Whats true for me isn't true for me?

Relativists often state that you can believe whatever you want.....lets see what Relativistic arguments actually sound like though:

2b. Kevin Currie, RebuttalClick here to go back to the debate section
I thank Mr. Tremblay for his responses. This post will be for purposes of clarifying my views to Mr. Tremblay and showing him how inconsistent his own are. How Many Positions does Mr. Tremblay Hold?As shaky as he accuses me of being on relativism, I am thoroughly confused by his simultaneous holding of objectivism (that there are objective ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’), contextualism (rights and wrongs are judged in context only) and subjectivism (the individual is the framework of all moral appraisals). There is the part where he says it: “If morality is subjective, then there is no grounds for… blame, since there is no objective or universal fact: rather, the individual can say that his position is subjectively valid.” There follows the part where he takes it back:. “[O]nly the individual himself experiences his own benefit and suffering, and that no one else can think for oneself.” And before that, “Subjectivity does not crowd out objectivity.” There is the part where he says it: “If we make it explicit, is that sense of morality objective? Yes, it is based on causality. Our need to eat or drink is a fact of reality that exists independently from our mind, and so are the psychological principles at work behind society.” Objective morality, he says, is objective because it is based on the fact of our values. Values lead, in other words, to the objective “rights” and “wrongs” of morality and are sufficient to found objective morality. Then there is the part where he takes it back: “I have never claimed that a single value magically gives us moral facts.” So what was he doing in the previous statement? Objective morality, he says, is based on causality. Since we value eating and drinking, we can definitively say that objective morality exists becuase there are facts-of-the-matter. On the one hand, morality is not up to individual fancy and is objective in that it is “derived from the facts of reality and [objectively?] their rational analysis. There are moral rights and wrongs. On the other, the individual is the sole appraiser of the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of a situation. Rights and wrongs are irreducibly contextual and subject-relative. On the one hand, subjectivism is scorned because it leads to the mistaken and detrimental view that positions are, at best, ‘subjectively valid’ [read: valid to the subject by the subject alone]. On the other hand, subjectivity is embraced because “[o]nly the individual experiences his own benefits and sufferings. No one else can think for oneself” And what “objective moral fact” is worth the name if its entire application differs from “person to person…, culture to culture” and context to context? Mr. Tremblay might not see it, but his concession of contextualism is part-and-parcel to an admittence of relativism. His admission that the individual alone can rationally appraise her situation is part-and-parcel to subjectivism. On the one hand, objective morality is based on values and even a rigid hierarchy of values that is tightly tiered because “one level need[s] to be fulfilled to a suitable extent before we can be concerned about the others.” On the other hand, the self-same author says that he never told us all of this, and that he doesn’t think that values by themselves are sufficient to argue moral facts-of-the-matter. And how do we make sense of this stupendous effort: “It is important here to understand that while values themselves are objective in all ways, their specific implementation differs from person to person and from culture to culture.” “In all ways,” he tells us, values are factual – “in all ways.” But isn’t the fact that moral application – appraisal of, and the acting on values – differs and is expected to differ “from person to person,” relativism exactly? Values may well be factual, but even if they are, so long as those values may be appraised, thought of, evaluated, and acted on differently “from person to person,” and “with the individual as the [presumably sole] framework,” it is difficult to see how there is any “objectivity” about it. Relativists like John Dewy, Sidney Hook, John Lachs, Charles Taylor, JL Mackie Bernard Williams, Geoffrey Harmon, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Midgley (to name the tip of the iceberg) hold that as the world exists, and we have certain constitutions, there are certain things – facts – we have in common. ‘We have to eat,’ ‘we want to avoid pain,’ ‘ we need love,’ are all things they rightly admit to. What makes them relativists (to themselves and seemingly every philosopher who writes of them) is that they hold – as does Mr. Tremblay – that moral action will irreducibly vary ‘from person to person and culture to culture’ (how is the latter not cultural relativism?). They, in