Morality, Relativism, and Supervenience

Morality, Relativism, and Supervenience

I find it hard to believe that the point I am about to make has not been made before, so I state that it must have been. If so, this may serve as a welcome repetition, for the point is a good one. It is that moral supervenience and moral relativism are inconsistent with each other. The former says that moral predications supervene on the natural, descriptive, or factual properties of the act in question: if one, then necessarily the other. Nothing needs to be added to get to the moral predication; in no possible world does the entailment fail to hold. But moral relativism claims that the underlying non-moral properties are not sufficient for the moral ones, since the latter are dependent on the attitudes of a given individual or group of individuals. The former properties are intrinsic to the act or state of affairs, but the latter are relational: the moral property is relative to a community, and so can vary from community to community depending on the attitudes held. But that is inconsistent with the assertion that the moral supervenes on the intrinsic non-moral properties of the act. For moral opinions and other attitudes are not supervenient on those underlying non-moral properties (e.g., the fact that someone is in pain). Opinions and facts are not necessarily correlated, but values and facts are. Being good is supervenient on non-value facts, but being thought to be good is not—that depends on the properties of the appraiser. Thus, moral relativism is inconsistent with moral supervenience.

So what–can’t we just give up supervenience? The inconsistency is certainly a pause-giving result, but is abandoning supervenience available to a relativist otherwise demolished? But how could it be that two situations are exactly alike in all non-moral respects and yet differ morally? Don’t right and wrong, good and bad, depend on the facts of the case? If not, they are worthless categories; we may as well just talk only about attitudes and get it over with. Then we have the anodyne doctrine that people can have different attitudes towards the same thing, perhaps because of ignorance; we don’t have the startling claim that one and the same thing can be both good and bad (at the same time). We don’t have to say that pain can be bad here but not bad elsewhere, despite being exactly the same in both places (except location). Supervenience certainly has common sense on its side; relativism is mind-numbingly revisionary—and for what? But we can say more: we can cite the factual properties of a situation in order to justify a moral evaluation, but that won’t work under relativism. We can say that the existence of pain justifies the assertion that it’s wrong to stick a pin in someone, but the relativist can’t say that—he has to say that the justification for not sticking a pin in someone is that other people are not of the opinion that pain is bad. That is what the moral evaluation depends upon not the fact of pain itself. The normal practice of moral evaluation collapses once supervenience is denied, because it is really neither here nor there what people think about pain; what matters is pain itself. So, supervenience can’t be rationally abandoned. But it is inconsistent with moral relativism. Therefore, moral relativism must be rejected. Values are not the same as opinions about them.[1]

[1] This is really an absolute truism, hardly worth enunciating, but relativism has a remarkable hold over the callow mind, so truisms must be treated as contentious doctrines to be ingeniously argued for. Why morality should excite such skepticism I don’t know. No one thinks that we should give up supervenience about the mind because people have minds only relative to a community! No one thinks that being in pain depends on whether people think you are in pain. That would be insane. Yet they think that pain’s being bad depends on people thinking it’s bad. Pain is bad no matter what some idiot happens to think.