I. CULTURAL RELATIVISM - Ethics relative to a specific social group. No universal cross cultural norms.

 

A. ARGUMENTS FOR

 

1. EXISTENCE OF DIFFERING CULTURAL NORMS

 

2. PROMOTION OF TOLERANCE vs. BIGOTRY

 

3. MORAL ISOLATIONISM

Moral isolationism (denying we can ever understand any culture except our own well enough to make judgements about it).

 

B. ARGUMENTS AGAINST CULTURAL RELATIVISM and FOR ETHICAL ABSOLUTISM

 

1. FACTS ABOUT DIFFERENT NORMS IN DIFFERENT CULTURES

 

a. underlying principles similar

 

b. some norms do exist

 

c. diversity simply indicates human ignorance of the objective norms

 

2. TOLERANCE/JUDGEMENT

 

a. Tolerance of customs

 

b. Absolutism does not require a dogmatic intolerance

 

c. Insistence on tolerance absolute.

 

3. MORAL ISOLATIONISM

Can't respect what is entirely unintelligible. Must know enough to make a favorable judgement in order to respect.

 

Example: Trying Out One's Sword on Chance Wayfarer (Mary Midgeley, "Trying Out One’s New Sword" in Heart and Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 1981) 71-75

 

1. Does isolating barrier work both ways?

2. Does the isolating barrier between cultures block praise as well as blame?

3. What is involved in judging?

4. If we can't judge other cultures, can we really judge our own?

 

Therefore, M.I. lays down a general ban on moral reasoning. But M. I. comes from moral concern. Real moral skepticism--inaction.

ARGUMENTS FOR and AGAINST PERSONAL ETHICAL RELATIVISM OR EMOTIVISM

A statement x is good or x is wrong simply expresses a person's feelings. Moral judgements are non-cognitive, evincing feelings of approval or disapproval and/or are performative language.

A. FOR: HUME

 

B. AGAINST

 

1. Counter example of Brand Blanshard "The New Subjectivism in Ethics" Philos and Phenom. Research 9 (1948-49): 504-11.

 

Painful death of a rabbit in a steel trap; "It was a bad thing that the little animal should suffer so."

 

a. Emotivism - no badness in rabbit's pain until someone came along and expressed an emotion - there is an actual state of affairs.

 

b. Emotivism would not allow us to retract our original judgement as false if we later discovered that the rabbit did not in fact suffer at all. (Sometimes we are wrong in our judgements.)

 

c. Emotivism would make our original judgement empty of meaning if we restated it when our original feelings had cooled and were no longer present.

 

d. Emotivism would preclude the assessment of attributes as fitting or unfitting with respect to certain acts or effects; if all acts are morally neutral then why should a feeling be fitting or not; worthy of approval or not.

 

e. For emotivism there are no mistakes about values - no distinction between what a person thinks is right and what is in fact right. p. 121 A boy abuses his little brother.

 

f. Moral anarchy - arbitrariness - no basis for disagreement (even if we agree about facts, we may disagree about what should happen). Hitler feels it is okay to kill over a million Jewish children - no place for reasons why something is right or wrong.

 

2. PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES OF EMOTIVISM

 

a. Emotivism gives no basis, no reasons for preferring one position over the other.

b. Emotivism leads to judgement that where divergent subjective evaluations are competing with each other in absence of objective norms, the competition can be resolved only by an appeal to force

c. A radical reinterpretation of what people think they are doing

 

3. INSISTENCE ON TOLERANCE IS AN ABSOLUTE

 

OTHER WAYS TO SEE THE ALTERNATIVES

A. James Rachels (p. 35):

 

1. There are moral facts in the same way that there are facts about stars and planets; or

 

2. Our "values" are nothing more than the expression of our subjective feelings.

 

3. Moral truths are truths of reason; that is, a moral judgement is true if it is backed by better reasons than the alternatives.

 

BUT: How does one judge "better" or "worse" reasons? Is "knowledge" or "reason" ever value free or neutral? Or, even in the area of "reason" is one always appealing to individual or communal norms?

 

B. Robert C. Solomon discussing A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, in first edition of Morality and the Good Life (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984) 29-31.

Loss of "sense of ethos, an already established and agreed upon way of living in which values are shared and unquestioned, in which the questions of justification, therefore, is beside the point and does not arise."p. 29 One can argue within the ethos. One can have appropriate or inappropriate sentiments within the ethos. But without an ethos there is no basis for moral justification. Our current US ethos values pluralism and tolerance to some degree.