Does "dictatorship of relativism" exist?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Whaleboy


Care to name a hypothetical example of one of these moral acts, that presumably are universal.

I didn't say anything about being universal. I'm not talking about moral codes.

As BS as that is, my point you answered was not addressed specifically to you, it was a general observation. Absolutism is by definition the opposite of moral relativism unless you want to say that something is absolute in context, which is self-defeating because of the hot -> hottest problem.

Actually "absolutism" was a bad choice of words. It meant that you don't have to believe in moral relativism to be opposed to intolerance.

There's no room for debate on 2+2 = 4, but that makes perfect sense does it not?
because of the hot -> hottest problem.

Of course, but moral relativism makes no sense what so ever.

[Kidlicious]

So let me get this straight. Take a specific case of killing someone. The moral relativist are saying that it's neither moral or immoral to kill someone. But at the same time they believe that it is either moral or immoral. Does your theory make any sense at all? Can someone in your group please say something that makes sense. I find it amazing that so many people here believe in this. Why?

[Kidlicious]

Oh, and there are absolute truths that can not be objectively proven. The earth has been round for it's entire life. Yes, even before it could be objectively proven. You can say otherwise if you mess with the definitions of words, but it doesn't make sense.

[Whaleboy]

The research implies a convergence of moral reasoning among those sufficiently advanced, but that remains unprovable and likely will forever remain so, since one has to be of the highly advanced moral reasoning level to recognize it for what it is

That's a good point, that something is hotter than something doesn't imply that there is a state of "hottest", nor that the "hotter" is necessarily closer to "hottest" than hot... (the old infinite perception issue).

I didn't say anything about being universal. I'm not talking about moral codes.

I know what you mean.... that a moral code isn't a universal truth but is absolute to context, like what you said about the Earth being round... but then it makes no sense to say that, imagine you're on TV drinking a cup of coffee, and then come out and say "I am drinking a cup of tea". It's useless. But that is hardly applicable to morality, particularly if you're opposing Kant and Mill. Morality in that case is more like art, the difference between "this is paint" and "this is beautiful".

None of this refutes relativism however, since you're accepting context and that something absolute in one context is not absolute in another. Accept that nothing (sic) is universally absolute and relativism is the result. I suggest that you cease claiming to be an absolutist, it's an inaccurate term for your own position and you'll only end up confusing others and yourself.

Actually "absolutism" was a bad choice of words. It meant that you don't have to believe in moral relativism to be opposed to intolerance.

Ah I didn't read that far . No you're right, relativism is not the sole predicate for tolerance... but then as with all things, there are elements of philosophies in many things, whenever people differentiate into "isms", you know they're just playing politics. For example, for the most capitalist system to work, you require communist elements, for absolutist humanism (tolerance), you need relativistic elements. Therein is the refutation to the relativistic paradox (relativism means that relativism itself is not an absolute truth yadda yadda), because it's a human claim, not a cosmological claim.

Ironic stuff eh?

Of course, but moral relativism makes no sense what so ever.

Explain.

So let me get this straight. Take a specific case of killing someone. The moral relativist are saying that it's neither moral or immoral to kill someone. But at the same time they believe that it is either moral or immoral. Does your theory make any sense at all? Can someone in your group please say something that makes sense. I find it amazing that so many people here believe in this. Why?

Subjectivism. The difference, in other words, between "I", and "is". I have an emotive repugnance to, say, murder. I can say that I find murder immoral, which is to say that my logic and emotions find it wrong, but that does not necessitate my consequent claim that "murder is wrong". Put simply, one can make statements about oneself that apply for oneself, but you accept that they needn't necessarily apply to others, thus no absolutism, thus relativism.

Kant would call it a hypothetical imperative, as opposed to the categorical imperative.

All of this renders morality as the same level as ones emotions like anger or love, or art... as if to say "this is moral", "I like Dali", but then that's part of the existential beauty of relativism imo. There are few concepts who's very logical form can be described as "beautiful".... evolution is one, relativity and relativism are others.

[Whaleboy]

You can say otherwise if you mess with the definitions of words, but it doesn't make sense.

Talk about self-pwnage!

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Morality in that case is more like art, the difference between "this is paint" and "this is beautiful".

Why? Just because you say it is?

I suggest that you cease claiming to be an absolutist, it's an inaccurate term for your own position and you'll only end up confusing others and yourself.

I'm certainly not a moral relativist. I'm trying to figure out how moral relativism makes any sense at all. I'm still waiting.

Ah I didn't read that far . No you're right, relativism is not the sole predicate for tolerance... but then as with all things, there are elements of philosophies in many things, whenever people differentiate into "isms", you know they're just playing politics. For example, for the most capitalist system to work, you require communist elements, for absolutist humanism (tolerance), you need relativistic elements. Therein is the refutation to the relativistic paradox (relativism means that relativism itself is not an absolute truth yadda yadda), because it's a human claim, not a cosmological claim.

It's not a paradox. It's a contradiction.

Explain.

That's what you are suppose to do. 2+2=4 makes sense. Moral relativism does not.

