I don’t think that your argument would beg the question against a relativist. I think it’s a perfectly cogent argument, and one of a form that I at least am happy to use.
A relativist would almost certainly accuse you of begging the question, but in my view the accusation would be unfounded. As I argue in my reply to Honderich, there just are no non-question-begging arguments against certain kinds of plain (Moorean
) truths, and I’d count moral truths like the one you mentioned among those plain truths.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that question-beggingness is a formal feature of an argument. But I’m not sure what you mean by it being a feature of dialogue rather than argument. What I would say is that, unlike most of the logical fallacies, an accusation of question-begging has to do with substantive epistemic features of your premises, rather than with any features of the formal inferential connection between your premises and your conclusion. In a formally fallacious argument, the conclusion can’t actually be inferred from the premises, even though a careless presentation of the argument may make it seem as if they do; but in a question-begging argument, the conclusion may very well follow from the premises. Many question-begging arguments are even deductively valid. The problem with them is that the premises fail to give reasons for the conclusion, not because the inferential link fails, but rather because the premises are really no more initially plausible than the conclusion.
]]>I’ve been waiting until I’ve had a chance to really digest your enormously generous answer to my question. I’m afraid I’ve been so busy with what keeps food on the table that I haven’t thought through everything you mention. And this is very dense stuff for me – the internet has given me A.D.D. I do appreciate your attention to precision and believe I have much to learn from it.
]]>Well, I’ve got no problem with your reasoning. Indeed, that’s basically just an application of the same kind of Moorean argument that I use against Ted Honderich and against Max Borders. (Honderich’s argument isn’t a relativistic argument; it’s objectionable for other reasons. Borders’s argument is an agent-relativistic argument, tricked out with some explicitly Hobbesian social contract apparatus.)
To be sure, a moral relativist is unlikely to be convinced by your argument, and they are likely to claim oen of two things. (1) She may claim that someone with a proper understanding of relativism can translate what you mean when you say drowning babies for fun is always wrong
into relativist-speak. (What you’re really saying is that you oppose it no matter who does it or why. That’s fine! But any speaker-relativist can accept that without ceasing to be a relativist…
) Or (2) she may claim that you’re just begging the question against the relativist. In either case, the relativist is likely to denounce you as unsophisticated. But I think that’s the relativist’s problem, not yours, and it’s a funny form of sophistication
that expresses itself in spinning out some jargon-laden, intellectualized excuses for why it can be be right and wrong at the same time to drown babies for fun, depending on one’s frame of reference.
I really enjoyed your back and forth with Jeremy at his blog. I think I’ve learned a fair amount from following it, and I think I agree with what you’ve written. I think I need to spend some more time figuring out what exactly the term “moral relativism” entails, as perhaps this definition is the source of my confusion.
]]>Well, the good news is that, at least based on what you say here, I wouldn’t conclude that you’re a relativist.
I agree with you that there are broader and narrower meanings for the term justice,
one of which I think has to do strictly with individual rights (i.e. legitimately enforceable claims), and the other of which has to do with some broader sense of respect and fair play. And there may be plenty of things that are unjust in the broader sense without being unjust in the narrower sense (thus, vicious, but not criminal). I’d need to think more about the specific case that you mention to decide for sure whether it is a case of that, but it probably is; I think that most of that sort of profiteering off of aggression is exploitative but not aggressive in itself. (It depends on the degree of ongoing conspiracy, if any, between the profiteer and the primary aggressor, and whether the profiteer’s actions directly create any new and distinct torts against the victim.)
I’d need to hear more about how you would spell out the details, but at first blush I wouldn’t say that you’ve said anything relativistic, at least not yet. It is perfectly possible for there to be morally binding judgments that incorporate subjective value (in the economic sense), without the aptness of those judgments thereby becoming relative to a frame of reference.
For example, consider the principle of restorative justice that if you deprive me of something I have a right to through force or fraud, then, ceteris paribus, you owe me compensation of equivalent value to what I was deprived of. But then, of course, the question is, in what sense of value
does the compensation needs to be equivalent? One possible answer is subjective value in the economic sense; i.e., that what the victim is owed is (again, ceteris paribus) fixed by how much she valued what she lost.
Set aside for the moment whether this principle is true. (I think it is, but only because the ceteris paribus clause is waving away a lot of important countervailing considerations and epicycles on the theory.) What I want to focus on is whether, if true this principle of justice, or the judgments that issue from it, would imply relativism about at least some parts of justice. I don’t think that it would. Here’s why: the principle incorporates the notion of subjective value, and the judgments that issue from it — e.g., Ceteris paribus, Smith owes Jones $30,000 for as compensation for destroying Jones’s car, which she would have been willing to sell for $30,000 but not less…
— incorporate specific subjective values into the judgment, those subjective values have a fixed reference point, and go towards fixing the content of the judgment.