addition, hold that no moral principle may be irrespective of context and that ‘the individual is the framework’ of morality. All of this is also asserted by Mr. Tremblay. Were all these philosophers – who held seemingly the same beliefs and were thus called ‘relativists’ – wrong about what they (or their peers) were? Or is it perhaps that Mr. Tremblay has not yet grasped that contextualism and subjectivism (“the individual alone” is the final arbiter of her moral actions) has always been seen as a relativist position? I think it is more likely the latter. Mr. Tremblay needs to get clear on (a) contemporary philosophy and its labels; and (b) whether he is a subjectivist, a contextualist, or an objectivist. Just to be clear, moral objectivism in contemporary philosophy is taken to mean the view that moral facts (facts about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) are valid in-and-of-themselves and irrespective of what we ‘feel’ about them. Relativism is the denial of this. Mr. Tremblay may be more comfortable as a relativist because he sure has a lot in common with them. Is Moral Relativism Self-Refuting?Mr. Tremblay asks: “[Mr. Currie] claims that his relativism is based on facts. I find this to be rather contradictory. Is relativism right in some factual sense or not?” Until one can show me otherwise, I regard it as a fact. It is not contradictory, though, to say that “morality is relative,” is a non-relative fact. First, there is what seems to me an obvious epistemic truth: we are all differently epistemically situated and that as we don’t have actual access to others epistemic situations, they have no access to ours. Next there seems the fact that unlike factual utterances like “John’s shirt is blue,” or “scientific theory x will hold up when tested in such-and-such situation,” can be tested, literally and directly, by appeals to an independent world. We don’t decide whether they are valid so much as we agree to ‘let the facts of the world decide.’ Morality is much different. Unlike, “John’s shirt is blue,” “Pro-choice is the morally right conclusion to come to,” is not something that is testable to the world, by the world. It is only valid to an individual if it accords with THEIR STANDARD of morality – their moral temperment, sentiment, commitments, and/or worldview. Asking whether a scientific theory holds up to tests or not is not a decision decided by appeals to the scientists value system. It is, rather, decided by agreed upon rules that if the results come back this way, we will accept it for now as good, and if they come back any other way, we won’t. There is a non-human arbiter – the world and its facts. But suggestions like, ‘giving to charity is the right thing to do when you have the money,’ is not appealing to facts of the matter to determine its ‘rightness,’ – as it is with empirical facts. It is appealing to ones irreducibly subjective moral sympathies. It is not tested against the world of fact (not of our making) but the world of values (which, even should they objectively exist, are not appraised the same way by all). If two scientists disagree on whether a theory is true or false, they test it against a non-human arbiter: the world not of our making. They agree, of course, to do an experiment on that world and agree that should x be the result, we will regard the theory as true (at least tentatively) whereas if anything else results, we will regard it as falsified. When we ask whether moral statements are true or false, we are not generally appealing to factual tests – whether they hold up objectively (like scientific theories) in describing the world adequately. Rather, when I say “x is the morally correct thing to do in this situation,” what is “morally correct” will only be so to you if I can convince you that it will satisfy YOUR values to YOUR satisfaction. I am appealing not to the world of facts – which are as they are irrespective of personal opinion – but values – which are ordered as they are because of personal opinion (not David Kelley’s opinion, but the subjects opinion). If I say that gays should be able to marry, what facts are we to appeal to? The argument is about a “should.” No matter what facts me or my opponent appeal to, there is a huge leap between saying “the fact is…” and “the appropriate moral imperative to derive from that fact is…” David Hume’s objection still stands: no matter what one calls it, facts simply do not entail moral dicta on their own. It is a leap that humans make and as Mr. Tremblay concedes, these judgments are make contextually and by subjects only. “[No others] can think for oneself.” Because of all this, and lacking any argument from Mr. Tremblay otherwise, I do not see how one can conclude that it does not seem factually true that no non-human-relative moral principles are sufficient to ground an “objective morality.” “Reason?” We’ve already seen the problem with this: whose reason? What is to count as reason and what is not and WHO is to make THAT call (other than each individual