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Notes
See the references in Wright’s bibliography.
Lewis (1998).
See, for example, the papers collected in Brogaard (2007).
The material in the square brackets is left implicit in the official formulations, because it is clear and is also brought out in clause B. But in the present discussion it is best to spell it out.
See Harman and Thomson (1996). I follow Harman in looking to the physics cases; but I disagree with him on how those cases should be described.
For much more detail, see Boghossian (2006).
For the last, see Boghossian (2006).
Though, of course, which semantical option one chooses will affect how (C) itself gets formulated, as Wright’s discussion illustrates.
Having promised to do so let me make a brief remark about the distinction between absolutist and thoroughgoing relativisms. Relativism about simultaneity is thoroughgoing because, on such a view, there are simply no unrelativized facts about simultaneity, period. There are only frame-relative facts. It is natural to think, however, that we are relativists about etiquette as well, yet it seems wrong to say that there are no absolute facts about how we ought to behave, if we are to behave politely. Rather, the correct account of etiquette seems to be that there is a universal moral norm that requires us to behave differently, depending on our location. That is the norm that we usually express by saying: When in Rome do as the Romans do! More precisely, the norm is: With respect to a certain range of behaviors (eating manners, but not the torture of children) defer to whatever is the local custom in the location in which you find yourself. This norm is not itself relative to anything but is absolute. However, what it calls for is different behaviors under different geographical or cultural circumstances. My point was that, while it is easy to motivate a thoroughgoing relativism about morality (or epistemic justification)—how could there be absolute moral facts built into the fabric of the universe and how could we know about them—it is hard to motivate an absolutist relativism about them. Any such version of moral relativism would commit itself to there being at least one universal moral fact—namely, that you are required to match local behaviors, whatever that behavior might be, even if it is Nazi Germany that you find yourself in.
What makes the Rome dictum the only dictum you need for etiquette is that it is plausible—indeed, morally plausible—that when it comes to such matters as whether or not to slurp one’s noodles, all that really matters is what the local conventions are. But that is definitely not what we think when it comes to the question whether it is alright to harm children or cleanse a region of a particular ethnic minority. Once we allow that there are some absolute normative facts, our usual procedures for determining what such facts there are kick in. And it is very implausible that these procedures will yield the result that what it is morally correct to do in a given situation will depend on which norms are accepted in that situation, or what the agent’s inclinations happen to be. As we shall see, similar remarks apply to an absolutist version of epistemic relativism.
One of the many simplifications in Fear (intended to make the book more accessible) is that I didn’t explicitly delineate the distinction between prima facie and adjudicating principles. As we shall see below, this omission on my part misleads MacFarlane into an incorrect reading of my discussion of Bellarmine and Galileo.
The word “prima facie” was inadvertently omitted from the printed version, though it’s clear that it was intended and MacFarlane assumes that it was.
The conflation between theorist and subject might be at work here again.
Another observation I owe to David James Barnett.
See Wright (2007) for the distinction.
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Acknowledgments
Some of this material was delivered as part of the Gottlob Frege Lectures at the University of Tartu in Estonia, June 2008. I am grateful to the members of that audience and especially to Daniel Cohnitz and Markus Laameranta for useful feedback. I have also benefited from the comments of David James Barnett, Sinan Dogramaci, Stephen Schiffer, Nishi Shah and Crispin Wright.
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Boghossian, P. Replies to Wright, MacFarlane and Sosa. Philos Stud 141, 409–432 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9283-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9283-4