Foundations for Moral Relativism E-Book

J. David Velleman

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In this new edition of Foundations for Moral Relativism a distinguished moral philosopher tames a bugbear of current debate about cultural difference. J. David Velleman shows that different communities can indeed be subject to incompatible moralities, because their local mores are rationally binding. At the same time, he explains why the mores of different communities, even when incompatible, are still variations on the same moral themes. The book thus maps out a universe of many moral worlds without, as Velleman puts it, "moral black holes”. The six self-standing chapters discuss such diverse topics as online avatars and virtual worlds, lying in Russian and truth-telling in Quechua, the pleasure of solitude and the fear of absurdity. Accessibly written, this book presupposes no prior training in philosophy.

Leseprobe

Foundations for Moral Relativism

J. David Velleman is a professor of philosophy at New York University. He is the author of seven previous volumes, including Self to Self (Cambridge, 2006), How We Get Along (Cambridge, 2009) and Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death, published by OBP in 2015. He is a co-founder of the Open Access journal Philosophers’ Imprint.

Foundations for Moral Relativism

Second Expanded Edition

J. David Velleman

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2015 J. David Velleman

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J. David Velleman, Foundations for Moral Relativism: Second Expanded Edition. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0086

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0086

Cover image: Cover image: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Physalis (1912). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egon_Schiele_-_Self-Portrait_with_Physalis_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

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for Kitty my North Star

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

I.

Introduction

1

II.

Virtual Selves

5

III.

Morality Here and There

23

1. Kant Among the Sherpas

23

2. Aristotle in Bali

37

IV.

Doables

53

V.

Foundations for Moral Relativism

75

VI.

Sociality and Solitude

101

VII.

Life Absurd? Don’t Be Ridiculous

119

Bibliography

129

Index

137

Acknowledgments

At a conference in the spring of 2012, I had the pleasure of meeting William St Clair, Chairman of the Board of Open Book Publishers. When he described the publishing model of OBP, I resolved at once that they must be the publishers of this book. I am grateful to OBP for taking it on, and especially to Alessandra Tosi and Corin Throsby for their work on its design and production. I am also grateful to my copyeditor, Katherine Duke, for her skillful attention to the manuscript and index.

A version of Chapter II was published under the title “Bodies, Selves” in American Imago 65 (2008): 405–426; before that, its title was “Artificial Agency”. An early sketch was presented at a symposium on “The Psychology of the Self” at the 2007 Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Subsequent versions were presented to a philosophy of mind workshop at The University of Chicago; to a conference on “Ethics, Technology, and Identity” at the Centre for Ethics and Technology in Delft, the Netherlands; and to the philosophy departments of Union College, Syracuse University, the University of Vienna, the University of Leeds, and Brown University. Thanks to Linda Brakel, Imogen Dickie, Kalynne Pudner, and Kendall Walton for their valuable comments.

The two parts of Chapter III were presented as the Alice Cumin Lectures at University College Dublin, the Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford University, and the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard University. I am grateful to the philosophy departments at those institutions for hosting my visits and discussing my work. In addition, the first part of the chapter was presented to a PETAF conference at the University of Barcelona, the Philosophy Department of Union College, a workshop on autonomy at Dartmouth College, and a workshop on metaethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For discussion of earlier drafts, I thank Herlinde Pauer-Studer and the members of the Skype Reading Group in Ethics (SkyRGE): David Owens, Nishi Shah, Matty Silverstein, and Sharon Street.

Chapters IV through VI were presented as the Carl G. Hempel Lecture Series at Princeton University. They were then presented as the Hourani Lectures at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Thanks to both philosophy departments for discussion and hospitality.

Chapter IV was previously published in Philosophical Explorations on January 14, 2013, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13869795.2012.756924. An earlier version was presented at a UCLA conference in honor of Barbara Herman. The commentator on that occasion was Carol Voeller. It was also presented as a ZENO Lecture at the University of Leiden, as the John Dewey Memorial Lecture at the University of Vermont, at a workshop on truth-telling and trusting at The University of Sheffield, and to the philosophy departments of Rice University and the University of Notre Dame. Thanks to audiences on all of these occasions, and also to Gabriel Abend, Alexandra Aikhenvald, Paul Boghossian, Frédérique de Vignemont, Imogen Dickie, Randall Dipert, Melis Erdur, Joan Manes, Bruce Mannheim, David Owens, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Gunter Senft, Bambi Schieffelin, Will Starr, Sharon Street, Daniel B. Velleman, and the Mid-Atlantic Reading Group in Ethics (MARGE), especially members Paul Bloomfield and Kyla Ebels-Duggan. Thanks also to my anthropology professor at Amherst College, L. Alan Babb.

