A week or two ago, my friend Momin Malik responded on Facebook* to my first post on Leah Libresco’s conversion. He took issue in particular with my very brief negative reference to relativism. I have argued against relativism at some length before, in response to Peimin Ni, and also to postmodernism. But in those posts I argued against relativism on pragmatic and performative grounds, because it was mainly being defended in pragmatic and performative terms. I’m interested in Momin’s position because, as far as I can tell, he argues for relativism on rational terms, tries to convince us of relativism because it is in some sense true, not just effective.
According to Momin, relativism says (his emphasis and brackets): “there is no universal or neutral perspective from which we can [rationally] arbitrate between competing viewpoints. So, it’s not that we can’t say Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were wrong and horrible, it’s that such a statement is made from within our own values, and not a universal or neutral perspective.” There is much to say about this, but perhaps the first and most important is the great difference between universality and neutrality. When it comes to the philosophy of value or practical philosophy (of which ethics, politics, aesthetics and soteriology are all forms or branches), neutrality is not a worthy goal to strive for. Universality is.
Momin’s version of relativism, as I understand it, claims that there is no right or wrong that transcends what is merely right or wrong to us. So it is not “Pol Pot was not wrong but merely different” but rather “Pol Pot was only wrong to us, not to him” – with no way to move further beyond the dichotomy of us and him. But let us think about this claim in a couple of ways. First of all, it does seem to undermine itself, for it would seem that this claim would itself be true only for Momin and others who inhabit it, not for me and others who don’t. If I disagree with the claim, then it would seem difficult to find a ground on which to establish that the claim should be wrong for me and not merely for Momin. But in attempting to reply to and defend relativism against my accusations with rational argument, it would seem to me that Momin is in fact trying to establish that I should consider it wrong for myself and not merely for him.
From another angle: if it is true that Pol Pot was wrong only to us, we should be clear about the grounds on which we say that Pol Pot was in fact wrong to us. Is our assertion of his wrongness mere arbitrary will and whim, with no reason behind it? Then there is no point in pretending to have arguments like these. The relativism itself is a simple whimsy, and to try to offer arguments for it (as Momin has done) is a callous deception of the kind Nietzsche accused the priesthood of. Or are there, in fact, reasons involved, as the practice of offering arguments implies? I think this is the option Momin has taken, and rightly so. But if relativism claims to be a logical conclusion of rational inquiry in this way, then it must admit reasons as a ground for accepting that one position is better for us than another. And if reason can arbitrate that position is better than another for us, why can’t it arbitrate that one position is better than another for someone else? After all, reasons cross the boundary of individual selves; people convince each other of things all the time. So if we accept that reason should decide matters for ourselves, why can’t accept that it should decide matters for others?
It can’t be that “reason itself isn’t true for them.” Very few people even claim to refuse reason entirely, and of those who do so claim, most of them betray the claim with their actions: making rational arguments and acting accordingly. Indeed, if we do try to understand Pol Pot internally, as Momin and I agree we should, then we need to understand his reasons. This is exactly what I have done when I have tried to so understand him. I noted how he justified his mass killings: “If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?” This rhetorical question serves as an argument, aimed to convince at least those who urged less radical, less destructive measures toward the communist goal: it would have meant that society was left more or less in the same unacceptable state it was in before the revolution. It strikes me that it is a part of being human in the world to employ reasons, to insist on reasons from others and to seek truth, at least to some degree. Those who do not are babies and the truly insane – not the Pol Pots of the world, who use rational means to accomplish terrible ends, but those whose brain functioning does not permit them to interact with the world.
Nor is it that reason can decide only means and not ends. People can and do get rationally convinced by each other about ends. I’ve focused on Leah Libresco’s conversion as an example and illustration of how this can and does in fact happen. So we can arbitrate between different perspectives rationally. We begin within one, but its inadequacies are revealed dialectically, leading us to another. At no point in this process are we standing on some outside neutral ground; but nevertheless we have come to decide that one such view is better than another.
Alasdair MacIntyre‘s work notes the possibility of such supersession even though he doesn’t advocate universality, and is a diehard opponent of neutrality. He nevertheless claims that competing viewpoints can be arbitrated – it is possible, and has indeed happened in important cases, that one viewpoint can give an account of both itself and its competitor that is fuller and more satisfactory – again, from the perspective of both that account and its competitor – than the competitor’s account is.
