This is my brain on drugs.

I just got off my antibiotics today - for the first time in a couple of days, I actually felt the joy of being pleasantly drowsy from overstuffing myself at lunch. Lunch was a decent affair - 5 aunties and myself having lunch at a pleasant Belgian eatery off China Square called Oosters. Yes they serve Hoegarden.

Looking through my blog, I had realised that much of the content was just...stuff I had found on the net to entertain myself, and had put very little creative thought (or any thought at all for that matter) into those blog entries. Well fear not - I now have another bunch of semi-digested thoughts for all.

One of my pet peeves is to discuss philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I love philosophy - and I love ethical debate most of all. But what I absolutely cannot stand is a person who launches into an ethical debate citing moral relativism as a panacea to all his arguments. I reject moral relativism as being illogical and the result of a sloppy post modernist education system.

I've set out below the two arguments that support moral relativism and how they can be proven to be illogical (as extracted and condensed from an old philosophy lecture and my comments in italics):

I. The argument from tolerance.

1. If moral relativism is true, then no one’s deepest opinions are more plausible than anyone else’s.

2. If no one’s deepest opinions are more plausible than anyone else’s, then we have to respect and tolerate the opinions of others.

3. Therefore, if moral relativism is true, then we have to respect and tolerate the opinions of others. [By hypothetical syllogism.]

Now it is clear that we can’t get from conclusion (3) to the claim that moral relativism is true by adding a new premise as follows:

4. It is true that we have to respect and tolerate the opinions of others.

The reason, of course, is that this would then commit us to the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Think about this for a second. Affirming the consequence is a fallacy because the claim that p therefore q does not rule out the possibility that something else, say r, also implies q. Thus, while it may be true that moral relativism (correctly) implies tolerance, this does rule out the possibility that other ways of thinking about morality also imply tolerance.

In other words, just because I don't subscribe to moral relativism does not mean that I don't have to respect and tolerate the opinions of others. Likewise, just because we have to tolerate and respect others does not necessarily mean that one has to subscribe to moral relativism.

II. The argument from disagreement.

1. If there is persistent disagreement among informed, good-willed, open-minded people about some subject matter, then that subject matter does not admit of objective truth.

2. There is persistent disagreement about ethical issues among informed, good-willed people.

3. Therfore there are no objective moral truths.


Is this argument sound?

Premise 1: This premise is clearly false. Although scientists, historians and mathematicians disagreement over many claims, this does not seem to compel us to think that there are no objective truths about the natural world, history or numbers!

Translation - the existence of disagreement on one or more levels does not mean disagreement on all levels. This is the informal fallacy of composition - in which you impute a characteristic to a subject matter by the nature of its components. Water, for example, does not have the properties of either oxygen or hydrogen, to use a very bland example.

Premise 2: There is a lot of agreement about many moral claims. For instance, very few people seriously believe that killing innocent people for no reason is morally acceptable. So disagreement is not nearly as widespread as one might think.

The reverse of what the above is saying. You cannot impute the nature of the whole into the nature of its component particles.

III. Problems for moral relativism.

The problem of moral equivalence. Since moral relativism implies that everyone’s moral views are equally good, are criticism of, say, the holocaust or 9/11 is only a criticism “from our own perspective” and our own perspective is not in any sense superior to the perspective of Nazis or terrorists. Criticizing 9/11 amounts to no more than just saying we disapprove of that sort of thing very strongly.

The problem of moral infallibility. An infallible person is one who cannot make mistakes. Since calling an action good (or bad) amounts to nothing more than reporting how I feel about it, the correctness of my moral beliefs will be as high as my ability to introspect and determine how I feel about something.

The problem of moral disagreement. Intuitively, it makes sense to ask whether or not eating meat is immoral or whether we ought to give to charity. But it is unclear what moral disagreement or “debate” amounts to if moral relativism is true. After all, I can’t really be wrong about how I feel about certain acts. Moreover, if you want to change my mind, you have to change how I feel. This looks like a rhetorical or psychological issue, not a rational one.

Consider these three problems - they are more pervasive than one might think.

(i) Claiming moral relativism denies the ability for rational man to question someone else's morality. In other words, claiming moral relativism would necessarily imply -all- morality is inherently justifiable, so long as it is justifiable to the particular person's morals.

(ii) Claiming moral relativism means that a person ceases to have an ability to judge himself, since he must always be correct on his or her own moral views; which leads to

(iii) Implication of this is that man is unable to improve or deprove himself morally, merely that he and his morals are eternally compatable.

Ahem.

Getting off my moral high horse for a while, the greatest problem I have with moral relativism is the -reason- people use it to -criticise- the actions of others. It's convenient and it's simple - and it's logically unsound. And it signifies to me a lot which is wrong with the way people think. Just because it's convenient and simple to understand does not mean it is correct or even defensible logically.

I'll be the first person to admit that logic is a system of beliefs as well - but it's one that defines the rules of this -particular- game of philosophical debate. In other words, if one want to get with the game, make sure one know the rules of the game first.

Dribbling, for example, is sometimes more than oozing saliva out of the side of one's mouth.

Oh, right, just to clarify, the five aunties didn't discuss philosophy with me. They know better.