Versions of Chapter V were presented to the philosophy departments of Colgate University, Rutgers University, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, the University of Vermont, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Marquette University, and The City University of New York; to the Undergraduate Philosophy Forum at Columbia University; to the Phil/Sci workshop organized at the University of Vienna by Martin Kusch and Velislava Mitova; and to a workshop on normativity and truth at the University of Geneva. For help with this material, I am grateful in particular to K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Boghossian, David Braun, Stephen Darwall, Randall Dipert, Ken Ehrenberg, Don Herzog, Shelly Kagan, Alexander Nehamas, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Gideon Rosen, and Matthew Noah Smith. Special thanks to the members of the Skype Reading Group in Ethics (SkyRGE) for repeated readings and discussions: David Owens, Nishi Shah, Matty Silverstein, and Sharon Street.

Chapter VI was previously published in Philosophical Explorations on February 11, 2013, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13869795.2013.767931. Bits of this chapter were presented at “The Pentagram of Love” at the 2008 Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I am indebted to Rae Langton for a very helpful conversation about that version of the paper and for a subsequent exchange on this version. Discussions with Sharon Street helped me to abandon the first and begin on the second. Extensive written comments on the present version were provided to me by Ruth Chang, who organized the APA session. It was then presented at a colloquium organized by Nancy Yousef at The City University of New York. The lecture was also presented to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami and in a workshop on the ethics of family relationships at the University of Bern.

Chapter VII benefited from a helpful conversation with Sharon Street.

I. Introduction

© J. David Velleman, CC BY-NC-ND http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0029.01

There is no universally valid morality, only moralities plural, each having merely local validity. This much seems clear on first glance at the historical and ethnographic data. First impressions can be deceiving, though, and this one is troubling as well, so it calls for a second look. Ethnographers and historians can look again at its empirical sources;1 a philosopher wants to look at its foundations. The philosopher asks: Can there be plural moralities of merely local validity?

There can of course be local mores. Mores are always specific to a culture or society or community.2 But mores lack the obligatoriness, or binding force, of morality: one can be justified in ignoring or defying them. Also, mores include such trivial matters as the choice of a fork or the height of a hemline. Local moralities, by contrast, would have to make inexorable demands on unavoidable matters, despite being restricted to the members of a particular culture or society or community. Moral relativism must therefore explain how mores can have moral force and moral subject matter without being universal.

This explanation cannot invoke a universal obligation to conform to one’s local mores, since moral relativism denies the existence of universal obligations. Nor can the explanation invoke extrinsic considerations such as a fear of social sanctions or a desire to fit in, since morality binds even those who do not care about these. Relativism must rather explain how mores can have the force and subject matter of morality all by themselves.

Philosophers may question whether I am really a relativist, for two reasons.

One reason is that I don’t believe in faultless disagreement. Faultless disagreement would occur if one person accepted a proposition or principle and another person rejected it, without either one’s being wrong. Faultless disagreement is impossible, though it’s just the sort of impossibility that spurs philosophers to heroic measures on its behalf.

My concern is moral relativism in the real world, not in logical heaven. I want to explain how there can be multiple, locally valid moralities of the sort that there actually appear to be. That explanation need not show that there can be faultless disagreement between moralities; it may show instead that they do not even share enough common ground to disagree, and that it is therefore a moot question which one is right. If it’s a moot question which of two moralities is right, then there is no adjudicating between them, and both remain standing — which is all that real-world relativism requires.

Of course, if ‘morality’ refers to a common set of pro-or-con questions on which different communities give different answers, then their views cannot be equally valid unless there is faultless disagreement. But the assumption of a common set of questions is already a form of universalism. It implies that communities agree about how to think, even if not what to think, about how to live. I believe that communities are more foreign to one another than that.

I see two obstacles to disagreement between moralities. One bar to disagreement is the lack of a shared taxonomy of actions. Actions are performed under descriptions, and act-descriptions are socially constructed, with the result that communities differ over the domain of things that can be done. If members of one community are choosing among options that members of another have never imagined, then the latter will have no opinion about the choice and no grounds for forming one.

A more profound bar to disagreement is that reasons for acting are essentially perspectival. What makes for a morality is not a set of answers to some universal questions but, as I have suggested, inexorable demands on unavoidable matters. Those demands come in the form of reasons for acting and reacting. I will argue that such reasons are perspectival in a way that prevents disagreement.

The challenge for a relativist who denies that communities disagree about a given set of moral questions is to show that there is still a shared topic — namely, morality — on which they are, for that very reason, failing to disagree. In other words, such a relativist must show that different communities are talking about the same thing but not in sufficiently similar ways to clash head-on. I meet this challenge by showing that the mores of different communities can share general themes that we would call moral, which they address with a force that we would call moral, without agreeing or disagreeing on any particular moral issue.

