problem for ethical egoism is that egoism counsels each person to treat everyone differently from how they treat themselves, irrespective of whether there is any relevant difference. As an ethical egoist you will act to advance your own interests regardless of how that may affect the interests of others. However, the Principle of Equal Treatment states that you should treat two people the same unless there is some relevant difference between them. What, then, is the relevant difference between you and everyone else that you should give no weight whatsoever to their preferences? Ethical egoism implies that you are so unique and special that you ought to treat every other person differently from how you treat yourself, since you should care only about promoting your own interests. You’re you; that’s true. But what makes you so special? In fact, runs the objection, none of us is so special that we should each treat ourselves completely differently from how we treat every other living creature. In short, ethical egoism is just a form of prejudicial discrimination, and for that reason should be discarded.
If you think the costs of ethical egoism are too high for its benefits, then you should consider other moral theories before making a purchase. Here’s another popular contender.
1.4 Moral Relativism (Is Morality Just How Society Says We Should Act?)
According to ethical egoism, morality is no more than your own code of behavior, designed to advance your own goals. Perhaps morality should be understood not on the personal level but on the social level. Here are some representative slogans of this idea, the idea of moral relativism.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.13
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.14
“Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason that the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in” 15 (Michel de Montaigne, 1580).
Moral relativism, as presented here, is ethical egoism writ large. With ethical egoism, morality is relativized to individuals; but with moral (sometimes called cultural) relativism, moral truth is relativized at a broader scale to cultures or societies themselves. To some extent, debates over moral relativism are just analogues to the pros and cons of egoism.
To start with, notice that there is a difference between descriptive relativism and moral relativism, as follows:
Descriptive relativism: beliefs about morality and the values people possess vary across cultures divided by times and places.
Moralrelativism: the truth of moral claims and which values people should adopt vary across cultures divided by times and places. What is morally permissible in one culture may be morally wrong in another culture.
Moral relativism is attractive in lots of ways. For one, it serves to counterbalance the provincialism of assuming that the moral principles and codes that you’ve grown up with must be the best ones for everyone in the world. You probably know people who have never gone more than 20 miles away from the same small town in which they were born, and think that their little corner of the world has everything one could want–the best barbecue, as solid citizens as you’ll meet anywhere, fine schools, good-looking children, devout churchgoers, sincere patriots, and first-rate scholars. But if you’ve traveled a bit, or moved in from another part of the world, you are probably aghast at such insularity and ignorance. People all over the world have found different forms of the good life, with views about purity, authority, respect and piety that may be wholly alien to one’s own. A young woman from Saudi Arabia may consider American college students in miniskirts to be no better than immodest whores who conveniently label themselves with tramp stamps, and American coeds may think that Saudi women are living under the false consciousness of repressive patriarchy, yet both groups manage to raise their children and find ways to lead satisfying lives.
Worse than provincialism is imperialism. When practitioners of a religion decide that they have discovered the one true way that everyone ought to live, the results tend to be the Spanish Inquisition and people flying airplanes into skyscrapers. When countries decide that their form of political economy alone will lead to human flourishing, then we get wars to force others to accept democracy, or become communists, or subjects of the Crown, or whatever it will take to remake foreigners into people Just Like Us. Moral relativism is offered as a corrective to such arrogant and aggressive moral absolutism, one that respects cultural diversity and allows for more than one decent way to live.
The preceding reflections give rise to a popular argument for moral relativism, which goes as follows. Moral beliefs vary all over the world, from place to place and from time to time. The values crafted by a tribe or a nation fit their specific circumstances and may be completely at odds with the moral codes of other societies–codes that they developed given their own idiosyncratic situation. The harsh morality of Sparta16, beset by warring enemies in a dry and rocky terrain, is hardly suited for the laid-back free-love natives of the tropical Trobriand Islands17. Insisting that every culture must have the same morality is like telling a chef that every dish he prepares must have the same spicing. The results will range from excellent, to palatable, to execrable. Moralities grow organically, and what works in one culture is inappropriate for another. Not only do moral beliefs and values vary across societies, but they should. In other words, the fact of descriptive relativism provides an excellent reason to adopt moral relativism.
The argument just provided assumes that descriptive relativism is true, assumes that if it is true then moral relativism is true, and then infers from those premises that moral relativism is true. Let’s examine the very first claim: is descriptive moral relativism really true? There can be little doubt that moral practices, customs and beliefs vary considerably from one society to the next. For Muslims, it is immoral to drink alcohol, yet for most Christians it is a sacramental imperative to drink alcohol. Western European societies consider the death penalty immoral, whereas China does not. In the United States, polygamous marriages are considered unethical, but in Islamic countries and the indigenous cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, they are expected. The ancient Spartans considered it their moral duty to leave weak or defective infants alone to die from the elements, and perhaps no modern society condones such a practice.
On the face of it, then, it seems that moral beliefs are quite variable from one society to another. However, it would be hasty to conclude that descriptive relativism is unequivocally right. The anthropologist Donald E. Brown has identified 373 traits as human universals18–characteristics present in every human society that has so far been identified and studied (Brown, 1991, ch. 6). Some of these traits are facts about language use, patterns of inferential reasoning, symbolic gesturing, and the structure of social groups. However, the majority of human universals involve moral or proto-moral judgment and behavior. For example, human societies universally judge that it is good to help others, that incest and indiscriminate killing are wrong, and that one has familial duties of piety towards one’s parents and obligations of care towards one’s children.
Some philosophers have argued that universally adopted moral norms are very general and open-ended, therefore allowing for local interpretation and variation. Just as every society has some language but they don’t all have the same language, every society forbids incest as immoral but they don’t all pick out the same family members as off-limits. One society might condone kissing cousins (cousins don’t count for the incest taboo) and a second society condemns them. It doesn’t matter for our purposes here. As a purely descriptive matter, descriptive relativism turns out to be partly true and partly false. There are moral beliefs present in some societies/cultures, but not in all, and other moral attitudes that do seem to be in all societies. But the fact that there are at least some moral universals stops any simple inference from descriptive relativism to moral relativism.
A
