Protagoras has established perceptual relativism, he moves on to establish social relativism. Just as one individual cannot be wrong about their perceptions, so a society cannot be wrong about its judgments. For example, if a country decides that capital punishment is wrong, then it is wrong for them. Conversely, if another country decides that capital punishment is right, then it is right for them. Protagoras states in the third Testamonia that “my position, then, is that whatever seems right and admirable to a particular city-state is truly right and admirable – during the period of time in which that opinion continues to be held.” Certainly the positions held by countries lead to better or worse outcomes, but Protagoras maintains that they are not true or false. If they lead to bad outcomes they will simply need to be reformed.
One might object to social relativism by arguing that standards of right and wrong do exist for social conduct and they can be found in religious texts. However, in the sixth fragment, Protagoras maintains the agnostic position and hence denies any type of divinely based standards to establish “right” or “wrong” conduct in a society. Very often, when people want to express a moral imperative, they invoke their religious texts as evidence. For example, a Christian may assert that violence is always wrong and then point to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” in the Book of Matthew as evidence for this belief.3 However, if Protagoras is correct and we can have no knowledge of the gods, then we cannot know what they demand from us. We may still have a prohibition against violence in a society, but it is not due to divine command; instead, it is due to the fact that we, as members of the society, have agreed that the outcomes overall are better if we refrain from violence. If tomorrow we all agree that violence is acceptable, then it is acceptable.
When these two Fragments are combined, an entire worldview emerges, one in which human judgment is all that matters; we are the measure of all truth and decide not what is right or wrong, for that is impossible, but instead what brings good and bad outcomes for ourselves and society. But how can we decide what is a good or bad outcome if such judgments are all subjective? Protagoras has a one word answer for this question: pleasure. In the third Testamonia he claims that “the wise man is one who can alter people’s way of judging so that what appears and is to them bad now will appear and will be to them good. It is like the case of some food which appears and is bitter to a sick man but appears and is quite the opposite to a man of health. … Still, we agree that the one state is preferable to the other, and so we think that the sick man had better be changed into a healthy state. … But whereas the physician brings about the change by means of drugs, the sophist does so by means of words.” Thus it is the pleasurable outcome of food tasting good that guides our judgments when we are sick. The same standard can then be also applied by the state to capital punishment – is the overall pleasure in society enhanced by capital punishment? If the answer is yes, then it should be enacted; if the answer is no, it should be outlawed.
The philosophy of relativism was seductive in the ancient world and is equally so today. Proponents of relativism can argue their position by pointing to three main benefits of the system. The first is moral flexibility. If there are objective moral truths about the world and we know what those truths are, then moral progress is impossible. With relativism, however, we can decide that the bad outcomes of some social customs such as slavery or oppression of women, viewed as moral truths, no longer bring as much pleasure as new moral truths would and so we change our morality so as to view slavery or the oppression of women as wrong.4 Humans also do seem very often to use pleasure as a guide in making moral decisions in their life; indeed, the moral theories of hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure in life) and utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest amount) utilize pleasure as the guiding principle in determining right from wrong. Finally, relativism can also be a guiding philosophy for agnostics or atheists who lack a holy scripture to supply guidance in moral matters. One need not adhere to any religious system while maintaining relativism.
However, there are also some serious limitations to the philosophy of relativism. First is the problem of pleasure as a guide to good outcomes. As detractors of utilitarianism and hedonism point out, pleasure is very difficult to define, measure, and compare. The definition of pleasure is completely subjective; how a masochist defines pleasure differs from how an altruist defines pleasure. Pleasure is also notoriously difficult to measure and is an unreliable guide to what is good in one’s life. Even if one adopts the “enlightened hedonism” of a utilitarian, that of balancing momentary pleasure with long term pleasures,5 humans are notoriously susceptible to prioritizing short term pleasures, regardless of the advantages of long term pleasures. In comparing pleasures, John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism, lays down the principle that intellectual pleasures are superior to what he terms as “pig pleasures”, those of food, drink, and sex. Although this principle may be true for Mill, the average human tends to be highly motivated by “pig pleasures”.
A second problem in relativism is that humans very often make mistakes about the world. It may be true that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but humans aspire to more certainty about their moral judgments than being occasionally right. Socrates often entraps his dialectic opponents with the problem of mistaken judgments. For example, when Polus asserts that orators and tyrants have the most power in their city-state in the Gorgias (466.b-468.e), Socrates quickly points out that they only do what seems good but not what they actually want. While we normally strive for what is actually good for ourselves, we often make mistakes and are limited to what seems good to us: “If we admit this, then if a man, whether tyrant or rhetorician, kills another or banishes him or confiscates his property, because he thinks it is to his advantage, and it proves to be to his harm, the man surely does what seems good to him, does he not?” (Gorgias, 468.d). It may not make much difference whether my judgment concerning the temperature of the wind is right or wrong, but it is very important to be right when one begins to kill, banish, or confiscate property.
A third argument against relativism is that there does seem to be universals that are cross-cultural. The institutions that humans have built around the globe are very uniform and there is no great variance in moral behavior. At times, the way different cultures express their morality can be different, but underlying assumptions can be the same. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, supplies a story that exemplifies the differences between cultures:
“When he (Darius) was king of Persia he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what it would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see from this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’.” 6
Herodotus here focuses on the differences between the customs of the two peoples and believes that this demonstrates cultural relativism. However, what he fails to note is that there is an assumption underlying both cultural practices, that of veneration of the dead. Different cultures express veneration of the dead in different ways, but all cultures do have some form of veneration of the dead.
The main problem with relativism that Plato attacks in the Republic is that of the “slippery slope” within the relativistic worldview. If one seriously adopts good and bad outcomes as the only measure for behavior, there is a large latitude for abuse. While Protagoras no doubt intended people to use his philosophy to build functional communities, many individuals use it instead to justify self-centered, egotistical behavior. Within the context of the larger community, it often leads to the justification of colonialism, empire, exceptionalism, and oppression of others. In order to see the destructive possibilities inherent in the relativistic worldview, one need look no further than 21st
