Rational Argument is Cultural Relativism?
Here’s another thing I’m curious about: this idea (if it is an idea, as opposed to a mere ad hoc ploy snatched up for the purposes of evasive argumentation) that rational argument is the same thing as cultural relativism. Is that an idea? In the sense that several or many people think that, as opposed to one idiosyncratic person commenting on a Note and Comment?
Well I suppose it is an idea, yes, come to think of it, but surely it’s an idea that belongs to the, how shall I say, the fervent moral majoritarian fundamentalist right wing crowd, not the multiculti diversity-celebrating Islamophobia-spotting crowd. That’s a favourite ploy with the fundies: doing things by contraries, declaring opposites to be identical and themselves to have won the argument. They like to say atheism is a religion, and secularism is another, and “Darwinism” another, and “radical feminism” another, and fill in the rest of the blanks. The gentle and reasonable Bishop of Rockford sees things that way, or pretends to for the purpose of firing his flock to rush out and tell lies about Democrats and libbruls. ‘The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation.’ Same kind of thing. “Secular culture” has sacraments, atheism is a religion, and rational argument is cultural relativism. Sure: coercive domineering theocratic types do like to claim that rational argument is identical to relativism and boils down to saying anything goes, everything’s good, all must be tolerated, if it works for you it’s groovy, there are no rules, take your pants off and stick around for awhile. But they like to claim that for their own nasty coercive theocratic reasons: they like to claim it so that they can claim that there is nothing between authoritarian inarguable Holy Book-ratified take it or go to hell dogma, and whoopee let’s bugger all the infants. They like to claim that (apparently this needs spelling out) so that everyone will pale with terror and cling to the dogma for dear life lest they find themselves copulating with a newborn. But that is a tactic, a ploy, a trick, not a genuine or legitimate argument, and it’s not true. Rational argument is not the same thing as relativism. That’s common knowledge, isn’t it? I’d have thought so, but perhaps I’d have been wrong. But take a look at, oh, I don’t know, Mill’s Subjection of Women, or Rawls’s Theory of Justice, or Sen’s Argumentative Indian; they’re none of them examples of cultural relativism, but you can find traces of rational argument here and there in all of them.
The crux here is my “The “up to a point” has to be defended and defensible, it has to be justifiable, it can’t be just a because God says so” answered with “NAMBLA are certainly prepared to have an argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys, and the reason that they can’t is going to have to depend on some absolute statement of (im)morality.”
Why? Why is the reason going to have to depend on that? Any more than, for instance, the arguments for gay marriage do? It’s noticeable that most of the arguments against gay marriage are not very good, are not conspicuously rational*, and that’s probably why they’re not thriving all that well with rational people. They flourish with theocrats (maybe partly because they don’t flourish with rational people: it’s part of the whole anti-“elitist” schtick that fundamentalists go in for) but they don’t flourish with people who are at least somewhat reachable by rational argument. Surely it would be the same with NAMBLA’s projected argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys, or any other moral issue. Either they’re rationally arguable, or they’re not, in which case they’re arbitrary, and their force becomes extremely questionable. Since I’m arguing here that precisely such arbitrary unjustifiable unarguable moral commands are coercive and should not be automatically respected or tolerated or celebrated or deferred to merely on the grounds that they belong to another culture, I fail to see why or how that makes me a cultural relativist, and I’m curious about the whole idea, and curious about leftists who apparently think their view is progressive and mine is conservative. Very curious.
*Harry Brighouse posted a request for “a really good article, by someone philosophically sophisticated, which argues against gay marriage” at Crooked Timber the other day, because he didn’t have much. That would seem to indicate it’s not an abundant commodity.
OB,
“I fail to see why or how that makes me a cultural relativist, and I’m curious about the whole idea”. I don’t think you are a cultural relativist, but that’s not the point. It’s totally a ploy.
The New Pope likes to drop the term ‘relativist’ when he yammers on about the world’s morals. “Relativists” is just another word for all those who don’t fall in line with the Church’s teachings. (Have you had a discussion with a young (20-40 yr old) conservative Catholic lately? I’m sorry to say I have, and ‘relativist’ and ‘relativism’ are buzz-words to make them feel better about imposing their beliefs on you and me.)
Catholics like to think of themselves as the rational religionists. They have Augustine and Aquinas, right? And the Pope always published books, so he’s an intellectual. It follows that anyone who is in opposition to their beliefs/canon are irrational or relativists.
