My Answer to Matthew Flannagan's Third Challenge to Moral Relativism

This is my reply to an article by Dr. Matthew Flannagan entitled

The Challenge of Moral Relativism: Three Problems with Relativism

9:03 PM (15 hours ago)

by Matt Flannagan

This is the third of a series of posts on moral relativism. These talks are based on some talks I have given on the subject in the last few months. In the first post, I looked at what the basic issues are. The second post examines some of the reasons people offer for accepting relativism. This last post looks at some problems with relativism.

Today most ethicists whether Christian or non-Christian reject relativism.

Truth isn't decided by majority opinion or what "most" ethicists think.  You agreed to this earlier when you said:

Moreover, the fact there is a consensus of judgement on a particular issue does nothing to establish the judgement is correct, consensuses have been mistaken, the history of science shows lots of examples where the consensus belief was later shown to be incorrect. The issue isn’t whether everyone thinks something, its why they think it and whether it’s correct.

Flannagan continues:

Critics of relativism argue it faces several problems, which give us reason to reject it. I will focus on three.

1. The Problem of Moral Progress and Moral Reform.

Relativism is incompatible with moral progress or reform.  While relativists can accept that the moral judgements of societies change they can't consistently claim these changes amount to progress.

If my 7 year old daughter takes three months to stop disobeying me on the bedtime I impose on her on school nights, that is legitimate "moral progress" despite the fact that what time kids must go to bed is 100% subjective, relative and nowhere expressed or implied in nature or the bible or any other source you might deem a source for objective morals.

If society at one time supports relativism-1slavery or racial segregation, and then later disapproves of these things. Relativists cannot say that society has thrown off an incorrect view and adopted a correct, one. Instead, it must say that it has gone from one correct view to another one.

No, the relativist would be more accurate to stop characterizing anybody's morals as 'correct' or 'incorrect'.  Connecting morals to objectivity is like connecting "greasy" to "radio wave".  It is a category error, and your obvious extreme fear of actually putting your money where your mouth is (i.e, your unwillingness to state a specific moral proposition and the reasons you think it is "objective") confirms that you fear, at least secretly, that moral objectivity constitutes a category error.  You know perfectly well you are never going to demonstrate that any moral is objective, especially since I raked you over the coals after you set forth "don't torture babies to death solely for entertainment" as an example of an objective moral.  I asked you what moral yardstick you used which told you that such act was always immoral for all people, and you skipped town.  Apparently your argument is so weak, you cannot seriously set it forth unless your opponent agrees with you that it is true.

A related problem is that relativism suggests that moral reformers who spoke out against slavery and segregation were in fact in the wrong.

Again, it would promote accuracy and truth if moral relativists either stopped using "right", "wrong", "correct", "incorrect" to characterize their judgment of another's morals...unless they carefully qualify that their standard of truth for such matters is itself also relative and subject to possible revision.

They were opposing what society approved of and hence what was right for members of society.

This problem also applies to subjectivism. If a member of the Ku Klux Klan holds racist judgements at one time and then later rejects these judgements as bigotry, The subjectivist can’t say he has moved from a mistaken to a correct. Instead, he has changed from one correct view to another.  Individuals don’t grow in moral insight or develop more discernment.

See above, i already showed the correctness and reasonableness of characterizing one's moving from disobedience toward a relative moral, to obedience to it, as legitimate moral progress.  And no, you cannot dumb that down by saying the bible tells children to obey their parents, because even you would agree that this cannot be absolute or objective, since a parent may possibly demand that a child commit murder or some act you think is objectively wrong, and commit it "in the name of the Lord",  in which case there would be an exception to "children obey your parents in the Lord", and in light of such exception, that particular biblical moral cannot be objective, but only subjective.

What will you do now?  Invoke Norman Geisler's "graded absolutism" wherein an absolute remains an absolute while being in some situations less important to obey than some other absolute (!?)

