by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
I had in interesting argument the other night. Not interesting because of the content precisely. It was old ground about the rationale for being in Iraq and Afghanistan and this person took the position of the post hoc rationalization “to contain Iran” and that – and this was a new one, funny but new – that our reason for being there was based on our need as driven by the hostage crisis of the 70’s. It wasn’t a match against a skilled opponent. He was about as smart and skilled at argumentation as a house plant and that is really an insult to house plants. But what was interesting was when the topic turned to the idea of just wars and ethical relativism. I’ll summarize the just war argument to give some context and then show how ethical relativism came into the conversation because it got me thinking about ethical relativism (and its natural cousin moral relativism). Is it a good idea or a path to anarchy?
Summary of the just war argument:
A’s Primary Contention: We went to war in Iraq to contain Iran because we’re on a 70’s style revenge mission for the hostage taking. (Ed. Note: Seriously. That was the claim.)
B’s Primary Contention: The rationale given the public for invading Iraq was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In the end, there were no WMDs, no support of terrorism, and the Iraqis were a lot better off before we removed the only stabilizing force holding their secular country together and destroyed their infrastructure. The just war would have been to attack those who attacked us on 9/11, the Saudis with help from Afghani terrorist training bases. It would have given us the same benefits as invading Iraq (oil, common border with Iran) and come at a substantially lower cost to materials and troops when combined with an in and out strategy in Afghanistan (which history has proven to be fairly immune to long term occupation because of geographic and societal factors).
A: There is no such thing as a just war. Name one.
B: I can name two. American entry into WWII and the Revolutionary War come to mind, but there are other examples of just war through history.
A: We went to war to make rich men richer.
B: Really. And that is a reason to wage war that is just?
A: I haven’t heard the term “just war” since Medieval History class. You’re a (*#$#($*#head.
B: That’s all very interesting but I think you don’t know what a just war is. %$*($%$.
A: I know there is no such thing.
B: I can think of a couple of examples. Coming to the defense of your allies in the face of outside aggression, in defense of attack or in retribution of an attack by foreign forces.
A: There’s no such thing as a just war. Just depends on your perspective.
B: No. It doesn’t. There are some ethical absolutes.
A: No there aren’t.
B: Saying there aren’t and proving there aren’t are two separate things.
A: You *()$(#)($#) $)#$()#$ ()$#$!
B: That’s still not proving there aren’t, )($#)()@head. Are there are are there no ethical absolutes? Yes or no.
A: That’s a stupid question.
B: It’s not stupid just because you can’t answer it. It’s a simple question.
[Much back and forth of “stupid” and/or ($#_)#@$#% combined with a rebuttal of “non-responsive, try again”.]
A: People make ethical judgements all the time.
B: That’s not what I asked. Are there ethical absolutes or not?
A: Have your ethics changed over time?
B: Yes they have but that is irrelevant to the question here: are there ethical absolutes or not?
A: You’ve got nothing!
B: You saying I’ve got nothing is not the same as you proving I’ve got nothing. Are you an ethical relativist?
A: Give me an example of an ethical absolute.
B: Human life has value. Protecting it is a good thing.
A: That’s true, but I just want to see some people die.
B: Then you are an ethical relativist and we really don’t have much more to discuss.
A: You’re jumping to conclusions.
B: No I’m not. If human life has value except when you “want to see someone die”, then you are an ethical relativist.
The rest of the conversation was basically A drunkenly ranting about how I (B) didn’t know $*(# and that he had me just where he wanted me (on my knees) before he called me a little girl and proclaimed victory. I was very not impressed. I’d say it was embarrassing for him, but he proudly proclaimed that “ignorance was not a problem for him” and that he thought “retrograde drunken Neanderthal” was a compliment. But I digress . . .
It all got me thinking about ethical relativism though.
