Ethics and the Environment
An Introduction
DA L E J A M I E S O N
New York University
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2.5 Relativism Human morality 39
[abridged]
The relativist … accepts … the claim that … morality has authority over
her. What she rejects is one important aspect of my conception of morality:
the idea that morality embodies resources for critically assessing the views
of ourselves and others, and indeed, on some occasions, can project its judg-
ments across times and societies. What the relativist denies is the possibility
of moral claims transcending the moral system of the speaker’s own society.
Relativism is a challenge to morality as I understand it because it threat-
ens to deprive morality of its critical edge, thus assimilating it to other
social practices whose ambitions are much more modest, such as ‘‘folkways,”
‘‘customs,” or ‘‘standards of etiquette.” By making cultures the locus of
morality, relativism not only threatens our ability to make moral judgments
that range across communities and times, but also diminishes the auton-
omy and responsibility of individuals, features that are also important to
morality.
Relativism grows from the simple recognition that different societies and
historical epochs judge different actions as right or wrong. Examples of
this are legion, and can be found in such diverse areas as sexual morality,
judgments about killing, and the treatment of animals and nature. Food
preferences, which are often highly moralized, will do as an example.
Most Americans think that it is strange to eat goats, disturbing to eat
horses, wrong to eat dogs and whales, and downright ghastly to eat gorillas
and chimpanzees. On the other hand they see nothing strange, disturbing,
wrong, or ghastly about eating cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, fish, shrimps,
and various other sea creatures. Europeans would largely share these views,
though their category of the animals that can be eaten without comment
might be somewhat more expansive, including, for example, horses and
snails. Religious Jews and Muslims are horrified at the idea of eating pigs,
but have little trouble with most of the other animals on the list. Hin-
dus and Jains would object to eating any of these animals, especially cows.
Most East Asians see little difference between eating any of these animals,
and many Africans consider the flesh of gorillas and chimpanzees to be a
delicacy.
When faced with such diversity, enlightened people are often inclined
to think that this shows that moral rules have sway only over particular
societies at particular times. This view is bolstered, it might be thought, by
the picture of morality that I have presented. Since, on my view, morality is
mainly directed towards regulating a community’s behavior, there is little
reason to think that the same set of prescriptions and proscriptions would
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40 Ethics and the Environment
be appropriate for all communities in all circumstances. According to the
relativist, someone who claims that his morality is right and the morality of
other communities is wrong fails to grasp the essential relativity of moral
judgments. It is one thing for a speaker to report the moral standards of his
own society; it is quite another for him to condemn the moral standards
of other societies. Worse still is any attempt to impose his own morality on
others.
What do we say of people who try to impose their moralities on others?
One natural thing to say is that they are immoral, but this is tricky terrain
for a relativist. For the tendency to export one’s morality may be intrinsic to
the morality of those who are doing the exporting, as certainly was the case
with the Victorian morality of nineteenth-century England and arguably is
the case with the prevailing, Christian-inflected morality of contemporary
America. Indeed, it is obvious that many Americans think that that they have
a moral obligation to ‘‘share” their morality with others. But if the tendency
towards exporting one’s morality is part of one’s culture, then denouncing
such attempts as immoral seems to require the same sort of trans-cultural
moral judgment that the relativist enjoins us not to make. But what is
the alternative? If we cannot denounce attempts to impose one’s morality
on others in moral terms, what can we say about them? Criticizing such
attempts in non-moral language – as rude, insensitive, or tasteless – seems
grossly inappropriate to the offence. Saying that a missionary who tries to
get a tribal people to worship Jesus, adopt western standards of marriage,
and behave like proper Englishmen is ‘‘insensitive” is like saying that Hitler
had a problem with his aggressive impulses.
The relativist seems trapped by her own theory. The point of her challenge
is to prevent us from trying to impose our morality on others. But insofar
as this attempt is an expression of one’s own culture, it would appear that
the relativist is stopped by her own theory from morally denouncing it.
She could try the following maneuver. Just as imposing Christian morality
on the natives was an expression of the morality of Victorian England, so
the relativist’s denunciation of this is an expression of the tolerant, secular
morality of her culture. In other words, when it comes to trans-cultural
judgments, everyone, including the relativist, is allowed ‘‘to do their own
thing,” so long as it is an authentic expression of their own culture and
does not claim any universal privilege, except, of course, from within their
own point of view.