If so, behold:  "thou shalt not wrangle words".  Pretty difficult to see how you could mount anything remotely approaching a scholarly refutation of some position on morality, without disputing the meaning of words.

2.The possibility of Error

There is another problem with relativism. It seems plausible that we can be mistaken in our moral judgements.

That's your first problem, because in saying "seems", you are appealing to our intuitive feelings, and you surely recognize that we can possibly be wrong even in our strongest intuitions.

I can make judgements about what is right and wrong which are incorrect,

Not if you are judging another moral viewpoint. Once again, "correct" and "incorrect" do not apply to morals.  Only fools would ask "Is it correct to refrain from adultery?".  Morals are value judgments that draw from several subjective bases, therefore, it promotes truth more if we reserve "correct" and "incorrect" for purely factual disagreements. Since you disagree that all morals come from subjective bases, please state the one specific moral proposition and your reasons for saying it is objectively true.

and whole societies can do this.  Relativism, however, suggests mistakes like this are impossible. Subjectivism means that If I believe something is right, then I am right in doing it.

In the sense that one believes oneself morally justified to do whatever they feel like doing.  I cannot imagine how it could be anything else, except in the case of irrational people who allow themselves to get involved in things they personally believe are immoral, such as teenagers or drug addicts.  But thankfully, the views of irrational people hardly qualify as anything that anybody need worry about.

Relativism means that if a society endorses a practice then its right for members of that society to do the practice.

Because of the presupposition that there is no objective right, therefore, the only "right" to speak of would be necessarily relative.  But yes, I agree with you that without careful definition of terms, the way many relativists talk is confusing and creates inconsistencies.

The consequence is that mistakes about morality are impossible.  For a person or a community to make a mistake, it has to be possible for the standards an individual or society accepts to be different from the standards which are correct.

No, see above.  Nobody says it is a "mistake" to agree with the clocks in New Zealand which say it is "6 p.m." merely because at that particular instant, it is not "6 p.m." in China.   Time is surely a relative thing, and therefore 6 p.m. in New Zealand is not a time that can be nailed down by any standard that is truly objective.  Yet nobody says the relativity of the time exhibited by New Zealand clocks makes it a "mistake" to agree with the current time they exhibit.  Again, the school night bedtime I impose on my daughter is not a reflection of any objective truth in nature or the bible or natural theology.  Nobody "intuitively knows" what time kids must go to bed, so the actual time chosen by the parents is entirely subjective and relative.  Yet it would be legitimate for me to characterize her rebellion against that admittedly subjective moral as "mistaken" (i.e., she says "I'm not going to bed!", and I reply "you are mistaken.").

3. Relativism Implies that Obvious Moral Wrongs Are Acceptable
Perhaps the most important objection to relativism is that it implies that obvious moral wrongs are acceptable. If actions are right or wrong relative to an individual or societies standpoint, then anything at all can be justified. Genocide, rape, torture of children, racial intolerance, are all morally right for a person if he believes that they are or his society endorses them.

Thank you for starting to put your money where your mouth is, despite the fact that you chose to start doing so only at the end of your third article on moral relativism.

Now that you've identified rape as an "obvious" moral wrong (which Ii safely presume you take to signify an objective immorality), please identify the standard you are using, which declares that rape is immoral, and why you believe that standard's declarations about morality are objectively true.

And remember, "objective" means something is true for reasons apart from human opinion, belief or input:

Oxford Dictionary
 Not dependent on the mind for existence;

So you need to demonstrate the objective immorality of rape without appeal to input on the subject from any human mind.

Just like if you think the existence of trees is objective, you should be able to demonstrate such without needing to gain the input of any other human being.

   Many find this implication hard to swallow if a serial killer thinks it's permissible to kill women, is it really plausible to suggest this fact alone means his actions are right or did the fact German society adopted Nazism in the 1930s mean that Germans did no wrong when they implemented these policies.

