There are, however, good reasons to think that relativism is a rather stingy philosophy for people living in a confusing time: stingy because it ultimately offers us an impoverished ethical vision of the world and of our place in it. I am constantly struck by its inability to answer the question: why care? Why bother when the matter before us has nothing to do with fulfilling our individual or collective interests? No relativist will be able to get off the couch when you tell her that there is genocide in Darfur, that the conditions of women living in Iran fall well below any reasonable mark, or that there is widespread poverty in Africa.

His essay on relativism grows from this concern that it’s a dead end, a stagnant pool in which little can grow except ill. Yet relativism is not a philosophical argument, but a mindset, and not usually a particularly well-founded one at that. At the start of the essay, he points out:

Needless to say, I reject relativism, but I am not certain that reason, as it is traditionally conceived, will do much to change things… whatever authority practical reason has—the sort of reason, I mean, that is concerned with moral conduct, political affairs, and values in general—is slight in comparison with traditional authority and with the authority that we implicitly associate with our everyday practices. Rarely indeed has engaging in philosophical argument changed somebody’s mind or gained her rational assent. Normally, she simply opts out or grows silent. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism, our views of the social world tend to change when our individual habits and our communal practices change.

I would argue that most people don’t accept the full ramifications of relativism. Few of those people in the West who in general proclaim that everybody’s views are equally valid would continue to assert this in the case of (for example) the popularity of female genital mutilation in various parts of the world. The reason that relativism is popular is that it is convenient, saving us both from having to think critically about other peoples’ positions or – more critically – to defend our own positions.

At the same time, relativism has its benefits. Those who speak out vigourously against relativism (and I don’t include Andrew here) are often speaking on behalf of a parochial viewpoint that they wish to see privileged against others. In many ways this is simply a mirror image of relativism – if their views are privileged, it will save them from having to defend it and from having to think critically about others (because all others will be equally condemned).

Surgically removing relativism from public discourse won’t be very productive if we don’t replace it with something else – but Andrew’s suggestion of “public practical reason” is unlikely to find much acceptance.

To what degree are the people who died under Stalin or Mao (especially Mao) offset by those that were saved? Compared to both societies before their revolutions, what was the improvement in material standards of living and medical care, both of which profoundly expect both life expectancy and quality of life?

While these questions are valid, this defense will not work well for one simple reason. While balance sheets do have a useful role in judging success and failure, but they are notoriously difficult to use when human lives are involved. This is not because human life is invaluable, but for precisely the opposite reason – because we do place a concrete value on individual human lives, even if we can’t articulate the precise amount of that value.

This can be seen in peoples’ responses to the death of a child versus the death of an old person; nearly everybody would agree that the loss of a child is the greater loss (including old people, of course). Balance sheets run into difficulties not because human lives are valuable, but because that sense of value is subjective. Nobody will agree on how much a human life should be valued at, partly because we’re afraid that this will expose our express belief that human life is invaluable (and therefore sacrosanct) as a sham. Nobody wants to be the first to shout the emperor has no clothes in this particular instance. (Possible exception: Peter Singer, who’s practically made a career out of it.)

How might we deal with this problem, especially in the company of people such Massimo Pigliucci’s repugnant dinner companions? Well, one could argue that any excess mortality in the service of political goals is unacceptable – but then that lands all of us in the same boat, and also overlooks the fact that heroic sacrifice for the fatherland / motherland / country of choice often makes such excess mortality voluntary (as well as being widely respected). Excess mortality alone makes for good headlines, but is not in and of itself a measure of culpability – which is presumably what we’re after in this case.

I propose that we must subdivide excess mortality into three distinct types. This will enable us to avoid comparing apples with oranges, although we may in fact find that the line between apple and orange is a little blurred. The three types are deliberate, incidental and accidental and I’ll explain the distinctions in my next blog post when I stop blogging about Batman R.I.P.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

That it makes me appear the way I really am.

Then you have the comments on Marginal Revolution, which range from clueless:

He sounds like a grumpy and possessive old man.

to tragic:

I am a mainstream philosophy professor in an very prestigious American university, and I have never heard of this guy.

to brilliant:

“Does he have a blog?”

One might be forgiven for thinking that he actually maintains every LiveJournal in existence.

This interview format is ridiculous, and a gift to an absurdist such as Zizek. The point of it is not to be informative but entertaining, and so Zizek entertains. I like the idea of Zizek with his own blog, but it’s hard to imagine how he could beat the absurdity of blog posts and comments like these…

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

I don’t have any such innate need, and consequently his entire argument is falsified.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation. One of these is the question of consciousness. [Insert barely-understood and largely irrelevant reference to quantum physics to distract the punters here.] Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them.