for themselves)? Lacking any vantage point above each individual human mind (we can imagine it, but can’t attain it in reality) I just can’t see how principles like “reason,” “appropriate justification,” or “the hierarchy of [grossly vague] values” are themselves not always and forever defined individually by individuals in individual situations for individual purposes relative to individuals’ own value appraisals. If Mr. Tremblay wants to argue otherwise, he is certainly welcome to do so. I have seen no such argument; only assertions that facts like “humans need to flourish,” somehow doesn’t depend on the innumerable varieties of what “flourish” could mean (defined, once again, by the subjects doing the “flourishing”). Smuggling The Naturalistic Fallacy Through the Back-DoorMr. Tremblay asserts that he does not commit the naturalistic fallacy. I intend to show that he uses it, but in a variation that is “smuggled in through the back-door.” He says that: “[M]any atheists do propose biological evolution as a rational justification of the existence of morality. However, this is a confusion, as it implies that evolutionary adaptation returns rational moral results.” Quite simply, the naturalistic fallacy is arguing that the facts of “human nature” are sufficient to justify moral facts. While he caricaturizes the naturalistic fallacy as one that only argues that EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENTS are sufficient to deduce objectively valid moral conclusions, in truth, the naturalistic fallacy was around far before Herbert Spencer. David Hume himself, living before the ‘age of evolution’ commented on it at length describing it as the tendency to take facts about how humans behave and deriving “ought” statements from them. Pragmatists like William James, Charles Peirce and Chauncey Wright, coming of age at the very dawn of the evolutionary age, commented at length (generally directed at Spencer) that the naturalistic fallacy – the derivation of “ought” from an “is” to do with “human nature” – was around long before Spencer. I dislike the naturalistic fallacy as I regard the jump from facts about human behavior to values about how humans should behave as well-disguised and dubious leaps. Mr. Tremblay pretends to agree. He asserts that: “it uses objective facts (evolution and evolutionary psychology) but uses them to falsely deduce moral facts.” But then, as usual, there is the part where he takes it back a notch. He writes things like: “If we make it explicit, is that sense of morality objective ? Yes, it is based on causality. Our need to eat or drink is a fact of reality that exists independently from our mind, and so are the psychological principles at work behind society. They are as much a part of the fabric of reality as gravity or magnetism.” This, he says, is sufficient to “prove that objective moral facts exist.” He goes on. The “hierarchy of values,” he tells us, is “based on existing physical and psychological causal facts that we observe in ourselves and other people.” Soon, he is whole-hog into the suggestion that moral facts – biological facts, even – ARE sufficient to show that objective morality exists. He quote David Kelley twice to support the view that he once said he was against: "The place of biological needs in the logical structure of Objectivism is this: since one’s life is one’s ultimate value, one has to know what one needs for the maintenance of life in order to know what to seek as a value. The needs of a living organism determine its goals. In other words, its needs determine its values." (p69-70) The fact that we need to eat, for instance, is sufficiently an objective value that’s biologically factual nature is sufficient to determine that we must morally act in certain ways. After all, we need to eat. Thus, moral objectivity exists! “It remains an inescapable biological fact that we both need to eat to survive.” Now, I can’t argue with the fact that we as human animals, need sustenance. But Mr. Tremblay is only using this as an exemplar of the ‘hierarchy of values.” We need certain things (apparently, art is one of them). Therefore, the fact that we need certain things and are biologically constituted to need them (“the needs of biological organism determine its goals,”) is sufficient for the derivation of objective morality – morality in accord with our hierarchy of values as biological organisms. So what happened to Mr. Tremblay’s assertion that deriving moral conclusions from “human nature” is flawed because it “uses objective facts (evolution and evolutionary psychology) but uses them to falsely deduce moral facts.” Is this not exactly what he cites so approvingly in Kelley? The hierarchy of values are facts of nature – facts about our needs as biological organisms – that are sufficient in-and-of-themselves to establish the CORRECT ordering of values! Yes, they are one in the same. My suspicion is that Mr. Tremblay does not per se disagree with the naturalistic fallacy so much as he thinks it leads to THE WRONG hierarchy