(“Relativist” is also used to refer to non-hard line Catholics (such as those who voted for John Kerry, or use contraceptives.))
Good point about Ratzinger, Ian – I linked to a lot of news items about his burblings about relativism when he made the cut.
I know it’s a ploy, I know it’s a conservative religious thing; what I don’t get is what a lefty is doing using the same ploy, right out in the open. It’s weird. So I’m wondering if the meme has leaked from the other side, or if that was just a warp in the space-time continuum.
OB,
I think a lefty would use the term ‘relativism’ loosely for the same reason a righty would – to distract people. Bad logic and sloppy forms of discourse are contagious.
The trouble with the mis/over-use of the term “relativism” is that is begins to strip all meaning from the word as the description of something real.
I recall back in March of 1999 , Salman Rushdie wrote a convincing article about American culture (Thank the Internet! I actually found it! http://www.uwm.edu/~wash/rushdie.htm) He argues that we in the West should not feel bad about judging other cultures by our secular, and possibly universal, standards.
When he wrote about cultural relativists, he was not tossing the word around to make himself appear smarter or distract people from weaknesses in his own argument. He was describing real people – and a real problem – on the left. I don’t know of any other way to use the word. It ticks me off when the Pope or his henchmen use it for their own devious purposes.
To make an obvious point, we are talking ethics again. If we are going to base our normative ethics on reason we need to be sure we clearly understand the axioms of our ethical systems – assuming we have one. People with different axiomatic foundations for their ethics may find it very difficult to have a reasoned argument. People who don’t understand each others, or their own, ethical axioms are almost certain to talk past each other.
If ‘God said so’ is the overarching axiom of my normative ethics, then I am likely to find reasons presented by ‘Yuk’ ethical reasoners or happiness satisficing utilitarians not only unconvincing, but absolutely meaningless.
This is an argument as old as Hume; that all chains of moral reasoning must either end up in a moral principle to be taken as an axiom (an absolute statement) or be taken as having content which is not straightforwardly deductive (most usually, by being coded statements about social institutions or personal preferences). I’m surprised that you haven’t heard of it. “rational argument, up to a point” means, specifically “rational argument, up to the point at which a transition is made from factual to normative statements”.
Oh, I’ve heard of it, I just don’t understand it. Comes of being so thick.
Well if you’ve heard of it, then have you heard that it isn’t “an idea that belongs to the fervent moral majoritarian fundamentalist crowd”? I think that there is a moral principle that it’s good to take other people’s arguments seriously and bad to try and present them on your blog hidden in a thicket of insults and attempts to associate them with unpopular causes. I realise, however, that this is fundamentally not much more than a cultural norm of some parts of the Internet.
“I think that there is a moral principle that it’s good to take other people’s arguments seriously”
Oh come on, you must be joking – yes, of course you are, that’s double or triple irony.
Let me clarify, in case that’s obscure. You haven’t been taking my arguments seriously, and you haven’t been arguing yourself. I don’t know what to call what you’ve been doing, but it’s not either of those.
Intellectual masturbation seems to fit the bill. There is a horrible laziness in the assumption that one axiom is as good as another. If one adopts certain axioms for everyday survival it is perverse to argue that they will not suffice for other arguments – I think that is what Moore was getting at.
“This is an argument as old as Hume; that all chains of moral reasoning must either end up in a moral principle to be taken as an axiom (an absolute statement) or be taken as having content which is not straightforwardly deductive (most usually, by being coded statements about social institutions or personal preferences).”
Wrong. An axiom is a general rule, not an absolute statement. Morality is not mathematics.
“rational argument, up to a point” means, specifically “rational argument, up to the point at which a transition is made from factual to normative statements”.
I don’t think so, and isn’t it just a tad presumptious to tell other posters what they really mean?
You seem to be arguing right past everyone here, and it seems to be because you think moral guidelines must be absolute to be compelling . This also seems to lead you to not see any difference between moral relativism and the notion that morals can be rationally arguable without being absolute. But I will leave it to you to try to explain just what it is that seems to bother you so much about this “up to a point” stuff.
Phil
dsquared, great to read you over here. Its been a while since I read CT, and you impress ‘philosophically unsophisticated’ person for a start.