For the judgment to be an instance of moral relativism, it would have to be the case that both of the following statements might be true (and both might be false) at the same time, depending on the context of utterance or the identity or associations of one or more of the parties involved:
Ceteris paribus, Smith owes Jones $30,000 for as compensation for destroying Jones’s car, which she would have been willing to sell for $30,000 but not less….
Ceteris paribus, Smith does not owe Jones $30,000 for as compensation for destroying Jones’s car, which she would have been willing to sell for $30,000 but not less….
As far as I can tell, your theory doesn’t allow for that to be the case, or if it does, you haven’t yet introduced the elements that would make it so. Thus far, at least, while the content of the judgments depends on one person’s subjective value, the truth-values of the judgments, once their content is fixed, don’t vary from speaker to speaker, or from culture to culture, or from agent to agent; as long as the victim attaches that subjective value to that car, the judgment will be true (if the principle it derives from is true), no matter who utters it, or in what context it was uttered, no matter who the victim is, no matter who smashed the car, and no matter what culture they all come from. Thus, the aptness of the judgment is a matter of independent fact, not relative to the frame of reference.
Besides subjective value, there is also a separate issue, which you seem to touch on briefly, which has to do with the role of convention, idiosyncratic judgment, and perhaps even arbitrary fiat, in applying certain principles of justice to concrete cases, or what I’ve elsewhere talked about as reducing the natural law
). If you mean to point out that there is such a role, I agree with you, but again, I don’t think it implies any form of relativism about justice, at least not in any sense that I object to. In cases where convention (for example) has to be taken into account to apply principles of justice, it’s because the concrete judgment in question isn’t strictly entailed by principles of justice, except in a conditional form. E.g.: you should follow the rules of the road, whatever they are
entails you should drive on the right side of the road, if you are driving in a society where the convention is to drive on the right side
; it’s only when combined with the fact that the U.S. indeed has this convention that you get you should drive on the right side of the road in the U.S.
You could say that there’s a sense in which you should drive on the right side of the road
and you should drive on the left side of the road
are judgments of respect for others rights which are relative to the culture in which you’re driving; but if so, the reason they are thus relative is only that you’ve started out by under-specifying the content of the judgment. If they’re intended as universal statements about rules of the road, then both of those principles would be false; if, on the other hand, they’re intended as elliptical statements (say, When driving in the U.S., you should drive on the right side of the road,
and When driving in the U.S., you should drive on the left side of the road,
then one of them is true and the other one is false, no matter who utters them or in what context.) The content of justice per se remains publicly accessible and non-relativistic; and the specific judgments of justice become relativistic only to the extent that you under-specify the full content of the judgment. A robust form of relativism, in the technical usage of the term, would require that the judgments and the principles they are based on be relative all the way down,
even when their content is fully specified. So, for a cultural relativist, it’s not only that You ought to drive on the right side of the road
might be true in New York but false in London. It’s that When you are in New York, you should drive on the right side of the road
might be true for a New Yorker but false for a Londoner, and also that the general principle from which it derives, You ought to follow the rules of the road, whatever they may be
might be true for a New Yorker but false for a Londoner, or true for me but false for you. (Actually, based on the driving of people around here, I think that this form of relativism might be a pretty popular belief in Las Vegas. But no less disreputable for being so common.)
Does that clarify or muddify?
]]>“If justice is thought of as something that’s less than universally and categorically binding, which individual people or cultures of people can take or leave as it pleases them, then I don’t think it is very surprising that what will soon follow is a whole host of reasons or excuses for leaving it in favor of some putative benefit to be got through coercion.”
This whole statement pivots on the definition of “justice” that is used. I personally would argue that, taken in isolation from other circumstances, it was unjust for the New England Cod industry to profit so handsomely from selling defective cod to the Carribean plantation owners, because they were profiting indirectly from exploitation. However, if I were using justice as it appears you were using it in that statement, I would say it was just, as the New Englanders were not engaging in rights violations themselves. Perhaps there is justice(1), which involves the concept of justified coercion, and justice(2) which involves more subjective valuations and is therefore necessarily more relativistic than justice(1)?
It seems to me that while there are some (perhaps as few as one) objective moral principles, the chain of deductive reasoning starts to include subjective value judgments more and more as you travel down the chain, and that, where the rubber hits the road (so to speak), there are always subjective elements involved in applying abstract principles of justice.
So while I don’t consider myself a moral relativist, many people (perhaps you?) would. I’m okay with pretty much (so long as its reasoning is transparent) any moral system that begins with a version of the principle “you have no right to use another person merely as means to your own ends” (which I think is pretty much self-ownership without smuggling the concept of property into the discussion). Of course, as noted at the beginning, I’m sure that we could duel over the precision of the terms involved, but I’m fairly comfortable with my understanding and ability to communicate what I mean those words to convey.
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