Week One - Moral Relativism Flashcards
Ruth Benedict (1934): Anthropology and the Abnormal
The essay makes a strong case for ethical relativism.
Vitiate - destroy or impair the validity of
Primitive peoples fortunately provide a laboratory not yet entirely impaired by the spread of standardised worldwide civilisations.
In higher cultures, the standardisation of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given a false sense of the inevitability of particular forms that have gained currency.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bend towards justice” - Martin Luther King
Al Gore - An Inconvenient Sequel
“Climate change is LIKE the Abolition movement/Women’s suffrage/Civil rights/Anti-apartheid/Gay rights and is resolved into a choice between right and wrong.”
How far are modern “normal-abnormal” categories culturally determined?
What about moral progress?
Abnormality = a term for the segment that a particular civilisation does not use.
Potlach = opulent ceremonial feast at which possessions are given away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige.
Usury = illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest
We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own locality and decide directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle.
We recognise that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.
The problem of understanding abnormal human behaviour in any absolute sense independent of cultural factors is still far in the future.
The categories of borderline behaviour which we derive from the study of the neuroses and psychoses of our civilisation are categories of prevailing types of local instability. They give much information about the stresses and strains of Western civilisation, but no final picture of inevitable human behaviour.
In our Time: Relativism
Relativism is a school of philosophical thought which holds to the idea that there are no absolute truths.
Instead, truth is situated within different frameworks of understanding that are governed by our history, culture and critical perspective.
Why has relativism so radically divided scholars and moral custodians over the centuries? How have its supporters answered to criticisms that it is inherently unethical? Have we lost all contact with transcendental philosophy and absolute truth that something is right or wrong?
Relativism is a doctrine in philosophy, but it’s had widespread appeal outside of philosophy. Today it appears to be used a pejorative term.
When we make a scientific hypothesis and assert it to be true, or when we’re trying to judge whether a work of art is beautiful, these claims are not absolutely true; they are always implicitly relative to some background set of standards or perhaps our cultural assumptions. These are local claims and are only true from a particular point of view.
Relativism challenges the idea of an absolute conception.
Protagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek Sophist philosopher who said ‘Man is the measure of all things’.
He said that regarding something as beautiful or ugly / true or false depends on a set of customs/traditions or on a particular outlook. (Plato was opposed to this view).
Relativism is NOT an ancient word like Scepticism, Stoicism and Cynicism. It is very modern - a 20th century word.
There has been an explosion of use in the word recently and it’s always used with negative connotations.
The Copernican revolution established the difference between scientific and pre-scientific thinking (local thinking). We moved from an Earth-centric view to a Sun-centric view of the Solar System.
The Copernican Revolution (1514) was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System.
Marx said that people’s consciousness is formed by their circumstances. In this, he recognised that the beliefs we have are not simply a consequence of the exercise of reason. What people came to believe was a result of the historical, material and social conditions in which they were placed.
People in different classes would see the world differently. Difference in point view of the capitalist system between capitalists and the proletariat - looks as if we have relativism.
Marx was an old Enlightenment thinker - he was very attached to the idea of truth. He thought that some perspectives were privileged based on the class system i.e. the working classes had a less distorted view of truth than the capitalists
Perspectivism is the philosophical view that all formations of ideas take place from particular perspectives, and that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made.
Nietzsche has a terrific fear that we call the truth actually depends on our needs and our vested interests.
People think that Nietzsche was sceptical of the truth. In fact he had no time for false conceptions of the truth, and orthodox doctrines of the truth which religious institutions might dictate to us.
He argues that we should seek the truth for ourselves, from our own predicament and standpoint. We must be authentic and not be hoodwinked about what there is.
Nietzsche was defending the truth - even though scientific truth was a certain perspective, it should still be respected because it had been heroically won.
Heidegger accepted this. His idea in ‘Being and Time’ is that everything is historical. Everything is far more historical than you can imagine - the words you use and the thoughts you have etc. He insisted that that did not mean that you had to be sceptical about our ability to get truth.
Difference is the way in which epistemological progress is going to be made. It’s a process of trying to see the world in way that other people see it.
Epistemological - relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
Data is only data relative to a theory.
Where we do see differences in our moral judgements, we just cannot stand outside our framework. There is no neutral perspective from which to say ‘they are morally wrong and we are morally right’.
The worrying thing about that position is that we tend to lose confidence in our own view, especially if ‘Anything Goes’.
How can we propound our view and push them forward if every truth perspective is valid?
For Marx, there was a distinction between distorted knowledge that was tied up with power and the good knowledge would give us an accurate account of the world. For Foucault all knowledge is tied up with power. There is no way of purifying it and getting some knowledge which reflects the true reality.
When we describe the world we are not only trying to reflect reality but we PRODUCING it with our language e.g. when baby is born - ‘this is a girl’. This is a description but it is also part of the production of the classification of gender.
A lot of nonsense has been talked about relativism.
When relativists get into danger they say things like:
“Our judgements and claims to knowledge are always made from a perspective, and we cannot escape our perspectives.”
AND
“There are just perspectives.”
This is nonsense and very bad inference. We may have different perspectives on a room. But there could not be perspectives unless we have a room on which to base those perspectives.
We should acknowledge that even though we make truth claims from our own perspective, that perspective does take in an element of reality i.e. the room