of values or moral dicta. He writes that, “Even if the evolutionary process was flawless from our perspective, it would hardly make the moral instincts of a tribal, status-based species living in an ancestral environment, devoid of almost all technology, applicable to today's world.” No wonder he doesn’t realize his sneaking of the naturalistic fallacy though the back-door. He does not, seemingly, realize that the naturalistic fallacy – the arguments from human nature – are not, today, practiced as his caricature has them. Arguments from human nature, as they are found in today’s zoology, evolutionary psychology, and biophilosophy, are not arguments from tribalism. They are arguments to do with deriving our existing biopsychology to establish arguments for objective value systems (exactly as Mr. Tremblay’s own arguments do). Maybe Mr. Tremblay has not read Desmond Morris’s “The Human Zoo,” Paul Ehrlich’s “Human Natures,” or Steven Pinker’s “Blank Slate.” If he had, he’d realize that surely his above quote is a caricature. None of these argue that tribal mentality rules the day, and all of them argue about human psychology as it actually is, not as a simple biproduct of the days of yore. Yet, all of them (less so, Ehrlich) argue that human biology and psychology is such that we have objective needs (yes, accumulated through natural and sexual selection) and that those needs are sufficient to argue moral cases. So it turns out that Mr. Tremblay’s intolerance for arguments from “human nature” were made only because he is not familiar with their arguments. Because he turns around AND DOES THE SAME THING THEY DO! The hierarchy of values IS an argument from human nature and a committing of the self-same naturalistic fallacy. Even if he does not mention evolution outright, he is still indubitably making his argument that human nature and our natural makeup is sufficient for proclaiming a proper hierarchy of values. So is Mr. Tremblay’s sneaking of the naturalistic fallacy through the back-door subject to his own criticisms of it? I hope so, though I trust he will not see it that way. If he says that evolutionists use flawed arguments by “us[ing] objective facts (evolution and evolutionary psychology) but uses them to falsely deduce moral facts,” then does he do so too? He is deriving “oughts” from naturalistic “is’s” the same way they are. He is arguing that the “needs of the biological organism determine its goals” with the same tenacity they do. Only time will tell whether Mr. Tremblay will correct himself and throw off his own use of the naturalistic fallacy he says he hates so much. Other ObjectionsMr. Tremblay takes issue with my invocation of the fact that different rational people may come to very rational – equally rational – conclusions. The fact that there is no standard above the person to objectively adjudicate the dispute doesn’t phase him. After all, he says, contextualism is not relativism. The fact that individuals irreducibly judge things differently because of context – that no moral principle is any good if it doesn’t account for the elasticity of context – is certainly NOT relativism. Why? I was hoping for an argument. I didn’t get one. Instead I just get an assertion: “If we take contextuality out of the picture, we are no longer being objective.” Maybe he is saying “not being rational,” or “not being sensical,” but I don’t see how contextualism – which, again, is philosophically acknowledged as a relativist positon – is “objective.” Mr. Tremblay doesn’t give argument here, but naked assertion. If he argues that people’s rational disagreement is owing to their irreducibly different contexts, then he is arguing that two people’s differing conclusions could solely be attributed to those differences in context (and “only the individual experiences” those context; no one else can “think for oneself.”) then there can seemingly be no adjudication between two irreducibly different contexts. If I’m not mistaken, that is what cultural and person based relativists have been arguing for years. They would be proud to acknowledge Mr. Tremblay as one of their own! So would I. Mr. Tremblay writes: Mr. Currie points out that "not many relativists – and certainly not I – would argue that rationality should NOT be taken into account", and later that "we tend to hold rationality as a valuable method for dealing with our moral lives", but that begs the question of why he thinks he should take rationality into account, given his apparent lack of moral basis to do so. I’ve dealt with this quite directly in my last post, so I will simply copy that. I wrote: As far as my own views on why rationality is justified, I turn to pragmatism. Reason – that is, dispassionate thinking through of problems to arrive at what one can argue are the ‘best’ conclusions – this is justified because it seems to work – for most of us and for the most part – better than, say, blind emotionalism, acting only on faith, or acting by a devil-may-care gut reaction. Thus, we tend to hold rationality as a