In my previous post, A Response to The Dunedin School’s “Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and Hidden Objectivist Assumptions”, I addressed some criticisms levelled at a talk I gave on moral relativsm by Deane from The Dunedin School (TDS) blog. In a follow up post, which, once again, I cannot link directly too as TDS seem to have deleted it and successfully removed it from the caches of Google, Bing and Yahoo (not to worry, I have pasted a full copy of the original below) Deane took issue with one the arguments I gave against relativism. In my talk, following Francis Snyder, I defined relativism as follows:
Cultural Ethical Relativism: An action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person’s society or cultural group condemns that action.
Individual Ethical Relativism: An action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person believes that the action is wrong.[1]
In the final section of my talk I gave several arguments against relativism so defined. One argument went as follows:
[1] If Cultural Ethical Relativism is true then an action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person’s society or cultural group condemns that action.
[2] Some societies or cultural groups do not condemn practices like wife beating, racism, religious persecution and rape.
Therefore,
[3] If Cultural Ethical Relativism is true, it is right for a person in those societies to beat their wife, be racist, engage in religious persecution and commit rape.
I gave a parallel argument against individual relativism:
[1]’ If Individual Ethical Relativism is true then an action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person believes that that action is wrong.
[2]’ Some people do not believe it is wrong to rape women and chop them up.
Therefore,
[3]’ If Individual Ethical Relativism is true then it is not wrong for such people to rape women and chop them up.
Now I maintain that the contention that it is permissible for a person to beat their wife, be racist, engage in religious persecution, commit rape and chop people up is false. It is not morally permissible to do these things; hence, as both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions they themselves are false.
Deane contends this argument is “confused” and constitutes a “tirade.” Of course merely describing an argument in pejorative rhetorical language does nothing to actually refute it. It is also worth noting that if Deane is correct, it does little to turn back the critique I offered because, as I noted, this is just one of several arguments I against relativism. Showing that one argument against a position fails does not show that all do.
That said, I do not accept that Dean has shown that my argument fails in this instance. His claim that this argument is obviously “confused” appears to be mere bluster; it remains unclear as to exactly which premise Deane rejects. My argument is formally valid; the conclusion follows from the premises. Moreover, premise [1] and [1]’ are true by virtue of the definitions of relativism, definitions widely accepted in the literature. Premise [2] and [2]’ are also clearly true. It is historically undisputable that there have been societies and people who accepted the practices outlined in both. Finally, [3] and [3’] follow from [1] [2] and [1]’ [2]’ respectively. So it seems then that the only remotely plausible way a person could escape this argument is by biting the bullet and contending that sadist nihilists who chop women up and rape them are not acting wrongly and that members of societies that persecute religious minorities, permit wife bashing, racism and rape are not doing anything wrong when they do these actions. I, myself, find this conclusion extremely implausible.
The first two arguments Deane offers actually avoid addressing this argument at all and instead attack my character and alleged motives. Deane’s first argument is the insinuation that I oppose relativism because it produces “equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution.” Two things can be said in response to this. First, even if this claim were true, it would show only that my motives for offering the argument were dubious; it would not show the argument itself is dubious. To do that Deane would have to actually address the premises and offer some actual argument supporting his assertion that they are false. Second, the claim is false. In fact, the argument [1] [2] [3] above, opposes relativism precisely on the grounds that it entails that certain forms of oppression of women are not wrong. It is an undisputed fact that many societies permit and even enjoin the oppression of women, Deane himself claims that 50 years ago New Zealand society approved of wife bashing, but if is wrong for someone to engage in conduct, if and only if, their society does not approve of it, as cultural ethical relativism maintains, then it follows that there was in fact nothing wrong with wife bashing 50 years ago. The New Zealand male who beat his wife black and blue in the 1950’s was acting perfectly appropriately. I find this claim to be clearly absurd. Deane is welcome to support an ethical theory that entails this if he wishes but if he does I strongly suggest that it is him and not I that supports and justifies the oppression of women.
