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.
Re: “No one thinks that being in pain depends on whether people think you are in pain. That would be insane.” The problem with this absolute truth is that mostly insane people decide who is sane and who isn’t and what counts as insane behaviour. And it happens in too many institutions and organizations up to and including governments and UN.
There is a military joke I am fond of that reflects this point:
– Why are there such thick and walls around military bases?
– So that stupidity doesn’t get out and common sense doesn’t get in.
All too true: insanity is not self-aware but deceives itself. It seems to thrive in institutional settings.
Why think that attitudes are independent of natural facts in such a way that we can hold the latter fixed while varying the former? If we can’t, then we won’t have two situations identical in terms of natural facts but differing morally, even by the moral relativist’s standard.
A different point/question: Why aren’t attitudes natural facts?
That’s the whole point of relativism–that people can have different attitudes towards the same facts, which they clearly can, e.g., slavery, abortion, capital punishment. Attitudes are natural facts (unlike values), but they are not intrinsic to the action or state of affairs.
But on some relativisms the attitudes that matter for the morality of an action or practice are the attitudes of those in the culture to which the action or practice belongs. In a culture where slavery is approved, changing the attitudes of those people would arguably require changing various natural facts. So it’s not obvious that supervenience would fail. It’s not obvious that you could hold all the natural facts fixed while changing the attitudes.
Remember that supervenience is metaphysically necessary not merely psychologically necessary or some such. I think if we changed the brains of the slavery-approvers with brain surgery we would not change the moral facts.
I’m no relativist, that’s for sure, I’m just questioning your incompatibility claim. I’m wondering why you can be confident that two situations naturally identical could be morally different on certain relativist views. A moral difference on such views would require a difference in attitudes. But there can’t be if attitudes supervene on natural facts.
Maybe your incompatibility claim holds for only some implausible/unsophisticated relativisms.
Attitudes don’t supervene on facts about the action or state of affairs itself, e.g., someone causing an animal pain. There might not even be any attitudes about this.
A relativist could say that moral facts supervene on facts about attitudes and that facts about attitudes supervene on natural facts. If so, then moral facts would supervene on natural facts. Supervenience is transitive, right?
Two situations naturally identical would be attitudinally identical and so morally identical. Supervenience holds and morality supervenes on attitudes. Would you deny that such a view is truly relativistic?
But facts about attitudes clearly don’t supervene on facts external to the person for the simple reason that he is a separate entity. My beliefs about the tree in my garden don’t supervene on the tree–you have to bring in facts about me such as my brain state. Isn’t this painfully obvious?
I think we’re thinking of the supervenience bases differently. If moral facts are relative to attitudinal facts, then it makes no sense to ask about the moral status of a situation independently of some set of attitudinal facts. And once such a set is in place, we can ask whether the natural facts on which those attitudes *and* the situation supervene fix the moral facts. And the relativist can say yes.
But the undeniable fact is that moral truths do supervene on intrinsic (non-attitudinal) facts about the action, but this is inconsistent with moral values varying across societies.
But now it seems that you’re just begging the question against the relativist.
No, because I was pointing out an inconsistency between traditional moral supervenience and traditional relativism not the kind you have in mind. Also, I brought up the point about moral justification.