Bored with politics? Lets start a philosophy discussion going! I will talk moral philosophy today. Today I will talk about moral objectivism and relativism. But as always we must first make distinctions!
"Moral relativism" can mean any number of distinct theories about the status of moral claims. Lets call "cultural relativism" the view that a moral claim's truth or falsity depends on the attitudes of the culture one finds oneself in.
"x is right (or wrong)" thus varies from culture to culture depending on what attitudues "the culture" has
Contrast this view with "Subjectivism". As the name implies, the subjectivist holds that moral claims are true or false depending on the attitudes of the person making the judgement. "The death penalty is wrong" if and only if the person making the judgement disaproves of the DP.
A good illustration of subjectivism is found in a famous quote by David Hume:
Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.
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A somewhat long quote, but its always good to quote Hume.
Yet another form of subjectivism holds that moral sentences are not really statements at all-they just reflect or express attitudes or emotions--Like cheering for a sports team, saying "ouch" or uttering a command. This sort of view has a longish tag--Non-cognitivism. moral sentences are pseudo-statements, they are neither truth nor false. They don't describe anything.
I think none of the varieties of relativism is plausible. Let's take them one by one:
(1) cultural relativism defines right or wrong in terms of what a society approves of. So, we can find out what is right or wrong by taking a poll. Any minority view is not simply wrong, but OBVIOUSLY wrong--on this view of moral claim it seems impossible to cogently challenge the dominant moral paradigm in the society.
(2) Subjectivism is more coherent, but still has problems. For one it seems every sincere disagreement turns out to be an agreement. its like when A says "I like chocolate ice cream and B says "I don't like chocolate ice cream" if both are sincere, the are both describing their own attitudes correctly, so they are both saying the truth--there is no real disagreement. A similiar problem befalls non-cognitivism.
There are rejoinders to these arguments, but space is short and I hope these replies and others will come up in the comments.
What about Objectivism?
Lets define Objectivism as the view that moral statements are descriptions of something (non-cognitivism is false) and what they describe is not the attitude of an individual or group.
But this definition has a problem: There is a view some people think of as objectivist, the divine command theory, accoring to which moral claims are true or false dependent on someone's attitudes, e.g. God's. I think of the DC theory as really a variety of subectivism even though from the perspective of finite mortals, there is an objective standard. It suffers from the same sort of arbitariness that more mundane subjectivist theories have.
So, forget about DC (or defend it in the comments).
Lets consider instead the view that moral statements describe some non-subjective feature of reality. "Pain is bad" on this view, tells us something about the nature of pain, some property or characteristic it has. Likewise, on some views, certain types of actions really are duties, (e.g. to tell the truth) and to say they are duties is to say something about the character of the kind of action itself, not about anyone's attitude towards this sort of action.
This view is not so popular these days, but I wil defend it.
I might be wrong but I think the main reason people are skeptical about moral objectivism depends on something akin to what J.L. Mackie called "the queerness objection." If moral statements describe something objective, what it is it? It does not seem to be a fact that one can discover empirically. The sciences don't help us discover moral truth, and its not like one can run into an "ought" or a "goodness" on the way to the store. It is therefore incumbent on the objectivist to explain what sort of things these moral facts are supposed to be, if the theory is going to be the least bit credible.
My reply: we do run into goodness on the way to the store. For example, I am walking to the store and see a person fall. another person nearby stops and offers assistance. I think in this case I may observe not merely two organisms interacting but also the goodness present in the action.
True, such goodness would not be found in a scientific account of what is going on, nor would it be something that can be perceived in the same way that we perceive colors or shapes. Hume's fallacy in my view likes in his impovershed phenomenology--he takes a much to limited view of the sorts of things we perceive.
This claim is not really so odd when we consider all the other facts, real objective facts, that we can recognize, which are not themselves sensory objects. When I see a blue object, I realize the object is also colored. Being colored is not a seperate sensible quality, yet it is still there--still present in the object and open to my awareness. Likewize logical and mathematical truths are just as real as anything else (or so I assume, reply in comments) yet are not objects of pure sensory perception.
Hume of course is right that if I see something I recognize to be good I may feel the attitude of approbation, but this attitude need not be what constitutes the goodness. Rather I take it to be a subjective reaction to my recognition of the goodness present in the situation.
There is a lot more that can be said, I will be happy to pursue the discussion in the comments.