Subjectivism. The difference, in other words, between "I", and "is". I have an emotive repugnance to, say, murder. I can say that I find murder immoral, which is to say that my logic and emotions find it wrong, but that does not necessitate my consequent claim that "murder is wrong". Put simply, one can make statements about oneself that apply for oneself, but you accept that they needn't necessarily apply to others, thus no absolutism, thus relativism.

What does claiming that something to be true have to do with it actually being true?

All of this renders morality as the same level as ones emotions like anger or love, or art... as if to say "this is moral", "I like Dali", but then that's part of the existential beauty of relativism imo. There are few concepts who's very logical form can be described as "beautiful".... evolution is one, relativity and relativism are others.

No. Emotions have nothing to do with reason.

[Whaleboy]

Why? Just because you say it is?

No, because of the argument in the above post:

"
Subjectivism. The difference, in other words, between "I", and "is". I have an emotive repugnance to, say, murder. I can say that I find murder immoral, which is to say that my logic and emotions find it wrong, but that does not necessitate my consequent claim that "murder is wrong". Put simply, one can make statements about oneself that apply for oneself, but you accept that they needn't necessarily apply to others, thus no absolutism, thus relativism.

Kant would call it a hypothetical imperative, as opposed to the categorical imperative.

All of this renders morality as the same level as ones emotions like anger or love, or art... as if to say "this is moral", "I like Dali", but then that's part of the existential beauty of relativism imo. There are few concepts who's very logical form can be described as "beautiful".... evolution is one, relativity and relativism are others."

I'm certainly not a moral relativist. I'm trying to figure out how moral relativism makes any sense at all. I'm still waiting.

Your problem is how a moral relativist can have morality. Moral relativism only refutes absolute morality, it does not refute subjective/emotive morality. I suggest reading Ayer and Stevenson.

It's not a paradox. It's a contradiction.

ADJECTIVE: ABSURD, nonsensical, farcical, preposterous, egregious, senseless, inconsistent, stultiloquent [rare], stulty [obs.], ridiculous, extravagant, quibbling; self-annulling, self-contradictory; paradoxical, macaronic or maccaronic, punning.

Roget's International Thesaurus

http://www.bartleby.com/110/497.html

That's what you are suppose to do. 2+2=4 makes sense. Moral relativism does not.

No I was asking you to explain how it doesn't make sense? Even a lot of the absolutists here have no problem in at least understanding relativism.

What does claiming that something to be true have to do with it actually being true?

We're looking at the nature of claims, since I have no cosmological oracle into which I can postulate the validity or fallacy of given claims. As such, we have to look at the claims themselves, are they relative, or do they purport to be absolute.

No. Emotions have nothing to do with reason.

No you misunderstand. Like I said, read Ayer and or Stevenson, two philosophers of the "emotivist" school of thought. The concept goes like this.... imagine you walk into a room and there is a man inside having intercourse with a frozen chicken. You'll have a human, emotional reaction, such as horror, amusement or, being American, arousal. One is likely to consider such acts immoral. Consider the same of murder, child abuse, etc... the proposition that they are immoral is motivated by emotion, though it can be constructed of nothing but pure (and fallible by nature) reason. If you accept emotivism, you do not necessarily accept that morality and arguments are intrinsically emotional, merely motivated thus.

[Agathon]

Only if you're an idiot. Mathematics is just a group of formal logics. It doesn't claim any truth beyond "our axioms imply -

Which comes down to saying "the rules are internal to the practice". But if you want to be relativist about mathematics, that's fine with me. I just dislike the double standard of many people.

But most people in this thread are doing this on a PHL 101 level. You're trying to look for something that's not there.

Is morality relative is neither a conceptual nor an empirical (in the old fashioned sense) question. It can only be answered by looking at what people actually do. The problem is that people are putting the bar for moral justification as high, or higher than the bar for regular epistemological justification. Of course you're likely to get nowhere if you do that, but real philosophers generally don't take scepticism as an acceptable answer (which would be ludicrous), but as a sign that we are thinking the wrong way about the matter in question.

Questions of biology are irrelevant (unless you are Aristotle -- and you aren't, GePap) since moral prescriptions are normative, and science does not provide normative prescriptions. You can give whatever explanation for the origins of moral beliefs you like, and that will have nothing to do with their justification. Once you get rid of that ridiculous prejudice, GePap's argument can be seen for the irrelevancy that it is.

Nobody really believes in relativism anyway. It's like Cartesian scepticism – people say they believe in it, but their actions betray them. Similarly, cultural relativity is exaggerated – in practice cultural encounters show that people are very good at adapting and expanding their ethical codes to enable them to get along with the newcomers, and as an act of cultural self criticism. This is because every ethical code is incomplete, not because of relativism. If relativism were true, it would be hard to make sense of the notion of moral discovery – where one revises one's code when presented with new evidence and upon being made aware of values that one had previously been ignorant of. It's not that much different from revising a scientific theory, except that precision in these matters is much more difficult, and it requires the addition of a first person perspective.

Relativism only arises when people are trying to make excuses for their bad behaviour.

