On Moral Relativism

Well, I am not going to write for a terribly long time on this topic, but I do want to put down a few things that have been rattling around in my brain for quite some time.  I also know that I have visited this topic before, but given the nature of many peoples' views on morality, it seems worth addressing again.

For the first point, many people believe they are moral relativists when they are actually not.  How can I make this assertion?  It is actually quite simple.  To truly be a moral relativist, one must not make a value judgement on any moral code adopted by any society - in a given context, majority rules is "right".  That means that the dominant moral view in a society is "good" and any minority view is "evil".  While many people can accept not judging other cultures, it is very difficult to label a particular thing (which you find reprehensible) as good.

By way of example, imagine a society that values men over women.  Women are second class citizens, forced to cover themselves at all times, are convicted of a crime if they are raped, etc.  Obviously, this is not an imaginary society; there are parts of the world that have this, now.  However, while some people might still cling to the idea that these cultures are legitimate expressions of a set of values, all but the most strident of moral relativists will be very hesitant to call these actions/values "good".  It is even more difficult to say that the person resisting this dominant culture is "evil".

A true moral relativist would have to take be able to look at a case where, say, for example, a 13 year old girl is shot on a school bus because she is vocal about educational rights for young girls, and make certain conclusions.  One - because the dominant cultural view is that women should not be educated, the young woman is performing an "evil" act by trying to change the culture, two - the person who shot her might actually have to be considered to be doing "good" because he was preserving moral order (relatively speaking, of course), and three - her continued attempts to reform the system after the attempt on her life would be similarly "evil".

It is very difficult to actually get someone who clings to the ideology of moral relativism to accept these as the inevitable conclusions of their philosophy, but they are the correct conclusions.  Of course, moral relativism has more issues, which I will attempt to elucidate below:

• If the morals are based on the dominant feeling/opinion in a culture or society, how is this determined?  Is a simple majority sufficient?  If, in a population of 101, if 51 people believe one thing is right and 50 believe it is wrong, according to relativism, the 51 are right.  What then happens if one person changes his/her mind?  Can the morality change day to day or even moment to moment?
• Most philosophers reject individual relativism, but then how many people does it take to define a moral structure?  And how many people make a society or culture?  Can a subculture hold different values that a primary culture?  And are those values then right and good within the subculture, even if they are evil in the primary culture?
• If several different groups form one culture, or one culture is made up of several subcultures, what is actually right and wrong?  Can things then be simultaneously right and wrong, if a person is a part of two (or more) "cultures"?  Since the family is ultimately the basis of human society (a point which may be open to argument, I will admit), can each family decide its own moral code?  If that is the case, and a family is started with a man and a woman, if they cannot achieve consensus on values, then what is right and what is wrong?
• What if one culture has the dominant view that conquest is good, and another holds the opposite view?  If the first culture conquers the second, is that act good or evil?  Which cultural norm prevails?  What if the two cultures have the same populations and there is no clear majority view?
• What, if anything, is the limiting size of a culture?  Is there a "human" culture, that could then dictate right and wrong on a planetary scale based on the majority belief of most humans?  If not, why not?

I could go on, but I do not feel the need to right now.  Most philosophers argue that individual relativism is untenable (I agree).  The reason should be fairly obvious - whatever I decide to do is the right and good course of action.  It cannot be otherwise.  If I make a choice, and I decide morality, then it is impossible for anything I do to be evil (unless I do something I do not want to do, but if I do it, then, at least on some level, I made wanted to - even if the choice was forced by onerous consequences of choosing the alternative; I wanted the choice more than the alternatives, so it was still the "good" choice).  Of course, this is completely ridiculous, but I believe that for moral relativism to be possible, then individual relativism must be viable as well, as it is the views of individuals that make up the cultural norms - how can individuals create morality in one circumstance, but not another?

Moreover, back to my original point, most people who cling to relativism seem to have a staunch belief in its validity.  For want of a better term, they believe that non-judgement is good.  But we then come against the crux of the issue - why is not judging other moral structures "good"?  Since it is all relative, isn't the idea of moral relativism subject to its own strictures?  That is, it can only be right if enough people believe in it.  If enough people do not believe in it, then they have to be, by their own definition, engaged in something morally wrong.

Of course, there is a flaw in my assumption - that is that the relativist believes that their opinion is "good".  A true moral relativist would probably not have this baggage (though I could still argue otherwise, and I will in a later post).  What I think is the case is that most people who claim moral relativism actually have a moral absolute, they just do not realize it.

They have a belief in the value of freedom and liberty - liberty of thought and of choice.  They feel bad for trying to force their perspective on someone else - not because of the value of the other's moral code, but because they believe it is "wrong" to impose one morality over another - it is "evil" to remove freedom.  But of course, this is an absolute statement.  One cannot have moral relativism and simultaneously hold this moral absolute.  A true relativist would have to recognize that their own beliefs on relativism would have to be relative, and that if a dominant culture emerged that believed in moral absolutism, then moral relativism would be wrong both by the dominant cultures absolutist beliefs and by the relativist beliefs as well.

I think that most people cling to moral relativism because it seems easy and comfortable - freedom is important, and relativism gives an excuse to value freedom without much baggage of the difficulty of making moral judgements.  In addition, they misunderstand the idea of moral absolutism as meaning there are no shades of gray - I would refute this hypothesis: just because there may be things are right or wrong does not mean that some may be more right or less wrong.  All moral reasoning is more sophisticated than that.  Lying may be wrong, and saving someones life may be right, so how does one assess lying to save a person's life.  Even if you believe in absolute rightness or wrongness, these nuances are not eliminated.  The problem is that moral absolutism has become (wrongly) connected with religious zeal and/or fanaticism - the two are not identical, but I would think that a lot of the cultural disposition to opposing of judgements is in opposition to the perceived judgementalism of the religious zealot.

Coming down to brass tacks, I believe that moral relativism is a vacuous and slip-shod philosophy that attempts to cover up people's own insecurity with the two actual options - either there is an existing morality that is (to some greater or lesser extent) absolute, or that morality is simply a fabrication and there is no actuality in the ideas of "good" and "evil".  Moral relativists seek to avoid the nihilism of the latter choice but end up with a fatuous and ridiculous philosophy that ultimately makes no sense.