Un modelo narrativo para la construcción del Self

Let us start our discussion in the domain of morality, where I think a plausible defence of a modest form of relativism can be given (Niiniluoto 1991c; 1992c). This provides a useful contrast to cases where I am inclined to reject relativism. It also allows us to sharpen our notion of relativism.

Human beings have supported, at different times and places, various customs, moral codes, legal orders, political systems, and religious doctrines. Such a diversity and variation is a basic fact about human culture and social life. In particular, it was the fact of the relativity of morality

end p.229

that enlightened the pioneers of social anthropology, such as Edward Westermarck, who started to study ‘the origin and development of moral ideas’ (see Stroup 1982).

The relativity or diversity of morality is thus a fact that is open to empirical

investigation—from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It is also the task of science to give an explanation of this fact. Such explanations usually have the form of

statistical arguments, which link the moral views M supported by a person, group, or culture A with some conditions C about the needs, interests, character, family

background, education, or social position of A (see Brandt 1959: chs. 5–6). The diversity of moral ideas is thus explained by variations of biological, psychological, or social factors.²

If relativity is a fact which can be socially explained, are we thereby committed to moral relativism?

3

Despite the relativity of moral views, a moral realist may still claim that moral values exist in some objective (human-independent) sense. According to Brink (1989: 7), moral realism is the view that ‘there are moral facts and true moral claims whose existence and nature is independent of our beliefs about what is right and wrong’. A Platonist version of realism locates values in the transcendent realm of ideas. For G. E. Moore (1929),

goodness is a real but non-natural property of human acts or persons. ‘Naturalist’ realists in ethics reduce morality to some natural properties definable in descriptive (physical or mental) vocabulary (see Boyd 1988; Brink 1989). It would follow from such versions of realism that absolute moral judgements of the form

It is important to understand why the answer to this question is no.

• (1)

•

have truth values (when a is some object, act, or state of affairs) (cf. Sayre-McCord 1988). Thus, if two systems of moral views contradict each other, both of them cannot be correct.

Moral realism (especially its metaphysical and religious versions) is often combined with epistemic absolutism, which claims that one of the moral systems can be known to be true, and the others are known to be mistaken. But, to account for the fact of ethical diversity, a moral realist may also be a fallibilist about moral knowledge (cf. Boyd 1988), who thinks that the choice of the right moral ideas always remains uncertain and thus some of us may be mistaken in these matters (cf. Mackie 1977: 36).

A particularly interesting form of absolutism accepts that all moral views are socially determined, but claims that one of the perspectives is the right one. The strategy of some Marxist philosophers to overcome ethical relativity was to urge that the morality of the

‘most progressive class’ (i.e. the working class) is the right one, since it is in the direction of the presumed objective laws of history (see Redlow et al. 1971). This view may be regarded as a secular version of the religious doctrine that an act is good if it works in the direction of God's will.

The relativity of morality is thus compatible with absolutist and fallibilist versions of moral realism. Hence, if one wishes to defend relativism, it is not sufficient to appeal to the fact of moral diversity within human cultures. Relativism is not a factual claim about the historical evolution and diffusion of moral views, but a philosophical thesis about their truth and justification.

More generally, as a philosophical doctrine, the relativist thesis that ‘X is relative to Y’

claims that Y is the necessary or ultimate medium for the existence of X (for example, there cannot be visual perceptions without a viewpoint or location of the perceiver), or Y

is the best, only, or ultimate standard or measure for X (for example, political systems as human constructions have to be assessed and decided by persons or cultures).

In Haack's (1996a) terms, what I call mere relativity (X varies depending on Y) is

‘shallow relativism’, and proper philosophical relativism (X makes sense only relative to Y) is ‘deep relativism’.