In short, I regard moralities as variations on some themes — except that there is no fact of the matter as to which morality states the themes and which ones are variations. They are a family of diverse mores bound together (to vary the analogy) by family resemblance. For this reason, I do not offer a definition of what I mean by ‘morality’ or ‘moralities’. I mean that family (you know which one it is). We should not be surprised that relativism rules out the possibility of giving a universal definition of morality.

My assertion of shared moral themes may be a second source of doubt about my credentials as a relativist. In order to show that there could be other moralities, I have to show that they would overlap enough with what we call morality to deserve the name, and then I seem to have found unavoidable convergence rather than unbridgeable difference.

Now, maybe local institutions similar enough to qualify as moralities will turn out to be one and the same institution adapted to local conditions, or maybe they will turn out to differ only by having different internal inconsistencies that will be ironed out in the long run. An optimistic thought, but it is no more than optimism. There is no a priori reason to think that differences among the world’s many moralities would disappear if internal inconsistencies or external circumstances were factored out. Optimism must therefore be tempered with humility — that is, with the recognition that distant communities may never, not even ideally, converge.

Such humility is the main lesson of moral relativism. The mere possibility of multiple valid moralities should be enough to shake our certainty in having the absolute truth about morality, given that there may be no such thing.

The chapters of this book do not add up to a monograph, and their contents do not add up to a theory. They are self-standing essays that offer some foundational ideas for a version of relativism that would account for the cross-cultural and historical phenomena.

In Chapter II, “Virtual Action”, I prepare the ground for my account of relativism by analyzing the construction of agency. I take as a modelthe construction of online agents in virtual worlds, where participants act with animated avatars as their online bodies. I argue that real agents are real-world participants acting, as it were, with flesh-and-blood bodies as their avatars. Both kinds of agent are designed, I claim, for social interaction of the sort required to pass a Turing Test of personhood; and the key to their design is a self-conception that they enact so as to be interpretable by others.

Chapter III, “Morality Here and There”, has been added in this Second Edition. It offers capsule interpretations of Kant and Aristotle as theorists of human agency, and it presents ethnographic information that challenges the universality of their theories. In the final paragraphs, I connect their conceptions of agency to the one that I sketched in Chapter II.

In Chapter IV, “Doables”, I consider the construction of action-types by members of a community. I argue that members of a community construct a shared taxonomy of actions because they need to make sense of one another and to one another for the sake of social interaction — the need that is constitutive of agency as analyzed in the preceding chapters. The social construction of action-types results in differences that stand in the way of moral disagreement between communities.

The central chapter of the book is “Foundations for Moral Relativism”, Chapter V, which explains the construction of perspective-relative reasons that can underwrite the demands of local moralities. Although these processes leave no room for moral disagreement, I argue, they give application to a secular concept of progress.

In Chapter VI, “Sociality and Solitude”, I offer a reason for thinking that human communities will tend to develop reasons that we can recognize as moral. I begin with the human capacity that makes possible the processes of action and interaction that I have discussed in previous chapters: I call this capacity objective self-awareness. I then argue that objective self-awareness is an essential, perhapsthe essential, element of personhood, and that it is the object of many attitudes by which we value persons. Thus, the foundations of moral relativism, as I conceive them, are also foundations for pro-moral values.

Finally, in Chapter VII, “Life Absurd? Don’t Be Ridiculous”, I consider the claim that the truth of relativism would deprive life of its meaning. I argue that the possibility of progress, which I have asserted in Chapter V, is sufficient to prevent life from being absurd.

1 I do not mean to imply that anthropologists have not done excellent work on the foundations of relativism. For an extremely clear and cogent characterization of moral relativism, see Richard A. Shweder, “Ethical Relativism: Is There a Defensible Version?”, Ethos 18, no. 2 (1990): 205–218.

2 Throughout the book, I will use the term ‘community’ for a group of people living in proximity to one another and therefore obliged to interact with one another frequently. The term is less than ideal, but I know of none better. As the term is generally understood, the members of a community are bound together by more than proximity. Since one of my goals is to explain how they are bound together, however, I will use the term without that connotation, so as not to beg any questions. Moreover, communities have vague and porous boundaries, whereas I will speak as if they can be clearly individuated. In this latter respect, my use of the term is an idealization intended as an aid to theorizing.

II. Virtual Selves

© J. David Velleman, CC BY-NC-ND http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0029.02

Second Life

Most mornings, thousands of computer users log on to a virtual world called Second Life. Their computer screens show scenes of a nonexistent world, peopled by humanlike figures. Each user sees the world from the perspective of one of those figures, which is his avatar in the world and whose movements and utterances he controls through his computer keyboard and mouse. The other figures on his screen are being controlled by other users, all of whom witness one another’s avatars doing and saying whatever their owners make them do and say. Through their avatars, these users converse, buy and sell things, and have all sorts of other humanlike interactions. (You’d be surprised.)