What is ethical relativism? It is the philosophical theory stating that ethics are relative to the norms of one’s culture; whether an action is right or wrong depends on the ethical and moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. There are no universal ethical or moral standards and the only standards against which a society’s practices can be judged are its own. The implication of this is there can be no common framework for resolving moral disputes or for reaching agreement on ethical matters among members of different cultures. We know from history that this is not the case. Some acts are considered to by universally wrong or right among the human species. Most ethicists reject ethical relativism because while the practices of societies may differ, the fundamental ethical and moral principles underlying these practices do not. Consider cultures where euthanasia is practiced like some Eskimo tribes when parents declare they are ready to die because of old age or illness, their families would kill them directly or leave them on the ice to die at the hands of nature. This would be frowned upon in our culture, but if you look at the underlying principle – taking care of one’s parents – both societies hold this principle as valuable.
Secondly, it’s an important topic because a kind of ethical relativism is encouraged in law schools under the guise of giving all comers adequate representation and ensuring a fair trial. It’s also something you see more often now in public behavior than in the past: rationalizations of bad behavior based on personal desire rather than ethical or moral principle. “I wanted to feel what killing someone felt like,” said 17 year old killer of 9 year old Elizabeth Olten. Truly a sign of someone with a broken ethical compass probably based in mental illness, but it illustrates the first problem with ethical relativism. It injects ego into the equation.
Consequently and concurrently we cannot remove ego from the equation altogether. If the ethical rightness or wrongness of an action depends on a societal norms, then the logical implication is that to be ethical that one must obey the norms of one’s society because deviance would be unethical or immoral. This leads to an interesting conundrum. If a member of a society that believes that racial or sexist practices are ethically wrong but they are permissible within that society, then one must accept those practices as morally right. This view is both oppressive and narrow in promoting unthinking social conformity and leaves no possibility for ethical and/or moral reform or improvement within a society. Consider that a lack of uniform majority though on a matter may not have created an ethical or moral standard to follow with the members of a society holding different views. Consider the example of the United States. Need I say more than “abortion” or “animal testing” or “medical marijuana” to provide examples of such unsettled ethical questions?
One of the strongest arguments against ethical relativism comes from the assertion that universal ethical and/or moral standards can exist even if some practices and beliefs vary among cultures. In other words, it is possible to acknowledge cultural differences and still find that some of these practices and beliefs are wrong. Consider that although the Aztec had a society that was in some ways more advanced that their contemporary European counterparts, that their practice of human sacrifice is simply wrong. Just so, the barbaric treatment of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped by Nazi society is ethically and morally reprehensible regardless of the beliefs of the Nazis. Ethics are an intellectual inquiry into right and wrong through applying critical thought to the underlying reasons of various ethical and/or moral practices and beliefs. Ethical relativism fails to recognize that some societies may have better reasons for holding their views than other societies.
However, although ethical relativism has much going against it, it does remind us to examine and consider that different societies have different ethical and/or moral beliefs and invites us to examine those forces influence within our own culture. The only way to reach universal ethical truths whenever possible is through examining and challenging our own ethical systems by comparing them to other systems.
Can ethical relativism lead to anarchy? When everything is relative, there are no true stable standards, so I think the answer is yes.
Should ethical relativism be discouraged in our educational systems and society as a whole or do you teach it with the proper caveats and perspective to make it a useful tool instead of a dangerous tool?
Is ethical relativism a good thing or a bag thing?
Or is it like most tools dependent upon the user’s intent and application?
What do you think?
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger.
Blouise 1, October 22, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Dredd,
I watched a program the other night ā¦ canāt remember the title as I was flipping channels when I happened upon it. The presentation went something like (and donāt quote me):
70 some million years ago a volcano erupted (Mount Toba volcano):
āThe six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Tobaās eruption may have decimated Modern Manās entire population.
…
In other words, Toba may have caused Modern Races to differentiate abruptly only 70,000 years ago, rather than gradually over one million years.ā
==================================================
Homo has only been around 200,000 years.
The Fifth Mass Extinction, the K-T Boundary extinction, was about 65 million years ago, well before Homo, and was caused by an asteroid as I stated and linked up-thread
@Bob: Well, I do not think you can know if anybody else is convinced of said truth.
As for counter-factual, that is obviously not true, I am arguing for a different approach that would produce, perhaps, a different take on social contract theory. I am not arguing at all about how the current social contract theory is formulated, except to say I think it began from a false premise.