Deane’s second line of argument fares no better. Responding to the second of the arguments mentioned above, Deane insinuates that I fantasise about raping women and chopping them up,
When Matt fantasizes about some weird behavior (and his favourite suggestion, for some reason, is a person who rapes, tortures and ‘chops up’ women…)
Deane here appears to reason that because I mention an activity as an example of unjust conduct that I must fantasise about doing it. The problem is that Deane in both his blog posts mentioned the persecution of gays and women as unjust practices; by his own logic then Deane is a misogynist homophobe who fantasises about harming women and homosexuals. Clearly this is not a valid response to the arguments above on Deane’s part here but an example of him engaging in another fallacious ad hominen.
Nether of Deane’s first or second arguments then actually call any of the above into question. Nothing he says gives us the slightest reason for thinking that people who bash their spouse or persecute religious or ethnic minorities with cultural approval are acting justly when they do. Nothing he says leads us to dispute that there are societies which do approve of these things, and these facts jointly entail that cultural ethical relativism is false. If he is to actually rebut this argument as opposed to simply vent his disgust for me, Deane needs to address these claims.
Later in the post Deanne does attempt to offer some arguments against the inference [1] [2] [3] above. However, these arguments quite evidently fail. At one point Deane argues,
Moreover, there is no absurdity in the fact that a person or sector of society with very unusual morals might consider their behaviour to be morally good. To the contrary, if morality depends on cultural norms, the examples he provides are exactly as we would expect. Only a few people would openly claim moral rectitude for really weird or kinky behaviour. For if everybody openly claimed it was morally good, then – culturally – it wouldn’t be considered weird or kinky in the first place!
Deanne here points out that it is not absurd to suggest “that a person or sector of society with very unusual morals might consider their behaviour to be morally good.” I agree entirely, the problem is that nowhere in my arguments above is this denied. I did not deny that some societies will claim that certain actions they engage in are morally permissible. In fact [2] explicitly affirms that some societies will claim that wife beating, religious persecution, rape and racism are permissible; hence, far from denying this claim I explicitly affirmed it. What I maintain as absurd is the contention that these societies’ assessments of their own norms are correct, that a person whom, with cultural approval, persecutes another or beats his wife actually is acting rightly and justly. Deane’s criticism here then attacks a point I did not make and fails to address the one that I did.
There is a hint at a criticism of [2] in the latter part of this paragraph where Deane suggests that societies that approve of abhorrent behaviour are rare. Unfortunately, this response is inadequate. First, even if it is true, it fails to address my argument. In [2] I maintained that some societies or cultural groups do not condemn practices like wife beating, racism, religious persecution and rape, not that many societies do. Second, with regards to the explicit examples I gave, it is untrue that only a few cultures and societies would support these things, a large number of societies have supported certain forms of rape, such as marital rape or raping women in war. Further, more than a few societies have supported religious persecution. Think, for example, of the execution of Socrates for heresy in ancient Athens, the persecution of Christians by the Romans, the inquisitions and the religious wars of Europe and the religious persecution in many Muslim countries today. Many have supported racist policies such as South Africa and the American South, not to mention the colonial and social Darwinist policies of the 19th century as well as the documented acceptance of racism in many ancient cultures such as ancient Greece and Egypt. Premise [2] is very clearly true. Further [2], when conjoined with the definition of cultural ethical relativism spelled out in [1], entails that these policies were justified and that those who carried them out and advocated them were correct.
It is this latter claim that I think is evidentially mistaken. Instead of evading the issue Deane owes us an answer. Does he believe, for example, that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so given that their society approved of this practice? Does he believe that when wife bashing was accepted that men who smashed in their wives faces acted rightly? If he does not then he cannot consistently maintain that an action is wrong for a person, if and only if, their society or culture does not condemn it.
Deane’s fourth line of criticism is to state,
Matt adds, “If you accept cultural relativism, essentially the norms of your society become infallible. They can’t be wrong. Because right and wrong is just what your society says it is.” As Matt concludes that is it implausible that societies can be morally infallible in their judgments, he concludes that moral relativism is not true.
