The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism

Carol Rovane

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674725713
• eBook ISBN: 9780674726970
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Relativism is a hotly contested doctrine among philosophers, some of whom regard it as neither true nor false but simply incoherent. As Carol Rovane demonstrates in this analytical tour-de-force, the way to defend relativism is not initially by establishing its truth but by clarifying its content. The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism elaborates a doctrine of relativism that has a consistent logical, metaphysical, and practical significance. Relativism is worth debating, Rovane contends, because it bears directly on the moral choices we make in our lives.

Three intuitive conceptions of relativism have been influential in philosophical discourse. These include the idea that certain unavoidable disagreements are irresolvable, leading to the conclusion that "both sides are right," and the idea that truth is always relative to context. But the most compelling, Rovane maintains, is the "alternatives intuition." Alternatives are truths that cannot be embraced together because they are not universal. Something other than logical contradiction excludes them. When this is so, logical relations no longer hold among all truth-value-bearers. Some truths will be irreconcilable between individuals even though they are valid in themselves.

The practical consequence is that some forms of interpersonal engagement are confined within definite boundaries, and one has no choice but to view what lies beyond those boundaries with what Rovane calls "epistemic indifference." In a very real sense, some people inhabit different worlds--true in themselves, but closed off to belief from those who hold irreducibly incompatible truths.

PART ONE

How to Formulate the Doctrine of Relativism

1

The Prevailing Consensus View: Disagreement, Relative Truth, and Antirealism

In my introductory remarks, I said that there are four desiderata that any satisfactory formulation of the doctrine of relativism should meet. It should (1) capture a central and important intuition about its content, (2) attribute to the relativist a distinctive metaphysical commitment that is controversial and yet nevertheless worth taking seriously, (3) ensure that the doctrine is coherent, and (4) show how we could meaningfully live in accord with the doctrine. A good method to set up, therefore, would be to start with (1) by looking at the chief intuitions we have about the content of the doctrine of relativism and assess them by the lights of the other desiderata, that is, by considering how well they meet the other three desiderata. That is the broad dialectic with which I will proceed in this first part of the book.

Among contemporary philosophers who seek to formulate the doctrine of relativism, there is a broad consensus that the most central intuition about its content that we should aim to capture is the Disagreement Intuition. On this intuitive conception, relativism would arise with a certain kind of disagreement that is said to be, first of all, “irresoluble,” but also, second, irresoluble for the specific reason that both parties are right.¹ Let us call disagreements of this sort “relativism-inducing disagreements.” The most commonly cited examples of such relativism-inducing disagreements in the recent literature are so-called “disputes of inclination” in which the parties disagree about such matters as whether snails or fish sticks are delicious, but the more interesting and pressing possibilities would arise in the domains of morals and politics, and it is widely agreed that there, too, relativism would arise, if at all, with irresoluble disagreements in which both parties are right.

In spite of the impressive consensus surrounding the Disagreement Intuition, there is much to be said against it, and indeed much has been said against it—one main charge being that it is logically incoherent because it lands the relativist in a position of having to allow exceptions to the law of noncontradiction. Recent attempts to rescue the Disagreement Intuition from this charge of logical incoherence have resorted to a second intuition about the content of the doctrine of relativism, namely, the Relative Truth Intuition, according to which the relativist holds that truth is relative to context. Although this latter intuition does hold a central place in popular conceptions of relativism, in the more strictly philosophical literature the view tends to be that it cannot stand on its own independently of the Disagreement Intuition, and that its interest lies mainly in the support that it might give to the project of elaborating that intuition in a coherent way—that is, in such a way as to satisfy the third of the four desiderata I have set.

The current consensus in favor of the Disagreement Intuition is strong enough that when objections are offered against it, they are not just taken as objections against a particular intuitive conception of the doctrine of relativism, but rather as objections against the broader project of trying to formulate the doctrine at all, and the question is not so much as raised as to whether there might be yet another, third, intuition from which we might proceed in that broader project. I shall be arguing that the consensus is wrong on this score. There is indeed another, quite different, intuition available from which to proceed, one that figured prominently in the twentieth-century debates about relativism but that has been left to the side in the recent debates. According to this third intuition, relativism arises with what were then generally referred to as “alternative conceptual schemes”—so I will call this the Alternatives Intuition. It is quite understandable that this third intuition has been set aside, because it was never, in my opinion, elaborated in a sufficiently clear or compelling way. Nonetheless, the main burden of my arguments in this chapter is that we ought to return to it.

I will begin, not by directly launching an argument in favor of taking the Alternatives Intuition as our starting point for formulating the doctrine of relativism, but rather by undertaking a critical examination of the Disagreement Intuition. As a path of argument, this more oblique approach is better for a number of reasons: first, given the consensus surrounding the Disagreement Intuition, we should not turn our backs on it without first considering its merits; second, insofar as there is more than one intuition about what relativism involves, we ought to compare their respective merits rather than fasten our attention exclusively on just one of them; finally, there is much to be learned by thinking through the difficulties that confront the Disagreement Intuition—in doing so, we shall learn much about what drives and supports the Alternatives Intuition.

