Is it All Relative?

That depends.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki

“You think it’s all relative, don’t you?” So said Dr. Stevens, to me, during an ethics consultation. He knew nothing about me except that I was an ethicist, a philosopher, an academic. Something I said, I suppose, set him off. The implication was his superiority: He was no relativist. He had standards. Yet he also sounded uneasy.

 “No,” I said, annoyed. “I don’t think that — not in the way you mean. If you want to talk more, let’s have coffee sometime,.” Of course that never happened. He had no interest in thinking further; he knew what he knew.

I’ve heard such claims — such accusations — many times. Another version is  “I don’t believe the end justifies the means,” an implicit criticism of  anyone who might.

But that would be everyone. Everyone, in some circumstances, believes some end justifies some means. This is not weakness, not inconsistency, and not the end of the moral universe.

When ends justify means: examples

• In 1940 Nicholas Winton saved almost 700  children from the Nazis as they invaded Prague. For some of the children he forged entry permits. Forgery is wrong. In this case, though, it was justified, by the ends it served. 

• In the movie “12 Years a Slave,” the enslaved Solomon Northrup is forced to whip another slave, Patsy. “If you don’t,” says Epps, the slaveholder, “I’ll do it, but worse.” Inflicting such agony is almost always wrong. In this case, it was justified.

• Miep Gies sheltered Ann Frank and her family, frequently lying to the Nazis. Lying is ordinarily wrong. Not in this case.

Dr. Stevens probably thinks of himself as an absolutist. Absolutism is the belief that when something is wrong, it’s absolutely wrong, in all circumstances. It is never justified by the ends it serves. That’s an attractive position. But it’s not tenable.

One reason absolutism is attractive is practical: The future is never completely predictable. In “12 Years a Slave,” after Nothrup flogs his fellow slave, the slaveowner seizes the whip and thrashes her himself, almost to death. Northrup’s compliance hasn’t saved her.  

Another practical consideration is the danger of a slippery slope. Once a moral boundary is breached, it’s easier to breach it again, in less and less compelling circumstances.s

Where passions run high and consequences are grave, an absolutist stance can do important work. Take for example doctors’ duty to treat the sick and injured. Patients’ worthiness, their guilt or innocence, are all irrelevant. Dr. Samuel Mudd treated John Wilkes Booth, running from the law after shooting Lincoln. Dr. Mudd was arrested and imprisoned. (The folk expression, “His name is mud” originated with this story.) In a field hospital during war today, the same rule holds: The most injured (unless they’re beyond help) must be treated first. It doesn’t matter whose side they were on. This absolute rule holds off the powerful desire for retribution. It also frees doctors to focus on healing rather than on judging.

So there are good reasons to treat some moral principles as absolute. There are also bad — unpersuasive — reasons. One is a false dilemma. Dr. Stevens, like many others, may have assumed there are only two possible worlds. In one, moral rules are understood to be absolute: context is irrelevant, and ends never justify means. In what he takes to be the only other moral world, all values are treated as relative – in the sense that there are no standards at all. Anything goes. There’s no way to criticize any decision, no grounds for even discussing rightness or wrongness. It’s all just preference. 

But that’s not true. Between the world of absolutes and the world in which anything goes, there’s another. It’s the real world.

In ordinary moral reasoning, context matters.

In the real world, most convictions about right and wrong are treated as relative. Not in the sense that Dr. Stevens seemed to fear (anything goes), but in a way that considers context. Lying, for instance, is ordinarily wrong, but sometimes justified. Saving Otto Frank’s family justified lying.

Nor are moral positions ordinarily considered to be just personal opinions. About those, we don’t argue: You like forests, I like beaches. Neither of us is right, neither of us is wrong. In contrast, if you believe cheating on your taxes is justified, and I don’t, we each believe the other is mistaken. We could give reasons for our position, and at the least make one another think.

Our public discourse is filled with moral debate. That’s not a sign of moral relativism. Instead, it’s a sign of disagreement about strongly held moral commitments. In fact, in our public life a lot of us sound like absolutists.

I wish that our public discourse were less absolutist, more nuanced, more contextual. Less like a jousting match, more like a conversation. Neither absolutist nor relativist, as those words are usually used. But real.

Lurking in the background of this discussion is what we all know: that cultures differ substantially in what they consider right or wrong, good or bad. That’s cultural relativism. But moral relativism (of the kind Dr. Stevens abjured) does not follow.  What follows is the need for serious moral reflection, now enriched by learning about different world views; reflection involving the use of our minds. More on that next time.