 The weakness of the objectivist position shines through brightly with your appeals to human emotion.  It is likely you can never do better to refute moral relativism, than prey upon the strong feelings of other people.  As soon as you run into an opponent like me who requires that you do something more than blindly assume the immorality of an act, but that you actually demonstrate why it is objectively immoral, you can do nothing.  Just like the last time I asked you for the moral yardstick that tells you torturing babies to death solely for entertainment is objectively immoral.  You correctly feared that if you open that door, it will be immediately clear that your bases for this judgment are subjective, relative, and based on the strong feelings shared by most civilized adults...not exactly a proof of objectivity...since you earlier denounced using majority or consensus view to demonstrate an objective moral.

Conclusion

Let me now bring the threads of this talk to a close. I have explained what relativism and objectivism are. I noted some common reasons why people accept relativism and suggested these reasons fail. The appeal to diversity fails to make some important distinctions and appeals to tolerance, openness and so on are incoherent. I have also sketched several problems with relativism it entails moral reform is impossible moral error is impossible and that obvious moral wrongs are right. For reasons like this most philosophers, today reject moral relativism. While it's a challenge to the way, Christians think about ethics. I am not convinced it's a challenge which is very defensible.

Once again, Dr. Flannagan, for what reasons do you suppose that torturing babies to death solely for entertainment, constitutes objectively immoral conduct, now that we know that you refuse to ground an objective moral in human consensus?  And remember, if what you plan to show is an 'objective' thing, than you should be able to show it without appeal to what any human being has to say about it.

Or was I correct to say that you cannot win this debate unless your opponent agrees that your viewpoint is true?

And you might wish to tread lightly in combating my challenge.  I have written a long scholarly rebuttal to your book co-authored by Copan "Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God".  If your theory of "dispossession only" be true, then the Canaanites, by giving up their land to the Hebrews, were subjecting their pagan children to slow death by starvation, exposure, thirst, abuse by other pagans, etc.  So that if god commanded "dispossession only", then logically he was commanding for actions that were the functional equal of torturing children to death.  See my post proving the point, here's a quote:

Apologist Glenn Miller says life in the ANE outside one’s established town or province was unbearably hostile and could not be sustained except by routinely stealing and raiding of others, with threats to the dispossessed of forced slavery and prostitution being ever-present. If he is correct, the Hebrews knew it too as they chased any fleeing pagan woman and children outside the promised land. http://christianthinktank.com/rbutcher1.html

So you must answer the terrible irony that the dispossession-only hypothesis, if true, made life more unspeakably unbearable for children than the "kill'em all" hypothesis you were seeking to refute.  The point being that you can no longer appeal to child-torture as an objective immorality, unless of course you revise your hypothesis and try to convince others that child-torture is objectively good where God commands it (!?)

Now that's a nasty turn of events, eh?

Be careful what you pray for.  The bible-god might have a few surprises in store for you.



 Update, June 25, 2018;

In advertising my replies around the internet, I also advertised then on the following youtube channel




 This channel is owned by "InspiringPhilosophy", it is located at this link, and he took an active side with James Patrick Holding when I sued Holding for defamation in 2015-2016.  I therefore have good probable cause to believe that once InspiringPhilosophy recognizes that "Barry Jones" is the guy that sued Holding, InspiringPhilosophy will do what most Christian apologists do, and remove my posting.  So I include the screen shot here.  Now he'll have to decide:  If he gets rid of a problem by removing the post, he looks like the frightened barking child he is.  If he doesn't remove it, then he faces the daunting prospect of his friends asking him to post a rebuttal to my blog pieces, which answered Flannagan and did what InspiringPhilosophy wouldn't like, and showed that moral relativism is defensible while moral objectivism is total bullshit. 

My Answer to Matthew Flannagan's Second Challenge to Moral Relativism

This is my reply to an article by Dr. Matthew Flannagan entitled

The Challenge of Moral Relativism: Arguments for Relativism

June 22nd, 2018 by Matt Flannagan

This post is based on a series of talks I have given on moral relativism. In my last post, I looked at what relativism and objectivism are. Here I examine some common reasons people accept or defend relativism I will offer critical commentary on these arguments.

