Introduction.
Posting this work resulted in a heated controversy in another forum. I was censored and my writings have been suppressed, "flaming," and criminal harassment -- which is only a small part of the attacks directed against me over decades -- followed upon publication of my "opinions" defending the objectivity of ethics and/or ethical truth.
I continue to argue that there are actions that may be called good as against actions that are bad or evil. I am confident that judgments concerning good and evil are made pretty objectively and can be established as accurate, correct, or true within a "community of rational inquirers."
Mathematical and scientific truths are also discovered or established within a community of inquirers while remaining true "objectively and universally." Please notice that these are all terms of art in philosophy.
I cannot say how often this work has been disfigured. I do not know how many other essays have been vandalized today. I will do my best to make corrections to these writings every day.
The persons destroying (or seeking to destroy) these writings have access to government technology to commit their crimes.
I cannot prevent damage to my essays nor to my security system and computer.
I can only struggle to make corrections -- however painful it is for me personally -- after "errors" are inserted, sometimes on many occasions.
Vandalism is usually the response of persons prevented by inarticulateness or severe intellectual limitations from offering more substantive comments on my thoughts. Their actions are the best demonstrations of the cogency of my arguments.
Noise fills the room in which I write. No doubt this is only a coincidence. I can only surmise that N.J. politicians are involved in this daily censorship effort. ("Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")
In fairness I should note that the opposition I encounter is incompetent and uneducated concerning the technical philosophical sources of the debate not least by failing to realize that the objectivity of knowledge may arise internally to a practice or discipline(s).
Scientific truth arises internally to the scientific enterprise, again, but it is still truth.
Scientific truth is objective and (unlike "pure" or "absolute" knowledge) remains non-relative despite being "represented" in culturally particular languages.
Kantian constructivism suggests that epistemological "originalism" does not necessarily make everything that is "real" only "relative." Ian Hacking, "Too Many Metaphors," in The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 35-62. ("Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")
I am prepared to defend the claims made in this work against all opposition.
Please see "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" then turn to: Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 55-76. ("Certain forms of thought cannot be intelligibly doubted because they force themselves into every attempt to think about anything.")
"How come everything is not relative?"
Well, the orbit of the planet Mercury is calculated within a cultural practice and language which makes the knowledge cultural as well as descriptive of empirical reality. The knowledge is internal to a discipline or science; the reality described by this knowledge remains an "objective" fact and our descriptions are still true. Indeed, these descriptions may be necessarily true. Much the same may be said of the logic of human association or moral life:
" ... the stars, as well as the mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates, are not in that way relative to an observer. True, we have to select a vocabulary of 'stars,' 'mountains,' etc., but once the vocabulary has been selected, it is a completely objective fact that Mount Everest is a mountain, for example, and not a giraffe. The general pattern of error is to confuse, on the one hand, the social relativity of the vocabulary and the making of descriptions within that vocabulary [knowledge] with, on the other hand, the social relativity of the facts described using that vocabulary [existence, reality]."
John Searle, "Why Should You Believe It?," in The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009, at p. 88.
Searle's review-essay is a comment on Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009).
I am confident that it would not have mattered what my views happened to be then -- nor what I write today -- since the harassment that I have endured is part of a long-term "psychological torture" effort emanating from New Jersey. I have no problems describing psychological torture as evil. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
Those who wish to "consult" a philosopher who disagrees with me on these metaethical issues even if he agrees with the substantive or normative ethical views that I defend are directed to the writings of Richard Rorty. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
Among philosophers who hold views not very different from mine are Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin, T.L.S. Sprigge and Brand Blanshard, also John Searle and A.C. Ewing.
Daniel Dennett holds views very different from mine on some issues but not on all matters. Professor Dennett is an outstanding philosopher as well as a terrific writer.
All of these thinkers are much more learned and adept than I can hope to be in discussions of these ideas.
A philosopher in search of middle ground in this controversy is Simon Blackburn whose recent book Truth: A Guide (Oxford: 2005) offers an excellent discussion of all aspects of the debate concerning the epistemology of ethics and the nature of truth. Professor Blackburn's discussion of Nietzsche's work alone makes his book worthwhile for readers.
I am not a political "Conservative." I am not an apologist for any religious group. Persons on the political Left may agree with my epistemology while rejecting my views concerning ethical cognitivism. Terry Eagleton, Against Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 104.
Whether this essay interests or infuriates you please purchase and read a book by any one of these philosophers in order to clarify your thoughts on the controversy.
Philosophical opinions cannot be refuted by defacing, censoring, or destroying a person's writings or by hurting the person who creates so-called "offensive" texts or who holds "radical" minority views.
Legal officials must not legitimate much less engage in and then lie about totalitarian tactics (including censorship) in a free society especially when they presume to judge the ethics of their victims.
Are My Opinions in Style?
Ethical relativism and skepticism are fashionable again.
These twin-philosophies or attitudes are usually deeply ingrained in the minds of young people especially.
There are, of course, both naive and sophisticated versions of these metaethical positions.
The appeal of all versions of skeptical doctrines for many people, paradoxically, seems to be their association with values such as open-mindedness and tolerance of different points of view.
Often adherents of ethical relativism may fail to realize that a consistent application of this stance may undercut their own values.
It is taken for granted by trendy thinkers that openness and tolerance are "good" things.
The very same people then deny that anything is really good (or "good-in-itself") without appreciating that such a position is likely to be self-contradictory.
One of my adversaries in a debate on these issues interrupted at this point to insist that this is not so and that I was "too stupid" to get it. She was unable to say why relativism is not self-contradictory. This left her with a set of contentions that had the effect of proving my point concerning her own inevitable reliance on some values to serve as the tacit premise to her argument that "it's all relative."
I know that my reasons for suggesting this experiment will seem obscure at first, but if you prefer to think in terms of cinematic imagery compare the movies "Pulp Fiction" and "A Man for All Seasons."
How would you describe the moral universe depicted in each of these films? In a moral sense is there one of those movie worlds in which you would prefer to live? If so, why?
Please see: R.M. Hare, "Rights, Utility, and Universalization: Reply to J.L. Mackie," in Essays on Political Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 89.
For persons in Cuba and other Spanish-speaking countries who are interested in this debate I suggest the translation of Professor Hare's greatest work: R.M. Hare, El lenguaje de la moral (Mexico: UP, 1975). The original is The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).
Notice that cinema, inevitably, is a moral medium because the ethical vision of film-makers will shape the material placed on screen. ("Where we are now.")
Consider the balance of this essay as my answer to the question concerning moral worlds. For reasons that I hope will become clear in the course of my discussion I prefer the moral world of Robert Bolt's "Sir Thomas More" to the situation of the characters in "Pulp Fiction."
This judgment has nothing to do with deciding which movie is better only with comparing the moral or ethical quality of the different "worlds" created and inhabited by the characters depicted in each film.
I am not comparing myself to Thomas More. I am aware of the price paid by Sir Thomas More for his freedom of conscience in "A Man for All Seasons." I also understand that my choice is unpopular with many fashionable people today. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Mary Midgley provides ammunition for those who continue to insist (as I do) that moral values are more than mere subjective whims or preferences like a taste for oysters or a fondness for strawberry ice cream. In a lively and provocative recent book Professor Midgley describes an all-too typical classroom conversation:
"But surely it is always wrong to make moral judgments?"
