Challenges: Relativism, Subjectivism, Religion

This is Unit Two of Ethics and Values: Relativism, Subjectivism, and Religion. Unit One built the machinery — what a moral claim is, what a verdict needs, how an argument goes into standard form. This unit turns that machinery on three theories that each, in a different way, say it has nowhere to go. The first says right and wrong are fixed by each culture's code, and no code outranks another. The second says a moral statement reports nothing beyond the speaker's own attitude. The third grounds right and wrong in what an authority commands. Each is worth taking seriously, and each carries a cost that shows up when you follow it out. By the end you will be able to do five things. One: state what cultural relativism claims, and show why the argument usually given for it does not reach its conclusion. Two: name what follows if the theory is true — for criticising another society, for criticising your own, and for calling any change progress. Three: separate a difference in factual belief from a difference in value, and name the values no functioning society drops. Four: tell reporting an attitude from expressing one, and say what each account cannot handle. Five: run the Euthyphro test on any claim that grounds wrongness in a command.

Start with the theory itself, then the argument that carries most people to it. The argument is the part that repays attention: it is short, it feels sound, and it does not do what it appears to do.

First the claim, in its own words.

Ethics 046 Cultural Relativism

Two peoples, each appalled by the other's burial custom. The theory declines to rank them — not undecided between the two, but holding that no ranking is available.

Now the argument that gets people there.

Ethics 047 The Cultural Differences Argument

The premise is about what codes say. The conclusion is about what is true. That move from one to the other is the whole argument, and it is where the weight sits.

Watch what happens when the move is tested.

Ethics 048 Why the Argument Fails

Disagreement is evidence that people differ, not that no answer exists. Two textbooks teaching rival causes of a disease leave the cause exactly where it was.

Set aside whether the argument works, and grant the theory. Three things follow that its defenders rarely want. Take them in order: criticism of others, criticism of your own society, and the possibility of progress.

The first consequence looks outward.

Ethics 049 No Criticizing Other Societies

Auditors find forced labour and the theory answers that the local code permits it. Whether local approval settles the matter is the very thing in dispute.

The second turns the same rule inward.

Ethics 050 No Criticizing Your Own Society

A citizen calls her country's inheritance rules unfair, and the theory measures her against those rules. She is refuted before the argument starts.

The third is about time.

Ethics 051 The Moral-Progress Problem

Ending legal slavery becomes a change in the code and nothing more. Calling it better needs a measure standing outside the code, and the theory has removed one.

A theory can fail as stated and still be onto something. Two distinctions rescue what is worth keeping — one about beliefs, one about the values no society can do without — and then a procedure puts them to work on a practice that startles you.

Start with why practices differ in the first place.

Ethics 052 Belief Differences Beneath Value Differences

A society that holds cows to house ancestors' souls refuses beef. The attitude toward grandmothers is not in dispute; a belief about where they are is.

Now the other direction — what never varies.

Ethics 053 Values Every Society Shares

Truth-telling, care of the young, limits on killing. Drop them and there is no group left to have a code: a village where lying costs nothing stops being a village.

With those two in hand, the theory's sound core.

Ethics 054 What Cultural Relativism Gets Right

Read as a warning it earns its place. A manager reads gift-giving at a signing as bribery; some of what feels like ethics turns out to be etiquette.

The procedure puts all of this into three questions. Watch it run.

Ethics 056 Sorting Convention from Morality

Belief first, shared value second, and only then the question that decides: with both answered, is anyone's interests still set back. The method judges practices, never peoples.

The second challenge grants that moral talk is meaningful and denies that it is about anything beyond the speaker. It is a tidy theory, and the two problems that follow are the reason almost nobody holds it in this form.

The claim first.

Ethics 061 Simple Subjectivism

Two roommates arguing about meat are, on this account, filing accurate reports about themselves. Nothing either says bears on the other.

The first problem is about being wrong.

Ethics 062 The Infallibility Problem

A slaveholder sincerely approves, so his report is accurate, and accurate is the whole verdict the theory can issue. The one that matters is missing.

The second is about disagreeing.

Ethics 063 The Disagreement Problem

One senator calls the tariff unjust, another calls it fair, and both reports are true. The debate has turned into two pieces of autobiography.

Emotivism is the repair. It keeps the idea that moral talk is not about the world and drops the idea that it reports anything at all — which dissolves both problems, at a price paid later in the topic.

The repair, stated.

