Julian Baggini: Moral Relativism Is Incoherent

The diversity of beliefs and ways of life is a remarkable fact about us humans. What seems right and reasonable to Mormons may be abhorrent to Marxists or Māori. The Aztecs sacrificed humans for reasons that are completely unacceptable to us today, and there is no doubt that future humans may be similarly astonished or disgusted by some of our practices. For such reasons, some conclude that there is no objective truth about morality. They say that disagreement is best explained by the existence of several different, irreconcilable relative moral truths, determined in some way by the beliefs of a community, and that this is the only kind of moral truth there is. Thus, for the Aztecs, ‘sacrificing humans is morally permissible’ is true, even though it is false for us. So, in general, moral statement A is relatively true provided that the members of community B believe it. (The same basic idea can be developed in other ways. For example, some relativists might say that moral statement A is relatively true if the standards of community B entail it, regardless of whether the members of community B believe it or not. I will ignore these details, as they will make no difference to the point I want to make.)

In this paper, I will examine this argument from moral disagreement and present what I consider to be the most serious problem with moral relativism: namely, that it is impossible to understand what it could mean for moral truths to be relative. And since we have no idea what that could mean, moral relativism can neither be a good explanation for the reality of deep and persistent moral disagreements, nor can it be supported by any other kind of argument. Therefore, if moral disagreement is evidence against the objectivity of moral truth, it can only be evidence for moral nihilism: the idea that there are no moral truths at all.

Incoherence

The argument for moral relativism based on moral diversity, as it has been presented, is not convincing. If the mere fact that individuals or groups disagree about an idea were sufficient reason to think that idea lacks objective truth-value, then there would be no objective truth about the age of the universe or the causes of autism. To protect themselves against this counter-argument, relativists usually claim that these disagreements are somehow different from moral disagreements. For example, Jesse Prinz claims that scientific disagreements can be resolved by better observations and measurements, and that when scientists are confronted with the same evidence or reasons, they agree, but this is not the case for thinkers working with different moral frameworks.

But even if we grant this distinction, it is still doubtful that moral disagreement is a good reason to accept moral relativism. After all, in philosophy, just as in ethics, there are deep and seemingly irresolvable disagreements. For instance, some philosophers think that mental states like pain or desire are merely physical states; other philosophers reject this, yet both groups are aware of the observations and reasons that support the opposing view. So, should we say that there is no objective truth about how mental states relate to the physical world? That seems highly implausible. Hence, many philosophers reject the moral relativist claim that moral truths depend on the beliefs held in a community. Can we then conclude that, regarding moral relativism itself, there is only a relative truth and not an objective truth – that is, to say that moral relativism is true from Jesse Prinz’s perspective and the anti-relativist view is equally true from mine?

I suspect that few moral relativists would be willing to accept this "higher-order" relativism. They think that although benighted philosophers disagree with them, moral truths simply "are" relative to a particular society—it is an objective fact about reality that there are no objective moral facts, only relative moral ones. But this position is worryingly unstable, for the relativist to believe in relativism on the basis of an argument that itself depends on the principle that if there is a certain kind of disagreement about subject X, then there is no objective truth about X. If that principle is correct, the fact that there is such disagreement about their relativistic conclusion shows that this conclusion itself is not objectively correct, but only relatively so. So if the relativist's argument is sound, by its own standards, they should not believe its conclusion to be objectively true; but if they are entitled to believe its conclusion, then their argument must be invalid.

Could this not be remedied by accepting that the belief in the relativity of moral truth must be self-undermining, and that the truth about moral truth is itself only relatively true? Fortunately, we need not dwell on this question, for I think the main problem with moral relativism is not that it is false, implausible, or self-undermining, but that it is in fact incoherent. What I mean is that there is no coherent concept of truth that can be used to formulate the view that moral truth is relative to the standards or beliefs of a particular society.

Truth and Belief

Let me clarify this objection by stating some truisms about truth. First, a proposition is true only if it represents things as they really are. The proposition that I am wearing blue socks is true only if I really have socks on my feet and the socks really are blue.

