Before one can talk clearly about moral relativism, one must first address relativism at a more general level, a level that includes statements that have nothing to do with practical or moral matters. Suppose you are talking to a man about whether the sun is a gaseous star possessing a gravitational pull on the earth that keeps our planet in orbit around it. He denies that this is true. You cannot tell whether he is sincere or just being silly, and you don't know how to argue scientifically about matters that we tend take for granted as true. You simply object, therefore, that science seems to show that he is wrong in his denial. He replies, "That is true for you, but not for me."
You may not at this moment have the resources to be able to present a cogent (convincing) argument about the sun and gravity, but you can point out that his last comment is incoherent. By "incoherent" I mean that, regardless of what one thinks of astronomy, that last sentence simply doesn't make sense.
That is because by "truth" we mean a claim that one would agree to if one could find the relevant evidence. Suppose that, while you are talking to a friend on a cellphone who is inside a store facing a city street while you are outside the store, looking at a street intersection: a motorcade of black SUVs with flashing lights passed by and you report this to your friend. She denies it, and you reply, "But it's true!" What you are saying is that if she saw what you saw, she'd say the same thing, perhaps first to herself and immediately afterwards aloud to you.
If you lay this example out to the sun gravity denier whom I first mentioned, he might object that in the imagined cellphone conversation, you might be hallucinating and your friend, after hearing your report, might step outside and see what you see, might hallucinate the same motorcade with you. It would be true for you that there is a motorcade.
To this objection I would reply that it would not be true. Truth is not about what seems so for me or for you or for the two of us, truth is what seems so inasmuch as anyone has adequate experience of reality. If I am hallucinating about the motorcade, then my claim that there is one is untrue, even if I find one or many who are similarly deceived.
To say that a claim is true is to say that it will become more obvious, the more comprehensively and adequately we grasp the way things are. To say that this particular claim is true is to place that original claim into a set of claims that together could be called "truths," "the set of truths," or just "the truth." To understand what I mean here, I ask you to think of an entire legal system, as in all of the laws that we can find in the United States. State laws, local laws, federal laws, the U.S. Constitution--all of them together. We could call this the Law. It's something concrete, not something ethereal. Whenever you make a claim about this or that law, your statement has a trajectory that points in the direction of the Law as I have now described it. You may not have recognized that the Law exists. You may only be thinking of this or that ordinance. But really, for this or that little ordinance to do what it needs to do, it needs to be connected to and interrelated to the U.S. Law.
Something analogous is at work when we say this or that is true. We care placing it within a set of truths that are interrelated. We are saying that it is part of the Truth.
It might be helpful in this regard to imagine what it would be like if we -- and all other rational beings -- had an infinite amount of time to carry on a conversation about ... everything. Add to that the claim that we were curious about every truth. The Truth (with a capital T) is what we'd know if we had that amount of time and curiosity.
You might think it strange to posit something infinite in order to clarify everyday conversation. But the fact is that we do this sort of thing all of the time, albeit without acknowledging it. When you talk of a straight line, for example, what do you mean? You mean a line that approximates a perfectly straight line. And what is a perfectly straight line? It's one that would look a certain way even if you were to look at it at a greatly enlarged scale. In fact, it would look that way at any scale. "Any" here includes an infinite number of scales. I think I've made my point.
I suggest that moral truths are part of this Truth. If someone were to deny that "It's true for you but not for me that Hitler committed an evil deed in killing millions of Jews," and says this, not to deny that the killing took place, but to deny that the deed was evil, then this person is saying something incoherent, just like the person who says it's true for you but not for me that sun's gravity pulls the earth. It does not matter whether or not tomorrow physics may discover a better physical explanation than gravity--in such a case we should say not that it had previously been true for me that the sun pulled the earth into orbit, but to say that I was mistaken and the claim that I previously made was false. The statement that it had been true true for me was incoherent and should be replaced by the claim that it is false the sun pulls the earth by gravitation. Something similar can be said for the claim that Hitler did something evil. It is either true or false; I am either correct or mistaken in thinking what I think about the matter: it is never reasonable to say that it is true for me but false for another.
You may not at this moment have the resources to be able to present a cogent (convincing) argument about the sun and gravity, but you can point out that his last comment is incoherent. By "incoherent" I mean that, regardless of what one thinks of astronomy, that last sentence simply doesn't make sense.
That is because by "truth" we mean a claim that one would agree to if one could find the relevant evidence. Suppose that, while you are talking to a friend on a cellphone who is inside a store facing a city street while you are outside the store, looking at a street intersection: a motorcade of black SUVs with flashing lights passed by and you report this to your friend. She denies it, and you reply, "But it's true!" What you are saying is that if she saw what you saw, she'd say the same thing, perhaps first to herself and immediately afterwards aloud to you.
If you lay this example out to the sun gravity denier whom I first mentioned, he might object that in the imagined cellphone conversation, you might be hallucinating and your friend, after hearing your report, might step outside and see what you see, might hallucinate the same motorcade with you. It would be true for you that there is a motorcade.
To this objection I would reply that it would not be true. Truth is not about what seems so for me or for you or for the two of us, truth is what seems so inasmuch as anyone has adequate experience of reality. If I am hallucinating about the motorcade, then my claim that there is one is untrue, even if I find one or many who are similarly deceived.
To say that a claim is true is to say that it will become more obvious, the more comprehensively and adequately we grasp the way things are. To say that this particular claim is true is to place that original claim into a set of claims that together could be called "truths," "the set of truths," or just "the truth." To understand what I mean here, I ask you to think of an entire legal system, as in all of the laws that we can find in the United States. State laws, local laws, federal laws, the U.S. Constitution--all of them together. We could call this the Law. It's something concrete, not something ethereal. Whenever you make a claim about this or that law, your statement has a trajectory that points in the direction of the Law as I have now described it. You may not have recognized that the Law exists. You may only be thinking of this or that ordinance. But really, for this or that little ordinance to do what it needs to do, it needs to be connected to and interrelated to the U.S. Law.
Something analogous is at work when we say this or that is true. We care placing it within a set of truths that are interrelated. We are saying that it is part of the Truth.
It might be helpful in this regard to imagine what it would be like if we -- and all other rational beings -- had an infinite amount of time to carry on a conversation about ... everything. Add to that the claim that we were curious about every truth. The Truth (with a capital T) is what we'd know if we had that amount of time and curiosity.
You might think it strange to posit something infinite in order to clarify everyday conversation. But the fact is that we do this sort of thing all of the time, albeit without acknowledging it. When you talk of a straight line, for example, what do you mean? You mean a line that approximates a perfectly straight line. And what is a perfectly straight line? It's one that would look a certain way even if you were to look at it at a greatly enlarged scale. In fact, it would look that way at any scale. "Any" here includes an infinite number of scales. I think I've made my point.
I suggest that moral truths are part of this Truth. If someone were to deny that "It's true for you but not for me that Hitler committed an evil deed in killing millions of Jews," and says this, not to deny that the killing took place, but to deny that the deed was evil, then this person is saying something incoherent, just like the person who says it's true for you but not for me that sun's gravity pulls the earth. It does not matter whether or not tomorrow physics may discover a better physical explanation than gravity--in such a case we should say not that it had previously been true for me that the sun pulled the earth into orbit, but to say that I was mistaken and the claim that I previously made was false. The statement that it had been true true for me was incoherent and should be replaced by the claim that it is false the sun pulls the earth by gravitation. Something similar can be said for the claim that Hitler did something evil. It is either true or false; I am either correct or mistaken in thinking what I think about the matter: it is never reasonable to say that it is true for me but false for another.
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