The validity of this sort of assertion is taken for granted these days. Professor Midgley was not surprised by this student's question:
"This is the manifesto I once heard someone lay down in an argument about the duty of toleration. It was spoken ardently and confidently, with no expectation that it might be questioned. It was not said as a new discovery, but as a moral platitude, something so obvious that it need only be mentioned to be accepted. And the speaker was not being at all eccentric in so pronouncing it; this confidence is normal today. In the last few decades the word 'judgmental' has been especially coined and is used, along with an older word 'moralistic,' to describe and attack this particular form of wrongdoing."
Can't We Make Moral Judgments? (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), p. 3.
Should philosophers, as they say at Teacher's College of Columbia University, "think outside the box"?
Among philosophers ethical relativism and the various forms of skepticism about values remain highly controversial positions.
As usual in philosophy, the opposite position which is sometimes called "ethical objectivism," "absolutism," or "universalism" also has its critics.
People who are not professional philosophers, as I am not, simply take it for granted that some things are right and others wrong. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and, soon, "What is it like to be raped?")
My guess is that most of us, even those of us who profess otherwise, really know that there is a difference between good and evil and can tell right from wrong in our own lives especially when we are the victims of an injustice. More on this later.
My experience in debating these metaethical and epistemological as well as metaphysical and ethical-moral issues is that people are highly emotional about whatever position they take and usually lash out at those who challenge the premises to their arguments. ("Are we free to believe in free will?" and "The Return of Metaphysics.")
What is all the fuss about? What are the considerations on both sides in this debate? Can these matters be discussed, calmly and rationally without resort to mutual insults or violence? Is there any chance that they can be resolved?
I will attempt to resolve these matters (for myself) while being as fair as I can be to those who disagree with me. And this fairness is not easy for any of us. To do this, I will set forth the strongest arguments "for" relativism that I know along with some rejoinders along the way. A brief statement of my opinion is offered by way of conclusion.
Readers are invited to disagree with my opinions, but not to censor or destroy my writings.
At the outset it will be necessary to define by consulting a standard Dictionary of Philosophy the key terms that will be used in this essay. Although this method will slow down the discussion clarity requires it:
"To be a relativist about value is to maintain that there are no universal criteria of good and bad, right and wrong. One difficulty is to avoid saying that what is right is whatever is actually commended wherever and whenever one happens to be. For, whatever its other faults, the general maxim 'When in Rome do what the Romans [do]' expresses not unbridled individualistic idiosyncrasy, but a specific and categorical universal standard. To be relativist about fact is to maintain that there is no such thing as objective knowledge of reality independent of the knower. The parallel difficulty here is to eschew the inconsistent claim that the relativistic thesis is itself an item of objective knowledge."
Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), p. 303 (emphasis added).
"Absolutism" is the "opposite of relativism" holding that "the criteria of right and wrong are absolute or universal where they apply."
Perhaps there is a more important distinction to be noticed between "subjectivism" and "objectivism." These two metaethical views can always be discussed together since an argument in favor of one is an argument against the other as these concepts are necessarily "entangled" or dialectical:
"Subjectivism [is,] in its simplest form, the position held by someone who believes that all moral attitudes are merely a matter of personal taste. 'Eating people is wrong,' for example, and its contradictory become not true or false statements but simply expressions of the dietary preferences of the speaker. ... [If] we encounter someone who does not share our tastes, then there is no form of proof by which we can demonstrate his [or her] error."
Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 2.
On the other hand there is "objectivism": This is the "belief that there are certain moral truths that would remain true whatever anyone or everyone thought or desired. For instance, 'No one should ever deliberately inflict pain on another simply to take pleasure in [that other's] suffering' might be thought of as a plausible example. Even in a world of sadists who all rejected it[,] the contention remains true, just as 5 + 7 = 12 remains correct even if there is no one left to count."
Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 342-343.
Discussing and establishing these distinctions is not to obviate the need for criticisms of the underlying concepts. Nor will I refrain from such criticisms.
Concepts which have not been defined or understood clearly can neither be criticized nor defended intelligently. This concern with and for definitions is not "overintellectualizing." ("Is clarity enough?")
Even the sadist does not enjoy being hurt; hence, in fairness, he or she should (rationally speaking) refrain from hurting others.
There are persons who take pleasure in causing or experiencing pain and suffering, but they would not be likely to serve as models of rational human agency.
We do not debate such people, but merely wish them well and move on, if possible, very quickly. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
A true rational discussion requires a mutual willingness to accept the constraints of rationality or a disposition to be persuaded by the better argument. Otherwise, without such acceptance, a discussion is not meaningful or productive, but only a trading of insults or shouting at one another, or is quickly transformed into violence.
Censorship is not a persuasive refutation of (or response to) what I am saying in this essay. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
I do not believe that obstructing my television signal refutes my philosophical arguments.
I am not persuaded that blocking my computer's cable signal or destroying that computer disproves my argument.
Threats and insults directed against me or my family members are irrelevant to what I am saying.
Among the things that may be discussed rationally is whether there is such a thing as "rationality" or what rationality as distinct from "reasonableness" means in different contexts, that is, the reasonableness of being "rational" in different situations and what this means is always at issue in ethical debate. John Finnis, "Objectivity, Truth and Moral Principles," in Fundamentals of Ethics (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1983), at pp. 56-83.
For the views of a person critical of Kantian philosophy, see Charles Larmore's "The Autonomy of Morality," in The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 87-139. I am not aware of efforts to address or examine Professor Larmore's underlying metaphysical assumptions extensively. However, students attracted by such an inquiry may wish to turn to John W. Yolton, "Actions and Persons," in Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 42-57.
Under what conditions, given the meaning of the symbols being used, would it be the case that 5 + 7 = 12 is not true? ("Bernard Williams and Identity.")
Notice how specific and precise is the claim being made here. To be sure one can reject rationality entirely. But then a self-proclaimed "irrationalist" or "anti-rationalist"is unlikely to engage in philosophical discussions at all nor will he or she care a great deal about arguments of any kind.
Why offer a rational defense of irrationality if one rejects rationality in the first place?
No reason.
One simply contemplates one's navel, belches, and spouts an opinion as an irrationalist. If another person disagrees, then one simply hits that other person. If the other person hits back and wins the fight, then he or she is right about whatever divides the parties.
Such an attitude to human controversy is not what I would describe as a "philosophical" disposition:
"There is nothing to say to the man, [person, or being,]" Bertrand Russell writes, "who insists that he, [she, or it] is a poached egg."
Skeptical metaethical positions, then, differ over whether to hold a moral position is: 1) to know or claim something to be true; or 2) merely to state a subjective "preference" regarding human activity.
Relativists usually rely on one or both of two general arguments, either the epistemological and/or the anthropological arguments, or some combination of the two.
There are many subtle variations on these two basic themes.
Fans of relativism should look to Plato's work. Although Plato is an absolutist, early in his greatest dialogue The Republic he presents the classic statement of the position that he wishes to reject. Also, Cicero's dialogues contain a defense of Natural Law doctrine which amounts to a powerful attack on relativism, a position which is clearly explained by Cicero in preparing for that attack.
In one sense, of course, everyone accepts relativism. For instance, relativity to circumstances. If there is a moral requirement that says: "whenever you are in situation A, you should always do X" then the wrongness of doing Y instead of X will depend on the circumstances, that is, on whether I am in fact in situation A at the time when I fail to do X.
