical behavior and not some postulated, theoretically abstract absolute.
Having said that, I do not mean that we must haplessly acquiesce in the face of obvious double-standards and injustice on the part of those in positions of power and influence in our own country. Nor should we excuse ourselves from responsibility for our own ethical relativity towards those of our own society whom we do not really know very well and instinctivley distrust because of their “strangeness.” But foreigners and their particular customs, however similar to or different from ours, have nothing to do with our own domestic injustices and unethical behavior towards each other. In fact, concerning ouselves with what foreigners do to each other in their own contries serves as nothing but a deliberate distraction from identifying and rectifying our own injustices. As my mother used to say about crusading religious proselytizers: “If you’ve got something good, you don’t have to sell it. Other people will steal it from you.” So we need to clean up our own selves first and if we do a good enough job of that — starting from the acknowledgment that we do indeed behave in ethically relative ways toward each other — then the strength of our example will impress and infuence the rest of the world far more than the empty verbal proclamations of our “exceptionalism” — as euphemistic a synonym for ethical relativism as anyone ever coined.
Anyway, all things considered, I come down on the side of Gene’s suggestion (in the form of rhetorical quesion) that “it is, like most tools, dependent upon the user’s intent and application.” That does not provide ready-made answers in advance about what one should do in any given situation, but it does motivate us to ask the relevant questions. And if we can ask the right questions, then we can probably find an answer suitable for the ever-changing situations that confront us every day.
MM says: While a good enough definition in general, it does not go far enough in my opinion in that it fails to acknowledge and emphasize the different notions of ethical behavior that exist within each society and culture,
See, that is bullshit. You do not get to hijack a term and redefine it because you want to use the term for something else. I don’t get to call somebody collecting on a bet I made a thief because I don’t want to pay up. You don’t get to redefine “ethical relativism” so it is talking about individuals because the actual definition doesn’t serve your purpose.
You are no better than the Aynish and Ayn Rand herself redefining words left and right so she can make some ridiculous argument about selfishness being the ultimate good.
If you want to argue about people within a society having different ethical standards, fine, but stop pretending you are answering THIS post and stop pretending that is “ethical relativism” because it isn’t. You are just hijacking the thread to deliver your own polemic on your 1% topic that has nothing to do with it, and lying when you claim they relate.
Tony C.,
Have you had time to put more thought into: “stop trying to ground them all from some absolute we cannot find; instead find absolute characteristics of “good” ethical principles, perhaps including the limits of their relativity.”?
Tony,
To be fair, I think it is easy to mistake cultural hypocrisy for ethical relativism. Under the right light, they do look a lot alike.
Blouise: Sorry, I haven’t.
But a relevant example of what I am talking about is the Constitution; it doesn’t define crimes, per se, it defines how we should go about defining crimes. It is meta-law.
So instead of claiming X is always ethical and Y is never ethical, maybe we can think about WHY we think one rule of behavior is ethical and another is not. If ethics is the search for ethical rules, how can we narrow that search?
Alternatively, perhaps the search for an ethical absolute is like the search for a universal machine part. There is no such thing that can serve as a gear, lever, spring, valve, bearing, lens and axle. Perhaps instead the absolute is a collection of interlocking ethical principles that are individually relative, but together form an absolute.
As we believe now, you cannot take a human life except in self-defense. Or defense of another. Or maybe with permission for euthanasia. Or in war time.
There is probably some better, single way to define the exceptions, I sense something in common there, and the prohibition against human life with its exceptions interlock to form an absolute ethical pair.
Anyway, I haven’t had time to think about it, I have a quarterly report due and administrative duties. Make Tex think about it, he’s retired!
Technically speaking the Constitution does define one crime. Treason.