Ethics 064 Emotivism

A fan's boo at a referee is neither true nor false. Emotivism reads moral language the same way: expression, and an attempt to bring others along.

The distinction the repair rests on.

Ethics 065 Expressing vs. Reporting

Saying you are furious is a claim about you and could be a lie. Slamming the laptop makes no claim and cannot be one.

Now the price.

Ethics 066 Emotivism's Reasons Problem

If the aim is only to move a listener, an invented rumour that works counts alongside a fact that works. Evidence and persuasion have stopped being different things.

Both theories so far are propped up by a suspicion that moral claims cannot be supported the way factual ones are. This topic takes that suspicion apart, then states the real limit — which is narrower, and more interesting, than the suspicion assumes.

First, what support in ethics looks like.

Ethics 067 Proof in Ethics

A paper matching the rubric line for line takes an F while its twin takes a B. State the reasons, answer the objections, rule out the alternatives, and unfair is established.

Now the genuine limit.

Ethics 069 The Is/Ought Gap

From the drug ending pain, nothing yet follows about giving it. Something carrying an ought has to join the argument before a conclusion about conduct arrives.

The limit is routinely overread.

Ethics 070 The Gap Misread as "Facts Don't Matter"

Whether a sentencing law reduces reoffending is a matter of fact, and for anyone holding that punishment must protect the public it decides almost everything.

The third challenge grounds right and wrong in what God commands. One question, twenty-four centuries old, divides it into two positions — and each position gives something up. The procedure at the end of the topic runs the same question against any authority at all.

The theory, stated plainly.

Ethics 076 The Divine Command Theory

Asked why promise-breaking is wrong, the answer arrives in one step and stops. No standard beyond the command is consulted.

Here is the question that splits it.

Ethics 077 The Euthyphro Question

Right because commanded, or commanded because right. Socrates put it to Euthyphro about piety; both answers still cost something.

Take the first answer.

Ethics 078 The Arbitrariness Horn

A parent's "because I say so" carries the cost the child hears immediately: a different say-so would have made the opposite right.

Take the second.

Ethics 079 The Independent-Standard Horn

An inspector approves a bridge because it is sound; the soundness came first and approval recognises it. Rightness now stands on its own, and the definition has been surrendered.

The test generalises past this one theory. Watch it applied.

Ethics 086 Running the Euthyphro Test

Would a rule change make the conduct right? Yes puts the claim on the first horn; no puts the wrongness somewhere the rule only recognises. The test locates what backs a verdict rather than refuting it.

A second route runs through religion without running through command: read the standard off human nature's purposes. It meets an objection you already have the equipment to state. The topic then closes on what reading a text for guidance actually requires, and where moral reasons have to work.

The theory first.

Ethics 080 The Natural-Law Theory

Aquinas's line — the eye is for seeing, speech is for truth, so deception misuses speech. Purposes built into nature are doing the work of a standard.

You met the objection two topics ago.

Ethics 081 Natural Law Meets the Gap

Disease is natural and vaccination interferes with it. Anyone unwilling to call vaccination wrong is already grading nature by some further standard.

What about reading a text for the answer?

Ethics 082 Scripture Still Needs Judgment

Two believers, one text, opposite verdicts on capital punishment, each citing chapters. What separates them is judgment, and judgment is moral reasoning.

Which leaves the question of common ground.

Ethics 083 Morality on Shared Ground

A council debates shelter funding with pastors and secular advocates at one microphone. It works because the reasons travel across every seat.

One case brings the whole unit together. A reformer inside a slave-holding society says the society's own code is wrong. Cultural relativism has an answer, and the answer is the problem. Watch what has to be true for the reformer to be right.

The capstone. Everything in this unit is in play.

Ethics 095 The Reformer's Case

Graded against the local code the reformer loses by definition, and a later change is movement rather than improvement. The case ran on shared standards, not on a visitor's customs, and that difference is the method.

Five things you can now do. You can state what cultural relativism claims, and show why the Cultural Differences Argument does not reach its conclusion — a premise about what codes say leaves what is true untouched. You can name what follows if the theory holds: no verdict on another society, no verdict on your own, and no change that counts as improvement. You can separate a difference in belief from a difference in value, and name the values no functioning society drops — truth-telling, care of the young, limits on killing. You can tell reporting an attitude from expressing one, and say what each account loses: on the first, error and disagreement both become impossible; on the second, evidence stops being different from persuasion. And you can run the Euthyphro test on any claim that grounds wrongness in a command, whoever is doing the commanding.