Jeremiah Keenan | The failures of moral relativism

Keen on the Truth | Why do we insist that there are no intrinsically valid morals?

By Jeremiah Keenan 10/07/14 10:45pm

I w a s eating breakfast at Boston University when one of my classmates in the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists sat down across from me. I had a foggy headache from number theory that morning — as I did every morning of summer 2012 — so I was happy enough for a little light conversation. But neither of us knew how to chitchat, so we started talking philosophy. My interlocutor was an extreme skeptic. He told me the tables and chairs around us might be a figment of my imagination, and that, for all I knew, the entire conversation between us was taking place inside my own head.

I couldn’t prove him wrong — for he was ready to claim that logic itself was a false construct — but I somehow suspected he didn’t believe his own words. So as we left the cafeteria, I carefully explained that I was going to shove him out in front of one of the moving automobiles which — my false imagination taught me — was hurtling down the street below. He knew this was a philosophical game, so he held out until he was within a couple yards of the road. Then suddenly, spasmodic fear dispelled his abstract skepticism, and he muttered, “Please don’t actually...”

While relatively few at Penn would radically doubt their physical senses, most of my classmates and friends would claim to hold a radically skeptical view of morality. Moral relativity, as this is called, argues that all morals are social constructs and, as such, are not intrinsically valid. The Hindu may be vegetarian, the Catholic may fast on Fridays, the Muslim may pray toward Mecca and the 20th century atheist may preach the morals of Mao’s Little Red Book, but none of these has a corner on truth. Even more general mores — condemnation of murder, theft, lynching and the like — are simply the product of contractual consensus and no more intrinsically valid than their antipodes.

Surprisingly, some of my activist friends and colleagues — earnestly lobbying for social change — hold that morality is a social construct. This might seem remarkable since their impassioned arguments opposing the entrenched norms in the society around them would, according to their own worldview, be amoral.

But perhaps their arguments are based on what they consider our most fundamental societal norms? This approach still becomes very slippery, because it allows each individual to create his or her own inventory of the most fundamental societal norms. In a global age, this inventory may be constructed from the mores of any sizable portion of the world’s population, and we quickly have a basis for anything from social welfare to ISIS terror.

Thus, moral relativity becomes a convenient way to dogmatically support any worldview whatsoever. Of course, the relativist has the advantage of being keenly aware of his intellectual superiority because he does not really “believe” what he preaches. But this absence of belief does not necessarily represent greater practical rigor than all the dominant theistic philosophies from Lao-Tzu to Plato to Descartes.

Skepticism in both the moral and physical realm is, to be sure, the easiest philosophy to maintain in an argument. But universal doubt — as well as moral relativity — is not a way of life that any of us practically believe in. Like the skeptic I met at PROMYS, we are suddenly converted to moral absolutes when confronted with child abuse, violent misogyny or racism.

And though we may claim that our involuntary, emotional response to these evils is purely a matter of social conditioning, the suggestion doesn’t hold water. Shirin Ebadi came from a society steeped in adult male chauvinism. This did not prevent her from deciding that women can and should be judges or lobbying for children’s rights. Angelina Grimke was raised in a Southern family of slaveholders who believed in their way of life, but she spent her entire adult life as an abolitionist. Many more examples could easily be raised of men and women who had a sense of morality that was not d etermined by their societies and was far from relativistic.

Jeremiah Keenan is College sophomore from China studying math. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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