Anarchy in general is a desperation state of affairs that occurs when basic survival is at stake and there are not enough resources to go around. I do not think it is human nature for people to submit to government rule and give up their autonomy under such circumstances, to me it makes far more sense that they would consent to be governed and follow rules when they could afford to do that, e.g. not when they are worried about whether their child is going to starve to death. In sociology (and the reality is reflected in much fiction) we see that poverty and desperation often drive law breaking behavior.
I do not think anarchy or desperation is a viable starting point for suddenly consenting to be governed; and as I said before, society was here all along, people did not leave a state of anarchy to form a society.
Tony,
Not for nothing, but argument for inquiry still requires assent of an audience; i.e. convinced of said truth.
You’re forming arguments based on counterfactual premises regarding social contract theory.
You may as well be arguing that the moon is made of green cheese.
@Gene: That you dismiss a theory based on observation and sound logic because you donāt like that the pedigree is philosophy and not science?
Except I do not; only you claim that I do. I am not swayed by the pedigree at all, I would be disgusted with myself if I were, it is against everything I believe in as a scientist; bias for or against an argument because of a pedigree is equivalent to an appeal to authority or tradition in my mind; it is irrational. Ideas stand or fall on their own.
My bias is not because it was a philosopher, my bias is because it is fiction. I would be just as dismissive if Newton himself proposed it; we should not make decisions about peoples lives by reasoning about what we might do in some post apocalyptic Mad Max scenario.
And again, since you do not seem to get it, I am not in denial about the history of law or how the state of nature was used at all, just as I am not in denial about the history of religion or how the arguments for divine guidance have been used at all.
My argument is that the ‘state of nature’ is a fiction that never existed and is NOT the ideal starting place for understanding why humans created or desire a government. The ideal starting place is to understand the truth of why they did it, and the truth is they did not do it because their alternative was anarchy, as the argument proceeding from a ‘state of anarchy’ hypothetical obviously suggests.
You might as well say they formed the government to fight dragons, which they then defeated, and that is why we do not see dragons, but the government proved to have other uses. So you, too, feel free to reason from fiction, and you will undoubtedly continue to INVENT fiction by claiming I said things I never said, and hold biases I do not hold, and that I am ignorant where I am not, because apparently coming to false conclusions about somebody else’s mind comforts you.
Tony,
Trapped hasn’t got a thing to do with it except in your mind. If you feel like trapped is an issue? Maybe that should tell you something.
That you dismiss a theory based on observation and sound logic because you don’t like that the pedigree is philosophy and not science? Is your ridiculous irrational bias to deal with. While you’re at it? You might as well throw the scientific method out the window too because ultimately its roots are in metaphysics which I will remind you is a form of philosophy. Not to do so would be hypocritical on your part since you’re so busy dismissing anything rooted in philosophy.
You apparently think science is the only path to true solutions and this is simply not so. To deny that is to fly in the face of mathematics. You know. Mathematics. That thing that is the language of science. Multiple solution paths are simply a mathematical fact. You claim to seek the truth but when it is presented to you, you stomp your feet and say “Only 5+5=10! It can never be 12-2=10 because I don’t believe in subtraction!”
That you also persistently fail to understand both the metaphor of the state of nature and its utility in defining two very real properties of a group (anarchy and social order) is quite simply one of the larger intellectual fails I’ve ever seen from someone who is otherwise an intelligent person. The state of nature of this metaphor is simply one side of the spectrum where the tipping point has been passed and the fundamental state of the system changes from one property (ordered) to another (chaotic). This should be easy for you to understand.
There is no magical thinking here, Tony.
There is simply you being wrong as a matter of your faulty logic, denial about the facts of the history of law in general and this theory in particular and your bias against anything not meeting your rather interesting definition science that discounts that disciplines origins in the very same root-bed as the law.
Oh, and that huge lump of ego you keep tripping over.
Like I said, feel free to be as wrong as you like. If it helps with your self image to think you are confusion proof? Knock yourself out. The only person harmed by your wilful ignorance is you.
@Bob: The goal of argumentation is to win the assent of the audience.