But when someone says, "What you should do depends on your moral principles" this involves a much more radical kind of relativism. It implies that fundamental moral principles -- or even the existence and reality of morality -- can and may vary among individuals as much as circumstances vary for rational agents in moral decision making.
It is this second position that I find unacceptable.
What are the arguments offered for this more radical skepticism?
Before offering an answer to this question I should note that much of the attractiveness of nihilistic or deeply skeptical positions concerning morality in America has to do with the popularity of alleged postmodernist theory and theorists who are often misunderstood or misrepresented in the works of their self-styled sympathizers: Jacques Derrida's thinking is grotesquely misdescribed as a defense of nihilism. Nihilism is a pose that seems to match this year's fashions on campus, but it is not very attractive to me. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Nihilism Against Memory" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Please see Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 244-305. (Does an "ethic" or fundamental commitment to truth underlie all philosophical efforts?)
For an association that many students would not make, compare Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 24-56 ("Idealism") with Brand Blanshard, "Sanity in Thought and Art," in The Uses of a Liberal Education (Illinois: Open Court, 1973), pp. 225-249. (The latter two superstar philosophers, Blanshard and Oakeshott, are political Conservatives.)
Please see Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 62-90 ("The Ethical Significance of the Chiffonier") and Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and The Law (New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 165-197 and Karen Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth Century Responses to Nihilism (Albany: SUNY, 1992), p. 10 and Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 125-154 ("Derrida and Language as Writing" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
None of the philosophers mentioned in the foregoing paragraph (to my knowledge) is a Republican or Conservative.
The Epistemological Argument.
The first and most popular argument offered for this dismissive or morally flippant attitude today, usually by people who do not have much use for appropriate philosophical terms, is the argument from "radical" skepticism or the epistemological argument.
This argument relies on crucial metaphysical assumptions: 1) there are no moral truths; and 2) on radical skepticism concerning our knowledge claims so that even if there are moral truths we cannot know them with certainty.
The first of the foregoing claims is ontological (existence); the second contention is epistemological (knowledge). Notice that there is a tension -- or possible contradiction -- between these claims.
The first of these claims is part of a familiar general skepticism about truth-reality recently associated, inaccurately, with the works of influential philosophers such as Richard Rorty (pragmatist) and Jacques Derrida (post-structuralist/deconstructionist). It implies a thorough "anti-essentialism" in metaphysics. Moral truths or entities ("Good") simply do not exist from this "perspective." Moral qualities are dismissed in J.L. Mackie's term as: "queer metaphysical entities." (Again: "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "Saying Goodbye to Richard Rorty" then "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
This amounts to a kind of "amoralism" and is not a view to assign to Wittgenstein. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
Relativists or skeptics say that, even if Plato is correct in claiming that moral essences exist or if Kant is right about the "categorical imperative," today, we cannot know these claims to be true.
How would we know even that much "today"? How can we know exactly what it is that we "cannot know" at any time?
Consistency in this position will bring relativists to a Kantianism that they rightly fear.
Skepticism is justified, allegedly, because of our limited and finite "perspectives" (Nietzsche) as human beings. We can only know what is right "for us" or (perhaps) for our own societies.
Key assumptions are made and must be made by skeptics concerning objectivity, truth, cogency and value.
What about those who do not agree with this epistemological humility? Many believe that they in fact know what is right for all. Are they wrong?
If so, then the skeptic is not so skeptical about moral knowledge since he or she is in a position to say what others cannot know about right and wrong or that he or she knows what others cannot know.
We cannot have knowledge of what is universally true or right, says the skeptic, and this is simply universally true and/or right.
A difficulty to notice here is the classic example of what philosophers call a "self-referential paradox" (Simon Blackburn calls this "the judo flip"), known more conventionally as the "relativist's paradox." Here is a brief statement of the paradox:
"Acts are not made right or wrong simply by people believing" -- as opposed to reasoning to a truthful conclusion which is impossible according to the skeptic -- "that they are right or wrong. ... [Relativists] ... think that moral absolutism is a bad view, encouraging intolerance and so on. But I ask them: Is absolutism only bad in a relative way -- only wrong for them and not necessarily for others? If so, then it might not be wrong for me. I can believe in it and act on it. On the other hand, if it is wrong for everybody, then it is absolutely wrong, which contradicts the relativists' position. So moral relativism is either self-refuting or it has no claim on my moral beliefs."
Colin McGinn, Moral Literacy: How to Do the Right Thing (London: Duckworth, 1992), pp. 12-13.
If we say that there are no moral truths then we must be asserting at least one moral truth -- that there are none. And yes, such a claim is necessarily a moral claim. Indeed, it is impossible that it could not be one, even an attempted and tendentious cleavage or division of the conceptual universe into the cognitive and non-cognitive, ethical and non-ethical, facts and values will not avoid the problem. These proposed divisions and distinctions are themselves subject to moral assessment and depend upon, often hidden, value choices. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
How objective are these dichotomies or "binary oppositions" between the realms of "fact" and "value"? "Subjective" and "objective"? ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
Iris Murdoch explains: "Morality or the ethical has jurisdiction over all." (See "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Nihilism Against Memory.")
There is no way to say that morality is ultimately a matter of power or pure opinion only without making both a statement about morality and a statement that has moral implications since the statement must reveal and rely upon the "values" of the speaker making it.
Every great work of art, incidentally, is also a moral statement. Calling any ethical statement a "metaethical position" does not alter this truth. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Thomas Nagel writes of this controversy:
"Since 1987 Ronald Dworkin and I have regularly taught together, and I have been exposed to his constant insistence that the only way to answer skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism about morality is to meet it with first-order moral arguments. He holds that the skeptical positions must themselves be understood as moral claims -- that they are unintelligible as anything else. I would not go so far as that, but I have been led to the view that the answer to them must come from morality and cannot be found on the metaethical level."
Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. vii, then Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?" and "Ethics Without Biology," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165-181, pp. 142-147. (I urge you to reverse the order of these essays in Professor Nagel's collection.)
Morality includes what is usually called "metaethics."
Iris Murdoch (and others) have noted the difficulty of grasping the pervasiveness and inescapable feature of human moral awareness even in our most dispassionate forms of inquiry. This illuminating insight on the part of Ms. Murdoch drives us back to Kant, then Hegel, and all subsequent moralists up to Derrida and Rorty.
Richard Rorty (like John Dewey) began his philosophical life as a Hegelian: David Walsh, "Freedom Requires Eternity," in The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 49. ("Our deepest access to being thus lies through the moral life.")
Suppose that you encounter someone who says: "I deny the existence of the ground that I stand on."
You may point to the ground and say, "look you are standing on the ground, not floating in the air."
He responds: "I refuse to believe it."
If you insist that he is mistaken he may hit you. The truth of the matter will not change even if you are beaten for stating it. This is so even if the skeptical person is physically stronger that you are. The same is true if your adversary destroys your writings. The truth of what you are saying is not altered by the physical destruction of a copy of your text.
Morality is the "ground" that we stand upon as human beings. Charles Taylor quotes Alan Bloom:
"Bloom sees that [relativism] has a moral basis: 'The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so [the relativists] see it.' But in fact, I would like to claim, it travesties and eventually betrays this moral insight. So far from being a reason to reject the moral ideal of authenticity, [relativism] should itself be rejected in its name. Or so I would like to argue."
The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 21-22.