With all this in mind, let me examine Momin’s arguments for his relativism in more detail. The key argument rests on the importance of understanding:
if Pol Pot was universally wrong, then how could he have done what he did? Obviously there was some perspective from which his project made sense, some perspective that was not, for him, defeated by arguments coming from our western enlightenment perspective. Relativism is simple the epistemic recognition and understanding of this dynamic. The alternative is to dismiss Pol Pot as crazy, insane, incomprehensible. And I don’t find perspectives that dismiss parts of the world as incomprehensible to be effective ways of understand the world. Perhaps dismissing Pol Pot as crazy is helpful in an emotional sense, but for me it is not helpful in an intellectual sense of understanding why historical events in Cambodia played out the way they did.
I disagree with the conclusion Momin comes to from this line of reasoning, but there is a very important grain of truth in it. We learn nothing by dismissing those we disagree with as incomprehensible. Not only do we learn nothing about them, we learn nothing about the world – or the features of the world that drove them to the positions that they took. We learn a little bit more – but not that much – by calling them insane, understanding their actions externally in terms of neurological breakdown or the like. This is much less than we learn if we can understand their positions internally, as their positions made sense to them – that is, if we can make those positions make sense to us.
But why is any of this incompatible with universalism? I had responded: it is pretty obvious to every universalist that some people – indeed probably most people – are wrong about many or even most things. A universalist account requires some sort of theory of error, and “they’re all nuts” is a pretty bad one. A really good universalist account can provide an internalist theory of error – not just explain error away (in, say, Freudian or evolutionary terms) but explain why it is internally persuasive despite being ultimately wrong.
Momin has already responded to this argument, claiming that internalism and universalism are incompatible. But this post is already long. I will post my reply next week.
I may not be understanding Momin’s argument accurately, but it sounds to me like a version of what James Rachels called the Cultural Differences Argument, although Rachels was specifically referring to cultural relativism, not the more subjective kind that seems to be Momin’s conclusion. That argument is simply:
1. Different cultures have different moral codes.
2. Therefore, there are no objective truths in morality.
(This is from Rachels’s essay, “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism”).
Momin’s basic argument sounds very similar, although he might replace “cultures” with “individuals.” The problem that Rachels has pointed out is the same, however. It’s that this argument as it stands is invalid, because the mere fact of disagreement doesn’t by itself support any conclusion about whether truths can be objective. Consider a parallel argument:
1. Some people, such as the Flat Earth Society, think the Earth is flat.
2. Therefore, there is no objective truth about the shape of the Earth.
It is (I hope) pretty uncontroversial that this is a terrible argument, and the basic logic of many arguments for relativism is no better. Of course, Momin and other relativists probably want to insert additional premises about how different perspectives or disagreements undermine moral objectivity in particular. But the reasoning there isn’t very convincing to me, either. I think there’s a huge mistake common to some sorts of anti-realism, pragmatism, postmodernism, etc. The mistake is to argue that because we don’t or can’t know something that it’s pointless, meaningless, empty, incoherent, etc. to think about that thing. Just because moral reasoning is very difficult, often subject to disagreement, and usually far less conclusive than we’d like it to be does not, at least all by itself, mean that it’s pointless to think there might some objective moral truths. To claim to know there are no objective moral truths is probably an appeal to ignorance and perhaps also self-refuting. To think there could be objective moral truths also doesn’t mean we know for sure what those truths actually are.
I think the real impulse that leads many people to relativism is a desire to avoid the kind of bombastic moralizing that some Europeans used as an excuse to conquer the world or that people like Stalin or Pol Pot used to commit atrocities. But I think it’s entirely possible to to avoid that kind of moralizing without giving up the idea that there could be some objectivity in morality. In morality, as elsewhere, a little bit of modesty and willingness to learn from people with whom you disagree can go a long way. Thinking that the truth is out there, but not necessarily in your possession, could be a far more humanizing and progressive view than the relativist insistence that “your truth” is whatever you happen to believe and, thus, beyond reproach.
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“if Pol Pot was universally wrong, then how could he have done what he did? Obviously there was some perspective from which his project made sense, some perspective that was not, for him, defeated by arguments coming from our western enlightenment perspective.”
1. What’s the problem in acknowledging that Pol Pot (or Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Bush) had his reasons for what he did and was also a criminal probably for those very reasons he proffered?
We know that every street criminal has his or her reasons for the crimes they commit, but unless we are victims of serious conceptual confusions engendered by strange philosophical theories, we would not think that this is inconsistent with judging and punishing them as criminals.
Unless one makes the bizarre assumption that every reason an agent proffers for his or her belief or action automatically (morally) justifies and makes that belief or action reasonable, there shouldn’t be any problem in recognizing that Pol Pot had his reasons for his pogrom and was a vicious criminal and mass murderer.
