Relativism Has Issues With Making Sense of Moral Conditionals
Relativists get their own Frege-Geach problem, as a treat
A few days ago, I put out a piece on moral relativism, and why I think it ends up falling victim to many of the same classic objections that people generally raise against emotivism. I’m happy with how it turned out overall, but there’s one big section that I really wanted to include even though I couldn’t ultimately find the space for it. See, near the end of the piece, I make a brief offhand reference to the Frege-Geach problem, and just mention in passing that I think relativism has its own issues with explaining how moral claims are supposed to work when they’re embedded in conditionals. I had originally planned to give a much more detailed account of what, exactly, I think those issues are, but it seemed like a bad idea to basically double the original piece’s word count — so now, dear reader, you get a follow-up piece with some highly sought-after unreleased material! How lucky.
First off, let me clarify what I mean when I talk about “moral conditionals.” When I use that term, I don’t just mean any moral judgment that depends on some sort of context, like “If your friend is planning on robbing a bank, then you should try to talk them out of it.” Relativism doesn’t have any serious problem making sense of claims like that, or at least the problem isn’t any worse than it would be for any other sort of claim. Rather, I’m talking about conditionals where the antecedent and consequent are both themselves moral assertions, like in the classic example that people often use to illustrate the Frege-Geach problem: “If it’s wrong to tell lies, then it’s wrong to get your little brother to tell lies.”
The issue for relativism, in my mind, is how we should understand where exactly the relevant moral framework “comes into the picture” — that is to say, whether the entire conditional should be taken relative to the framework, or each element individually, or some split down the middle. I’ll call these three basic approaches the external view, the internal view, and the partial view. In my mind, the internal view is pretty much dead in the water, so that would be a good place to start.
On this view, the conditional “If it’s wrong to tell lies, then it’s wrong to get your little brother to tell lies” breaks down into something like: If, relative to a moral framework M, it’s wrong to tell lies, then, relative to that same moral framework M, it’s also wrong to get your little brother to tell lies. But the problem with this view is that the resulting assertion just simply isn’t true, or at least it doesn’t have to be. After all, it’s not as if there’s any cosmic guarantee that a moral framework containing a prohibition against lying will also, as a matter of necessity, contain any additional prohibition against getting your little brother to lie.
It would certainly be weird, of course, to run into someone who believed that lying was wrong, while at the same time also being fine with getting your little brother to lie. But then again, people have exceedingly weird moral commitments all the time, right? At the end of the day, whether or not the elements of a given person’s moral framework will come together properly — whatever that even means given relativism! — is an empirical question, not a logical one. So while there are plenty of moral conditionals that you can reliably expect to come out true, none of them would actually be capable of expressing any legitimate entailment, which seems like a serious problem for the internal view.
So what about the external view instead? This would see the entire conditional as existing inside a moral framework, producing something like: Relative to a moral framework M, [if it’s wrong to tell lies, then it’s wrong to get your little brother to tell lies]. I would imagine that most relativists, if asked, would probably say this is how they personally understand moral conditionals — as an expression of what their own moral framework says about the implications of one commitment or another. And personally, I think it’s the most reasonable interpretation out there too. But there’s still a pretty major issue with it that I’m not sure relativists can really get around.
The issue is pretty simple: It just doesn’t seem to me that a normal person’s moral framework actually does give content to conditionals like these, especially when it comes to conditionals that involve moral assertions they don’t actually affirm. For example, I think it’s true that, if it’s morally wrong for a man to date another man, then it’s also morally wrong for a man to marry another man. That just seems true on a logical level. But of course I don’t think it is actually wrong for a man to date another man, and I don’t think my own moral commitments are what explain why the conditional holds. To me, what explains it instead is just my basic belief that moral judgments have to have consistent entailments — but that’s precisely what I’m worried that relativism can’t explain!
One possible solution to this dilemma might be for relativists to step back a level or two and identify some meta-principle that structures the first-order content of their framework, like “If X is wrong, then anything relevantly similar to X is also wrong.” But while that certainly closes the gap, it doesn’t really seem like a moral principle, so much as a logical one — and once you start introducing those sorts of structural second-order constraints, the “relativism” in question starts to look more and more like a degenerate constructivism.
Furthermore, what are we supposed to do with people who, for whatever reason, don’t have a framework governed by this kind of consistency principle? Would a relativist be forced to accept that “If it’s wrong to torture babies, then it’s wrong to torture toddlers too” could ever actually be false? That certainly seems crazy! But arguing that moral frameworks simply must be committed to consistency is, as I said, a dangerous move for relativists to make. And here’s the thing: Even if there is some relativist-friendly way to establish the constraint, the conditional statements it would produce still don’t seem like they’re about that constraint at all. Like, do I think “If segregating schools is good, then segregating restaurants is good” is true? I mean, I guess. But it’s obviously not as though, when I affirm that conditional, what I’m communicating is a personal commitment to keeping judgments about racial apartheid consistent!