Perhaps for a lawyer. For a scientist, the goal of argumentation is to arrive at the best approximation of truth we can find.
Oh, and what Gene said.
Tony,
The goal of argumentation is to win the assent of the audience.
And Tony, may I just say that that is perhaps the most solipsistic approach to an analysis of the social contract that I’ve ever read.
@Gene: I understood what you said just fine.
No you didn’t, somebody that understood what I said would not have written what you wrote, unless you were purposely mischaracterizing my claim.
You accuse me of bullheadedness while practicing it, Gene. I do not admit I am wrong when I do not believe that I am, and you do not admit you are wrong when you do not believe that you are. That is as it should be, and neither is evidence of being correct. I believe that starting from scratch and taking a scientific and fact-based approach to what was a fiction-based philosophical approach has always ended up in a superior understanding and application.
There is no way to take the ancient fiction-based philosophical belief that all things were composed of “fire, water, earth and air” and turn that into quantum physics. Even if, as they did, they continued to invent more fictions of sympathetic magic in order to try and make their fiction comport with reality. The fictional concepts had to be abandoned in order to move forward toward more sophisticated understandings.
These are not gyrations to escape, because I do not think I am trapped in the least, I think I stand on solid ground and you are defending magical thinking. You certainly know the law as it stands better than I do, and the history of the law as well. If you are telling me that the ‘state of nature’ is not really the basis of the law and the reasoning no longer depends on it, then good. I am glad. If you are not telling me that, then I am surprised you prefer a philosophical metaphor to the truth.
Tony,
I understood what you said just fine. You are the one with the understanding gap here. Your bias against anything you perceive as non-scientific is creating a staggering blind spot for you. Read (and better yet understand) my previous post. Surely I don’t have to explain the meaning of heuristics to you.
Or you can continue to try to tell me that you know legal history and theory better than an entire profession if that assuages your massive ego requirement that every solution must come from purely science (despite it being manifestly logical that correct solutions may be reached by more than one path) and that you get to remain “right” even if it is only in your mind. I have told you the truth about the social compact theory. If your choice is to remain wilfully ignorant rather than see your error (or, FSM forbid! admit it), that is your choice and the only person harmed is you.
Quite frankly your gyrations to escape the appearance of being in error is growing as tedious as those who deny the reality of evolution simply because the word “theory” is attached to it.
@Gene: No one writing the Code of Hammurabi was sitting around thinking āWell because of the nature of social animals and their sense of fairness as observed in lower primates, we should make this law equitable.ā
I did not say that, either, so again you misinterpret what I wrote, so again I will try a different angle. The people WERE social animals ALREADY, and modern cognition developed after they were social animals for many millions of years, long enough for the rules of society to be encoded in the most effective place evolution had at the time, the emotional feelings and reactions.
So when people finally sat down to code laws, they weren’t thinking about social animals, they WERE social animals, and they were thinking about how THEY felt, and what they felt was fair, and unfair, and equitable. The code of Hammurabi borrows (or at least came to the same conclusions as) from the code of Ur-Nammu 300 years earlier, and that code specifically states in its first line that the law was created to promote truth and equity (fairness) in the land.
And your belief does not change that you are ignoring that the social compact as understood through the lens of heuristics is the scientific based approach to the subject, Tony. That which you claim to not believe in for being based on magical thinking instead of science has been based in rational observation (heuristics – just like science) for the last 100 years. You have a bias and it is fairly screaming out loud to everyone but you. Because the term state of nature is a metaphorical term coined to describe a concept (anarchy versus social order) which is valid, but because that term was coined by a professional philosopher instead of a scientist you somehow think that automatically invalidates the idea when it most certainly does not. The metaphor stands and remains useful because observation proved it to be a good and useful metaphor, not simply because Hobbes and Locke were philosophers. Although the social compact movement started in the spooky language of writers like Grotius and Locke, it evolved to the non-spooky language of Rousseau and into the practically scientific language of Rawls and the utilitarians.
Like I said, you are not ignorant. You have generally the right idea. You are just in error of the facts of the matter because you want the right model to come from science proper when in fact the right model is already here and based in heuristics applied to philosophy. What you claim to want is what the modern theory actually provides – a rational evidence based theory of government and its legitimacy.