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Human morality 41
This gambit amounts to a sophisticated surrender on the part of the
relativist, for it puts her objection to imposing morality on others on the
same level as the attempt itself. Each is an equally authentic expression of
the morality of the culture in which the impulse originates. What started
as a noble, if misguided, attempt to use moral language to prevent domi-
nant cultures from imposing their moralities on others has, under pressure,
degenerated into the view that when it comes to moralizing we should let a
thousand flowers bloom, acknowledging that insofar as they are all authen-
tic expressions of a culture, no view has any special claim to acceptance
beyond the culture in which it originates. What has been lost is any princi-
ple, method, insight, or approach for deciding when culturally transcendent
claims are appropriate, insightful, true, or right. Instead, we are left with a
clash of competing cultures, with no guidance about how to resolve it. This
kind of relativism ceases to be a serious challenge to anything. It has trans-
formed its own critique into just another provincial voice, with no claim to
anything more than local interest.
In addition to this theoretical objection, there are serious difficulties in
implementing the relativist view in the highly globalized world in which we
live. Relativism takes cultures as the primary locus of moral authority, but
it is not easy to determine people’s cultural membership and thus identify
the standards by which their behavior should be assessed. The following
case brings this out clearly.
In 1996 a seventeen-year-old girl, Fauziya Kassindja, arrived in the United
States from Togo and asked for political asylum.10 She had fled in order to
escape an elaborate ritual which marks the onset of adulthood in young
females in her tribe. Part of this ritual involves a procedure that is vari-
ously called ‘‘excision,” ‘‘female circumcision,” ‘‘female genital cutting,” or
‘‘female genital mutilation.” There is much to say about such cases, but the
question I wish to raise here is quite limited. Which is the society whose
moral standards are supposed to take precedence in this case? Is it the
standards of Kassindja’s tribe, those of urban Togo, those of West Africa,
those of Africa generally, or those of the United States, where she came to
seek asylum? It is clear that each of these societies has different attitudes
towards this procedure and would produce different moral judgments about
this case. My point here is not to argue any particular view, but rather to
10 I borrow this example from Rachels 2003.
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42 Ethics and the Environment
point out how difficult it is in the contemporary world to assign people to
the cultures that are supposed to have moral authority over them.11
Indeed, putting the matter in this way brings out how relativism points
in the wrong direction when it comes to locating the grounds for moral
judgments. What is central to moral judgments are reasons for action that
reflect a host of concerns involving the interests that are at stake, the harms
that would be caused, the precedents that would be set, and so on. Cultural
membership may bear indirectly on how we assess these considerations, but
in itself it is not of central moral importance. By making cultures the locus
of morality, relativism turns us away from the reasons that ground and
justify moral judgments.
There are other problems with relativism. With its emphasis on cultures
as the locus of moralities, it seems to have little place for moral disagree-
ment within cultures. This risks putting horrendous acts of racism and bru-
tality beyond criticism, so long as they occur within a society rather than
across societies. For example, what do we say about people who oppose theoc-
racy, slavery, or patriarchy in societies in which these practices are widely
accepted? If the content of morality is determined by the moral standards of
the society, then these people are just wrong. On the other hand, someone
who simply conforms to his society’s prevailing morality would be doing
the right thing, however horrendous the morality he would be upholding.
On this view, an abolitionist in a slave society would be wrong about the
morality of slavery while a slave-owner would be right. But surely it is not
the abolitionist who is wrong, but the relativist. Every society has cranks,
deviants, and rebels, and they are often the revolutionaries who make moral
progress possible. Yet relativism seems committed to their moral condemna-
tion. One wonders whether moral progress is possible on such a view, and
if so, what its engine might be.
Still there is something to relativism, and before moving on we should
make sure that we understand what it is. Certainly one of the gifts of rela-
tivism is that it attunes us to the fact that there is a great deal more diversity
in moral practices than people were once in a position to recognize, and a
great deal more than many people today are willing to accept. Even so, it is
easy to exaggerate the extent and depth of moral diversity.