In attacking moral realism, relativists have to dissociate their position also from the stronger rebuttals of moral absolutism. Such traditional attacks include moral nihilism, which denies the existence of moral values in any sense, and moral scepticism, which denies all knowledge about moral values. J. L. Mackie's (1977) ‘error theory’ admits that moral statements are cognitively meaningful, but they are all false. Semantical anti-realism in ethics denies that moral judgements have truth values.⁴

end p.231 Nihilism,

scepticism, and anti-realism are negative doctrines. Relativism in the deep sense is, instead, a positive thesis which accepts that moral views may be true or justified in some relativized sense.⁵

But how could the thesis of relativism be formulated? Let us approach this problem by starting from the philosophical problems concerning moral realism.

Some versions of moral realism rely on questionable metaphysical assumptions (such as Platonic ideas, God's will, or the telos of history) which are untestable by any factual information or lack explanatory power relative to any known aspect of the world. Even though such assumptions have been part of many traditional philosophical world views, from the viewpoint of scientific realism there does not seem to be any ground for accepting or supporting them (cf. Section 1.2). Similarly, non-natural moral properties are ‘queer’, if they are assumed to belong to the fabric of the world (Mackie 1977). The independent existence of moral values is unnecessary for the explanation of moral observations and beliefs: if I see an act of violence and judge it to be morally wrong, the appeal to ‘real’ moral facts does not add anything to the explanation of my views

(Harman 1977; but see Sayre-McCord 1988).

Further, the attempts to reduce values to physical or mental facts commit what G. E.

Moore (1929) called the naturalist fallacy: for example, if ‘good’ is defined as that which satisfies human desires, we can open the question of whether the satisfaction of such desires is always morally good or not. I think this kind of objection can be raised also against Richard Boyd's (1988) attempt to extend scientific realism to the domain of moral realism: according to his version of naturalism, goodness is a physical property, but it does not have an ‘analytic’ or reductive definition at all. However, Boyd gives a characterization of moral goodness in terms of a ‘cluster’ of ‘human goods’ which

‘satisfy important human needs’ (such as the need for love and friendship), together with psychological and social mechanisms (such as political democracy) which contribute to their ‘homeostatic’ unity. Knowledge of this property is to be obtained by observation and by attempts to reach a ‘reflective equilibrium’. I fail to see why such a complex cluster of various types of elements should characterize a physical property, and how this approach hopes to evade Moore's open question strategy.

Putting these anti-metaphysical and anti-reductionist points together, moral realism is wrong, since there simply seems to be no independently

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existing ‘moral reality’ to which moral judgements could be in the relation of

correspondence. Hence, there are no objective grounds for thinking that absolute moral judgements of the form (1) have truth values.⁶

Moral realism fails to appreciate the fact that morality is human-made—a historically depeloping social construction. According to what may aptly be called moral

constructivism, moral values as social artefacts belong to Popper's World 3.

7

If moral facts are part of the ‘fabric’ of World 3, it is possible to make true or false statements about morality relative to some socially constructed system of moral ideas (e.g. an ethical theory or the moral code of a human community). Instead of absolute statements (1), we have relativized statements of the form

Besides rejecting naturalist attempts to reduce morality to the physical World 1, this view also excludes the claim of moral subjectivism which takes morality to be simply a matter of personal attitude or feeling, hence an element of World 2. The constructivist view of morality as a social fact helps us to understand why a moral system has binding or coercive force (in Durkheim's sense) within the community where it has been constituted and accepted.

• (2)

•

where S is identified by its content or by its acceptance in some community. For example,

• (3)

•

Statements of the form (3) have truth values as assertions about World 3, and can be results of descriptive and interpretative social and cultural sciences.⁸

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The relativization of value statements (2) agrees with our earlier remarks on the fact of moral relativity. There are, and have been, moral views such that

• (4)

•

Another way of expressing this relativity is to use predicates of relative goodness:

• (5)

•

where x is a member of a community supporting the moral system S.⁹

• (6)

For example,

•

are just other ways of formulating the claims (3). Even ‘universally’ accepted principles about human rights (if there are any) have the form (3), since they are relative to the moral system accepted by humanity at a given time.