Here, again, Deane does not actually address the argument [1] [2] [3] above but instead addresses a different argument that I made elsewhere in the same talk. This was the argument that cultural ethical relativism entails that a society can never be mistaken in its moral judgements. So, once again, even if Deane’s criticisms of this argument are correct they do not actually address [1] [2] [3] above. However, once again, even in response to this line of argument Deane fails to be cogent. He notes,
Matt’s reference to ‘infalliblity’ here is interesting. For infallibility is a normal trait of divine commands. Once again, it seems that Matt is assuming that moral relativism must have the characteristics of moral objectivism. He just cannot appreciate how moral relativism works. For moral relativism is not some monolithic system across society, but a variety of different views, some coalescing together, some in conflict to some degree or another. Moral relativism is not some stationary edifice, as Matt pretends, but is always developing, always reacting to material circumstances and prior ideologies. Once one removes the imaginary characteristics of divine command theory – infallibility, immutability, universality, etc – from the description of moral relativism, then Matt’s conclusions are exposed as unsound.
Deane here states that I “assume” that a society’s norms are infallible. This, however, is false. In the quote he cites, I argued for this conclusion. I stated explicitly that the norms of a society “can’t be wrong because right and wrong is just what your society says it is.” The ‘because’ here notes an inference. If the property of ‘being right’ is the property of ‘being approved by society’ then it is impossible for society to approve of an action and for that action to be wrong. Deane is welcome to address this inference but ignoring it and then stating that I merely assumed the conclusion does not address my argument.
Deane does go on to offer some arguments to the effect that societal norms are not monolithlic and static, rather they are rather fluid; the societal norms change, develop, evolve, etc. However, nowhere did I deny any of these things. What I argued for was that relativism entails that these norms are infallible. No matter how fluid or changing cultural norms are, the fact remains that, according to cultural ethical relativism, at any given time T, if a society approves of an action then that action is right for any member of the society who performs it at T. At no point in time can a society be mistaken about what right and wrong is if right and wrong are identified with the norms of a society. Of course at T+1 the societal norm may change but if this is the case then this simply means that society has changed from one correct assessment of right and wrong to another. For the reasons I stated, which Deane ignored, Deane’s position commits him to the view that societies’ norms are never mistaken, and this, I maintain, is absurd. Clearly throughout history societies have made mistakes in their moral judgements and this fact shows us that societal norms and moral norms are not the same thing.
[1] Frances Howard-Snyder “Christianity and Ethics” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans Publishing co, 1999) 376-377.
RELATED POSTS:
A Response to The Dunedin School’s “Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and Hidden Objectivist Assumptions”
Video of Matthew Flannagan Speaking on Moral Relativism
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism I
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism II
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism III
The original blog post, “Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and So-called ‘Counter-examples’”, by Deane Galbraith of The Dunedin School is below
Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and So-called ‘Counter-examples’
by Deane Galbraith
10 November 2009
Back to Matt Flannagan’s tirade against moral relativism – that producer of such moral outrages as equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution, and all those other things that cause your average member of a conservative think-tank to worry about all night in bed.
Later on in his presentation, Matt announces that he is going to produce ‘counterexamples’ to moral relativism. Now, usually a ‘counterexample’ would demonstrate the illogical or absurd nature of moral relativism. So does Matt produce this type of ’counterexample’? Does any one of his examples demonstrate the illogical or absurd nature of moral relativism? In fact… none of them do.
Matt makes the following confused suggestions about moral relativism:
– If a society considered wife-bashing to be morally acceptable, it would not be ‘right’ for a feminist or a moral relativist to object to it;
– In an Islamic society which believed that conversion to another religion was a capital offense, it would be morally required to execute converts;
– In countries in which racism is widely practiced, then racism is acceptable;
– An individual who thinks it is right to rape, torture, kill or ‘chop up’ women would be morally right under individual relativism, and nobody could impose their views on them.
Matt adds, “If you accept cultural relativism, essentially the norms of your society become infallible. They can’t be wrong. Because right and wrong just is what your society says it is.” As Matt concludes that is it implausible that societies can be morally infallible in their judgments, he concludes that moral relativism is not true.