The point about transition from rational to normative statements is way cool. Do you think that an early transition that gives the same conclusion as a later one, but saving much investigative work, is useful? Seems to me it is, especially if on previously refusing a normative grounding you find nothing else to ground on.
Shucks, don’t be too hard on dsquared, there is a sort of point there somewhere. What value would there be in trying to rationally determine an ethical relationship with [wacky example] bloodsucking aliens who saw us as walking fast-food stalls? Are we really sure that all human beings are operating in the same ethical space as the ‘us’ that prefers rational argument to dogma? Or are we being dogmatic in insisting that there ought to be a space for rational discussion? Us pluralist liberals have a pretty definite idea of acceptable human behaviour, and I’m not sure that it’s shared by a majority. I still prefer it to all the others, but there are plenty of others. Personally, I’d say turning that around and trying to make it a problem of ‘relativism’ is getting it arse-about-face, but that the See of Rome for you.
Dave: I have no disagreement with the existence of a concept of acceptable behaviour that comes from “us pluralist liberals”; I just think it’s pretty silly to claim that it has some other basis than being the concept of us; in particular, I think it’s wrong to pretend that something close to the Constitution of the USA is the natural consequence of rational reflection.
Indeed, especially when it’s really the result of a desire to defend capitalist merchants from disgruntled farmers, preserve the institution of slavery, and licence the wholesale stuffing of the aboriginal population… Talk about unintended consequences…
“Are we really sure that all human beings are operating in the same ethical space as the ‘us’ that prefers rational argument to dogma?”
Are you kidding? Of course not. That’s the point. Most human beings are operating in the ethical space that prefers to say homosexuality is bad and wrong because it’s a sin because god says so, period, end of discussion. That women are subordinate to men for the same reason. That it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is, “Darwinism” is wrong and that’s that, end of discussion.
“Us pluralist liberals have a pretty definite idea of acceptable human behaviour, and I’m not sure that it’s shared by a majority. I still prefer it to all the others, but there are plenty of others.”
?
What are you arguing with? Of course it’s not shared by a majority, of course there are plenty of others. It’s a preference; but it’s a preference that can give better reasons for being a preference than ‘because god said so.’ It’s a preference that can give better reasons for universalizing it than ‘because (our) god said so’ can.
I was merely pointing out our beleaguered state, to which point I would add that if there are plenty of people out there who are closer to the aforementioned bloodsucking aliens than they are to ‘us’ in their ethical standpoints, then alas it won’t really matter how good our reasons for universalising our preference are, should we be forced into contact with them, because we’ll probably be dead.
Unless you’re going to share with us the secrets of Death Ninja Liberal Pluralism? I for one would be glad of a crash-course.
Ah. Well, I’m sharply aware of our beleaguered state, I assure you. I’m not at all optimistic about rational argument prevailing, I’m just saying it ought to.
[It’s a preference; but it’s a preference that can give better reasons for being a preference than ‘because god said so.’]
playing “chase the unsupported evaluative premis” with people who are trying to get round Hume’s Law is one of the best games in philoshopy. In this case, you’ve smuggled in “better”. If there is an objective standard to decide what kinds of reasons are “better” than others, then why not use that as a basis for morality rather than your preferences? Except that “better reasons” in this case means “reasons which appear better to me and people who share my preferences”.
This ‘culture determines everything’ relatavist merde is beginning to annoy me. If Dsquared is an anti-realist he ought to declare himself thus. Then we can discuss the real basis of his carping.
To recapitulate, not all axioms are equally useful. Fortunately there is an evolutionary process by which rubbish axioms tend to diminish – like ‘the world is flat’. I really loathe the way people with a dualist or anti-realist agenda smuggle their crap theories in to serious discussions about social injustice. If I may use an hyperbolic characterisation – trafficking nubiles for non-consensual sex? Just free market economics, in’t it?
I really don’t think you can dismiss the substantive point by calling it rubbish, or indeed crap. If we are discussing social practices, which I think we are, is it not evident to the unprejudiced observer that the ‘wrongness’ of any such practice can only ever be determined in relation to a set of essentially moral/ethical decisions, and that those decisions ARE decisions, they are not given by the world? Cultures practice all manner of things ‘we’ consider to be horrific. Under the auspices of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there currently exists a framework for denouncing many of those practices — but denouncing them against the ‘agreed’ framework, not against ‘the Truth’ of good human conduct.