Note that we have maintained an important fact–value dichotomy as the difference between ordinary factual statements and value statements of the form (1). We have also opposed attempts to collapse this distinction by reducing values to ‘natural’ elements of World 1 or World 2. But at the same time we have been able to go beyond this dichotomy by claiming that relativized value statements of the form (4) may express facts about World 3. Again, such facts about World 3 do not express absolute principles of morality, since there is always the prospect of changing or transforming the social reality in World 3. Relativism as a philosophical thesis has to add something to the fact of relativity. I shall call modest relativism the claim that relativization is an

end p.234

essential or uneliminable aspect of moral judgements: (4) and (5), as statements with a truth value, cannot be reformulated without reference to system S or auditory x.

It is important to emphasize that modest relativism does not entail radical moral

relativism which claims that all moral systems are equally good or equally well justified.

This is a highly questionable doctrine for several reasons. Attempts at formulating it usually stumble over the problem of incoherence: theses like ‘it is a basic human right that everyone may decide his or her own morality’ or ‘as rights are always relative to a society it is wrong for people in one society to interfere with the values of another society’ are internally inconsistent, since they support relativist theses with absolutist premisses (cf. Williams 1982: 171).

Unlike radical relativism, modest relativism is compatible with the idea of moral progress and moral regress. This was argued in detail by Westermarck's Ethical Relativity (1932). He started from the plausible hypothesis that morality has developed from retributive emotions, i.e. from impartial feelings of approval and disapproval. As most theories of emotions today emphasize, emotions are not pure qualitative feelings but also contain in some way or another a cognitive component.¹⁰ The adequacy of emotions can then be assessed at least partly by considering the correctness of their cognitive aspect. For example, xenophobia (as a kind of fear) is usually based on irrational beliefs about the threat of strangers. In particular, as Westermarck tried to argue in his merciless criticism of what he considered as old-fashioned and inhuman aspects of the ethical

doctrines of Christianity, ethical views can be evaluated on this basis—without accepting a realist view of morality.

Moral systems can also be evaluated and compared in terms of higher-order principles (such as consistency, universalizability, agreement with moral intuition, harmony with other valuations) which are explicated in philosophical ethics. Factual knowledge is also relevant to the assessment of values, since we can have significant historical evidence concerning the consequences of the adoption of value systems (e.g. the present ecological crisis leads us to criticize the ideology that takes nature to be just a resource for human exploitation). Personal and collective experiences, improvement of human knowledge, critical conversation of humanity, and systematic ethical theories have taught us to give better and better articulations of the conditions of good human life. These lessons are codified in such agreements as the Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

But, in my view, the twentieth century—with its wars, concentration camps, and the recent wave of nihilist egoism—has also exhibited morally regressive trends.

The idea that moral knowledge can be improved by the critical discussion of the free citizens of democratic nations has led to the suggestion that moral objectivism could be defended without presupposing moral realism in the ontological sense. Thus, Jürgen Habermas (1983) defines the truth (or rightness) of normative statements as the ideal consensus reached in discourse free from domination and undemocratic asymmetries.

Hilary Putnam (1990; 1995) criticizes moral relativism by arguing that the basic insights of American pragmatism, namely the consensus theory of truth and fallibilism, apply equally well to science and ethics.¹²

It seems to me, however, that this line of argument again leads only to relativized moral judgements, conditional on some more basic value assumptions. In particular, the

discourse ethics of Habermas presupposes the principles of equality and democracy—and thus it at best gives relative statements of the form (2), where the system S is defined to be the basic moral beliefs of the ideal democratic community.

Against the consensus theory of moral truth, it is also possible to raise Quine's (1960) famous queries about Peirce: why should we think that moral beliefs converge to some ideal limit, and why should such a limit be unique? A consensus theory of factual truth fails for similar reasons (cf. Section 4.6).

It thus seems clear that the appeal to long-run moral objectivity does not overcome modest relativism—even though it may help in refuting radical relativism. The fundamental reason for this conclusion is the failure of moral realism: as morality is a social construction, progressively constituted by the consensus of human communities, there is no independent or ‘external’ criterion for saying that the consensus reached actually in a finite time or ideally in the limit is the ‘true’ or ‘right’ one.