Metaethics and Moral Relativism (SACE Stage 2 Philosophy)

What this dot point is asking

You need to distinguish metaethics from normative ethics, set out the main positions on the status of moral claims, and assess whether relativism is defensible.

Normative ethics versus metaethics

Normative ethics asks first-order questions such as whether lying is wrong. Metaethics asks second-order questions about those claims. Is moral wrongness a real feature of the world? Can a moral claim be true or false at all? Are moral judgements beliefs or disguised commands? Keeping these levels apart is essential, because the same person can hold a normative view while disagreeing about its metaethical status.

Moral realism

Moral realism holds that there are objective moral facts that hold independently of what anyone thinks. On this view, the claim that torturing children for fun is wrong is true in the same robust sense as a fact about the world. Plato offered an early version with his Form of the Good. Realists point to the apparent objectivity of moral progress: abolishing slavery looks like discovering a truth, not merely changing tastes. The challenge is explaining what moral facts are and how we could come to know them.

Anti-realist positions

Emotivism, associated with A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson, claims that moral statements do not describe facts at all. To say stealing is wrong is to express disapproval and to influence others, roughly equivalent to saying boo to stealing. This is sometimes mocked as the boo-hooray theory. It neatly explains the motivating force of moral talk but struggles to make sense of genuine moral reasoning and disagreement.

J. L. Mackie's error theory takes a different route. Mackie agrees that ordinary moral language aims to state objective facts, but argues no such facts exist. His argument from queerness says objective values would be metaphysically strange entities unlike anything else, and his argument from relativity points to the sheer diversity of moral codes. So, for Mackie, all positive moral claims are systematically false.

Moral relativism

Moral relativism holds that the truth of a moral claim is relative to a culture or framework, so an act can be right in one society and wrong in another with no neutral standpoint to settle the matter. Its appeal lies in tolerance and in honestly acknowledging deep cultural variation, a point anthropologists from Ruth Benedict onward have pressed.

Relativism faces serious objections. First, it appears to make moral criticism across cultures impossible, yet we want to say that some practices are wrong wherever they occur. Second, it makes moral reform incoherent, since a reformer who challenges their own society's norms would, by definition, be mistaken. Third, the tolerance objection notes that the demand to tolerate other cultures is itself a non-relative value, so the relativist seems to smuggle in an absolute. The fact of disagreement, moreover, does not by itself prove there is no truth, since people also disagree about scientific questions that nonetheless have answers.

Evaluating

A strong answer recognises a tension. The diversity of moral practice is real and supports anti-realist or relativist leanings, yet our practices of reasoning, criticism and progress presuppose that some moral claims are better than others. Many philosophers therefore seek a middle path, such as a constructivism that grounds moral truth in what ideally rational agents would agree to, retaining objectivity without spooky moral facts.