The ethical skeptic, nihilist, "absolute-relativist" (to the extent that there can be such a position and person) is a man or woman sitting on a tree branch and sawing off that same branch.
When one points out that this is a project that will result in a fall one is accused of being excessively theoretical and logical.
I cannot agree that such a common sense observation is "overintellectualizing."
People say that morality is nonsense because right and wrong is all about power. This leads to the problem of deciding what is meant by power. Morality and rationality may also be deemed to be powers. Hence, the idea that "might makes right" may be incoherent on its own terms -- for if the statement is true then it is and can only be true when made by the person with the "might" to enforce it bringing us back to the question of whether rationality and truth are forms of might.
The view that ethics is reducible to power-relations is found in Nazism. Ethics and ethical reasoning sneaks in through the back door of the conversation. (See my comment about Stalin in my conclusion.)
Very few people are willing to accept (much less to call it "right") an injustice against them because it is inflicted by the "mightier" party. What persons appeal to in objecting to injustice is not necessarily power, but justice as a positive value embodied in law.
Morality and moral thinking become inescapable because ethics discussions will inevitably shift from the issue of who has the power to act to what is the right thing to do and how this should be determined so as to yield legitimate power or "moral authority" to the actor. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")
The fallacy in much relativist thinking is the idea that because moral thought is "human" it cannot be objective.
Scientific thinking, once more, is equally human and yet relativists accept the objectivity of science.
As Brand Blanshard explains: An ethical theory may be subjectivist "... because it makes all values relative to experience, but [still] ... objectivist about moral judgment. The statement that Chamberlain did wrong in Munich is as objectively true or false as anything in chemistry, whether we discover the truth about it or not."
Knowledge of truth (phenomenal) is distinct from existence of truth or the ultimate "Truth" about reality per se (noumenal).
Human knowledge may be partial without affecting the absoluteness and objectivity of truth/reality as a whole.
"This was Kant's 'Copernican revolution.' Assume that knowledge is an adjustment of our ideas to the world, and our possession of universal truth is an inexplicable anomaly. Assume that nature adjusts itself to our reason, and the explanation is plain. Man creates nature."
Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis (Illinois: Open Court, 1964), p. 82 (emphasis added).
Ammunition for the forces of darkness may be found in Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York & London: Verso, 2007), pp. 77-88 ("Humor"?).
It is this capacity for capturing reality or truth in our theoretical formulations that seems to provide a means of navigating through the dark seas of quantum mechanics. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Does this make everything "relative"?
No.
Nature MUST reveal itself to rational agents in some ways and not others. Furthermore, rational agents will construct knowledge -- necessarily -- based on a marriage between categories that are a priori and sense data that is a posteriori. Hence, the objectivity and universality of rational agents' knowledge for all rational agents everywhere and everywhen: 2 + 2 = 4.
There are and must be "synthetic a priori judgments" which make our knowledge-constructions possible and sense data meaningful. Onora O'Neill, "Vindicating Reason," in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180.
Professor O'Neill, formerly of Oxford University, has written of the concept of "trust" and its centrality in legal institutions which must never act secretly or illegally upon the lives of persons.
Is trust is now lost to New Jersey's Supreme Court and judiciary? ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
Today the focus in philosophy is on language as the means by which we come to apprehend reality in our efforts to determine boundaries between selves and worlds. Derrida is relevant, again, but Blackburn, Putnam, Nozick, Nussbaum, Butler, Searle and many others should be mentioned as scholars devoting their working lives to these difficult questions. Language is a big word. ("John Banville's 'The Newton Letter.'")
This focus on language is not undertaken because it is well-settled that, paradoxically, there is "nothing to know" or "no truth" or some similar claim. None of the philosophers referred to in this essay is best classified as a "nihilist," including Nietzsche. In a technical or analytical philosophical sense I cannot improve on P.F. Strawson's summary of the key Kantian insight shared by this foremost English-language Kantian in the late twentieth century:
"If this outline is correct, then Kant's sense of the need for a Transcendental Deduction not merely as an explanation but as a proof -- a need which he himself clearly feels, but never very clearly explains -- accords very satisfactorily with our suspended analytical hopes. A major part of the role of the Deduction will be to establish that experience necessarily involves knowledge of objects, in the weighty sense, and hence to displace that thesis from the status of prior definition, or premised assumption, of the inquiry." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co., 1966), p. 88 (emphasis in original).
We can and must have real knowledge of objective truth, Kant explains and Strawson agrees, as a matter of being "rational agents" engaged in moral inquiry. Indeed, this "knowing" is part of what it means to be a person. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
Here is an illustration of what Kant means by synthetic a priori judgments and truth:
Suppose that you visit the sea shore and bring a bucket that you dip into the ocean. You extract a bucketful of ocean water. Now the form or bucket "shape" that is filled with water is supplied by you. However, the ocean water in the bucket is still water that is part of the ocean.
The buckets that we dip into the "ocean of truth" are science, philosophy, ethical reasoning, law and art, maybe others, like religion. The truth derived through these disciplines is still truth. The ocean that we dip into for our human buckets of truth has a short name.
Reality, or ultimate reality, or God are words used by different persons to designate what we seek to know through human intellectual efforts. (Again: "Is it rational to believe in God?")
The reality(ies) revealed by science is (are) unaltered by the ways in which we come to know that external reality(ies), which has to do BOTH with our apparatus for knowing things and the ways in which the universe (or multiverse) must reveal itself given that human epistemic equipment and the contexts and methods by which we "inquire." ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
Your calculator -- if it may be described as a "rational agent" -- will come to the same conclusion in performing this mathematical calculation which is entirely a priori: 2 + 2 = 4. This is true regardless of the gender-preference, race, or sexual-orientation, if any, of your calculator. This may even be true of "multi-gendered other" calculators at The New School University in New York. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Statements about our incomplete knowledge (buckets) have no bearing on ontological reality(ies) (ocean), apart from human knowledge because this ontological entity (or stuff) is noumenal reality. (Compare "A Doll's Aria" with "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" then "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
Derrida suggests that "there is nothing outside the text." This is not nihilism. The "text" may be a language -- like mathematics -- with an objective logical structure that dictates "right" answers pretty objectively. Texts are social entities.
Very few philosophers, if any, contend that the concept of truth is "meaningless" or "whatever you want it to be." ("Is truth dead?" and, again, "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Why does nature reveal itself only in "certain ways" that are amenable to the minds of rational agents in order to become knowledge? Why is knowledge a "meeting" between knower and reality(ies) that makes itself (themselves) knowable only in some ways and not others? What is this "meeting"? Fit? (Gadamer?) Mirrors? (Ricoeur) Gap? (Derrida) Love that is never exhausted? (Marion, Merton, Buber's "I and Thou"?) Science's "verifiable data"? (Polanyi?) Pick your poison.
Some may prefer to shift the discussion from talk of a "fit" between words and things, facts and values, to a "gap" between these dualities. Others will speak of "loving as knowing." (Merton, Weil.) A few will speak of "power."
Even this skeptical or relativist discussion -- if it is to take place -- will depend upon notions of truth. A gap implies something outside itself, a relation, every relation implies a third term that contains it. ("F.H. Bradley's Concrete Universal" and "F.H. Bradley's Absolute.")
If you speak of an epistemic "gap" then you are well on your way to the concept of God or some notion of the Absolute or at least a form of realism that deifies "Reality" with a capital "R." ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
Bradley can be "fitted" into (or with) Derrida's postmodernist metaphysics. Hegel's return is celebrated by some and deplored by others. ("Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.")