Think about what you do every day. You make countless ethical decisions without even thinking about them. You follow the rules and know what they are: you can't even help it. The only time it becomes a matter of controversy is when we strike unfamiliar territory or we have cross cultural encounters. These sort of situations force belief revisions or re-examinations, and there's no reason to treat them much differently from any other cases of belief revision other than prejudice.

People are much the same everywhere. But we only notice the differences because they cause problems. Focusing on the differences without noticing the overwhelming degree of similarity is just ridiculous.

Go out one day and actually try to be a proper relativist. It's like trying to live without believing in causality.

[Agathon]

Oh.. and people who haven't read Wittgenstein have no business pontificating about this.

[Ben Kenobi]

In other words, the more humans decide to make their own moral judgments (and reject those of "moral authorities") the more complex the dilemma they can resolve, and the more they reason like others who have rejected external moral authority

First of all 'resolution' of a moral problem is not necessarily the desired outcome. One can resolve the problem of pain by killing oneself, which is a resolution, but not necessarily the best option.

As for a convergence, even if everyone made the same decision at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that it is the highest good, or the right choice.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Agathon

Only if you're an idiot. Mathematics is just a group of formal logics. It doesn't claim any truth beyond "our axioms imply -

Which comes down to saying "the rules are internal to the practice". But if you want to be relativist about mathematics, that's fine with me. I just dislike the double standard of many people.

Relativism about mathematics would be, say, redifining the syntax so that the symbol '2' represented what we know as the number 3. So 2 + 2 = 6. But that's meaningless, since mathematics refers to a PARTICULAR set of formal logics.

[Az]

It's meaningless for a different reason: if you mess the definitions, of course everything will be different. That's the same with ethics and mathematics. Nothing wierd about it. That's why you should agree on the basic definitions when you debate ethics as well. But after you did THAT, everything should and can be logically explainable.

[Whaleboy]

But if you want to be relativist about mathematics, that's fine with me. I just dislike the double standard of many people.

I suppose the question hinges on whether logic is itself absolute, or to be more concise, a definition of it's operant context (ad infinitum or ad infinitum where infinite is a "human" issue).

You can give whatever explanation for the origins of moral beliefs you like, and that will have nothing to do with their justification. Once you get rid of that ridiculous prejudice, GePap's argument can be seen for the irrelevancy that it is.

But you just said that it depends on what people actually do? I assume you meant that in an existential sense in which case people's motivations (as opposed to the intent towards a given end, rather a prejudice that predicates an action). As for where they come from, the question remains are they emotive/subjective, where the relativist would obviously try to rape Plato, or they come from some objective transcendant thing (god?) or are a function of absolute logic (Kant)... in any case, emotivism makes perfect sense.

Nobody really believes in relativism anyway. It's like Cartesian scepticism – people say they believe in it, but their actions betray them.

1) You cause yourself a problem by saying "believes". Relativism is not something one believes in, like theism, communism, humanism etc. It's something that one accepts, like that existence precedes essense, and then uses it as a premise for other things i.e. tolerance, pacifism or pantheism.

2) I've never understood the argument for one practicing what one preaches... cries of "hypocrisy" feel like a cop-out to me, perhaps you'd like to fill me in?

Think about what you do every day. You make countless ethical decisions without even thinking about them. You follow the rules and know what they are: you can't even help it. The only time it becomes a matter of controversy is when we strike unfamiliar territory or we have cross cultural encounters. These sort of situations force belief revisions or re-examinations, and there's no reason to treat them much differently from any other cases of belief revision other than prejudice.

None of that means that relativism is being undermined, since none of that requires a claim to objective morality. Moral relativism |= no ethics, it merely means no claims to absolute ethics.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Az
It's meaningless for a different reason: if you mess the definitions, of course everything will be different. That's the same with ethics and mathematics. Nothing wierd about it. That's why you should agree on the basic definitions when you debate ethics as well. But after you did THAT, everything should and can be logically explainable.

The difference with ethics is that those are NOT simply a set of axioms and the theorems based on those axioms. It relates these abstract concepts to real objects. Mathematics doesn't do that - applied mathematics (physics, etc.) does, but it itself claims not to be absolute truth but merely a useful tool.

[Az]

so the problem is that in your opinion, the abstract concepts aren't descriptive enough to fully describe the nature of real objects, but are just models, approximations.

Here we reach the comparison to science: it's true that

applied mathematics (physics, etc.) does, but it itself claims not to be absolute truth but merely a useful tool.

Or to put it more simply, an approximation.

However, these models, even incomplete, are holding their water very well in their appropriate sircumstances, and thus they are more correct than other models. It's even possible that one model is simpler to understand, and easier for scientists to work with, but is less correct, and thus we must always remember that it is an approximation of a better, stronger model, almost an immensly strong "rule of thumb".

Now, let's carry back the discussion to ethics and morals:

One could claim that we haven't reached the end of ethical discussion, and/or haven't reached the complete truth about it. One could even claim that to reach such a truth is impossible: still, our best models are to be followed when we make decisions on ethical questions. We shouldn't descend into the ethical equivalent of the amish just because we don't find the perfect answers.