Matt’s reference to ‘infalliblity’ here is interesting. For infallibility is a normal trait of divine commands. Once again, it seems that Matt is assuming that moral relativism must have the characteristics of moral objectivism. He just cannot appreciate how moral relativism works. For moral relativism is not some monolithic system across society, but a variety of different views, some coalescing together, some in conflict to some degree or another. Moral relativism is not some stationary edifice, as Matt pretends, but is always developing, always reacting to material circumstances and prior ideologies. Once one removes the imaginary characteristics of divine command theory – infallibility, immutability, universality, etc – from the description of moral relativism, then Matt’s conclusions are exposed as unsound.
For moral rules are always sites of dispute. A society that approves of wife-bashing, like most of New Zealand did only about 50-or-so years ago, can certainly renegotiate the moral rightness or wrongness of such behaviour. And such disputes need not only occur within a society. Our learned (not objective) disgust at certain behaviour might prompt us to attempt to alter the behaviour of other societies (and it often has, for better or for worse, relatively speaking). So there is no illogic in the system, once relativism is properly viewed as a fluid process, rather than as the artificial imaginary associated with Matt’s divine command theory.
Moreover, there is no absurdity in the fact that a person or sector of society with very unusual morals might consider their behaviour to be morally good. To the contrary, if morality depends on cultural norms, the examples he provides are exactly as we would expect. Only a few people would openly claim moral rectitude for really weird or kinky behaviour. For if everybody openly claimed it was morally good, then – culturally – it wouldn’t be considered weird or kinky in the first place! When Matt fantasizes about some weird behaviour (and his favourite suggestion, for some reason, is a person who rapes, tortures and ‘chops up’ women…), the very fact that this behaviour is culturally abnormal is consistent with the claims of moral relativism. Moral relativism in fact claims that morally weird behaviour will usually correspond to culturally abnormal behaviour. Morality follows cultural norms. Just as we would expect from moral relativism.
So Matt’s so-called ‘counterexamples’ are nothing of the sort. Instead, these examples have all backfired on him. Matt’s examples are entirely consistent with the truth of moral relativism.
Tags: Bad Reasoning · Deane Galbraith · Relativism · The Dunedin School9 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
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Dealing with Relativism…
This is an excellent post dealing with issues concerning cultural and individual ethical relativism:…
Hi again, Matt.
As in your last post, I don’t think you have offered anything new to your original argument (which misfired).
You spend a good deal of time defending an argument, or rather two closely related arguments (which you term ‘Cultural Ethical Relativism’ and ‘Individual Ethical Relativism’ respectively). But each of these arguments only gets you to the conclusion that certain actions are deemed “right” or “wrong” by certain individuals or societies. This is no different from the claim of moral relativism: certain actions are indeed deemed “right” and “wrong” under the analysis of moral relativism. Your argument – and I congratulate you most sincerely for its overall soundness – gets you nowhere at all.
You seem to appreciate this, as you then add a further premise and a further conclusion, a conclusion which itself is at odds with moral relativism. Your argument is invalid. I am referring to this further argument:
“Now I maintain that the contention that it is permissible for a person to beat their wife, be racist, engage in religious persecution, commit rape and chop people up is false. It is not morally permissible to do these things; hence, as both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions they themselves are false.”
When you claim that the contention is “false” that wife-beating, racism, religious persecution, etc is permissible, you are using a different meaure of “false” from that in [3]. For in [3], these behaviours are “right” according to the measure of a certain society. But your use of “false” appears to be according to the measure of your own personal morality. In any case, it is “falseness” measured according to the measure of something other than the original society’s. What you cannot validly conclude is “both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions”.
For you have smuggled in a second measure of “true” and “false” morality, yet the validity of your argument depends on their consonance. This is a quite clear fallacy of equivocation which, as a result, makes your argument invalid.
Your equivocation is only continued when you ask:
“Does [Deane] believe, for example, that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so given that their society approved of this practice?”
Matt’s equivocation can be demonstrated by identifying the two different questions resulting from the double meaning of “right” as either (1) right for their society; or (2) right for me.