At this point, relativists and skeptics begin to pound their fists on the table. They attempt to make an exception for this one moral truth (there are no moral truths) or to deny that it is moral. By making such an exception, however, they allow the "camel's nose into the tent" because soon other exceptions will be discovered so as to establish the relativists' own ethical preferences as somehow required by the order of things.
If there can be one truth with regard to morals then there may be others -- and soon there will be.
Merely saying that something is not a moral claim fails to establish the point. Experimenting on people in horrible ways, for example, in order to "gain neutral scientific knowledge," not for the purpose of causing anyone harm, does not absolve the experimenter of moral or legal responsibility for any harm that is caused in fact. This is true whatever knowledge (if any) is gained by the experiment.
Results of an involuntary experiment are irrelevant to the criminality of the act which involves violating the autonomy and integrity of the victim who is a PERSON with inviolable rights. There are experiments to which we cannot consent. No one can "agree" to be a slave. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
A last desperate effort to rescue the skeptical argument involves crude allusions to the "doctrine of double effect" that are offered by persons who, in the same breath, reject all morality and truth:
"The doctrine of double effect is based on a distinction between what a man foresees as a result of his voluntary action and what, in the strict sense, he intends. He intends in the strictest sense both those things that he aims at as ends and those he aims at as a means to his ends."
Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 19-32.
"The words 'double effect' refer to the two effects that an action may produce: the one aimed at, and the one foreseen but in no way desired. By the doctrine of double effect I mean the thesis that it is sometimes permissible to bring about by oblique intention what one may not directly intend." (Ibid.)
I hope that a sense of outrage at "unfairness" (isn't it all relative?) will allow New Jersey persons to appreciate -- to a slight and small degree -- some of what I have known and still experience on a daily basis. ("New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers on the Tit" and "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics.")
I like to think of this heuristic effort, on my part, as a kind of "behaviorist conditioning" aimed at guiding the New Jersey legal system into greater compliance with the Constitution of the United States of America. I do this "for their own good" in Trenton.
I am confident that political corruption and theft from the public treasury are "unethical" practices even if they are time-honored features of New Jersey life. ("New Jersey's Political and Judicial Whores" and "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
Application of this doctrine of double effect from Catholic reflection on the abortion controversy does not diminish the responsibility, say, of a physician for "foreseeable" consequences of his actions -- whether they were explicitly desired or not -- since they are deemed "intended."
This is especially true in the case of a self-professed "C.I.A. physician" with unique obligations to an individual whom he has rendered "helpless" or impaired in some fashion (who must never be touched or affected, in any way, without consent or in violation of that person's privacy), as distinct from a pregnant woman carrying a potential person who may also need to be considered, along with the mother, as a moral subject, according to many philosophers.
I am pro-choice. I am against slavery in any form or manner. R.M. Hare, "What is Wrong With Slavery?," in Essays in Political Morality, pp. 148-166. (This essay was written by one of the few philosophers to have been a slave during the Second World War.)
Professor Foot explains that: "It does not follow, however, that we would be justified in inflicting the injury, or getting a third person to do so, in order to save ... five. We may therefore refuse to be forced into acting by the threats of bad men. To refrain from inflicting injury ourselves" -- this is especially true for physicians or lawyers and certainly for family members of a victim of injustice -- "is a stricter duty than to prevent other people [including that victim] from inflicting injury ..." ("The Problem of Abortion," p. 29.)
The worst outcome is to cause injury to a victim in such a way that this injured person may then hurt others or herself.
How many of you in New Jersey "knew" and injured or raped Marilyn Straus? Lilian Munoz? Maureen Manteneo? Maria Martinez a.k.a. Barcelo? Lourdes Santiago? Loretta Weinberg? ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!" and "Diana's Friend Goes to Prison.")
None of us can be "ethically" forced to serve as spies or informers against friends and family members on behalf of the state or any institution.
None of us may or should assist "ethically" in the torture of any human being. Maria Martinez? This certainly includes young people on college campuses. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
My response to today's censorship will be to focus on New Jersey Superior Court judges who are racists and proud of it. I will be happy to name lawyers commenting on Judge Mark Baber's racism, for example, and I will be delighted to quote other lawyers' comments concerning various prominent and despicable members of the N.J. judiciary. Maurice Gallipoli? Maureen Manteneo? Estela De La Cruz? Lourdes Santiago? ("Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?" and "Senator Bob Struggles to Find His Conscience.")
Philosophically sophisticated relativists and many other contemporary ethical skeptics, especially the pragmatists, have sought to avoid this quagmire by making use of the doctrine of "fallibilism."
Fallibilism is a theory presented by C.S. Peirce describing inquiry as "an activity generated by a state of unease" and aiming to obtain a "state of rest through finding the right answer to a question."
Rest is never assured since no one can know what fresh evidence may present itself to necessitate a "change in position."
The fallibilist cannot know whether ethical truths exist since even this claim may be wrong. There may be ethical truths which are simply unknown or unknowable to him or her. The fallibilist can not even know whether it is possible to know ethical truth. To claim that one cannot know whether such truths exist is far from establishing that such truths do not or can not exist. Agnosticism is merely a prudential position. What we cannot know, we may feel or believe, or understand intuitively. ("F.H. Bradley's 'Concrete Universal.'")
The cautious and intelligent relativist gives up some epistemological ground to the objectivist or universalist by clinging to a more secure foundation "simplifying" the skeptical position by admitting that relativism cannot be known to be true or correct because it is a mere preference -- nor can objectivism be known to be false -- in accordance with his or her own premises, but that relativism seems to be the most "plausible" position in light of all the available evidence at any given time.
An important objection to this response, however, is that it implies an external measure of the validity of these arguments either in the evidence presently existing or in the possibility that such evidence may be found which happens to be the very point denied by relativists to begin with.
By what criteria of truth or validity is one position more "plausible" than another if all are equally subjective choices and nothing more? Why is it possible to "feel" or believe that some positions are better than others?
It is also a tacit admission by the relativist that, on fallibilist foundations, he or she may be wrong and objectivists may prove to be right; or objectivists may be the holders of the more plausible position once all the evidence is in.
Gathering all of the evidence is something which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
This is a humbling concession which relativists are rarely willing to make.
At this stage in the argument the usual response of New Jersey persons is to threaten to "break my legs."
Alas, even breaking my legs will have little effect on the logic of these arguments.
Does the fact of disagreement prove that there are no universal values? How about the claim that if there were universal values they would have been discovered already?
Agreement is far from dispositive on the issue of whether truth exists. Furthermore, universal values pretty much have been discovered already. Many are found in organic documents in the world's democracies and elsewhere. They are central to such documents as the United Nations' Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What will always remain -- quite properly -- subject to debate and disagreement is what generally accepted values require in new and unforeseen circumstances. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Given our respect for the dignity of every human life is it morally permissible to clone a human being? "Gene editing"? ("'Blade Runner 2049': A Movie Review.")
Reasonable persons may always disagree concerning what values require when applied to difficult new cases.
Respect for persons leads me to accept the morality of gay marriage rights. Resolution of this issue calls for prudential judgment or practical (not theoretical) reason and the matter is always subject to re-examination.