Let me finish things off with the third option, the partial view. This would be the view that the moral framework only applies to the consequent of the conditional, giving something like: If it’s wrong to tell lies, then, relative to moral framework M, it’s wrong to get your little brother to tell lies. Personally, I can see why a view like this might appeal to some people, since it captures the commonsense notion that moral conditionals express what we think follows from a universal claim — but the problem, of course, is that there are no such universal claims about moral reality given relativism, so any analysis of moral conditionals with a non-relative aspect to it can’t possibly be true. And once you do try to ground the truth of the antecedent properly, you’ll need to give it its own relative framework, which just collapses things back into the untenable internal view.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying these problems are totally insurmountable, or that they count as some knockdown proof that relativism is false. I’m sure it would be more than possible for a committed relativist to find a semi-plausible way of dissolving the tension, or at least work up the courage you’d need to bite whatever bullets need biting. Still, I think these sorts of concerns are, if nothing else, yet another good example of all the work it takes to make relativism match up cleanly with the full range, depth, and complexity of everyday moral thought. And so long as the realist position gets all these things for free once you pay the ontological cost upfront, I think that’s a serious point in its favor, and one that doesn’t get acknowledged nearly enough.
Not a relativist, but wanted to ask a question about this passage:
“On [the internal] view, the conditional “If it’s wrong to tell lies, then it’s wrong to get your little brother to tell lies” breaks down into something like: If, relative to a moral framework M, it’s wrong to tell lies, then, relative to that same moral framework M, it’s also wrong to get your little brother to tell lies. But the problem with this view is that the resulting assertion just simply isn’t true, or at least it doesn’t have to be. After all, it’s not as if there’s any cosmic guarantee that a moral framework containing a prohibition against lying will also, as a matter of necessity, contain any additional prohibition against getting your little brother to lie.”
This passage confused me because it feels like we could raise the exact same objection to the realist’s explanation of this conditional: the objective wrongness of lying doesn’t necessarily entail the objective wrongness of getting others to lie - there’s no “cosmic guarantee,” as you put it.
Just as a general observation: I think your entire approach to arguing against relativism is wrongheaded, because the thrust of the arguments is not that moral relativism is incorrect, but that it doesn’t make sense: it’s in some way incoherent. I don’t find this approach very threatening, as subjectivist. Rather than the very obvious and productive approach of arguing why there are objective moral facts that rational agents must accept, which would establish the truth of moral realism, the approach relies on there scholastic, circuitous attempts to say that what relativists are trying to say is out of bounds. I think all such attempts are doomed to failure. A good way of understanding subjectivism is that we say that the human social practices and psychological commitments to morality are all there is. Now, explaining how statements are true is just a philosophically tricky thing. It’s tricky for ordinary empirical statements, it’s tricky for fictional or hypothetical statements. But there is clearly a sense in which ‘according to Roman Catholicism, abortion is wrong’ is true. And that sense, I presume is understandable and distinct from saying ‘abortion is objectively wrong’. But since I am confident that it is quite sensible to talk about whether x is right or wrong according to utilitarianism, or deontology, or Roman Catholicism, or whatever moral code you choose, there is no fundamental way in which moral subjectivism makes no sense. It does make sense: it may arguably be tricky to explain how it makes sense, but that’s just because in philosophy even things that are obviously fine often are tricky to cash out precisely.
Anyway, relativism does NOT have trouble making sense of anything here. The correct answer to your question is, I believe, what you call internalism, which is actually not problematic at all in my opinion. Ask yourself: what would we say about an actually existing moral framework faced with these kind of questions? So according to deontology, if it’s wrong to lie, does it make it wrong to encourage your little brother to lie? Yeah, probably, but I guess the deontologists have to work that out. A framework has various commitments: what do they commit you to? If an answer isn’t specified, the framework is incomplete and needs to be further specified to answer the question. These kinds of problems arise ALL the TIME for real moral theories. Consider, for example, Rabbinic students, who spend basically their whole lives debating the meaning and implications of the laws they accept. It’s a question of interpreting the system from within, and supplementing the system if you need to.
You seem to be operating with the assumption that there’s something _wrong_ with a moral framework where you wouldn’t draw the implication that it’s wrong to encourage your little brother to lie. But there isn’t according to a subjectivist. A moral system might have presumptions that license that inference, or it might not. If it does: great! Not only is it wrong to lie in this moral framework, it is also wrong to encourage your little brother to lie. I take it that deontology probably says this. But hey, the thing that makes you lying have bad consequences doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your little brother lying will have the same bad consequences: maybe in utilitarianism that conditional doesn’t follow. But this whole thing is just not a problem for relativism AT ALL. It’s just a kind of interesting question about what sort of commitments different moral frameworks might have, which is quite orthogonal to the question of whether any moral framework _is objectively correct_.