If Matt meant, ‘do you believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so within their own system of morality, given that their society approved of this practice?’, then I would answer, yes, of course. Assuming a society in which such a practice is considered “good”, the actions are indeed “right”. The defence for such actions is not even difficult to imagine, as they were given a wide defence in various medieval, rennaissance, and reformation texts. If one had the particular mindset of an Inquisitor, one would reason, as many in fact did, that the evil of the risk to the many souls who would be damned to an eternity in the fires of Hell, through listening to the lies of a heretic, outweighed the evil of the death of the single heretic. So, it would be argued, killing the heretic is “good”.
But if Matt meant, ‘do you (within your system of morality) believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so, given your system of morality objects to such a practice?’, then I would answer, as a quite consistent and expected answer, no, of course not. If confronted with such a practice today, due to my horror and disgust at killing and torturing people for effects which are in my opinion imaginary, I would even attempt to persuade or even force these other people to act differently. For I have a different notion of “right and wrong” than they do, and I am quite attached to it. Such is moral relativism.
Understanding the difference between one person’s notion of “right and wrong” and another person’s notion is central to an understanding of moral relativism itself. I do not think it is a distinction Matt has yet grasped. The same failure is evident in Matt’s discussion of wife-beating, and in his rigid and unrealistic conception of the “infallibility” of moral relativism – both reveal his failure to consider that one person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality can contradict another person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality. So I don’t need to repeat myself in so much detail concerning the rest of Matt’s reply. Contrary to his misunderstanding, I repeat that it is only within a particular mindset – one shared to some extent with others in one’s society – that one can call another morality “mistaken”. And one does so, not through “tolerance”, which I have little time for, but through a positive disrespect for other cultures, one usually fueled by horror or disgust rather than any purely rational analysis.
In any case, Matt has failed to identify the “absurdity” that he sought to prove, and which was necessary for his argument to have succeeded. There is no absurdity whatsoever. There is only the predictable coincidence between societal structure and beliefs and society’s morals. Now, there is no decisive proof from ‘what is’ to there meta-ethical theory of moral relativism – but there is also no disproof. And once Matt’s equivocation is exposed, there is also no valid argument against moral relativism whatsoever.
.-= My last blog-post ..The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity =-.
Deane wrote: You spend a good deal of time defending an argument, or rather two closely related arguments (which you term ‘Cultural Ethical Relativism’ and ‘Individual Ethical Relativism’ respectively). But each of these arguments only gets you to the conclusion that certain actions are deemed “right” or “wrong” by certain individuals or societies. This is no different from the claim of moral relativism: certain actions are indeed deemed “right” and “wrong” under the analysis of moral relativism. Your argument – and I congratulate you most sincerely for its overall soundness – gets you nowhere at all.
Well that pretty clearly misrepresents the argument I gave. My conclusion was not the trivial claim that some actions are deemed right and wrong by different societies rather my claim was that actions actually are right and wrong for members of those societies.
[1] Action A is right for a person if and only if their society approves of A.
[2] The Inquisitors Society approved of burning heretics at the stake.
Therefore,
[3] It was right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake
The conclusion here is not that some people believed the Inquisition was correct, it is that it was right for the Inquisitor to burn people at the stake.
When you claim that the contention is “false” that wife-beating, racism, religious persecution, etc is permissible, you are using a different meaure of “false” from that in [3]. For in [3], these behaviours are “right” according to the measure of a certain society. But your use of “false” appears to be according to the measure of your own personal morality. In any case, it is “falseness” measured according to the measure of something other than the original society’s. What you cannot validly conclude is “both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions”.
No, I mean true and false in the normal sense. A statement is true if what it affirms is in fact the case. So returning to the case of the Inquisitor who in 1523 burned a heretic to death, were the Inquisitor’s actions right or wrong? I maintain that the answer “it was right” is false, it is not the case that his actions were morally right.
For you have smuggled in a second measure of “true” and “false” morality, yet the validity of your argument depends on their consonance. This is a quite clear fallacy of equivocation which, as a result, makes your argument invalid.
No I meant true in the normal sense of the word above. BTW here you appear to confuse epistemological questions of how one can know and measure what is true with ontological questions of what is true. I was simply making the ontological claim that it is not true. I said nothing about how one can measure it.