This Kantian (by way of Aristotle) division between "theoretical reason" which is concerned with the discovery or discernment of values and "practical reason" or judgment which has to do with the interpretation or application of values, or evaluation, is fundamental to the objectivist position.
Those who prefer to speak of ethical cognitivism and discard the vocabulary of "subjective/objective" are welcome to do so.
Lawyers will immediately think of the distinction between "law" and "equity."
"The postmodern hatred of value simply compounds a cultural attitude that has been dominant since the birth of the social sciences at the end of the last century. This attitude stems from a tendency to confuse values with evaluation, which, in turn, arises from the reduction of the world to 'the-world-for-me,' [subjectivism] the fundamental inversion of human consciousness away from the world and toward the self who experiences that world."
Hugh Mercer Cutler, Rediscovering Values: Coming to Terms With Postmodernism (London: M.E. Sharpe. 1997), pp. 165-166 (emphasis added).
The key insight both in modern physics and idealism is that "the world" (objectivity) and my thoughts or knowledge of it (subjectivity) are not so easily distinguished.
This does not deprive us of a chastened concept of truth and/or reality because we are not the only observers or knowers of what is nor of what must be for all rational agents. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
What is known, necessarily, by "all rational agents" -- to use a Kantian vocabulary -- has characteristics of independent truth since there is and must be something about objects of observation (and observers) that allows or requires their being "seen" in some ways and not others:
"The self and the world," Hilary Putnam says, "jointly make up the self and the world."
Brian Greene, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 77-123. (Subjective/objective collapses, in extreme states while truth remains to allow for "verification" or "falsification" of quantum mechanics principles.)
This insight is based on a kind of philosophical "multitasking." Some thinkers find this sort of flexibility disturbing. I am sure that it is reasonable to think differently in varying contexts. I think one way at the grocery store; another way way when planning housework for the day; still another way when outlining an essay; or even as I ponder weekend plans with my family.
I do not regard one of these ways of thinking as more difficult or better than another, just different because they are aimed at independent goals.
January 31, 2008 at 11:53 A.M. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (Senator Bob? Cuban-American National Foundation?)
January 30, 2008 at 8:01 A.M. blocking:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N2998.msn/B26753... (NJ Mafia? "ADJ" Appellate Division Judge? Should judges engage in computer crime and lie about it? If so, is this New Jersey's legal "ethics" Mr. Rabner? Ms. Poritz? OAE? U.S. Chief Justice Roberts?)
http://view.atdmt.com/0Y6/iview/msnnkall01000... (Allegedly unrelated threatening letter received today from N.J.'s DRB, then another threatening letter from Trenton's DRB. Is Lourdes Santiago also "William B. Ziff, Esq." in what purports to be a letter to me from the Office of Attorney Ethics? Is such a lie "ethical" Ms. Santiago? Mr. McGill? Maureen Manteneo?)
Are values changed by the need for interpretation.
Values are clarified through interpretation -- clarified to our human and flawed understanding and, thus, better enforced. (See again my discussion of U.S. Constitutional interpretation in "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
It may be that the need to interpret values serves to establish their reality. This is similar to the reality of ideals which are the stars by which we navigate our moral lives. Sometimes we get things wrong. We misread the stars. We fail to live up to our own standards and are criticized accordingly. This does not invalidate the standards. The stars will always be there once the fog has cleared. Perhaps we will see them more clearly tomorrow than we do today. We must continue to search the skies for them.
We must not claim that values or ideals no longer exist because we -- ALL of us -- sometimes fail to live up to them.
The Anthropological Argument.
So much for the epistemological argument. Relativists also deploy the so-called "anthropological argument."
This argument holds that societies obviously differ on fundamental values and that there is no universal agreement on right and wrong. These terms are merely labels attached to conduct of which a particular society approves or disapproves.
A great deal of scholarship in the social sciences seems to support such a view.
A number of prominent anthropologists and psychologists deny that there can be any absolute or objective moral values on the ground that moral values are the products of individual cultures which differ from one another in such a fashion that the values of each society must also differ.
Two of the leading authorities for this view are Ruth Benedict (anthropologist) and B.F. Skinner (psychologist).
The views of Benedict and Skinner resonate with ideas with which we have all become acquainted and that to many people, especially lots of college students, seem correct -- for example, that "good" must always mean "good for him," "good for them" or "good for me," but never just good.
The word "absolute" is a term of art in philosophy that is not always used "correctly" by social scientists discussing metaethical issues.
That was certainly the view that I found attractive as a college student: What is good for one person or culture is not necessarily good for another, and therefore there can never really be any genuine moral reasoning, but only (at best) acknowledgment of others' goods.
This view assumes, inconsistently, that it is "good" for each person and society to decide what is for his, her, or its own good, and that this "autonomous" decision-making is itself a transcultural "good."
An easy-going campus relativism like the opinions that I once defended ("The Man Show") runs into even more severe problems when we confront questions like this:
"Must we withhold moral judgments about Nazi atrocities on the grounds that we are not members of a Nazi culture and, therefore, have no right to judge?"
Exterminating 6 million people may be "good for" Hitler but not for me. The same applies if we throw in 3 million Gypsies and 2 million or more "others."
I do not find this view attractive or persuasive at my advanced age.
People have actually made such claims in debating these issues with me. I hope that they were not serious in making them. This may not be the best time to accuse me of antisemitism. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Any flippant "live and let live" approach now seems pretty hollow to me when set beside the atrocities of history.
Notice that advocates of ethical relativism, nihilism, or absolute skepticism, each to a different degree, often confuse two distinct claims: 1) "there are no universally held moral values"; and 2) "no value or set of values can or should be recommended to all people."
I believe that both of these claims are mistaken.
Despite Benedict and Skinner there is one undisputed universal characteristic of human societies with regard to morals. They all have some kind of a morality; they all have some set of values; some things are admired and rewarded and others are punished as reprehensible in every community of persons of which I know.
There is no human society on record anywhere that I am aware of without any values at all. No nation exists without values of some kind. New Jersey may be the one exception to this principle. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Very few good philosophers are nihilists. Perhaps the Marquis de Sade may be interpreted as a nihilist although I doubt it. Jean-Paul Sartre is the foremost defender of the freedom of subjects and an engaged socialist committed to struggle for the masses. Sartre is not a nihilist. Daniel Dennett is not a nihilist. Richard Rorty is not a nihilist. Jacques Derrida is not a nihilist.
Distinguished anthropologists and psychologists challenge the relativistic conclusions drawn from their fields contending that beneath surface differences there are indeed universally cherished values common to all human societies. (Kroeber and Kluckholm.)
There is no society that dispenses entirely with morality as an institution or set of beliefs about right and wrong, nor with the concepts of right and wrong, come to think of it, however they may be defined. Any society that attempts to do so quickly disintegrates.
This danger of disintegration is a real one for America today. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
Joseph Campbell argues that the universal moral impulse is connected to the religious impulse in humanity. Religious or mythological imagination seems essential to the moral identity of any community. Perhaps art or science can replace or become religion in a secular society.
I doubt that religion will ever disappear entirely from any human society.
Roger Scruton's discussion of the binding role of culture in Western society is also helpful on this issue. ("Daniel Dennett and the Theology of Science" and "Is Daniel Dennett an Unhelpful Samaritan?")
The social psychologist Solomon Ash claims that every society despises cowardice and honors bravery. In every society modesty, courage, hospitality and generosity are encouraged. They differ in how they define and apply these values.