Here, then, is a preliminary statement of the detailed plan of argument for the rest of this chapter.

Since the first desideratum I mentioned asks us to begin with intuitions, I will begin in Section 1 with an initial exploration of the Disagreement Intuition. Given the prevailing consensus, it obviously meets the first desideratum, of capturing a central intuition about the doctrine of relativism. Prima facie, there is no difficulty about its meeting the second as well—of attributing to the relativist a distinctive metaphysical commitment. It does so by construing relativism-inducing disagreements as being irresoluble for a very nonstandard reason, which is that both parties to the disagreement are right. This is to be contrasted with another familiar account of how irresoluble disagreements might give rise to relativism, on which the doctrine does not emerge as carrying a distinctive metaphysical commitment but amounts to mere “epistemic” relativism. The latter doctrine does not claim that both parties to a disagreement really can be right, but only that in some cases there is no way for the parties to determine which of them is wrong and which of them is right. In many philosophical contexts—especially when the disagreements in question are political disagreements—it has seemed to many that this epistemic version may be all that is meant by “relativism.” But my project in this book is to formulate and evaluate a metaphysical doctrine, and so my interest in the Disagreement Intuition lies in the fact that, when it claims that both parties to a disagreement can actually be right, it seems to introduce an idea of metaphysical and not merely epistemic significance—in other words, insofar as relativism-inducing disagreements are to be characterized as irresoluble, they are to be characterized as metaphysically irresoluble. In Section 1, I will set this idea of a metaphysically irresoluble disagreement against a philosophical background of more general and longstanding ideas about the nature of disagreement, and about the possibility that disagreements could ever be irresoluble in any sense at all, metaphysical or epistemic. We will learn that, in general, disagreements have a distinctive normative significance that is entirely missing in the situations that are alleged to be metaphysically irresoluble disagreements, and this puts into doubt whether we should regard them as disagreements at all. Merely to raise this doubt will not automatically suffice by itself to undermine the Disagreement Intuition, because its advocates might respond by simply admitting that relativism-inducing disagreements do not hold the very same normative significance that other disagreements do. But then the question arises, What is their distinctive normative significance? Eventually we will find that the answer to this question will lead us away from the Disagreement Intuition and back to the Alternatives Intuition that had been so central in discussions of relativism in the last century.

In Section 2, I will temporarily shift my focus away from the normative issues that I raise in Section 1, in order to explore how the Disagreement Intuition might nevertheless be elaborated in a coherent way, thereby meeting the third desideratum I have laid down. Because it alleges that both parties to relativism-inducing disagreements can be right, it seems to saddle the relativist with allowing outright violations of the law of noncontradiction. As I have said, the Relative Truth Intuition is standardly brought to bear in order to rescue the Disagreement Intuition from the threat of logical incoherence that appears to arise when we allow that both parties to a disagreement can be right—the thought being that there would not be any outright contradiction if the truth of the parties’ respective claims could be portrayed as relative to different contexts.

It is often objected that even if we can succeed in rescuing the Disagreement Intuition from logical incoherence in this way, we shall nonetheless end up failing in the larger project of arriving at a satisfactory formulation of the doctrine of relativism, because once the appearance of outright contradiction is removed in the situations that are generally characterized as relativism-inducing disagreements, so too is the appearance that they involve a genuine disagreement. Contemporary relativists take it for granted that the only intuitive conception of relativism that is worth trying to elaborate is the one suggested by the Disagreement Intuition, and so they have responded to this objection by trying to refine their accounts of relative truth accordingly, so as to do what the objection says cannot be done—which is to retain the appearance of a disagreement while removing any outright contradiction. But in Section 3 I shall offer a very different strategy of response. With the help of an illustrative example, I will bring out that there are further reasons we should not expect to be able to retain the appearance of a genuine disagreement in the situations that are so often characterized as relativism-inducing disagreements. In addition to the fact that it is hard to retain the appearance of a genuine disagreement without supposing that the parties involved really are contradicting each other, there are, in any case, strong grounds for interpreting their claims in such a way that there is not even a surface appearance of contradiction between them. This interpretive point is very much in line with the difficulty I raise in Section 1, that the situations that are supposed to give rise to relativism-inducing disagreements lack the distinctive normative significance of a disagreement. Yet the example will bring out that there is nevertheless a distinctive normative response that such situations call for. It is distinctive in the following sense: although it is not the normative response that disagreements call for, it is also not the normative response that agreements call for either. Once we come to appreciate this fact about the situations that are alleged to be relativism-inducing disagreements—namely, that from a strictly normative point of view they are not properly characterized either as disagreements or as agreements—we can begin to see what supports the Alternatives Intuition. But it will take all of Chapter 2 to unpack that intuition, and to show that it can be elaborated in a satisfactory way, so as to yield a formulation of the doctrine of relativism that meets all four of the desiderata that I have imposed.