Matt’s equivocation can be demonstrated by identifying the two different questions resulting from the double meaning of “right” as either (1) right for their society; or (2) right for me.
No I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it. A simple yes or no answer will do.
If Matt meant, ‘do you believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so within their own system of morality, given that their society approved of this practice?’, then I would answer, yes, of course. Assuming a society in which such a practice is considered “good”, the actions are indeed “right”.
But I did not ask if it was right according to their society’s norms. I asked if they themselves were right to do it.
The defence for such actions is not even difficult to imagine, as they were given a wide defence in various medieval, rennaissance, and reformation texts. If one had the particular mindset of an Inquisitor, one would reason, as many in fact did, that the evil of the risk to the many souls who would be damned to an eternity in the fires of Hell, through listening to the lies of a heretic, outweighed the evil of the death of the single heretic. So, it would be argued, killing the heretic is “good”.
Actually I suspect this is a caricature of what Inquisitors actually argued but that’s another topic.
But if Matt meant, ‘do you (within your system of morality) believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so, given your system of morality objects to such a practice?’, then I would answer, as a quite consistent and expected answer, no, of course not.
But I didn’t ask this, I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it.
If confronted with such a practice today, due to my horror and disgust at killing and torturing people for effects which are in my opinion imaginary, I would even attempt to persuade or even force these other people to act differently. For I have a different notion of “right and wrong” than they do, and I am quite attached to it. Such is moral relativism.
I did not ask you what you would say if it occurred today. I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it.
This does raise another issue. Suppose the person who was doing it today was part of a society that endorsed it? Suppose a citizen of an Islamic state was going to execute a woman for apostasy to Judaism, would it be right for this citizen to kill the woman in question today? Cultural relativism entails that it would be.
Understanding the difference between one person’s notion of “right and wrong” and another person’s notion is central to an understanding of moral relativism itself. I do not think it is a distinction Matt has yet grasped.
Err no. It is quite easy to understand that different people have different notions of right and wrong. What is a mistaken is to slip from this to the claim that right and wrong are relative to people’s notions. This was one of the arguments I criticised in my talk which you conceded was clearly fallacious.
The same failure is evident in Matt’s discussion of wife-beating, and in his rigid and unrealistic conception of the “infallibility” of moral relativism – both reveal his failure to consider that one person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality can contradict another person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality.
Again no. They actually show awareness of a self-evident logical principle. That is if two things, A and B, are logically equivalent then it is impossible for one to be the case and the other not the case. It follows immediately from this that if wrongness is equivalent to being contrary to society’s norms then it is impossible for society’s norms to be wrong.
Simply asserting over and over that I “don’t get it” and citing nice pejorative terms like “rigid” and “unrealistic” does not actually address this argument.
In any case, Matt has failed to identify the “absurdity” that he sought to prove, and which was necessary for his argument to have succeeded. There is no absurdity whatsoever. There is only the predictable coincidence between societal structure and beliefs and society’s morals.
I identified the absurdity in my post. It is absurd to state that it was right for inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake. You have nicely evaded the question by addressing questions that I did not ask.
[1] Action A is right for a person if and only if their society approves of A.
[2] The Inquisitors Society approved of burning heretics at the stake.
Therefore,
[3] It was right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake.
Premise[1] is a definition of relativism, [2] is clearly true (and you granted it) [3] clearly and self-evidentially follows from [2], so given this, I’ll ask you again, was it right for Inquisitors to burn people at the stake?
Pejorative terms, side issues, red herrings, sarcasm, etc do not address this nor does confusing ontology and epistemology or interpreting my comments in ways I did not make them.
.-= My last blog-post ..Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic =-.
