SUBJECTIVISM, RELATIVISM, AND EMOTIVISM Á 21
’ QUICK REVIEW objectivism—The view that some moral principles
are valid for everyone.
cultural relativism—The view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. Implications: that cultures are morally infalli- ble, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between indi- viduals in the same culture amount to argu- ments over whether someone disagrees with her culture, that other cultures cannot be legit- imately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible.
subjective relativism—The view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. Implications: that individuals are morally infallible and that genuine moral disagreement between individ- uals is nearly impossible.
emotivism—The view that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. Implications: that peo- ple cannot disagree over the moral facts because there are no moral facts, that present- ing reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering nonmoral facts that can influence someone’s attitude, and that nothing is actually good or bad.
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our commonsense moral experience. First, subjec- tive relativism implies that in the rendering of any moral opinion, each person is incapable of being in error. Each of us is morally infallible. If we approve of an action—and we are sincere in our approval—then that action is morally right. We literally cannot be mistaken about this, because our approval makes the action right. If we say that inflicting pain on an innocent child for no reason is right (that is, we approve of such an action), then the action is right. Our moral judgment is correct, and it cannot be otherwise. Yet if anything is obvi- ous about our moral experience, it is that we are not infallible. We sometimes are mistaken in our moral judgments. We are, after all, not gods.
By all accounts, Adolf Hitler approved of (and ordered) the extermination of vast numbers of inno- cent people, including six million Jews. If so, by the lights of subjective relativism, his facilitating those deaths was morally right. It seems that the totalitar-
ian leader Pol Pot approved of his murdering more than a million innocent people in Cambodia. If so, it was right for him to murder those people. But it seems obvious that what these men did was wrong, and their approving of their actions did not make the actions right. Because subjective relativism sug- gests otherwise, it is a dubious doctrine.
Another obvious feature of our commonsense moral experience is that from time to time we have moral disagreements. Maria says that capital punishment is right, but Carlos says that it is wrong. This seems like a perfectly clear case of two people disagreeing about the morality of capital punishment. Subjective relativism, however, implies that such disagreements cannot happen. Subjec- tive relativism says that when Maria states that capital punishment is right, she is just saying that she approves of it. And when Carlos states that capital punishment is wrong, he is just saying that he disapproves of it. But they are not really
22 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
’ Jesus said “Judge not that ye be not judged.” Some have taken this to mean that we should not make moral judgments about others, and many who have never heard those words are convinced that to judge others is to be insensitive, intolerant, or abso- lutist. Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain examines this attitude and finds it both mistaken and harmful.
I have also found helpful the discussion of the lively British philosopher, Mary Midgley. In her book Can’t We Make Moral Judgments? Midgley notes our contemporary search for a nonjudgmental pol- itics and quotes all those people who cry, in effect, “But surely it’s always wrong to make moral judg- ments.” We are not permitted to make anyone uncomfortable, to be “insensitive.” Yet moral judg- ment of “some kind,” says Midgley, “is a necessary element to our thinking.” Judging involves our whole nature—it isn’t just icing on the cake of self- identity. Judging makes it possible for us to “find our way through a whole forest of possibilities.”
Midgley argues that Jesus was taking aim at sweeping condemnations and vindictiveness: he was not trashing the “whole faculty of judgment.” Indeed, Jesus is making the “subtle point that while we cannot possibly avoid judging, we can see to it that we judge fairly, as we would expect oth- ers to do to us.” This is part and parcel, then, of jus- tice as fairness, as a discernment about a particular case and person and deed. Subjectivism in such matters—of the “I’m okay, you’re okay,” variety— is a cop-out, a way to stop forming and expressing moral judgments altogether. This strange suspen- sion of specific moments of judgment goes hand- in-glove, of course, with an often violent rhetoric of condemnation of whole categories of persons, past and present—that all-purpose villain, the Dead White European Male, comes to mind.*
*Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Judge Not?” First Things, No. 46, pp. 36–40, October 1994. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Judge Not?
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color, and allow children to die by refusing to give them available medical treatment. (These latter acts have all been practiced in subcultures within the United States, so not all such cultural differences happen far from home.) It is only a small step from acknowledging this moral diversity among cultures to the conclusion that cultures determine moral rightness and that objective morality is a myth.
The philosopher Walter T. Stace (1886–1967) illustrates how easily this conclusion has come to many in Western societies:
It was easy enough to believe in a single absolute morality in older times when there was no anthro- pology, when all humanity was divided clearly into two groups, Christian peoples and the “heathen.” Christian peoples knew and possessed the one true morality. The rest were savages whose moral ideas could be ignored. But all this changed. Greater knowledge has brought greater tolerance. We can no longer exalt our own moralities as alone true, while dismissing all other moralities as false or inferior. The investigations of anthropologists have shown that there exist side by side in the world a bewilder- ing variety of moral codes. On this topic endless vol- umes have been written, masses of evidence piled up. Anthropologists have ransacked the Melanesian Islands, the jungles of New Guinea, the steppes of Siberia, the deserts of Australia, the forests of central Africa, and have brought back with them countless examples of weird, extravagant, and fantastic “moral” customs with which to confound us. We learn that all kinds of horrible practices are, in this, that, or the other place, regarded as essential to virtue. We find that there is nothing, or next to nothing, which has always and everywhere been regarded as morally good by all men. Where then is our universal moral- ity? Can we, in face of all this evidence, deny that it is nothing but an empty dream?1
Here, Stace spells out in rough form the most common argument for cultural relativism, an inference from differences in the moral beliefs of cultures to the conclusion that cultures make morality. Before we conclude that objectivism is in
CHAPTER 2: SUBJECTIVISM, RELATIVISM, AND EMOTIVISM Á 23
disagreeing, because they are merely describing their attitudes toward capital punishment. In effect, Maria is saying “This is my attitude on the subject,” and Carlos is saying “Here is my attitude on the subject.” But these two claims are not opposed to one another. They are about different subjects, so both statements could be true. Maria and Carlos might as well be discussing how straw- berry ice cream tastes to each of them, for nothing that Maria says could contradict what Carlos says. Because genuine disagreement is a fact of our moral life, and subjective relativism is inconsistent with this fact, the doctrine is implausible.
In practice, subjective relativism is a difficult view to hold consistently. At times, of course, you can insist that an action is right for you but wrong for someone else. But you may also find your- self saying something like “Pol Pot committed absolutely heinous acts; he was evil” or “What Hitler did was wrong”—and what you mean is that what Pol Pot and Hitler did was objectively wrong, not just wrong relative to you. Such slides from subjective relativism to objectivism suggest a con- flict between these two perspectives and the need to resolve it through critical reasoning.