I will close this chapter by introducing the relevance of the fourth desideratum. This will be done via a discussion of a recent and influential attempt to rescue the Disagreement Intuition via the Relative Truth Intuition. Here again, the aim is the usual one of trying to absolve the relativist of the charge of logical incoherence, while preserving an appearance of genuine disagreement in the situations that are generally taken to give rise to relativism disagreements. But again, I will argue, the particular normative response that is called for in these situations is quite different from the normative response that disagreements generally call for. The conclusion that will emerge is that although we may be able to find logically coherent ways to portray these situations as disagreements, such portrayals do not help us to make sense of how it is possible to live in accord with the doctrine of relativism. Meeting that fourth desideratum will require making adequate normative sense of a situation that is neither disagreement nor agreement, and, as I have said, it is this task that will lead us back to the Alternatives Intuition.

1. A Prima Facie Difficulty for the Very Idea of a Relativism-Inducing Disagreement

Prior to contemporary debates about relativism, disagreement had been the implicit subject of a range of philosophical doctrines and positions ranging from Kant and Mill down to the positivists, and in those debates, the idea that some disagreements might be irresoluble met with varying degrees of hostility. I want to begin this section by considering why the idea was met with such hostility—not necessarily with a view to undermining the very idea of a relativism-inducing disagreement, but in order to get clear on what might be at stake in ever allowing or disallowing that some disagreements might be irresoluble. Once we get clear on this, we will be better able to see what, in general, the normative point in registering a disagreement really is. This in turn will afford a deeper understanding of the special character that relativism-inducing disagreements are supposed to have, and why they might be regarded as holding metaphysical and not merely epistemic significance—and hence, why starting with the Disagreement Intuition seems to promise a formulation of the doctrine of relativism that satisfies the second desideratum that I have set. However, we will also see that this special character of relativism-inducing disagreements ensures that they lack the usual normative significance of a disagreement—that is, the usual normative point of registering a disagreement is entirely missing in them. I will argue that this poses a prima facie difficulty for the Disagreement Intuition, one whose gravity will become more apparent as the chapter proceeds.

The idea of a relativism-inducing disagreement is to be contrasted with the idea of what I shall call an “ordinary” disagreement. In the former, it is supposed that the parties are both right, whereas in the latter it is taken for granted on all sides that the parties cannot both be right—at least one of them is mistaken. It is natural for us to approach such ordinary disagreements as occasions on which to figure out which party is mistaken and which (if either) is right, and when the parties do this to their mutual satisfaction, they thereby resolve their disagreements.

Some philosophers follow John Stuart Mill in placing a high epistemological value on promoting ordinary disagreements, because they view the process of resolving them as a good way to identify and correct errors, thereby advancing the overall state our knowledge. It is a little unclear to me whether this view entails that we are rationally required to always respond to our disagreements with others by trying to resolve them. But I do think it is clear that if anyone were to hold this, they would be going too far, because it is easy to imagine circumstances in which it would be rational to forego such an effort at resolution. All we need to do is imagine that we have much more confidence in our own judgments than the judgments of certain others with whom we disagree, and yet also have reason to refrain from trying to persuade them that they are mistaken—perhaps because we think they should be free to make their own mistakes, or that their mistakes are harmless, or that the chances of actually convincing them are too low to be worth the bother of trying. The important point is that even if we do not go so far as to place a supremely high value on always trying to resolve ordinary disagreements, we must still acknowledge that they always present the parties involved with something to be resolved, in the sense that they cannot both be right, and that so long as their disagreement is left unresolved, at least one of them will remain mistaken.

If ordinary disagreements present the parties involved with something to be resolved, it does not necessarily follow that such disagreements always can be resolved. Yet, I have noted that the suggestion that some of them might actually be irresoluble has been viewed with hostility by some philosophers. Reviewing the grounds of their hostility will enable us to identify some conditions that would have to be met in order to take the suggestion seriously.

The radical empiricist wing of logical positivism deliberately aimed to rule out the possibility of irresoluble disagreements by embracing an “empirical criterion of cognitive significance” according to which the meaning of any truth-value-bearer is exhausted by its empirical confirmation conditions, from which it follows that any issue over which we can meaningfully disagree can in principle be resolved by empirical means.² They did acknowledge that some traditional metaphysical issues that have generated controversy among philosophers appear not to be resoluble in this way. But they argued that if it really is the case that these controversies cannot be resolved, then the issues allegedly at stake in them do not sati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: How to Formulate the Doctrine of Relativism
• Part Two: Evaluating the Doctrine of Relativism
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index