When examining any position in philosophy it is important to understand what motivates people to hold it, why do people find it plausible? Two reasons are commonly cited.

You must be a Christian before you are a philosopher, so you must choose obedience to the bible where this conflicts with what you wish to do as a philosopher.  The bible does not permit you to wrangle words, despite the fact that you cannot refute moral relativism without going round and round with others about the meanings of words:

 14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. (2 Tim. 2:14 NAU)

It is hardly believable that Paul was only prohibiting the shockingly babyish "yes it is; not it isn't" type bantering, I prefer to presume that the people who converted to Paul's gospel in Timothy's church were just a bit more emotionally mature than a 3 year old.  He was clearly prohibiting anything that could be reasonably defined as word-wrangling.  Go ahead, challenge me with your alternative interpretation, I'll respond, leaving you without excuse for willfully defying those biblical commands that directly apply to Christians.

    The Argument from Cultural Diversity

One common motivation for relativism, particularly cultural relativism, is the observation that different societies have different moral beliefs.  To use a well-known example: people in 14th century Europe believed witchcraft was seriously immoral and executed witches. People in 21st century New Zealand doesn’t believe this. Some societies endorse polygamy others endorse monogamy.   Facts like these are held to cast doubt on the idea there is a single true morality relativism-1independent of what society thinks.

And you cannot overcome that prima facie case for relativism by trifling about the technicality that if God issued objective moral commands, these would exist whether we believed it or not.  If the tooth-fairy left me $2 million in a secret location, that would be true whether you believed it or not. But in both cases, we are dealing with a pretty big "if", and nothing important will happen until you move beyond the greasy marsh of the solely theoretical, to the practical.  Either state the one moral you believe is most clearly objective, or stop telling yourself that moral relativists find your arguments the least bit compelling.

 Response to the argument from cultural diversity.

Objectivists make several responses to this argument.

 Distinguishing Separate idea’s.

First, they argue that this argument conflates two separate ideas.  (a) the idea that beliefs about what is right and wrong differ from society to society. And  (b) that idea that what really is right, and wrong differs from society.  The fact different societies have different moral beliefs provides evidence for the first of these ideas. It establishes (a).  However, cultural relativism affirms something stronger than this. Relativists believe moral standards are correct or incorrect relative to society. 

Well then, you were wrong to previously declare that when a relativist labels a moral as "wrong", they are necessarily presupposing the existence of an objective standard.  Not they aren't.  Their standard for deciding what's wrong is their own relative opinion.  If you insist this is problematic, then maybe you should argue that drawing conclusions about what time it is, is unreasonable, because 3 p.m. in New Zealand is never 3 p.m. in Scandinavia. Time is utterly relative, yet if somebody asked you for the time, you would do so, with no worries about the fact that time is ultimately relative.  So stop telling us that a subjective basis for declaring a moral to be "wrong" is reasonable.  In practical life, we very often base our judgments of right or wrong on an admittedly subjective standard.

Cultural Relativists contend an action is wrong for a person because their society condemns that action.  Hence, they affirm (b).

However, that the fact different societies have different moral beliefs doesn’t support (b) It’s possible that when different societies make different judgements about something that one of them is mistaken.

 And we are still waiting for you to provide an example of the one moral whose objectivity you think is most clearly demonstrable.

When don’t normally assume that when societies disagree on something the correct answer is relative to society. 

Speak for yourself and your objectivist friends.  We moral relativists do normally draw that conclusion.

If different societies have different beliefs about the shape or age of the earth, we would not take this to demonstrate that the earth’s actual age and shape differ in various societies.

Fallacy of false analogy:  the shape of the earth is demonstrable empirically.  The objective wrongness of adultery is not.  Yet you necesarily imply with such analogy that you can disprove the moral goodness of any act you deem objectively wrong, just as easily as you can disprove the flat-earth theory.