Matt,
Your replies continue to demonstrate a quite fundamental misunderstanding of what “right” and “wrong” means under moral relativism. Your comments labour under the false assumption that there is some objective “wrongness” about an action – that is, you continue to smuggle in a moral objectivist understanding of morality. Your error results in your false distinction between what actions a society or individual deems to be good or bad and the goodness or badness of those actions. Simply put, there is no such distinction to be made. Your error also results in your false distinction of so-called “ontological” and “epistemological” considerations. Again, simply put, the distinction is false: there are no ontological considerations whatsoever in a subjective morality; morals do not exist as facts in the world. Your talk of alternative moral opinions as “things” “A” and “B” shows that you continue to misunderstand moral relativism on its own terms. One cannot call another person’s morality “true” or “false” in the way that one would call the existence of a thing or event “true” or “false” – it is only “true” or “false” according to some subjective standard. As we are dealing with subjective standards, not objective ones, it is quite logically possible for an action to be (subjectively) deemed both “true” and “false” at the same time. Your attribution of “absurdity” to such a scenario only shows that you are yet to appreciate moral relativism on its own terms (you keep slipping in objectivist assumptions).
As a result, you are asking all the wrong questions. To engage with the position of a rigorous moral relativist understanding of the world, you need to at least appreciate that the worldview has no objective standards. Your continued assumption that moral relativism has objective standards impedes any philosphically rigorous discussion of moral relativism.
.-= My last blog-post ..Conferences: Towards a Unified Science of Religion and The Bible and Critical Theory Seminar – Buy One, Get One Free! =-.
Incidentally, the opening paragraph of your post here gives the false impression that The Dunedin School was responsible for somehow removing the original post from the caches of Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is not true. As already discussed with Madeleine, in November, The Dunedin School shifted about 30 or more posts to another folder, in an attempt to streamline the focus of the blog to religious studies and biblical studies and their reception history. I appreciate that you may be easily swayed by the conspiracy-theory-laden world of Investigate Magazine and right-wing climate change deniers, but at the risk of deepening the conspiracy in your mind: it just happened.
Be good.
.-= My last blog-post ..Conferences: Towards a Unified Science of Religion and The Bible and Critical Theory Seminar – Buy One, Get One Free! =-.
Deane wrote “Your error results in your false distinction between what actions a society or individual deems to be good or bad and the goodness or badness of those actions. Simply put, there is no such distinction to be made. Your error also results in your false distinction of so-called “ontological” and “epistemological” considerations. Again, simply put, the distinction is false: there are no ontological considerations whatsoever in a subjective morality; morals do not exist as facts in the world. Your talk of alternative moral opinions as “things” “A” and “B” shows that you continue to misunderstand moral relativism on its own terms.”
I disagree, cultural moral relativism is defined as follows: Cultural Ethical Relativism: An action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person’s society or deems that action wrong.
This definition is a bi-condition. The right side of the bi-condition describes an epistemological scenario, a society believes or deems and action wrong. The left condition describes an ontological situation where the action actually is wrong. What relativism contends are that these two situations stand in a particular relationship: they are logically equivalent.
It does not follow from this, however, that there is no distinction between an action being deemed wrong by a society and an action actually being wrong for members if that society. For two reasons, first not all relationships of logical equivalences are relationships of identity; causal relationships, for example, exist where one event causes another, the two events are co-extensive and once cannot occur without the other yet they are not the same event. Similarly in meta-ethics there can be supervenience relationships where two distinct properties are always instantiated together yet they remain distinct properties. Second, even if the two properties are identical, so that the property of actually being wrong and the property of being believed to be wrong by ones society are the same property, it does not follow that there is no conceptual distinction between the properties. The evening star and the morning star are the same object, yet it does not follow there is no conceptual distinction between them. The former is the star one sees in the evening, the latter the star one sees in the morning. Morning and evening are not the same thing and so one can recognize that these descriptions have different meanings in an important sense while acknowledging that they both refer to the same object. Hence, your suggestion that according to relativism there is no distinction between what a society believes is wrong and what is actually wrong is false and appears to be based on a failure to understand the meta-ethical issues.
Relativism does not deny that there are things that are actually wrong, nor does it deny that one can make true statements about what is actually wrong. What it contends is simply that what is actually wrong is co-extensive with what a society believes is wrong. I am afraid it is your comments that display a fundamental misunderstanding of relativism as well as a failure to understand some basic distinctions in meta-ethics and not mine.
