Last week, I examined the philosophy of cultural relativism: the idea that morality is a “construct” of culture. By this argument, no culture can be judged by another. Cultural relativism is the One Big Idea of Capital-M Multiculturalism.
As we saw though, cultural relativism is also “fashionable, politically correct baloney”. Not only does it contradict itself, but it necessarily condones some practises which seem very difficult to morally defend: slavery (at least by non-whites) for instance, or cannibalism, or female genital mutilation.
But can we successfully defend its opposite: moral realism? Where relativism denies that there are objective moral facts, realism asserts that there are and that these facts mean that some answers to moral questions are correct. Correct for everybody.
But moral realism seems to have as many problems as moral relativism
By far the most popular moral realist ideologies are religious: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it”. But which religion is right? Despite the best efforts of ecumenism to draw a polite veil over it, even the three Mosaic religions disagree with one another on some pretty basic moral questions.
More importantly, even millennia ago, the Greeks noticed another fundamental problem for all religions. In Plato’s famous phrase is “the pious or holy[…]beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods”? Both answers undermine the possibility of moral realism.
If something is “pious or holy” (in other words, moral) because it is beloved by the gods, morality is the arbitrary caprice of the gods. Morality is whatever God feels like making it, even murder or rape.
Of course, the religious believer would respond that God would never make something so heinous as murder “moral”. In other words, morals are beloved by God because it is moral. But that necessarily takes the matter out of God’s hands. Moral facts must exist independently of God.
So, where are these moral facts? Here, even the non-religious crash on the rocks of logic.
400 years ago, David Hume made an uncomfortable realisation: ought does not necessarily entail is. That is, objective facts about the world cannot necessarily entail subjective judgements.
This is a powerful idea which applies to everything from climate change (that the climate is warming says nothing about whether or not it should) to morality (that Jane did kill Dick says nothing about whether it was wrong to kill Dick).
So doesn’t that leave us unavoidably in the moral relativist camp? But, as we have already seen, moral relativism doesn’t hold much water, either.
It was, in fact, Hume himself who hinted at a resolution.
Hume’s great work was his A Treatise of Human Nature (my emphasis). While subjectivism is unavoidable, Hume seems to suggest that it is a human subjectivism. That is, there are moral facts that are true according to human nature. Aristotle suggested the same with his eudaimonia, the ideal of human flourishing. More recently, Sam Harris explored the same idea in his The Moral Landscape.
Despite its faults, Harris’s book hits on an important idea: objective facts do not necessarily entail subjective judgements, but… what else can we use to make subjective judgements, but objective facts? Harris argues that there are facts about human nature we can objectively establish: some things encourage human flourishing; others, human suffering.
If we accept the fundamental assumption that human flourishing is good, and suffering is bad, everything else follows.
The beauty of Harris’s argument is that it is so applicable across cultures and religions: what he calls the “moral landscape”. The “peaks” of the landscape are human flourishing; the valleys, suffering. What makes a peak of human flourishing in Christianity may differ slightly in Hinduism, but peaks both remain.
Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card explored the idea even more forcefully, in Speaker for the Dead. Can we, Card asked, make moral judgements, not just for the human species, but all intelligent species?
In Speaker, humans encounter the only other intelligent, rational species so far discovered in the galaxy: a race of forest-dwelling tribes colloquially dubbed “Piggies”. The crux of the novel is when the piggies inexplicably murder first one, then another human “xenologer”, by dismembering them while they are alive and fully conscious.
As another character puts it, there is an objective fact here: murder.
So the question becomes one of moral fact. Are the piggies evil, or are they acting according to an ethics completely different to ours? “There is our dilemma. There is the problem. Was the act evil, or was it, somehow, to the piggies’ understanding at least, good?”
The crisis is resolved when humans belatedly become aware of certain peculiarities of the piggies’ biology. In the final, reproductive stage of their lives, male piggies metamorphose into sentient trees – which can only happen when they are ritually dismembered alive. The piggies feel no pain during this procedure because they chew the leaves of a native plant.
The piggies, likewise unaware of human biology, had attempted to pay this ultimate respect to the xenologers. What they also didn’t know was that the pain-killing plant has no effect on humans. The piggies belatedly recognise that they have committed a grave moral error: inflicting suffering.
Both species therefore honour the same moral value: the wellbeing, happiness, or eudaimonia of rational beings. Indeed, in the final act that seals the covenant of understanding between the species, the hero (reluctantly) agrees to perform the ritual dismemberment on one of his piggie friends.
So, in the end, neither relativism nor realism is a completely satisfactory account of morality. But they lead to very different conclusions.
Relativism leaves us adrift in a slurry of “non-judgement” that pretends to be very sophisticated, “inclusive” and “open-minded”. Yet, in practice, not only is it contradictory and selectively very, very judgemental, but it gives a free pass to every heinous practice from female genital mutilation to slavery. Relativism is so open-minded that its brains fall out, taking moral sensibility with them.
On the other hand, moral realism not only allows concrete moral judgements in at least the most obvious cases, it truly is “inclusive” in the most meaningful sense. Once we establish that some acts really are morally beyond excuse, then those standards can be applied across all cultures, without fear or favour. In at least the most important respects, what is wrong for one culture is wrong for all.
Given the choice between the two, I’ll take “judgemental” moral realism.
After all, the opposite of judgement is gullibility.
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