Even in cultures where acts that are horrible (to us) are routinely performed, it is often possible to find that the disagreement is really a debate about apparently empirical "facts" and not a debate about "values."
The existence of universal values, if granted, will never diminish the need for evaluation. An example is the abortion controversy. The parties to a dispute about abortion may well agree that human lives or persons are sacred or to be cherished yet disagree about whether the fetus is a human life or a person.
I am pro-choice because I am a firm believer in persons' rights to privacy or autonomy concerning bodily decisions as well as liberty of conscience and expression. I am also confident that women are persons. ("A Doll's Aria.")
A "person" (are politicians "persons"?) who I remember discussing the abortion controversy very intelligently from both a philosophical and Constitutional perspective -- as a pro-choice Catholic (as I recall) -- is Mario Cuomo.
I anticipate the objection that says: "What if I don't believe that human life is sacred or especially worthwhile?"
It is certainly true that persons may reject a conclusion about a fundamental value. In doing so, however, they will postulate the possibility of being right themselves about the issue. They will be saying (affirmatively) that there are no true values, which I have suggested is also a value-claim, or (negatively) I reject your claim of value concerning human life which has nothing to do with whether that value exists or whether the claim is true.
Any such rejection of a value in the end must reflect the rejector's values and valuing.
I may choose to "reject" the law of gravity. This does not mean that gravity will cease to exist. It will not prevent things from falling when I drop them nor invalidate our explanation for why this happens. No fancy scientific theory concerning the formulation of a law to explain the effects of what we call "gravity" alters the fact that when we drop things they fall to the ground.
None of us will be anxious to test the theory by leaping off the edge of a cliff unless we have a parachute.
But isn't the law of gravity "relative"?
Well, Einstein's conclusions concerning relativity were certainly deemed by him to be objectively true. (See my quotations from Brian Greene's The Fabric of Reality in "David Stove's Critique of Idealism.")
Relativists tend to find the distinction between values and evaluation frustrating because they wish to infer from the fact of moral disagreement the impossibility of objectively valid moral values.
This is not a valid inference.
The relativist premise may actually support the opposite of what proponents believe to be the correct conclusion.
If people disagree about what is the right thing to do they may well be making a tacit appeal to higher values that determine (if properly understood) the answer to be discovered, eventually, that will resolve their disagreement; or establish, objectively, who is correct with respect to that disagreement.
Even the possibility of being "correct" about such matters, again, is something that relativists I have encountered must deny.
The principle that no value or set of values can justifiably be recommended for all people cannot be the conclusion drawn from any scientific investigation.
Even if, contrary to the foregoing discussion and arguendo, it did turn out that no values are universally held, it would not follow from this finding that no value is worthy of adoption by all, that no value should be universally accepted would remain an open question.
To argue the opposite is to reject the "is/ought" or "fact/value" dichotomy which adherents of these forms of skepticism usually claim to accept.
Deciding what is a fact or value -- or that we should bother distinguishing between the two -- is a judgment that already involves a number of value choices, in my opinion, and an exercise of imagination as well as intelligence. ("Why philosophy is for everybody?")
If we decide to uphold the fact/value distinction we will be making one value judgment; but if we decide to reject the distinction, we will also be making a value judgment, and much will always depend on our reasons for the position we take on this issue.
Valuing and judging are inescapable activities for persons.
Part of what is meant by a "person" has to do with the capacity to develop and deploy such distinctions. ("Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood" and "The Naked Ape" then "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
It is contradictory or impossible to step out of our moral awareness in order to examine that moral awareness, so as to decide whether it is "moral" to do away with morality.
Again: Morality may well coincide with our humanity.
Morality is the "floor or ground that we stand upon as civilized human beings."
We cannot leave moral awareness at home when it is inconvenient like an old umbrella. Mind you, there are days when I'd love to do exactly that.
Morality is a burden. It is the burden of being a person. Morality is a joy. It is the joy of being a person.
Why your mother was right.
Forget about the fancy theory and the philosophical references for a moment. Let us pause to consider: What do I really believe about all this? What would I say in the silence of my own conscience?
I think that we all know that there is a difference between right and wrong. Once again, it appears that your mother was right. These terms designate powerful and genuine alternatives in all of our lives. I am certain that we recognize an obligation to choose between them at difficult moments.
We know in our hearts when we have acted immorally. Making mistakes is a great reminder of the "bite of conscience." (Nietzsche.)
Moral values are just as real as rocks and trees. We bump against them or ignore them at our peril. The Holocaust -- which I would describe a moral Grand Canyon -- was certainly and obviously unspeakably evil despite the collective madness of the culture that endorsed it. This is true regardless of anybody's culture or perspective. If we are honest then I think we know this much already.
I do not know how to respond to a person who tells me, in all seriousness, that "the Holocaust was right for the German people at the time that they approved of it." Something beyond an error in logic is involved in making such a statement. It is wounding or painful for me to listen to someone state such views (though I would not censor them) because I feel offended and abused on behalf of so many individuals whose suffering and humanity is denigrated (or denied entirely) by such a claim and who are not here to respond today. ("Book Chats and 'Chits.'")
Would you not be even more offended if the person making such a statement were a Jew?
I would be and I am offended by such claims.
Rationalizations of evil (or nihilism) may be found in all totalitarian societies whether they are Left or Right on the political spectrum. Evil is found in every denial of human rights. This is "true" no matter who is responsible for this denial. This includes our own societies. None of us is without sin. No human society can claim to have avoided all evils or crimes in its history.
The unwillingness to recognize great evils for which systems and nations or persons are responsible only aggravates the tumor-like malignancy of evil that can devour an organism or any nation.
No legal system, for example, can survive cover-ups of atrocities such as torture, censorship, cruelty, rape and theft by the powerful or frauds for financial gain.
If you deny the moral worth of PERSONS -- if you regard all judgments of value as essentially without rational criteria -- then persons are no different from rocks or shoes on any objective, valid, or truthful moral scale because there is no such moral scale. It follows that what you may do to a person is not logically different from what you decide to do to a car or necktie. At the instant when you accept this conclusion you have arrived at Dachau. This was Dr. Josef Mengele's view of Jewish children who provided an excellent source-material for experiments designed to lead to increased scientific knowledge to benefit so-called "Aryans." ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, 'Terry A. Tuchin' and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and "Is there a gay marriage right?" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "Not One More Victim.")
Nihilism is not a philosophical position that is defensible or livable in the real world.
Nihilism is a form of psychopathology or extreme autism which is highly dangerous. The person who genuinely holds such a position or belief may be in need of medical attention and, potentially, a sociopath, psychopath, or common criminal.
We have seen such persons in positions of power in the twentieth century.
The results for millions of people have not been pleasant.
Joseph Stalin asked: "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
The sort of power wielded by a person symbolizing moral authority was inconceivable to Stalin.
Moral power is real, objective, true, even if it is not a material object to be weighed and measured. If stated seriously -- I have encountered persons who have done so -- a claim about the ethical "neutrality" of the Holocaust reveals a kind of moral pathology that I cannot ignore.
I feel the same about defenses of slavery or racism, and there are persons willing to offer them, even today. I have encountered and debated such persons. I think this is because of those persons that I have known (or loved) who are members of the groups hated by Nazis and racists. Maybe also because of my own, much milder, experiences (milder by comparison with the Holocaust) of being insulted and ignored, even tortured and raped, or stolen from, evidently, to the indifference of the U.S. legal system. ("Have you no shame Mr. Rabner?")
