i don't understand moral relativism

[lamargue]

i hear a lot of so-called logical howlers when related to this topic. i think that philosophy has yet to truly grasp the question of moral objectivity. we have such a limited technical vocabulary for this field that it is almost appalling. nothing unique has come either, aside from a few ventures into Kantian equilibria.

a lot of relativists, i imagine, will try to ask for ostensive cases in which a moral proposition is objective, or some manner of proving such. i don't think this is all-refuting since it doesn't account for foundationalist claims.

how do you justify moral relativism, if you hold that position? i would like to hear how people justify it considering my reasoning tends to myopia at times.

 

[cryone]

i think it's justifiable b/c we all inherently have biases since our beliefs are inevitably shaped by our environment. so, anything we believe to b moral has to be based on personal experiences. even if we transcend this fatal flaw of being biased, the human cognition is v limited so we can't reach objective truths or morals (if they were to exist). As neitzsche said, "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. Consequently, what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another; what holds for one civilization does not necessarily hold for another."

tbh, i think you've considered my points already since your knowledge is much deeper than mine. im not actually too big on philosophy, i js remember neitzsche's points in his book beyond good and evil. i think his book will def provide a more profound + sound argument.

 

[obligatoryshackles]

I think morals are ultimately a tool for accomplishing a particular goal, a means to an end. Since there is no singular goal that can be objectively derived for humanity, IE life has no purpose beyond the one we give it, which is extremely subjective, there is no singular moral system that can be objectively derived.

For example, whether you want humanity to grow into an interstellar civilization or just find a comfortable and sustainable way of life on earth will have drastically different implications for what you care about (productivity, sustainability, utility, etc. being different factors), and thus how you would construct your moral framework. Even more so if, for a more radical example, your goal was for humanity to die out.

 

[lamargue]

i think it's justifiable b/c we all inherently have biases since our beliefs are inevitably shaped by our environment. so, anything we believe to b moral has to be based on personal experiences. even if we transcend this fatal flaw of being biased, the human cognition is v limited so we can't reach objective truths or morals (if they were to exist). As neitzsche said, "There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. Consequently, what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another; what holds for one civilization does not necessarily hold for another."

tbh, i think you've considered my points already since your knowledge is much deeper than mine. im not actually too big on philosophy, i js remember neitzsche's points in his book beyond good and evil. i think his book will def provide a more profound + sound argument.

love Nietzsche. my critique of his view would be that the very capacity for human beings to engage in moral discourse and recognize differences from the functional norm is sufficient evidence that while this norm may not be an objective standard, there must be some system of consistency in order for us to properly accord moral propositions any real value. that is a kind of short-hand for my own views, though i think that Nietzsche was speaking of a personal ethic. he was criticizing the slave ethic, which is a criticism i agree with.

I think morals are ultimately a tool for accomplishing a particular goal, a means to an end. Since there is no singular goal that can be objectively derived for humanity, IE life has no purpose beyond the one we give it, which is extremely subjective, there is no singular moral system that can be objectively derived.

For example, whether you want humanity to grow into an interstellar civilization or just find a comfortable and sustainable way of life on earth will have drastically different implications for what you care about (productivity, sustainability, utility, etc. being different factors), and thus how you would construct your moral framework. Even more so if, for a more radical example, your goal was for humanity to die out.

true, but this is only relevant when speaking of constructed systems i.e trying to derive absolute laws from pure abstraction. barring the inter-species mind, i think that there are certain constants in order to maintain cooperation among people in a society, and this evolved through language and communication.

 

[obligatoryshackles]

true, but this is only relevant when speaking of constructed systems i.e trying to derive absolute laws from pure abstraction. barring the inter-species mind, i think that there are certain constants in order to maintain cooperation among people in a society, and this evolved through language and communication.

But maintaining cooperation in society is an arbitrarily chosen goal. There is no ultimate universal purpose saying humanity has to cooperate. That's a goal you've implicitly chosen there.

There are certainly constants you can learn on how to get people to cooperate. Humans in large groups should be fairly predictable if their culture and such are well understood. But that's anthropology, not objective morality. Those are behavioral laws, not a moral system.

 

[lamargue]

But maintaining cooperation in society is an arbitrarily chosen goal. There is no ultimate universal purpose saying humanity has to cooperate. That's a goal you've implicitly chosen there.

i think this idea rests on a false ontology. i cannot imagine that there are moral laws equivalent to physical laws outside of the mind, nor anything that tells us that we should cooperate, but i don't think it is completely superficial since if it is not some physical property of the universe, then it must be a component of our underlying cognitive features, which does not entail subjectivism. it is not as if we could choose to avoid cooperation, nor was it an isolated objective. i have more to say on this but it's beside the point.

i don't think that morality developed as a means specifically of cooperation -- as some materialists do -- but as a consequence of the development of language. so really it should be viewed as a feature of our cognitive architecture. as the general structure of language is dependent on the structure of our minds, so too is morality the same (in my view), though i'm not claiming it is rooted in something like empathy. it embeds itself in language, therefore we can model it using our understanding of language.