It may be the case that the reason that we haven’t been able to “see” the consciousness before is that we didn’t have the right tools – in exactly the same way as we weren’t able (and in many cases, remain unable) to see the “great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy” that so impresses Scruton. It may be the case that we may be in the early stages of exploring consciousness, some years behind our journey of exploring the cosmos. It may be the case that consciousness will soon be laid bare, and that Scruton’s metaphysical discourse turns out to be a dead end.

On the other hand, it may not. One thing is absolutely certain, however – consciousness is very clearly and very obviously a question that is addressed to science. If I were Roger Scruton, I probably wouldn’t try to build my house of worship on this particular sand.

This is because this is not a rights issue in the same way as racism or sexism is – in this case the rights-holders cannot argue for their own rights, and it is therefore up to others to argue for them.² This being the case, it is critical to deliver a stronger argument that the one than Stephen does here – most people will not be receptive to this reasoning because it goes against such a deeply embedded perspective, and so the case needs to be forceful rather than elegant.

In the comments, Stephen responds:

If you find sexism or racism wrong, my guess is because you find something like this principle plausible: We are justified in discriminating between a and b only if there is some morally relevant difference between a and b that justifies this difference in treatment.

If you don’t sign up to some such principle, why would you consider sexism or racism be wrong? (possibly you would appeal to some other principle) Sexism and racism are wrong, I think, because discrimination that is unjustified by some morally relevant difference = bigotry, and is wrong. And skin colour and sex are not morally relevant when it comes to most racial and sexual discrimination.

Trouble is, this principle then gets us into trouble with other species. Unless there’s some morally relevant difference, our discriminatory practices come out as bigotry – speciesism.

My argument is that the morally relevant difference is that most people consider that humans are the only animals with moral relevance, i.e. that only humans have the capacity for moral judgments. Clearly this distinction breaks down at the borders – a newborn infant has no moral capacity, as far as I can tell – but that is exactly why speciesism makes sense.

It is impossible in practice (and I would argue in theory, although that is a weaker argument) to set up a rule of sophistication that states exactly which humans have sufficient moral capacity to be considered part of the “moral community” and thus subject to moral considerations (such as the right not to be experimented upon).

If you agree that such a rule is impossible, then you must agree that we need a heuristic to decide who is included in our “moral community” or be paralysed by every individual having to make their own judgment every time they meet another person. The obvious boundary is exactly where it is at the moment – with our own species, since this presents an obvious and visible line of demarcation that has the added benefit of being an instinctive human response.

1. I don’t think Scruton stands up to scruton-y, ho ho ho – see his recent piece on The Return of Religion for a particularly weak chain of thought.
2. I am one of those people: I favour limited human rights being extended to non-human animals of sufficient intelligence.

I was immediately struck by this conflict, and became very confused. How was it possible for me – an outsider – to work out which group was right in its beliefs? When I asked individual Frugians about this they presented three linked explanations. First, they pointed out that Frugi is above mere descriptions, so Frugi can be all things to all people. Second, they pointed out that humans are imperfect creatures, so their comprehension of Frugi will always be flawed. Finally they conclude that my observations have no bearing on the truth or falsity of their personal beliefs, which they hold to be true regardless of anybody else’s beliefs about Frugi.

However my confusion is not about what the true nature of Frugi is, nor about whether it is possible to know the true nature of Frugi, or even about whether their beliefs are true. No matter what the answers to any of these questions are, the beliefs of each group concerning Frugi are mutually exclusive. Either Frugi controls everything directly or Frugi does not – there is no way that both beliefs can be true at the same time. Of course the Frugians themselves recognise this – which is why each group asserts that their belief about Frugi is true, and the other groups false. When an outsider criticises Frugi or Frugianism in any way, however, the two groups present a united front – they are all Frugians together, and any criticism of Frugi or Frugianism is a criticism of them all.

Although both groups refer to their supreme being as Frugi, the only possible conclusion for an outsider is that the two groups are describing two different entities. It is only historical accident that leads them to use the same name for both entities, without recognising that they are talking about different things. There is no point in asking which group’s beliefs are correct – the only way to decide would be to join one of the two and subscribe wholeheartedly to their version of Frugi, condemning all other versions as mighty errors in thinking.

(HT: Stephen Law and his vastly superior God of Eth.)