Abstract
Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution.
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Notes
See MacNaughton 1988 for a more comprehensive treatment of deep disagreements, with special attention to the notion of incommensurability, which is crucial in the genesis of the idea of the relativism of distance.
There are important commonalities between Wong’s pluralistic relativism and Williams’ relativism of distance. Both recognize the importance of cultural and social information when arguing for a realistic version of relativism (Wong 2006. p. 41–43; Williams 1985. p. 165). They also agree on the benefits derived from endorsing some variety of methodological naturalism when approaching relativism (Williams 1985. p. 160; Wong 2006. p. 35–41). On a more specific level, both Williams and Wong develop their views on relativism by stressing some problematic assumptions shared by standard versions of relativism trying to make sense of the agent’s internal perspective in deep disagreements. For Wong the key is to reject standard relativism’s commitment to ‘the radical difference view’, i.e. the belief in the existence of radically different moral codes (Wong 2006. p. 10–12). By contrast, for Williams, the problem is standard relativism’s lack of touch with agents’ effective reactions (Williams 1985 p. 157). However, there are also remarkable differences between Williams’ and Wong’s approach to relativism. A crucial one is the effective scope of both theories. While Williams’ relativism of distance is rarely implemented in effective disagreements–because according to Williams the perceived social distance required for being in a notional confrontation is not accessible to us in most of our current historical conditions–Wong claims that his pluralistic relativism accommodates a familiar feeling of estrangement from one’s own values we all can experience if confronted with strange but not fully alien moral traditions (Wong 2006. Chapter IX).
Gilbert Harman, for instance, claims that relativism is first and foremost a theory about the truth-conditions of moral terms and not about their meaning as perceived by the speaker (Harman and Thomson 1995).
The pragmatic component is present in Williams from the very start. In 1971, for instance, he writes: “The most the theory can allow is the claim that it was right for (i.e. functionally valuable for) our society not to interfere with Ashanti society, and first, this is certainly not all that was meant, and, second, is very dubiously true”. (Williams 1971. p. 21)
Our appeal to ‘description’ in order to qualify Williams’ meta-ethical view can be seen as problematic. Why cannot be seen our project an instance of ‘descriptive ethics’ after all? Meta-ethics has been traditionally constructed as a vindication of our moral thinking and moral phenomenology. The label ‘descriptive ethics’, by contrary, has been usually reserved to some disciplines in the social sciences (Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, etc.) delivering empirical evidence about our moral experience – evidence about the distribution, social causes or psychological underpinnings of our moral thinking. So by describing Williams’ relativism (a meta-ethical view) as ‘descriptive’, are we locating it under the umbrella of descriptive ethics? We don’t think so. We are asking for more evidence coming from the social sciences about the internal side of our moral experience or moral phenomenology. When descriptive ethics focus on meta-ethical thinking we open the path of descriptive meta-ethics.
This sort of distancing effect the authors find in the empirical literature arises at about age 9 (but not much earlier). See Schmidt et al. (2017).
To our knowledge that prediction has not been tested yet. That is perhaps because, in recent years, the interpretation of the results of the moral/conventional task has paid particular attention to the condemnation of harm (see e.g. Haidt 2012; Kelly et al. 2007). However, Turiel was far more liberal when stressing the significance of the moral/conventional divide and thus we must be able to envisage a more systematic approach to components of the moral domain, one sensitive to the relative incidence of distance on the different dimensions.
Here, we are advocating moderate syncretism. We are aware that this gradualistic view fits badly with Williams’ claim that “it is always too early or too late” for relativism to appear (ELP 158–159). Williams surely had in mind, when using this metaphor, the necessity of assuming a uniform social context if we wish to secure a robust pattern of moral reasoning within a group, along with the difficulty of overcoming such moral pattern in later years, and for that reason he added the ‘too late’ point. Moral-domain theory, however, would surely help to modulate Williams’ resistance to the gradual development of a relativistic thinking. A possible path on this gradualistic direction would lead us to notice that an early understanding of the relative conventionality of certain rules (the fact that even young children understand that it may be both “OK” and “Not OK” to break a given rule, depending on the situation) can support an early grasp of the relativity of certain moral judgments.
Maybe in the cases at hand, perceiving the internal coherence of others (again, even when we know that there are conclusive reasons against their attitudes or choices) could have some effect on the intensity of our moral condemnation. This, by the way, is another classic topic in Williams (Williams 1979). Relevant here is Quintelier et al. 2014, where they find this basic effect: when a person in a vignette does something he or she considers wrong (by their own lights), subjects find what they’ve done to be more objectively wrong than when the person does not consider what he or she has done to be wrong.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks for very helpful comments and criticisms should be given to Fernando Aguiar, Fernando Broncano, Pierrick Bourrat, Toni Gomila, Anton Leist, Gabi Lipede, Eduardo Pérez Navarro, Manuel de Pinedo, Alejandro Rosas, José Ramón Torices, Carissa Véliz, Neftalí Villanueva, and two anonymous reviewers. Research for this paper was funded by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) through the Research Project ‘La constitución del sujeto en la interacción social’ - FFI2015-67569-C2-1-P.
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Gaitán, A., Viciana, H. Relativism of Distance - a Step in the Naturalization of Meta-Ethics. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 311–327 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9864-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9864-z