valuable method for dealing with our moral lives. Mr. Tremblay himself writes that “rationality is a virtue” because for him (and I agree) rationality is “more conductive to the pursuit of my goals.” It is not that there is objective justification for rationality that is non-person-relative, but that he judges it as a more effective option than not. Mr. Tremblay quotes me from this paragraph but apparently didn’t pay attention to it. I have argued that reason (not Reason) is, to me, justified (so far as it goes) because it works better than other methods like blind-faith and sheer gut reaction. But I cannot suggest that since it works best for me, that means it is ipso facto objective and should, as an imperative, be used by all. Mr. Tremblay thinks that since reason works for him it must be used by all – lest they err by making incorrect moral judgments. To me, this is egotistical. Mr. Tremblay argued that “insofar as individualism is an objective standard, as I explained in my opening case, he cannot use it as a relativist argument. This is most definitively not "relativism", unless he takes back his own definition of what relativism is.” But when did Mr. Tremblay present any argument that individualism was and was only an objective standard. He only asserted and reasserted it, assuming wrongly that it was just self-evident. He only writes that, “ there is the implied individualism in the method I have discussed. Any objective morality must start from the premise that only the individual himself experiences his own benefit and suffering, and that no one else can think for oneself.” So does relative morality. The acknowlegment that “only the individual” can experience her own framework is part-and-parcel to relativism. The primacy is on the individual’s framework. If it were not, it would argue that general moral principles WERE NOT relative to framework – the exact antithesis of the relativist argument. Relativism, once again, is the view that moral judgments are irreducibly subjective as each individual inhabits her own distinct framework of values, ideas, feelings, appraisals, and methods. That sounds like it puts the primacy on the individual to me! To his credit, Mr. Tremblay does write: “If he is using this in the epistemic sense that all moral judgments depend on an individual to make them, I obviously agree. But that has once again nothing to do with relativism as he defined it.” Did Mr. Tremblay forget my definition? “moral judgments are relative to the appraiser and that there is no non-subjective standard from which to judge whose moral judgments are right in a factual sense.” There it is; “moral judgments are relative to the appraiser and… there is no non-subjective standard from which to judge [moral decisions.] Isn’t it clear that what I am saying is that “moral judgments depend on the individual to make them?” Mr. Tremblay writes: [I]f Mr. Currie is outright denying all forms of knowledge, then his own claims are equally to be denied, and all his arguments must be rejected as well as mine.” I don’t remember denying all forms of knowledge and would be delighted if Mr. Tremblay found that quote, because I can’t. Other than that, I am merely pointing out a truism: all of our arguments will stand or fall by whether the reader HERSELF is convinced by them. Even if one argument is true and one false, it is up to the INDIVIDUAL to accept or reject the one she finds most convincing by her own standards. This, I think, is how moral argument works. That is why I am a relativist. Mr. Tremblay writes: Mr. Currie claims that the hierarchy of values is "so vague" as to be meaningless. Apparently he has no evidence for this except the opinion of various proponents and opponents of those concepts. David Kelley was obviously arguing from an Objectivist standpoint, and freedom, for instance, has a definite meaning : self-ownership, which is predicated on the existence of a government which protects that self-ownership. If Mr. Currie is unclear on the meaning of some terms, I think I can give him a specific definition for those terms. Simply asserting that they do not have definitions, is a naked assertion. Did we all notice that Mr. Tremblay slipped in a buffer to his rebuttal here. Mr Kelley, it is pointed out, was “obviously arguing from an Objectivist standpoint,” and from that standpoint, certain words have certain definitions. Mr. Tremblay could of course give me his own definitions of certain words, but those would be the definitions he feels are best – not that are objective or fixed. The principles that Dr. Kelley brings up – things like “art,’ “education,” “self-esteem,” and “love,” are all concepts that are amazingly vague. One persons idea of education is likely not to be another’s; one person’s idea of art is another’s idea of debauchery. Words like these connote broad and ultra-elastic categories, rather than fixed and explicit things that are across-the-board definable. So saying that “we all need love” is sufficient as an objective moral principle ignores the