This same general principle, undoubtedly, holds for moral propositions as well. Suppose I say that suicide is immoral, yet in objective reality there is no such "thing" as moral wrongness. That is, suppose that nothing anyone does is morally wrong, although some actions may seem wrong to us. In that case, my claim about the immorality of suicide is false, because it attributes a property to certain actions that nothing possesses. It is like saying that my socks were made by Santa Claus's nephew. Nothing has the property of being made by Santa Claus's nephew, and any proposition that presents my socks as having this property is false.

Those drawn to moral relativism might object that I have simply presupposed an objectivist concept of truth: a concept that relates what is said or thought about the world to the way the world really is independently of those thoughts. What they have in mind instead, they might say, is a different concept of truth—one that does not involve such a relationship between subjective perspectives or representations and something independent of those perspectives.

I accept that I have presupposed an objective concept of truth, but what is the alternative? Do we have a concept of truth that does not entail such a relationship? Certainly, people sometimes say that a proposition is true for one person but not for another – meaning that the proposition "seems" true to the first person but does not seem true to the second. However, just as something that seems like gold is not a kind of gold, something that seems true is not a kind of truth. What is meant by this kind of talk (if anything is meant at all) is merely belief. To say that it is true for some children that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole is really just another way of saying that they believe this. But believing such a thing does not make it a fact. Similarly, if moral relativism is merely the claim that what seems morally right to some people (what they believe about morality) seems wrong to others, it is true but philosophically trivial, and compatible with objectivism about moral truth. It should also be noted that interpreting moral relativism in this trivial way cannot be supported by the argument from disagreement. The crux of that argument was that moral relativism is a good explanation for the moral disagreements we observe. However, the claim that some moral propositions "seem" true to some and seem false to others merely "restates" the fact of moral disagreement that relativism is supposed to explain, and cannot explain it. (Perhaps some things are self-explanatory, but moral disagreement is not one of them.)

Thus, there is this familiar kind of truth and truth-belief that depends on how reality is, independent of people's beliefs and perceptions, and there is also a contrived kind that is nothing more than belief. The theory of moral truth relativism clearly denies that moral propositions – in the familiar sense – can ever be true (or false); but if relativism is interpreted in the second way (the contrived kind), it collapses into meaninglessness or triviality. The relativist needs a third kind of truth, somewhere between familiar truth and contrived truth: not merely an "appearance" of truth, nor a truth dependent on "objective reality." But no such thing exists. At least, I cannot conceive of what this special kind of truth would be, and relativists are strangely silent on this fundamental issue.

There Is No Third Way

Remember that moral relativism has two elements: the denial of any objective moral truth, and the assertion of some other kind of moral truth. Suppose that moral disagreement raises doubts about the objective truth of any moral code. Can we conclude that moral codes are true in another sense? No, because it might mean that moral propositions have "no" truth in any sense. People's disagreements might stem from being acculturated into different moral cultures, but all the moral beliefs or standards of all cultures are simply false. Therefore, the argument from disagreement might be an argument for nihilism rather than moral relativism.

How do relativists propose to establish their positive thesis, namely the claim that moral propositions are sometimes true without being objectively true? I know of no convincing argument for this. Instead, relativists tend to argue at length for their negative thesis, the claim that morality is not objectively true, as if this alone suffices for their relativistic conclusion. Thus Prinz says that “moral judgments are based on emotions,” and “reason cannot tell us which values to choose,” and even if there were such a thing as human nature, it would be of no use, since the mere fact that we have a particular nature still leaves open the question of whether what is natural is morally good or not. Now let us grant all of this, and assume for the sake of argument that this view raises genuine doubt about the objective truth of moral values. In the absence of any justification for a special kind of truth supposedly lying somewhere between mere belief and accurate representation of objective reality, why should we think of moral judgments as truth at all, in “whatever” sense of truth that might be? Why not simply settle for the statement that all moral rules are false? It seems reasonable that a philosopher who thinks this way about moral reasoning would view moral beliefs just as atheists view religious beliefs—as false beliefs.

I suspect the reason so few philosophers are willing to accept this nihilistic conclusion is that they, like most people, hold firm moral beliefs of their own. For instance, they think it is morally wrong to rape children, and therefore they do not want to say that this belief is “false.” How can they stand by their belief while simultaneously believing that their belief is not true? This awkward compromise is untenable. If we have no “objective” moral truth, there can be no other kind of moral truth either.

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Julian Baggini

Translated by Zuhair Bagheri No’parast

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