On moral relativism

I recommended Philosophy Bites recently, and was listening to an installment this morning that was worth mentioning, Simon Blackburn on moral relativism. What he says seems to apply to the occasional LD case.

It is not hard to think of examples of one culture believing something is morally correct, and another culture thinking that same thing is morally incorrect. For that matter, even within a culture, different people can view the same act as right or wrong, depending on a variety of criteria. But I’m more interested in the idea of cultural differences in morality at the moment because often resolutions encompass multiple cultures, and the differing moral viewpoints of cultures are called into play in peoples’ arguments. The problem is that people will argue that when there is a discrepancy in moral views, we must respect the other culture’s views, to which they have some sort of cultural entitlement. The relativist, in other words, claims that all cultural views are equally acceptable.

No one, of course, seriously believes this. But in certain circles, the truth of an argument, i.e., the acceptable reasonableness of a position, is beside the point.

But the issue goes further. Take female genital mutilation, for instance. Some cultures do claim that this is morally correct. Others find it morally repugnant. At the point where the cultures on both sides come into contact, then there is a conflict. If we were to take a morally relativist position, as Blackburn says, we would be unable to resolve the conflict, but the problem is, we have a serious issue that must be resolved. We can’t avoid it: We must resolve the conflict. We must find a satisfactory moral approach that transcends any cultural bias. This asks for a morality that transcends culture, and while it may be hard to determine such a morality, it does make sense to me that any conflict resolution between morally disparate cultures must transcend those cultures. At some point, some things are simply right or wrong, regardless of where you are. At the point where anything can be right and anything can be wrong, and it doesn’t matter what they are because where you are takes priority, then we have moral chaos.

The process of globalization is often vilified as the imposing of (usually Western) culture on other cultures. Certainly one impact of globalization is the spreading of the globalizing culture. Everyone around the world drinks Coke, eats at McDonalds and watches Jon Cruz Tom Cruise movies. There is certainly an impact of cultural leak, at the very least, from the globalizer to the globalizee. Often this is argued as cultural hegemony (bad if we want to maintain sovereign cultural integrity, good if we want to boss everyone else around). And so it is. Subjectively, the globalizer might like to think of itself as civilizing the savages, but imperialists always like to think that they are benefiting their wards. But changing a taste for crocodile steaks to a taste for Big Macs, while perhaps culturally damaging, is nonetheless morally neutral, or at worst, morally so-so. Morally suspect, but not really high up on the immorality hit parade. To a degree, this process just may be a fact of life (and, I hate to say it, go back and read your Old Baudleroo for more on the subject). Cultural studies seem to tell us that we are going to globalize whether we like it or not, at best holding on to a simulacrum of our original cultures. That is, Norway will no longer be Norway, it will be a Disneyfied Norway where Norway-ish materials create the illusion of it being Norway, but for all practical purposes, aside from the whale cutlets, you might as well be in Bayonne, New Jersey.

But serious questions of right and wrong are not addressed by glib analyses of cultures homogenizing, or of some neutral vision that everything every culture does is right because of an inherent warrant that cultures are entitled to do what they want because they are a culture. Culture is not a warrant for any action whatsoever. What the relativist tells us, even if the relativist does not agree with an action, is that because cultures are different, they will do these different things. True enough. But as an ethicist, and as a debater, one ought to seek more than just an obvious descriptive. One must look to prescriptive measures.

In other words, don’t tell me life sucks and walk away. Tell me life sucks, and give me some idea how to make it suck less.