@Gene: science is not the historical basis of legal theory
I did not say it was, Gene, and I am not pretending it was. And the emotional reactions that produce socially cooperative group cohesion precedes both philosophy and religion by millions of years. My claim is that with the benefit of scientific progress to date we can NOW understand better why and how government originated, and that understanding comports with what we see today are the most demanded functions of government.
Fiction based philosophy (including but not limited to religion) also used to inform physics, and chemistry, and weather prediction, and biology, and medicine. The introduction of fact-based science to those disciplines has improved them, and made irrelevant (or even laughable) the fictions that used to inform those disciplines; and continues to do so.
I am not denying the ‘state of nature’ is important to current legal philosophy, I am saying it is a fiction based philosophy and I believe a fact-based scientific approach would produce superior results.
OS,
Only use it for Scrabble … make everything private … no friends of friends etc. Takes about five minutes to do then go to the apps icon and get Scrabble then let us know and we’ll request friend status voila … I only have 5 friends and all we do is play Scrabble
“It is a scientific approach, not a philosophical approach” and that is why it is fundamentally flawed, Tony. It’s what you want it to be, not what it is. What the history of the law reveals is that law had its start in philosophy and/or religion. Those were the tools men past used to decide what constituted right or wrong. Then came ethics. Then came scientific method to inform the whole lot. However, the introduction of the scientific method to jurisprudence is a fairly recent development in human history but that kind of evidence based thinking is demonstrated in the heuristic approach to the social compact. No one writing the Code of Hammurabi was sitting around thinking “Well because of the nature of social animals and their sense of fairness as observed in lower primates, we should make this law equitable.” They didn’t have modern science as a guide, Tony. The smart ones used reason in philosophy and then the more logic and evidence driven study of ethics came to the fore. The less rational used the top down dictates of religious dogma and religious based philosophy. You are now committing both the historian’s fallacy (assuming that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing an issue) and the fallacy of presentism (historical analysis in which present-day ideas like modern social mores and modern tools like the scientific method are projected into the past).
And you matter how many time you repeat it, science is not the historical basis of legal theory no matter how badly you want it to be. You should be content that at the cutting edge of modern jurisprudence, the scientific method does inform it.
Blouise, you are not the first to suggest I set up a fake Facebook page. I have resisted so far, because I don’t have time for all the other things that take up time I don’t have to spare.
I have not forgotten your offer on the pipes. My youngest is still trying to catch up with her piping instructor. He has a new job at a new school teaching special needs kids, and has been scarce lately. Her other piping instructor moved to Florida.
@Bob Esq: t is a restatement of the origin of rights and society from which we build government.
No it is NOT a restatement of the origin of rights, it is a fictional imagining of the origin of rights. Rights originated in the emotions of proto-Man living in societal groups, they did not originate in a ‘state of nature” that never existed.
The real question is WHY do we have any rights at all? What justifies that privilege? Why is it wrong to murder, steal, cheat or deceive? The answer is always some phrasing of the concept of what constitutes fair treatment, equitable treatment, justice in the form of deserved punishment (equal to the crime) and injustice in the form of undeserved punishment.
Where does that sense that things should be fair come from? It exists in so many socially cooperative animals (i.e. not including herds or flocks that forage independently) that it is probably a necessity of living in socially cooperative groups to avoid being overwhelmed by free riders.
The ‘state of nature’ has nothing to do with why we built government, as we developed the power of abstract thinking, we evolved government to serve our inherent sense of fairness, equity, justice, and punishment in ever larger societal groups.
That is where government came from, 5000 years ago (at least) or more likely 60,000 years ago; it was empowered by the people to establish equity. The oldest stone tablets and laws are specific and literal about fairness, including the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, life-for-a-life laws of Hammurabi.
Basing the law upon the ‘state of nature’ argument is like basing your life on belief in a magical prophet transcribing the words of an imaginary God. They are similar because the false basis may still allow you to come to some valid conclusions, but both require twisting parts, ignoring parts, and declaring some parts to be metaphorical and meaning something entirely different than the literal words. In other words the false basis just gets rationalized away whenever it is inconvenient to what we know is the truth (about life or the law).