So why do we do this when the disagreement involves moral judgements? 

For the same reason you think it is objectively wrong to burn a teen prostitute to death for working out of her priest fathers house (Leviticus 21:9).  Either you agree, or you start looking like the foolish moral relativist who says burning your daughter to death might perhaps be morally good in certain situations. 

The mere fact societies make different judgements on a topic tells us nothing about whether those judgements are objectively true or false.

Correct.

Exaggerated disagreement

Second, objectivists argue that appeals to cultural diversity often exaggerate the amount of cross-cultural disagreement over moral standards. Often when societies have different moral beliefs, this isn’t due to different moral standards but the result of disagreement over certain factual questions.  Consider the abovementioned case of witchcraft. In the 14th-century people believed in the existence of witches. They believed witches met together secretly and sacrificed children and ate these children in a ritual feast. They bound themselves by oath to the devil to use supernatural powers to harm, and kill innocent people. Hence the believed witchcraft involved the deliberate conspiracy to cause serious harm to innocent people.

 They probably also believed it was objectively morally good to burn witches, and would have sneered at devil-protecting liberals who campaigned for less barbaric treatment of the accused.

We don’t hold these beliefs today but if we did our opinion of witchcraft would be very different. Suppose we believed there was a group which conspired to randomly kill and maim innocent people and killed and ate children as part of its rituals.  We probably would legally suppress this group. And many people would support the death penalty for those who did these things, killing children is a horrendous form of murder after all.

But you aren't linking the horrendousness back to "god" or showing that child-murder violates any "objective" moral.  

The difference between us and 14th-century Europeans is due, in a large part, to different factual beliefs not simply a disagreement over moral standards.

Our supporting a death penalty less barbaric than burning at the stake testifies to the level of wrongness we and 14th century Christians disagree on.  It wasn't like burning alive was the only method of death in the 14th century.  They preferred that for witches because they felt the witch-crimes were far more heinous than simply killing and eating children.  These fanatics thought violation of "god's order" was the height of satanic rebellion.   You are quite aware of many hideous crimes people commit against children, but I doubt you'd recommend death by burning, since you see it as moral overkill.

 Trust me, the difference is moral and not merely factual.

    Relativism Promotes Tolerance

A second motivation behind relativism is the idea that moral relativism promotes tolerance and humility. When you realise that your own moral standards are correct only for you, you are less likely to fall into arrogance and pass judgements on the beliefs and practises of others. Nor are you likely to demand they change these practices and adopt yours.

Response:

Objectivists respond that this concern reveals a subtle contradiction. The argument assumes that tolerance and humility are good things, it assumes people should be tolerant and humble and should not be arrogant and rush to judgement. 

 I agree with you that tolerance and humility are the subjective judgment call of the relativist.

However, if relativism is correct, this isn’t the case. According to cultural relativism, it is wrong to be intolerant only if your society believes that it is.  Societies which are imperialistic and arrogant and believes its permissible to colonialize other nations don’t do any wrong if it imposes its moral judgements on to others.  Similarly, according to subjectivism humility and tolerance are wrong only if you think it is. If someone has bigoted or arrogant beliefs, then bigotry is morally required of them, and they shouldn’t act in a humble, tolerant way.

 I agree that some relativists irrationally presume that their own opinions are more objective than others.

Objectivists maintain that one can condemn individuals or societies who have arrogant and bigoted practices only if you hold these things are wrong despite the fact societies or individuals may endorse them. There is something incoherent about offering a moral criticism about the arrogant and intolerant moral judgements of societies or individuals and then concluding you can’t make judgements about societies and individuals.

 Thanks again for telling us what Christian objevists believe.  Do you ever plan to get down to actual business, and state the specific moral proposition whose objectivity you believe to be the most clearly demonstrable?

See my answer to Dr. Flannagan's third installment here.