Abstract
A popular accusation against moral relativism is that it goes too far in its vindication of tolerance. The idea behind accusations like this can be summarized in the slogan, frequently attributed to relativism, that “anything goes”. The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it is an “anything goes” view; from the accusation that it forces us to suspend our judgment in cases in which we do not think we should even be allowed to. In the end, relativism is not an “anything goes” view because it is not a view about what goes, but about the way things go—about what goes on when we say that something is morally right or wrong. There is indeed a view, sometimes called “relativism”, that forces us to suspend our judgment about practices that do not allow for such comfort, but it is not so much moral relativism as moral contextualism. Apparently, though, the most salient alternative to “anything goes” views such as contextualism is not moral relativism. It is moral objectivism, according to which there is a fact of the matter about moral issues. However, I show that moral objectivism too ends up being an “anything goes” view unless the objectivist takes herself to be endowed with “God’s point of view”, which I prove troublesome.
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Notes
As we will see, there are other standards, besides Alice’s and Beth’s, that Alice could take into account when assessing Beth’s claim. This is why, if the views are characterized in this way, there are at least three options as to how Alice should answer to the question whether Beth has said something true.
I intend this characterization to be neutral as to whether contextualism is better understood as an indexical or nonindexical view (see, for instance, MacFarlane, 2009 for the distinction). These are two different ways in which the idea that the truth of moral claims is relative to moral standards can be implemented. On the one hand, we can say that the content of a moral claim includes a moral standard, so that the same moral claim can vary in truth-value depending on the occasion, for it has a different content each time. This is what an indexical contextualist would say. On the other hand, we can say that the content of a moral claim is always the same, but whether this content is true or false depends on the occasion; in this case, too, the same moral claim can be true under some circumstances and false under others. This is the option pursued by nonindexical contextualism. Everything I say about contextualism in this paper is intended to apply to both versions of contextualism.
Applying MacFarlane’s relativism to moral claims supposes extending his theory beyond the cases for which it is intended. MacFarlane does not develop nor argue for moral relativism—he does propose to use relativism to explain the behavior of claims featuring “ought” (Kolodny & MacFarlane, 2010; MacFarlane, 2014: chapter 11), but this is a prudential, rather than a moral, “ought”. Still, I think moral relativism too is best characterized in terms of the context of assessment.
In the first case, we would be talking about indexical contextualism; in the second case, about nonindexical contextualism (see n. 4 for the distinction).
Thanks to María José Frápolli for suggesting this objection to me. For a similar objection, see Baghramian & Coliva (2020: 83–84).
In fact, we will see in Sect. 5 that there are versions of objectivism that do not make Alice intolerant, but have other problems. Let us keep things simple for now, though.
It has been discussed whether there is such a thing as faultless disagreement. Some authors, such as Stojanovic (2007) or Iacona (2008), have argued that, as long as there is no fault in the exchange, it cannot count as a disagreement. Here, however, I will leave this discussion aside and assume that it makes sense to talk about faultless disagreement, and that it is something we should expect a theory to account for.
Baghramian & Coliva (2020: 228) call views that are only committed to (i) “weak” forms of relativism, and views that are committed to both (i) and (ii) “strong” forms of relativism.
Boghossian, Baghramian, and Williamson characterize relativism as committed to Equal Validity in the context of their criticizing epistemic relativism, but they arguably intend their characterization to apply to moral relativism as well.
Thanks to David Bordonaba for making me aware of the importance of emphasizing this.
See Herbert (2001: 25–28) for a collection of some further examples that show that relativism is not committed to Equal Validity.
The kind of argument that Dreier (2005: 253–257) offers for his view, which resembles the argument for relativism advanced in this paper, may drive us to think that he is indeed a relativist, as he claims, and not a contextualist, as I do. However, for Dreier’s argument to work he needs moral standards to be relative to the context of assessment, and not to the context of use, which is the one that plays a role in the characterization he gives of his view (Dreier, 2005: 251–252). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for suggesting me to take Dreier’s argument into consideration.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Manuel Almagro, David Bordonaba, Cristina Corredor, María José Frápolli, Manuel García-Carpintero, Manuel de Pinedo, Huw Price, Esther Romero, Andrés Soria, Neftalí Villanueva, and three anonymous reviewers for Philosophical Studies, as well as audiences at talks in Berkeley, Cluj-Napoca, Donostia, Granada, Salzburg, and Tepic, for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Funding
This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the grant FPU14/00485, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the research projects “Contemporary Expressivisms and the Indispensability of Normative Vocabulary: Scope and Limits of the Expressivist Hypothesis” (FFI2016-80088-P) and “Disagreement in Attitudes: Normativity, Affective Polarization and Disagreement” (PID2019-109764RB-I00), by the Regional Government of Andalusia under the research projects “Public Disagreements, Affective Polarization and Immigration in Andalusia” (B-HUM-459-UGR18) and “The Inferential Identification of Propositions: A Reconsideration of Classical Dichotomies in Metaphysics, Semantics and Pragmatics” (P18-FR-2907), and by the University of Granada under a “Contrato Puente” fellowship and the excellence unit FiloLab-UGR (UCE.PPP2017.04).
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Pérez-Navarro, E. The way things go: moral relativism and suspension of judgment. Philos Stud 179, 49–64 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01650-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01650-z