To think otherwise would be to believe that ‘we’, now, have discovered a set of values which are, in fact, eternal verities, and yet, also, have been completely ignored by almost everyone since before the dawn of recorded history. Which would be, for me anyway, a pretty presumptuous way of seeing the world. Almost as presumptuous as thinking that one stood in an apostolic succession from the Son of God, or indeed had the truth of the universe whispered into one’s ear by an angel.
The values of the UDHR are good, very good, probably too good to ever actually be carried into practice comprehensively, that’s how good they are, but they’re no more ‘real’, in that really real, so real you can’t argue with me sense, than the values of the pope, or any other religious icon.
I think that the most promising way forward to try and create a foundation for moral principles would be some kind of practical constraint (or if you have recently read Dawkins and are feeling pretentious an “evolutionary constraint”) on what kinds of values it is possible to have.
Thus, a culture whose highest value was starvation and suicide would not be able to exist, so although there is nothing logically contradictory in having this as a value, there is a practical contradiction. This looks quite promising in that it gives you a preference for pleasure over pain, special obligations toward children, a taboo on theft etc. The problem that it runs into is that, if you consider it purely in this form of “what values does a culture need to survive and thrive”, then it is very difficult to get *universal* human rights out of it (and very easy to get a set of explicitly racist values). I don’t think anyone’s really solved this.
But the real problem lies in thinking that moral principles need to have a ‘foundation’. They don’t, they just need to be agreed upon, or at the least seen as an acceptable and workable platform for deriving the actual, coercive laws by which a society operates. The UDHR, for example, states as fact many things which are pure assertions. If we agree to take those assertions as fact, we can build upon them, but they are not ‘founded’ in anything but agreement to treat them as worthy premises of social organisation.
well, I agree with that, but this would be a different thing from saying that they were based on “rational argument”.
But this whole discussion started with my saying yes, there are substantive moral commitments underpinning the ‘neutral’ political framework I favour. But it’s also true that I think I have to offer some kind of rational argument for them in cases of disagreement, or else be reduced to mere taboo-invocation. Sure, I realize that eventually one gets driven back to the final axiom that is difficult or impossible to justify. (‘Yes but why is it wrong to make people suffer?’) But there are levels before that, where argument is necessary, unless one just wants to join the shouting bible-thumpers.
“there are levels before that, where argument is necessary, unless one just wants to join the shouting bible-thumpers.”
Whether you join the taboo-shouters or not, once you engage in that ‘space for discussion’ where ‘argument is necessary’, you could offer rational argument to support taboo-invocation. Murder, slavery, FGM and rape seem to me to be to be self-evidently easy to just accept as shared taboos and move on. But even there, as OB has so effectively pointed out, the forces of irrationality are dreaming up and exploiting ways to make those blacks seem white.
Rational argument is perhaps not the way to address the perpetrators. A loudly shouted taboo enforced with the full weight of retributive activity, followed by even more shouting seems to be the way to go.
[But it’s also true that I think I have to offer some kind of rational argument for them ]
but you don’t offer “rational argument” for a proposition like “women should be equal to men”; you take it as a self-evident axiom and use it as a premis for other axioms.
I said, I think I have to offer some kind of rational argument for propositions of that kind (implicitly: in cases of disagreement); I didn’t claim I was doing it here. I realize I’m taking gender egalitarianism to be self-evident for the purposes of this particular argument, but obviously I’m well aware that it can’t be taken as self-evident. That’s rather the point.
but this is exactly the problem; it’s a regress. If we consider the rational argument you’re going to offer for sexual equality, then either:
a) it is based on a chain of reasoning which ends in a premise which is taken as axiomatically true
or
b) the statements which you are “rationally arguing” for are mutually self-supporting and not based on any more fundamental principles, in which case the whole set of them is being asserted as axiomatically true.
The chain of supporting arguments has to end somewhere. And where it does, there’s something which is asserted without argument. Referring to this point as “up to a point” is just saying that it’s there.
I know that. I’ve already said that, and that that’s part of what I’m saying. But the chain of supporting arguments ends a lot later than it does with taboo or god says so reasons, and it is in that space that we have to live – in the space between ‘do what you’re told’ and reasons. Between god wants women to be subordinate because god says so, and reasons; between homosexuality is bad because it’s a sin, and reasons. What is your point? That there’s no difference between arbitrary laws and reasoned ones? That all courts of appeal are deeply misguided?