Dealing with relativism

I said that the fundamental challenge of relativism to the emotivist was that there seemed to be no reason why the mere fact that I rec­ommended a certain attitude should lead someone else to accept it.

One of the most important recent moral philosophers, the British philosopher R. M. Hare, has taken up this challenge. He starts, like Kant, with the recognition that moral claims are categorical imper­atives and that they must be universalizable. But he also recognizes that these two formal demands on moral principles need to be added to, if we are to end up with a really substantial moral view. And he deals with the problems raised both by Attila the Hun and by Hitler, in two different ways.

Hare's way of dealing with the problems raised by someone such as Hitler is to restrict the kinds of features of actions and situations that we are allowed to take into account in universalizing our categorical imperatives.

The idea that we should treat everybody equally and the idea that we should consider the consequences for them of what we do together rule out the principles of racists such as Hitler as moral principles. These basic ideas are the parts of the Golden Rule that the universalizability principle leaves out. Hare sometimes suggests that we should not call a principle that discriminates, as Hitler's did, between different kinds of people a “moral principle.” Given the way most of us use the word “moral,” this is probably right. But even if we would not call it a moral principle (but, perhaps, an immoral one), this doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is that even if we wouldn't call this principle “moral,” the mere fact that Hitler espoused the principle does not show that he had a defective reason. So we are still left with the problem of relativism: the problem that we don't seem to have any reason to expect Hitler to come to agree with us simply because we announce our con-attitude to racial discrimination.

In other words, even though Hitler himself was wrong about the facts—Jewish people did not cause Germany's problems—and probably not a very sound reasoner, neither of these deficiencies seems to account for his moral errors. I shall get back to the ques­tion of how we should react to this fact in a moment. For now, let us return to Attila the Hun and see what Hare has to say about him.

Hare calls someone like Attila the Hun a “fanatic.” Fanatics are people who are willing to universalize maxims that allow them to do things to other people that they would not like done to themselves.

In order to decide whether you can universalize a maxim, you should consider what the effects would be of the maxim's being uni­versalized to apply equally to everybody. Suppose the consequences of your act would be that some people would suffer terribly and nobody would derive much benefit. Then, if you really exercise your imagination and consider what it would be like for you to suffer ter­ribly, you are bound to come to prefer that this should not occur. This means that you cannot consistently will that the maxim should be universalized, for if it were universalized, you would have to be willing to accept that the same thing should (or could) be done to you.

This argument is really quite convincing: once we get Attila the Hun to universalize in the right way, he would have to be most unreasonable to accept that it was all right for people to do to him what he was willing to do to others.

Some philosophers have insisted that a problem remains: how, they ask, should we react to the fact that Attila the Hun and Hitler will not universalize in the right way? But why, exactly, is this a prob­lem? When I introduced the idea of relativism I said that a relativist held that what was good depended on who you were or what soci­ety you lived in. But, as we have seen, if the sophisticated emotivist account of moral content is correct, when I say “Kindness is good,” I am saying that I have a pro-attitude to kindness and that I want everyone else to have that pro-attitude. I am not just saying, as the relativist would require, that I want everyone who shares my feel­ings or my culture to have this attitude. It does not follow from the fact that people who disagree with us morally need not be wrong about the empirical facts and may not be incapable of reasoning that we have to accept their moral claims.

Why, then, do so many people think that the fact that moral judg­ments express attitudes means that whether you should accept them depends on where you live or who you happen to be? One answer, I think, is that they confuse two different senses in which judgments can be subjective. The view that moral judgments express attitudes means that they are, in one sense, subjective. Which judgments you will agree to depends on what attitudes you have, which is a fact about you. But, in this sense, factual judgments are subjective also. Which ones you will accept depends on what beliefs you have. From the fact that they are subjective in this sense, therefore, it does not follow that they are subjective in the sense that you are entitled to make any judgments you like.

Once we have seen this, we can answer what I called the real challenge of relativism: to explain why you should expect someone to share your pro-attitudes. The answer to this question is simply that if someone does not have the right pro-attitudes, then she may well not come to agree with you, however many facts you show her or arguments you make. The error is to react to this fact by suppos­ing that it obliges us to give up either the universality or the cate­gorical nature of our moral claims. Someone who reacts in this way is trying to derive an “ought”—“You ought not to make universal or categorical claims”—from an “is”—“No amount of argument will force someone to share your pro-attitudes.”

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