Why are there so many ethical relativists?

Question

I feel astonished by the large number of relativists nowadays especially when it comes to the answers that some persons give for ethical questions. In discussions about what actions are right or wrong in certain social situations, there are many people who claim that there is no such thing as ethical truth. Ethical relativists claim that answers to questions about what is ethical can only be subjective and are nothing more than personal opinion about what is good. Their denial of ethical truth is also a denial of the capacity of behaviour to be GOOD independent from the socially accepted values. I think that denying ethical truth is a way of trying to avoid responsibility for one's actions. What do you think about relativists?

People who believe that morals are relative oversimply the question about the nature of morals. Moral relativists fail to recognize that our morals can be both true or false, even though our morals are influenced by external, social factors. The question about whether our moral beliefs are true or separate from the question about whether our morals are influenced by external factors. Moral relativists treat those questions as if they are the same, and as if the same answer applies to both. Moral relativists are confused. Just because our social and life experiences influence the morals that we subjectively hold does not mean that our morals cannot be objectively true.

Moral relativists point to the fact that on Earth there are diverse moral codes and that societies vary on the moral codes that they accept. Moral relativists point to the fact that social institutions such as religion and the legal system influence the morals of people. Moral relativists rely on the fact that when moral are examined at a causal level, they are found to be socially relative in that they vary from one society to another. Morals are a function of cognition and society. Society, culture, and politics influence the morals that persons have. Morals are qualities of the human mind that can be affected by social experiences.

However, morals can be ethically correct or ethically mistaken. All of our beliefs are internal factors that are influenced by external, social factors, but we rationally recognize that nature exists and that some claims about it are true, while others are false. Similarly, human nature exists. We recognize that there are many facts about human nature. For example, that human nature is capable of both wisdom and foolishness and that it can create societies. The wise learn to distinguish between good and harmful human conduct. Fools deny that conduct can be harmful, and thus they make themselves susceptible to harm. The wise would not create a society that takes moral relativist claims seriously, since the conduct of the society that tolerates its member's harmful conduct is itself unethical.

Ethical principles are universal principles. This does not mean that the rules have no exceptions. By considering multiple ethical principles, ethical principles can be qualified to be case sensitive, i.e., to meet the needs of specific situations. There are certain ethical principles that rational persons accept, for example, that it is ethically wrong to kill human life. There are other ethical principles that society does not yet recognize but that it should. Denial of ethical truth is unethical.

Answer 1

I think those 'relativists' are redefining the words 'relative' and ''relativism'. I have to admit there is the possibility that a person with different notions for their believing may consequently have a different interpretation or theory as to why or how people think this way or that, or why they did such and such, but I have notion that there are facts of humans that are universal for all humans. To say that a person can only reference from subjective condition is to deny objective fact, things in their selves exist as their own being and do not need subjective conditions to continue existing.

Universal conditions in humanity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erick_Erickson

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlobject.htm#HL3_705

The Doctrine of the Notion
Section Two: Objectivity

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Mechanism - Chemism - Teleology

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/sl_iv.htm#SL41n_2

(2) Kant’s examination of the categories suffers from the grave defect of viewing them, not absolutely and for their own sake, but in order to see whether they are subjective or objective.

Answer 2

I think they are both epistenologically and ontologically confused. The attack objective reality in language, which presupposes reality. They confuse perception and relativity; a difference in viewpoint, is difference to them. Their pious cant has infected both social science and humanities, until both are subject to wide swaths of incoherence. The use scientific concepts as a three year old would; without the slightest understanding of said concepts. They are good for " arguments from authority "; mere name dropping. I could go on all night, but " the Sokal affair " in " Social Text " rather held these phonies up to a ridicule the whole world now knows about.

PS Drew. Rather obvious that you are not a scientist. You can not be any kind of relativist knowing of our evolved histories. The evidence is coming in all the time on our morality being part of our evolved heritage. Read " Moral Minds ", by Mark Hauser and see how behind the times you are.

And next time you have some incoherent criticism for some one, have the fortitude to leave your e-mail address accessible.

Answer 3

Wow, some of these answers are kind of off base. Alan Sokal proved absolutely nothing about cultural or ethical relativism; all he established was that academic writing in the humanities is often extremely dense to the point of near meaninglessness as well as prone to systemmic distortion of scientific theory. Postmodernists misuse the theory of relativity, as well as other recent physical and mathematical theories: so what? This only bears on ethical relativism in an extremely roundabout way. I don't understand why jonmcn49 even brings it up. Ethical relativism really doesn't have that much to do with the rest of the academic phenomena he describes, beyond the fact that many ethical relativists are also marxists, poststructuralists, deconstructivists, etc.

You can be an ethical relativist and not be a Delueze-reading, Birkenstock-wearing, organic-baba-ganouj-eating communist English professor. It's a philosophical viewpoint, not a lifestyle. It's actually a very reasonable position to hold; believing in universal moral codes is quite difficult once you know enough about the world and its peoples.

To directly answer your question, there are so many ethical relativists because it's very hard to imagine where universal moral laws might come from. YHWH? Allah? Plato? Confucius? There are many different cultures with differing moral values, and none of them will confess to being "evil"; everyone believes that they are doing what is right and good, even the terrorists who planned and executed the 9/11 tragedy. How do we reconcile these beliefs? One way is to say that we and only we are right, and then to make war until everyone else is dead. Only other approaches -- ways of thinking that incorporate some degree of ethical and cultural relativism -- will enable us to exist in a globalized society.

*****

p.s. jonmcn49 --
I've not made my email address available precisely because people like you would write to me were I to do so.

Citing Marc Hauser would have made a good response to the original question ("Ethical relativists are obviously ignorant of the latest scientific findings," and so forth); citing Sokal, not so much. It was misleading and had almost no bearing on the question. My critique of your response, though hastily written, was not incoherent, and you've done nothing to refute it.

I'm happy to address the Hauser angle as well, by the way. Hauser's "universal moral grammar" has all the same flaws as Chomskian linguistics. When you posit a totalizing universal model, you tend to ignore or write off deviations -- which is exactly what both Hauser and Chomsky do, often very unconvincingly. Both theories are subject to serious contention within their fields. This is not an open-and-shut case, so to speak.

Further -- and this is the part that you really should have thought about before you posted that condescending addendum to your original post -- even if we have collectively evolved a "universal moral grammar," there is nothing to say that these instincts are morally correct in a philosophical sense. You can believe that humans all have the same moral instincts at birth and also believe that those moral instincts are wrong. After all, there are many instances where our instinctive behaviors are at odds with modern life. Faced with an effectively limitless supply of food, some humans have a genetic proclivity to obesity, for example. How do people decide which instincts to honor and which to reject? Socialization, cultural norms, and so on. We're back to relativism.

I have no doubt that there is an evolutionary basis for most of the spectrum of human morality on some level, but ethics and science are still distinct disciplines. It's simply not clear that science will ever be able to answer moral questions, just as it's not clear that neuroscience will ever be able to explain the qualitative experience of consciousness. Science may be able to tell us why and how we make the moral decisions we do, but whether those decisions are right? It's simply beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

I stand by my original answer. Ethical relativists are people who believe in the validity of viewpoints besides their own, and the world could use more of them. There are too many people going around convinced that they're morally superior to everyone else, and they've caused the rest of us no end of trouble.

Answer 4

Individuals who sit on the fence and wait for adventitious input. Now is the moment to create. The bourgeois have had their day.

Answer 5

How much better the world would be if everyone thought and believed just exactly like you.