Relativism: So What? (Part Two)
Jul. 1st, 2008 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotMy guess is that someone who derides "relativism" would consider me a relativist if he knew my philosophical views. But my intuition here is to call the conversation - relativism, pro or con - a stand-in issue. That is, my relativistic views have no bearing one way or another on whether or not in a specific instance I feel that I need to learn more about someone's context, or whether I think an accepted truth needs to be reexamined or a truth that's under attack needs defending.
In my book I say, "As a relativist I can say, 'Nothing exists in isolation,' and two minutes later say, 'I grew up in an isolated village,' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." My point was that the philosophical position addresses nothing of concern to the village, i.e., addresses no human concern.
But actual villagers - actual humans - do say "nothing exists in isolation" and other relativistic equivalents, even if I think the isolation the sentence addresses has nothing to do with the isolation that concerns them. They think otherwise.
I'll go back to what I said in last week's post: People who talk about relativism think that they're taking care of something by doing so. So, my eye on the prize, my trick is to find out what it is they think they're taking care of. The problem is that people who discuss relativism don't really know what they're trying to take care of. That's how stand-in issues work. People jump to the stand-in issue in order to feel various concerns without actually thinking about them.
Questions to ask might be: what are the social or institutional situations where relativism is called forth as a justification or a bogeyman? What are you trying to justify, and whom are you trying to justify it to?
Details to come in later posts.
In my book I say, "As a relativist I can say, 'Nothing exists in isolation,' and two minutes later say, 'I grew up in an isolated village,' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." My point was that the philosophical position addresses nothing of concern to the village, i.e., addresses no human concern.
But actual villagers - actual humans - do say "nothing exists in isolation" and other relativistic equivalents, even if I think the isolation the sentence addresses has nothing to do with the isolation that concerns them. They think otherwise.
I'll go back to what I said in last week's post: People who talk about relativism think that they're taking care of something by doing so. So, my eye on the prize, my trick is to find out what it is they think they're taking care of. The problem is that people who discuss relativism don't really know what they're trying to take care of. That's how stand-in issues work. People jump to the stand-in issue in order to feel various concerns without actually thinking about them.
Questions to ask might be: what are the social or institutional situations where relativism is called forth as a justification or a bogeyman? What are you trying to justify, and whom are you trying to justify it to?
Details to come in later posts.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 08:25 pm (UTC)This might help to mask the arbitrariness of certain value systems -- not that they're not important or that there aren't good reasons to adopt them, but that there's not necessarily a coherent underlying principle that makes them seem satisfying philosophically, as a System That Can Be Justified.
The recent Supreme Court case on child rape not being a crime punishable by death had me thinking about this recently -- I'm against the death penalty fundamentally, and therefore I don't see this as a decision that has any bearing on my own feelings on that issue. For myriad reasons, I've decided that legally mandated death as punishment isn't a tenable position I can hold; personally this Court decision has no impact on my own stance, but it's clearly a controversial decision to other people. But if you pressed those people to explain WHY they think that child rape should or should not be punishable by death, I'd be curious as to who could make a reasoned argument for it (since I also don't understand how one can make a reasoned argument for the death penalty) -- but I also couldn't tell you what the underlying principle is in my thinking that makes me feel the way I do, except to say that governments shouldn't get to decide who lives and who dies according to its own rules. To me it's outside the scope of law. Clearly this isn't a relativist position -- it's one that I think needs to hold true across any culture for any reason. But I can imagine constructing a relativist position that's weaker than my own (let's call the favoring Supreme Court side "relativists") to inflate my own position's significance.
At some point I should try to parse the various invocations of "moral relativism" in regard to that case, though a quick scan suggests that the people using the term aren't worth engaging in the first place: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=supreme+court+relativist+child+rape&btnG=Google+Search