11 Sen (2006) argues strongly that it is immoral to assign people such identities, even when
it is possible to do so.
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Human morality 43
Consider, for example, traditional Eskimo society, in which female infan-
ticide was widely practiced and accepted. Perfectly healthy female infants
were sometimes killed at birth. Before jumping to conclusions about the pro-
foundly different moralities of traditional Eskimo and contemporary Amer-
ican societies, consider the circumstances of traditional Eskimo life. The
environment was harsh, food was in short supply, and the margin of safety
was small. In this society, mothers nursed for many years, thus limiting the
number of children who could be supported at a given time. Traditional
Eskimos were nomadic, and infants were carried while the mother did her
work. Food was primarily obtained by hunting, and this was extremely dan-
gerous under Arctic conditions. Men were the primary food-providers, and
they were often in short supply because of premature death. In traditional
Eskimo society, female infanticide was not a first but a last resort, often
carried out only after attempts at adoption failed. However, it has been esti-
mated that without the practice of female infanticide, an average Eskimo
group would have had 50% more females than food-producing males.12
What should we say about the moral differences regarding infanticide
between traditional Eskimos and contemporary Americans? Surely there
are such differences, for one can say, however superficially, that contem-
porary Americans believe that female infanticide is wrong while traditional
Eskimos did not. But if one tries to say anything deeper or more precise,
things become quite murky. Neither society approves of murder; neither
society approves of the gratuitous killing of innocent people; neither society
believes that children are disposable; neither society believes that, every-
thing else being equal, males should be preferred to females. While con-
temporary Americans and traditional Eskimos would disagree about what
general rules they would assent to with respect to infanticide, it is not clear
that they disagree about any deep moral principles or even that they would
disagree about particular cases. People and communities find themselves in
different situations, and achieving common purposes sometimes requires
[abridged]
different strategies.
It should not be surprising that in the most general way there would
be widespread agreement about morality across societies. Humans form a
single species and they face common problems of survival; morality is an
12 My account of Eskimo infanticide is based on Rachels 2003, who in turn relies on
Freuchen 1961 and Hoebel 1954.
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44 Ethics and the Environment
institution whose role it is to help solve those problems. However, humans
are extremely adaptable and live in a broad range of environmental condi-
tions, and in societies characterized by very different forms of social organi-
zation. It is thus not surprising that there is diversity in their moral expres-
sions, especially with respect to ‘‘middle-level” principles.
Even though the extent of relativity is often exaggerated, there is no
denying both the fact and the importance of diverse moralities. Despite the
fact that awareness of diversity and difference is supposed to be part of
the common knowledge of our epoch, there continue to be ignorant and
arrogant attempts to remake the moral fabric of ancient societies. States
whose weaponry far outruns their respect for others behave in ways that
are almost as crude as their imperial predecessors. It is difficult to fully
appreciate the moralities of others, and there is generally enough work to
be done in reforming one’s own society for even the most committed of
moral crusaders. The facts of relativity should make us humble about our
ability to understand, much less improve, the morality of others.
Moral relativism is a doctrine that can be educative, but as a challenge to
morality it fails. Relativism errs when it goes beyond a set of observations
about the diversity of cultural practices and begins to promulgate an ethic
of its own. This failure is located precisely at the point at which it moves
from a description of how morality is exemplified in the world to the norma-
tive view that a society’s morality cannot be morally criticized. It commits
the fallacy of deriving an ‘‘ought” from an ‘‘is” – of drawing a normative
conclusion from a set of descriptive premises. In its crudest form, it borders
on inconsistency. In its more sophisticated versions, it remains implausible,
while its claim to be a challenge to morality recedes.
2.6 What these challenges teach us
There is a lot to learn from these challenges to morality. They include the
following. Morality is ubiquitous and difficult to escape for even the most
hard-bitten of men (e.g. Dirk). Morality does not need the support of God in
order to have content or to be motivating. Morality is not culture-bound.
At the same time nothing has been said to suggest that there is a single,
true morality, and the facts of moral disagreement should make us sensitive
to the difficulty of interpreting and assessing the views of others. Moreover,
there is no requirement in morality or any other domain that requires us to
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