fact that this still leaves such innumerable varieties of what people think love is, how they enact to get or sustain it, and how much they value it. Saying “everyone needs love” is an objective moral principle is like saying “things should sound good,” is an objective musical principle. Both simply allow so much subject-dependent definition as to hardly be objective anythings. As far as evidence goes, the evidence is precisely the fact that these vague words experience very little definitional agreement in the world. What is “art”; what is “education”; what is “love”? Societally and globally, we are nowhere close to consensus on any of these – and what’s more, no “objectively correct definitions” seem to be in sight. Words and concepts are defined by their users and their definitions are relative to them. We tend to coalesce to a degree on definitions but certainly not anywhere close to what Mr. Tremblay would like. We coalesce the bit we do because socially, we want to make sure others can understand our words – that we share the definitions they do (or at least close enough). But if I was at a gathering of Marxists and spoke of “self-ownership” or “political freedom” it is doubtless they would not have the idea about what they are that I do. I personally agree with Mr. Tremblay’s definition of what those terms mean, but they do not. Am I right and they wrong? Are they right and I wrong? Who can know? There is no pie-in-the-sky dictionary that tells us what words (and the concepts they express) must mean now and for all times. Mr. Tremblay tells me that if morals are not objective, I have no grounds to judge others. My professors will be disappointed to hear this, because they are right now grading my papers – they are judging them. They are all, I’m sure, fully aware that there is no objective across-the-board principles for “an A Paper.” The grader grades to her own standard of what an A paper is. I will tell them to stop grading my papers immediately because there are no objective standards of grading. Thank you, Mr. Tremblay; you have saved them much work. The fact that teachers grade papers without across-the-board standards; the fact that jazz musicians talk of who the best trumpet payer is without objective standards; these are simply indications that, contra Mr. Tremblay, it is certainly possible to judge things while holding the realization that these judgments are not made on pie-in-the-sky moral principles. The same goes for obligations. Moral obligation is certainly a thing even relativists feel. Why? Because obligation comes from within, not from without. I may still feel obliged to a certain person even though I realize that that obligation and the feeling of loyalty therein are my own; not ones imposed upon me by some general principles: “You have to be obligated here; reason…Reason…says so.” Where is Mr. Tremblay’s Case?Mr. Tremblay asserts that he has proved objective morality possible simply by stating truisms like, “we all need to eat,” “we all need to flourish,” and “we should take facts into account when making moral decisions. But Mr. Tremblay himself defines morality thus: “Morality is the study of action and its parameters, how we should act. The issues of moral systems, values, virtues, value-judgment, moral obligation, and so on, refer to the field of morality.” So even if he has shown that ‘we all need to eat’ is an objective moral value, under his own definition it is not sufficient to prove objective morality. What about objective moral virtues, value-judgments, moral obligations “and so on?” Where are they? Per above, I would also advise Mr. Tremblay to look at what is and is not objectivism in the philosophic community because he holds a position that most relativists hold (and are called relativists for holding it). That is, that : “Objective morality is possible because we can construct moral systems where every structural attribute, premise and process is based on objective fact.” One example should suffice: JL Mackie, a relativist, spent the last chapters of his book “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,” writing that there are certainly facts and that the best course in moral action is to take them into account. Mr. Tremblay would love these chapters as it expresses much of what he said: particularly about morality practiced differently “from person to person and from culture to culture.” But Mr. Mackie is a relativist (and is always considered one) BECAUSE he argues that moral judgments vary ‘from person to person.” This is also why Mary Midgley, Charles Taylor, Sidney Hook, and scores of other philosophers are called relativists: THAT JUST SEEMS TO BE WHAT RELATIVISM IS!!! In other words, relativism (as it is recognized in the academy) has a new member; Francois Tremblay!

So...we are now imposing a morality that is not meant to be imposed on anybody onto Francois Tremblay! Amazing how self defeating this logic is. Might I say, quite an objective take on the issue of moral relativism as well ...back to the archives.