And I don’t understand why Cambodians need to take recourse to “Western enlightenment perspective” to denounce Pol Pot! This seems to go against the alleged anti-patronizing temper of cultural relativism!
The (Buddhist) moral tradition of Cambodian culture and the laws of Cambodian society are sufficient to hold Pol Pot guilty of orchestrating heinous crimes!
Further, I’m sure Pol Pot himself would have appealed to this Cambodian moral tradition and the laws of his society had his followers had been subjected to the sort of torture and killings he meted out to his opponents.
Doesn’t this show that Pol Pot is inconsistent in the face of a situation which requires consistency, and, hence, irrational?
2. Understanding a belief or action is not identical to justifying it.
Understanding someone’s purported or proffered reasons of believing X or doing X is not equivalent to arriving at a justification of X. If it were, we would not have certain kinds of people in prisons and lunatic asylums!
No doubt, a person who is paranoid has “reasons” for his hostile behavior, but it would be bizarre to think that the mere existence of those “reasons” justifies the hostile behavior.
3. In fact, in many cases, understanding an agent’s reasons for doing X may have no bearing on the (moral)justification of X!
We don’t ask a professional car thief, or a mass murderer, or a hijacker, what his or her reasons were for doing what they did in order to justly condemn and punish them for their crimes!
So, why on earth should one ask or seek to know, except for purposes of research on psychopathology, what reasons Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Bush, or Stalin had or gave for their indubitable crimes?
4. Pol Pot had his reasons. Hitler had his reasons. Stalin had his reasons. So what?
It is a bizarre non-sequitur to jump from this premise to the conclusion that they were justified in their respective beliefs and actions.
5. If an agent’s beliefs and/or actions are based on reasons, it is still an open issue whether those reasons are good ones for those beliefs and/or actions.
What constitutes a good reason for a belief or action?
Obviously, the mere fact that an agent has a reason or thinks that her reason is a good reason does not make it a good reason.
That’s just absurd subjectivism, a facet of the prevalent narcissism in North American culture.
If cultural or social relativism presupposes, or collapses into, or implies this subjectivism, then that’s a conclusive reductio ad absurdum against cultural or social relativism.
6. “Cultural relativism” is a curious specimen. It assumes that there are universals or shared views and values in a given culture despite the fact that there are diverse groups in any culture! Otherwise, it would make no sense to say that this or that value is held in “Western culture”, but not in “Indian culture”, and so on.
The cultural relativist implies that there are universals in a given culture, but denies that there are universals shared by different cultures.
But if there are universals in a culture despite the existence of different social groups in any culture, given the universal historical fact of cultural exchange, why is it difficult to envisage that it is likely that many cultures share beliefs, values, practices, etc?
This is an empirical issue and has been conclusively resolved by the discovery of universals across cultures, beliefs, values, actions, and practices shared by many or all known cultures. (See Donald Brown’s book “Human Universals” and/or Steven Pinker’s book “The Blank State”).
7. The Nazis claimed that it was morally right to exterminate Jews because they were “subhumans” who were conspiring to destroy the great civilization of Europe.
Now, if we don’t think that the mere fact that a Nazi proffered it as a reason for supporting the “Final Solution” justifies the extermination of Jews, could we possibly subscribe to the view that the mere fact that the Nazis as a group proffered it as a reason for supporting the “Final Solution” justifies the extermination of Jews?
If you affirm this possibility, then you are assuming that a reason becomes a good reason for believing or doing X merely because a group proffers that reason, that merely an increase in the number of people who proffer that reason makes it a good reason.
But this is a false assumption because a great number of persons can hold beliefs which are simply false, e.g., that there are witches who fly around on broomsticks, that eclipses are caused by giant serpents swallowing the Sun or the Moon, etc.
The Nazis certainly held that a great number of persons can hold beliefs which are false or absurd! They thought that their opponents were all wrong in their beliefs about democracy, racial equality, individual liberty, etc.
It would, obviously, be inconsistent and irrational for a Nazi (or a cultural or social relativist!) to hold the view that a great number of persons can be mistaken in their beliefs and yet affirm that the mere fact that the Nazis had certain beliefs about Jews makes those beliefs good reasons for supporting the “Final solution”.
8. Thus, the absurdity of cultural or social relativism, and of the notion an agent’s reasons for believing or doing X necessarily justifies X, is shown by two simple truths:
1. The mere fact that an agent proffers a reason for a belief or action doesn’t make that reason a good one for that belief or action.
2. The mere fact that a group proffers a reason for a belief or action doesn’t make that reason a good one for that belief or action.