The encounter with a contemporary person -- who is essentially identical to Adolf Eichman in his or her opinions -- is not something that anyone will forget or ever fully leave behind. This kind of encounter leaves a scar in a person's psyche especially when the person expressing such views is a lawyer or judge from New Jersey. (Again: "'Terry Tuchin,' Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Racist or Nazi-like ideas are more than wrong or mistaken. They are evil. I have to fight against them. Sadly, the Internet offers plenty of opportunities to do so. My daily struggle against censorship offers proof of this truth. Even more sadly persons who are members of traditionally despised groups may lend themselves to the exploitation or demonizing of others for a small fee or a job promotion or even a pat on the head from a powerful official.
I would not censor even the most hateful opinions.
However, I will respond to such arguments FOREVER, if I have to, in order to make it clear to people that hatred and inhumanity are despicable even when they are disguised as metaethical sophistries (or "therapies") adopted by powerful individuals wearing expensive clothes while munching on Tofu somewhere in the East Village in Manhattan, or in the many the hell holes of New Jersey.
This is a value judgment that I am making and defending -- defending successfully -- against trendy relativists with a fondness for criminal conduct and kiwi or "multi-gendered otherness."
Can anything be said about the content of objective values if it turns out that there are some after all? ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "Skinny People Dressed in Black.")
Kant's philosophy is very helpful on this issue. As rational agents we discover the requirements of sociability or what it means to be rational agents in a practical sense which at the most fundamental and public level must mean something like the categorical imperative:
"Act so that the maxim of your actions can be willed as a universal law."
My grandmother was not Kant, but she figured out this much: "Treat others the way you wish to be treated." If something hurts you do not do it to others.
My grandmother believed what many scientists are now telling us is true on non-religious grounds. Everything that exists shares in a fundamental quality or essence, the "Ur-stuff" of the universe, and participates somehow in a cosmic order that we are only beginning to understand, so that this participation by each of us may be needed -- or we would not be here for the time that we are -- and is implicated in the actions of all others.
Call this the "butterfly effect" meets the "principle of sufficient reason." Quantum mechanics again.
If you are "here" (and you must be since you are reading these words), then there may be good reasons for why you are here and perhaps grounds to believe that you should be here. There seems to be something special about this quality of "being-here." Being. (Heidegger, Sartre, Ricoeur and many others.)
We can always choose to believe that we are free as well as necessary. We certainly experience ourselves as free agents. We may well turn out to be free. (Spinoza, Blanshard, Nozick.)
"Choose to be free!" may be the slogan to adopt. (Sartre, Camus, Murdoch.)
The implications for those who wish to believe in God should be obvious. Nobody can say that you are wrong. (See again: "Is it rational to believe in God?")
Perhaps poets have always known this. "What you do to another you do to yourself." (Oscar Wilde.)
And it is fundamental to our religious traditions as well: "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers [and sisters] that you do unto me." (Gospels.)
Similar quotes can be found in Judaism and Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Notice how we approach aesthetics and the realm of feelings at this point. Philosophy becomes literature or religion. The religious impulse in persons seems to be allied to these other-regarding emotions with cognitive content:
"Christ's place is indeed with the poets. His whole conception of humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realized by it. What God was to the Pantheist, man was to him. He was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been gods and men. He alone saw that on the hills of life there were but God and Man [or Woman,] and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the One or the son of the other, according to his mood. More than anyone else in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which Romance always appeals. There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world."
This quotation is from De Profundis.
In these words by Oscar Wilde the shortcomings in our moral lives and flawed thinking are highlighted. All of us bear the burden of the world on our shoulders. These words reveal a poverty of feeling and imagination in most of us most of the time that we take for granted in our current American embrace of scientism and relativism. ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Wilde concludes with much more urgency for us than for his contemporaries from the cold and darkness of his prison cell:
"Yet the whole life of Christ -- so entirely may Sorrow and Beauty be made one in their meaning and manifestation -- is really an idyll, though it ends with the veil of the temple being rent, and the coming of the darkness over the face of the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre."
This bringing together of sorrow and beauty is love which takes us beyond morality.
Beyond philosophies and principles, beyond theories, is a kind of simple humanity. I can look at another person and see an abstraction or a social category, maybe race or gender, and so on; or I can try to see what is universal or shared with that other person, to give him or her the "attention" (Simone Weil) or respectful regard accorded only to that unique locus of rights and responsibilities in our moral universe that we call a "person." (Please see Iris Murdoch's great essay "On God and Good.")
Exceptional gifts for such attention to others -- including distant others -- together with ease in representing or recreating what is seen is the essence of great acting and maybe all of the arts.
As with all of the arts, in fact, I believe that great acting is a kind of "love" which is for the other. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith" and see the film "Another Day in Paradise.")
I can choose to see another human being as a "person" who feels, hurts, cries, needs, dreams, imagines and most of all, loves.
Think of the images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Do you see the problem?
No one is "collateral damage." No human being or his family member is an object to be manipulated by others without his or her knowledge and/or against his or her will for purposes that do not belong to that victim.
Perhaps I may be able to assist New Jersey persons in grasping this point. According to Brand Blanshard (see above and also Blanshard's long essay on idealism in a collection on Ethics republished in the Open Court volume devoted to Blanshard's philosophy):
"If I meet a Chinaman [sic.] in a Pacific jungle, he and I may be beyond the jurisdiction of any state or court, but he has a right to decent treatment from me, based on the fact that he is a [free and equal] human being with powers and needs. These are natural rights."
Brand Blanshard, "Morality and Politics," in R.T. de George, ed., Ethics and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 1-25 (emphasis added).
For me -- in a very American way that becomes universal -- this amounts, again, to respecting the other's right to freedom or "difference" at all times as well as his or her claim on my concern and compassion as an equal human being. Charles Taylor comments:
"The general feature of human life I want to evoke is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression ..." that allow us to RECOGNIZE one another.
Think about acting again: How does the spaceman in the movie "Starman" learn to be human? How did you learn to be a person?
"Acting" has been defined as "reacting" to a situation (or other actors) on stage or in society. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
We are predatory creatures, true, we are "survival machines." (Richard Dawkins.)
We must not forget that we are also something more.
We are beings capable of love -- needing to love others -- seeing ourselves in others whose confirmation and affection we require so as to "become the persons we are" or even to become persons at all. ("Bernard Williams and Identity.")
Yes, we are survival machines, but we only wish to survive for reasons that make that survival worthwhile -- like loving others, loving them so much that we are willing to sacrifice even that personal survival for their welfare. ("Behaviorism is Evil.")
To admit this call to love others is to acknowledge that morality, like the capacity for love, is a condition of being fully human, comparable to language and sociability. It is also difficult "work" sometimes, though rarely the kind of work for which the taxpayers will pay in New Jersey.
"If some of the things I value most are accessible to me only in relation to the person I love," Charles Taylor says, "then she becomes internal to my identity." ("'The Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
In Emma Donoghue's novel Hood "Pen" discovers, through loss, the impossibility of removing a beloved other's ("Cara's") presence from her own identity, as a woman, lesbian, lover, person:
" ... Everything will change when woman gives woman to the other woman. ..." (Hood, pp. 208-209.)
Anne Frank wrote after experiencing some of the worst aspects of human nature:
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