So again I put to you that you have ignored my fundamental challenge. According to relativism, what a society believes is wrong will actually be wrong for members of that society and what a society believes is right will actually be right for members of that society. Hence if relativism is true then it is actually right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the state. Note that what this conclusion states is not the truism that medieval societies believed it was right to do this, rather it is the conclusion that it actually was right for Inquisitors to do this. This is an implication of relativism and I maintain that this implication is false.
If you wish to defend relativism you need to either deny that societies exist that believe/believed religious persecution of this sort is/was permissible or maintain that religious persecution actually is permissible. Neither claim is terribly plausible. Ignoring the dilemma and expressing a misunderstanding of relativism and the conceptual distinctions involved does not address this dilemma. Likewise, neither does making snarky remarks about “conspiracy theories” and people who are “right wing.”
.-= My last blog-post ..Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I =-.
“the opening paragraph of your post here gives the false impression that The Dunedin School was responsible for somehow removing the original post from the caches of Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is not true. As already discussed with Madeleine, in November, The Dunedin School shifted about 30 or more posts to another folder, in an attempt to streamline the focus of the blog to religious studies and biblical studies and their reception history. I appreciate that you may be easily swayed by the conspiracy-theory-laden world of Investigate Magazine and right-wing climate change deniers, but at the risk of deepening the conspiracy in your mind: it just happened.”
That’s right you did say that. On 30 Dec 09 you said “they got transferred into another folder where I was accumulating largely off-topic things before I transferred them somewhere else, and have since tragically disappeared – I know, because I was trying to recover them all just yesterday. Don’t tell Gavin. He might get upset.” I’d asked you because I’d noticed that the caches of the major search engines no longer held copies, which is impressive given the files had only been removed for about a month.
Now you’ve got them back and you have a problem with Matt commenting on the strangeness of their disappearance? That is a bit rich isn’t it? Let’s take a look at the false impressions you leveled at Matt in your opening and subsequent paragraphs:
“Matt Flannagan, who blogs with his wife Madeleine at MandM, contributes to a New Zealand-based conservative think-tank called Thinking Matters.”
You establish an association between Matt and conservative think-tanks (and me).
“These ‘conservative think-tanks’ crop up from place to place and the term is usually a euphemism for frustrated and atavistic reactionists who want to take away rights from women, homosexuals, and other minorities and restore power to the patriarchy.”
You then establish an association between conservative think tanks and “frustrated and atavistic reactionists who want to take away rights from women, homosexuals, and other minorities and restore power to the patriarchy.”
“Some of the members of Thinking Matters don’t appear to be noticeably different in this regard.”
Ooh, I wonder who you could possibly be referring to. Just in case it is not clear the next line reads:
“In a talk available on YouTube, Matt Flannagan attempts to argue against that phantom nemesis of all conservative think-tanks, what they term ’moral relativism’.”
Matt Flannagan strongly desires to take rights away from women, homosexuals, other minorities because he is patriarchal and this is his real reason for opposing moral relativism.
Your next post adds to this:
“Back to Matt Flannagan’s tirade against moral relativism”
You establish an association between Matt and opposition to moral relativism.
“ – that producer of such moral outrages as equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution, and all those other things that cause your average member of a conservative think-tank to worry about all night in bed.”
You state that people opposed to moral relativism oppose “equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution” etc and you bring up the conservative think tank again.
Again just in case the connection between Matt and these oppressive things is not clear enough, a few lines later you add:
“When Matt fantasizes about some weird behaviour (and his favourite suggestion, for some reason, is a person who rapes, tortures and ‘chops up’ women…), “
You imply that Matt is some frothing at the mouth bigot who lives to seek the oppression of women, gays and minorities, who fantasizes about raping, torturing and killing women and your issue is that he questioned the plausibility of your files vanishing both from your computer and the caches of the major search engines? You seriously begger belief. Matt wrote these posts before you and I had that conversation. Further, you had that conversation with me, not with Matt. Matt and I are different people and you call him patriarchal!.
.-= My last blog-post ..Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic =-.
So Deane, no body removed your article and it just disappeared? Like it happened via unguided natural process, perhaps some random mutation?