There are certainly constants you can learn on how to get people to cooperate. Humans in large groups should be fairly predictable if their culture and such are well understood. But that's anthropology, not objective morality. Those are behavioral laws, not a moral system.

no, i think that behavioural laws fall short unless tied somehow to our innate features, which i claim is the case for a built-in morality. we simply don't have the predictive power to make those kinds of generalisations. i don't think cultures can be understood through behavioural laws, as i assume they are understood in anthropological contexts.

 

[Jay Sea]

i hear a lot of so-called logical howlers when related to this topic. i think that philosophy has yet to truly grasp the question of moral objectivity. we have such a limited technical vocabulary for this field that it is almost appalling. nothing unique has come either, aside from a few ventures into Kantian equilibria.

a lot of relativists, i imagine, will try to ask for ostensive cases in which a moral proposition is objective, or some manner of proving such. i don't think this is all-refuting since it doesn't account for foundationalist claims.

how do you justify moral relativism, if you hold that position? i would like to hear how people justify it considering my reasoning tends to myopia at times.

What is moral relativism? According to one definition:

"Moral relativism is the philosophical position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute or universal truths, but instead are relative to cultural, historical, or personal contexts. In other words, moral relativism holds that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular standpoint (such as a culture or individual), and there is no single objective standard by which to judge all moral claims."

This may or may not be a good definition, but at least it serves as a point for further discussions

Empirically, one could easily offer observations that different culture/societal groups have different cultural/social practices, for example the Korowai people of SE asia reportedly practices ritualistic cannibalism.

The more interesting question to me is whether one could tender the fact that there are different cultural/social practices as evidence to support moral relativism?

 

[lamargue]

What is moral relativism? According to one definition:

"Moral relativism is the philosophical position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute or universal truths, but instead are relative to cultural, historical, or personal contexts. In other words, moral relativism holds that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular standpoint (such as a culture or individual), and there is no single objective standard by which to judge all moral claims."

This may or may not be a good definition, but at least it serves as a point for further discussions

Empirically, one could easily offer observations that different culture/societal groups have different cultural/social practices, for example the Korowai people of SE asia reportedly practices ritualistic cannibalism.

The more interesting question to me is whether one could tender the fact that there are different cultural/social practices as evidence to support moral relativism?

i was waiting for someone to bring up this point. for the puritan, this is probably the most difficult fact to digest. as i claimed before, moral rules are not determined through convenience (i.e cooperation, pure) but are implicit in the moral architecture or syntactical features of a community of speakers.

i think that the objectivist view that moral propositions contain truth values which are globally invariant is false. this, i believe, is due to a kind of model we assume over the architecture. that is, we assume that a moral system is a closed system of propositions with defined transformation rules.

in this sense i am a critical realist. i don't think we have the explanatory power to produce a correct model, hence selectively choosing correct features of a moral architecture may seem like a subjectivist requirement and nothing more, but in actual fact are not contradictory to my original position. so taking this view, the burden placed on an objectivist to explain a cross-cultural ethic is reduced. it is not a consequence of relativism, but a misunderstanding in our own framing of morality. i am not under the delusion that all moral propositions need be invariant across cultures for the claim of objectivism to be true, just that there are certain functional elements which are consistent throughout cultures. i will neglect thinking of how these develop into static systems for now, since i don't think the realist position requires a weak teleology.

in the case of the Korowai people, we must not ask ourselves why they believe cannabilism is not morally unsound, but rather what moral acts are held in equivalence to a normed model? that is, what functionalist argument determines the features of their moral architecture? we can say that certain moral systems which have radical differences to ours are differentiated by their features
there was a culture -- i forget which -- who would inflict injuries or kill members of other tribes if one of their own were to be injured or killed. so an arrow to he foot would result in the maiming of another's foot, and so on. so we can already determine that the concept of degree is implicit here. whether such cultures are good or evil is beside the point.

to put it more simply, what sets cultures apart are not truth-values assigned to root propositions, but those propositions which are defined in the context of a normed model. or else we would be working with an incomplete system which we could not speak of. i can only speak of en ethic with some implicit notion of what a standard ethic entails. this is a kind of occluded metaphysical topic; of which i have rarely seen discourse on, since the requirements for modeling such a hypothesis are too great (i become more of a Platonist day by day). in any case, we may require some mathematician/philosopher in the future to perform logical trickery in order to free the burden of the objectivist.