Abstract
Of the various views that have been called ‘moral relativism,’ there are three plausible versions, which I will label ‘normative moral relativism,’ ‘moral judgment relativism,’ and ‘meta-ethical relativism.’ The first of these views is a thesis about moral agents; the second, a thesis about the form of meaning of moral judgments; the third, a thesis about the truth conditions or justification of moral judgments. Normative moral relativism is the view roughly that different people, as agents, can be subject to different ultimate moral demands. Moral judgment relativism holds that moral judgments make implicit reference to the speaker or some other person or to some group or to one or another set of moral standards, etc. Meta-ethical relativism says that conflicting moral judgments about a particular case can both be right.
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Notes
William Frankena, Ethics, Second edition (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 109.
Richard Brandt, ‘Ethical Relativism’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. III (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), p. 76.
Actually he suggests this as an analysis of the Hopi term Ka-anta which he takes to be roughly equivalent to the English term wrong. R.B. Brandt, Hopi Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 109.
Charles L. Stevenson, ‘Relativism and Nonrelativism in the Theory of Value’, in Stevenson, Facts and Values (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 71–93.
Roderick Firth, ‘Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer’, Philosophy and Pheno-menological Research XII (1952), 317–345.
‘Ethical Relativism’, p. 75.
Richard B. Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1959), p. 272.
‘Ethical Relativism’, p. 75; Ethical Theory, pp. 278-279.
Ethics, p. 109.
Cf. ‘On Saying the Ethical Thing’, in K.E. Goodpaster (ed.), Perspectives on Morality: Essays by William Frankena (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), p. 123, where Frankena calls this position simply ‘relativism’: “if two people hold conflicting normative judgments,... both judgments may be rational or justified.”
Ethical Theory, p. 275. Cf. ‘Ethical Relativism’, p. 76.
‘Relativism and Nonrelativism in the Theory of Value’, p. 86.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 81. See also ‘The Nature of Ethical Disagreements’ in Facts and Values, pp. 1-9.
Stevenson, ‘Relativism and Nonrelativism in the Theory of Value’, p. 86.
Cf. Frankena’s useful discussion of such considerations in ‘Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy’, in Perspectives on Morality, pp. 49-73.
‘Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy’, p. 52.
Ibid., p. 51.
Brandt, Hopi Ethics, pp. 213-215, 245-246. According to Brandt, the Hopi do recognise a weaker principle of concern for animals. More recently he has argued that basic psychological principles ensure that “our benevolence is and must be engaged by the suffering of animals — unless we wrongly believe they suffer little or not at all.” ‘The Psychology of Benevolence and Its Implications for Philosophy’, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 450.
I am thinking here of Plato, Kant, and more recently Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Ethical Theory, p. 282.
Cf. Brandt, Ethical Theory, Chapter Six, ‘The Development of Ethical Values in the Individual’, pp. 114-150. Also Martin L. Hoffman, ‘Moral Development’, in Carmichael’s Manual of Psychology, ed. by Paul H. Mussen, 3rd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 264–332.
See Gilbert Harman, ‘Practical Reasoning’, Review of Metaphysics, pp. 431-463.
Ethics, p. 109.
Ibid., p. 25. Brandt usefully discusses what might be said in favor of such a principle, which he calls “the requirement of generality,” in Ethical Theory, pp. 19-24.
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Harman, G. (1978). What is Moral Relativism?. In: Goldman, A.I., Kim, J. (eds) Values and Morals. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7634-5_9
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