Topics Ethics

Question Many people attack moral relativism on the grounds that accepting moral relativism implies that there is no more reason to ever consider anybody's behavior to be wrong, and that it therefore becomes impossible to punish wrongdoers (because there won't be any). For example, moral relativism would imply that we can't intervene in an abusive household or protect battered women whose religious believes would have them submit to their husbands or male relatives. Why is tolerance and abstention assumed to be a fundamental quality of moral relativism? After all, if moral relativism implies it isn't wrong for my neighbour to beat his wife because he believes God allows it, then moral relativism also implies it isn't wrong for me to call the police on him, or for the police to lock him behind bars, or even for me to go over and protect his wife myself, physically if necessary. So why is moral relativism assumed to go hand-in-hand with being passive and (essentially) impotent? Is there really some link that I'm missing?

Accepted:
October 27, 2010

Comments

Your argument is fine so far as it goes, and it would be perfectly consistent for you to endorse moral relativism and also to protect the victims of what you consider to be wrongdoing -- for example, by locking up the perpetrators. But it would be difficult to justify such imprisonment as punishment. It is generally thought to be legitimate to punish people only when they are guilty in the minimal sense that they could or should have known that what they were doing was wrong. This is why we generally don't punish animals, children, the mentally handicapped and the temporarily insane. (To be sure, we find other ways to render them harmless in the future, but we don't think they deserve to be harmed for what they did.) Now if moral relativism were true, then there could be many views about right and wrong that are no worse supported than our own views; and then it cannot be said of the persons who acted wrongly by our lights that they should have known that what they were doing was wrong. These persons would then, by our lights, not be guilty and hence not be fit for punishment. But we would still want to protect their potential victims, of course, and so we would deprive them of some of their freedoms anyway.

To conclude, moral relativism does not entail the conclusion you challenge. As moral relativists, we can still protect people from those we judge to be wrongdoers. And we could even change our own moral view: coming to hold that it is permissible to inflict punitive pains upon people for what they had done even though they could not have known that their conduct was wrong.