Online research in philosophy

Nicholas Sturgeon has claimed that moral explanations constitute one area of disagreement between moral realists and noncognitivists. He claims that the correctness of such explanation is consistent with moral realism but not with noncognitivism. Does this difference characterize all other anti-realist views. This paper argues that it does not. Moral relativism is a distinct anti-realist view. And the correctness of moral explanation is consistent with moral relativism.

In a paper, “Is there a Single True Morality,” Gilbert Harman presents an argument for moral relativism that some have found persuasive. Relativism is, Harman argues, the view that is most compatible with a scientific view of the world. The present paper argues that Harman’s argument is unsound since it contains at least one false premise. Further, there are considerations to which Harman himself draws attention which count against moral relativism and in favor of moral absolutism i.e., the view that actions have a moral character that is independent of how individuals or groups think or feel about them.Nor is moral absolutism incompatible with a scientific view of the world, although it is no doubt incompatible with the radical empiricsm that underlies Harman’s argument.

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical (he thought it often involved a certain ‘fantasy’). I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance.

Do moral questions have objective answers? In this great debate, Gilbert Harman explains and argues for relativism, emotivism, and moral scepticism.

Hate crime is more than a legal category. It is also a moral category that promotes tolerance and respect over prejudice. In so doing, the concept of hate crime makes a claim for social justice on behalf of those groups disadvantaged by racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and so on. This article argues that one of the means via which the concept of hate crime does this is to generate certain forms of ‘emotional thinking’ among the general public, such as compassion for victims and contempt or disgust for perpetrators. The question of whether a given criminal event will be labelled and constructed as a hate crime is thus not simply a matter of whether it meets the minimal definitional requirements. It is also dependent upon the capacity of those who claim victim status to engender forms of emotional thinking that encourage others to see them as the undeserving victims of prejudice, that is, as ‘ideal’ victims. This argument is grounded in a recent empirical study of the Snowtown murders in South Australia. Despite the emergence of a strong ‘hatred as motive’ theme in the legal arena, the murders have never been publicly labelled as hate crime. The article argues that images of deep moral failure on the part of the victims (not just the perpetrators) precluded them from engendering forms of emotional thinking that are essential if the concept of hate crime is to function as a moral category.

I consider here the issue of whether and to what extent moral truths are absolute. My aim is to raise some new considerations in favor of moral relativism: the thesis that some moral statements can vary in truth-value depending on the moral standards at issue.1 2 This paper has three major components. First, I describe a new puzzle concerning the possibility of moral knowledge in light of expert disagreement. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle requires moral relativism. Second, I develop a notion of a moral standard that incorporates recent developments in moral psychology, including work by..

The fundamental thought of moral relativism is set out as follows: moral criteria, derived from overall moral points of view, are used to derive particular moral judgments. Thus such a judgment might be correct relative to one overall moral point of view and incorrect relative to another. The evaluation of an overall moral point of view does not involve the application of moral criteria. Rather, the evaluation of a morality takes us outside the province of morality. The result of sharpening this view is a doctrine called system relativism. System relativism is contrasted with other conceptions of moral relativism that have recently been propounded. It is argued that system relativism is the most defensible version.

I attempt to rebut the following standard objections against cultural relativism: 1. It is self-defeating for a cultural relativist to take the principle of tolerance as absolute; 2. There are universal moral rules, contrary to what cultural relativism claims; 3. If cultural relativism were true, Hitler’s genocidal actions would be right, social reformers would be wrong to go against their own culture, moral progress would be impossible, and an atrocious crime could be made moral by forming a culture which approves of it; 4. Cultural relativism is silent about how large a group must be in order to be a culture, and which culture we should follow when we belong to two cultures with conflicting moralities.

Gilbert Harman’s defense of moral relativism is distinctive because it is grounded upon a fundamental theory of moral obligation, and not merely upon certain well-known anthropological facts (e.g., cultural diversity). Harman’s theory of moral obligation is a particular form of “internalism”-roughly, that to have a moral obligation, one must have some adequate motivation (either dispositional or occurrent) to observe such constraints on action. It is argued, in the present piece, that Harman’s version of internalism fails to account for the sense of using common moral judgments for the purposes of moral education (there is, in other words, a relativism that exists between those with more complex moralities and those who are just learning moral ideas). But this use of moral judgments seems to be crucial in moral education. Since this is so, this difficulty poses an important anomaly to Harman’s relativistic moral theory.

Consider the following facts about the average, philosophically untrained moral relativist: (1.1) The average moral relativist denies the existence of “absolute moral truths.” (1.2) The average moral relativist often expresses her commitment to moral relativism with slogans like ‘What’s true (or right) for you may not be what’s true (or right) for me’ or ‘What’s true (or right) for your culture may not be what’s true (or right) for my culture.’ (1.3) The average moral relativist endorses relativistic views of morality without endorsing relativistic views about science or mathematics. (1.4) The average moral relativist takes moral relativism to be non-relatively true and does not think there is anything contradictory about doing so. (1.5) The average moral relativist adopts an egalitarian attitude toward a wide range of moral values, practices and beliefs, claiming they are all equally legitimate or correct. (1.6) The average moral relativist often admonishes others to be more tolerant of those who engage in alternative ethical practices and to refrain from making negative moral judgments about them. (1.7) The average moral relativist sometimes makes negative moral judgments about the behavior of others—e.g., by harshly judging moral absolutists to be intolerant—but is less inclined to do so when the relativist’s metaethical views are salient in a context of judgment. (1.8) The average moral relativist takes anthropological evidence concerning the worldwide diversity of ethical views and practices to support moral relativism.