In proto-man, when foraging groups grew large they split. This controlled the size of the groups, so that our instinctual enforcements of social cohesion (anger, lashing out, crying, threats, peer pressure and the fear of being outcast for bad behavior) were enough to keep the group together and cooperating.
Genetic mutations in our brain led to larger groups, so large, more than 150 or so, that these instinctual methods begin to break down. (The limit is derived from both historical and modern sociological studies of associations, political groups, business groups and clubs and how they tend to fracture and why; one of the reasons is a natural limit on how many people the average person can keep up with in their circle.)
Normally that would lead to group fracture; a large cohesive splinter (30% or so) would go their own way; and problem solved. But when the reason for the groups growing larger is more intelligent cooperation, some division of duties, exploiting fixed resources (like farms or a river or lake), then splitting becomes problematic. Neither side wants to give up the resource. The easier solution is to use the abstract thinking that created the problem in the first place: formalize as laws those instinctual methods of sharing and punishment that lead to social cohesion. Define rules of behavior and make it somebody’s job to enforce the rules.
That eventually leads to its own problems in the concentration of power (and interpretation) of the law, but the point remains. Government is about preserving social cohesion in groups that are just too large for everybody to be lifelong acquaintances with everybody else
That is how government (most plausibly) was really built, as an extension of our emotional needs for equity and fairness to preserve social cohesion. That is why the vast majority of laws in the last 5000 years have been about punishing the violent or punishing the cheats (thieves, frauds, liars, contract breakers). Government was built for justice, which has its literal roots in the words “fair,” “equitable” and “correct.” Although we analyze acts of people in various situations analytically, whether they are “fair” or “equitable” is something we typically interpret emotionally, it is a usually a feeling, not a rational conclusion, because fairness and equity are part of our inherent emotional nature.
I think fundamental rights are a later simplifying abstraction (and a good one), but also based in social cohesion. I think the administration of cooperative efforts is another later abstraction, but cooperation itself came first: It was cooperative survival (farming, ranching, hunting, trapping and territorial defense) that led to the growth that led to the need for government in the first place.
Understanding the most plausible real roots of government and its fundamental purpose (equity and fairness to preserve social cohesion) can lead us to better government. It does not change the conclusion that government should be at the consent of the governed, and should serve the governed, and should be the sole authorized user of force. It does not change the idea of fair contracts being enforced. All of those characteristics become obvious.
What it can inform are the priorities and limitations of government; what it also obviously justifies is much of the Bill of Rights, the social programs that care for the elderly and sick and disabled that have always been a part of society, it justifies the socialization of education in the name of equity and egalitarianism, it justifies taxation and spending on common infrastructure.
Derision and insult do not persuade me; they are emotional reactions, not rational arguments. Clutching a copy of Locke is no different than clutching the Bible or Koran or Atlas Shrugged; widespread acceptance of any treatise derived from a fictional premise is not a measure of whether it is plausible or makes sense in the real world.
My framework for understanding government is derived from what I believe (with archaeological and sociological evidence) is the most probable real world justification for government in the first place.
It is a scientific approach, not a philosophical approach, because I do not wish to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether God can make a rock he cannot move. Debating fictional philosophical premises is entertaining but far too arbitrary for me to take seriously; I am interested in the real world and real people, and real arguments. I do not consider appeals to authority a real argument; if I did I doubt I could be a scientist; half the job of discovery or invention is suspecting that some dogma is wrong or an authority is mistaken.
OS,
Set up a fake facebook page using a variation of the OS screen name then send me an email … I’ll play games with you all day … š
Mike S.,
Just get the app on facebook and since we’re “friends” simply start a game with me. “Step into my parlour” …
I haven’t played Scrabble in more than forty years. I finally gave it up because no one would play with me. I did play a lot of Monopoly in grad school because I am terrible at it and all my friends knew they could take me easily. Apparently I never figured out the secret strategy for winning; either that, or I don’t have the killer instinct needed to take over the world.