Doxastic moral relativism

Reductive doxastic moral relativism is the view that an action type’s being morally wrong is nothing but an individual or society’s belief that the action type is morally wrong.

But this is viciously circular, since we reduce wrongness to a belief about wrongness. Indeed, it now seems that murder is wrong provided that it is believed that it is believed that it is believed ad infinitum.

A non-reductive biconditional moral relativism fares better. This is a theory on which (a) there is such a property as moral wrongness and (b) necessarily, an action type has that property if and only if it is believed that it does. Compare this: There is such a property as mass, and necessarily an object has mass if and only if God believes that it has mass.

There is a biconditional-explanatory version. On this theory (a) there is such a property as moral wrongness and (b) necessarily, an action type has that property if and only if, and if so then because, it is believed that it does.

While both the biconditional and biconditional-explanatory versions appear logically coherent, I think they are not particularly plausible. If there really is such a property as moral wrongness, and it does not reduce to our beliefs, then it just does not seem particularly plausible to think that it obtains solely because of our beliefs or that it obtains necessarily if and only if we believe it does. The only clear and non-gerrymandered examples we have of properties that obtain solely because of our beliefs or necessarily if and only if we believe they do are properties that reduce to our beliefs.

All this suggests to me that if one wishes to be a relativism, one should base the relativism on a different attitude than belief.

Autonomy and relativism

Individual relativism may initially seem to do justice to the idea of our autonomy: our moral rules are set by ourselves. But this attractiveness of relativism disappears as soon as we realize that our beliefs are largely not up to us—that, as the saying goes, we catch them like we catch the flu. This seems especially true of our moral beliefs, most of which are inherited from our surrounding culture. Thus, what individual relativism gives to us in terms of autonomy is largely taken away by reflection on our beliefs.

Relativism and natural law

Individual relativism and natural law ethics have something in common: both agree that the grounds of your ethical obligations are found in you. The disagreement, of course, is in how they are found. The relativist says that they are found in your subjectivity, in your beliefs and values that differ from person to person, while the natural lawyer thinks they are found in your human form, which is exactly like the human form of everyone else.

(Whether Kantianism shares this feature depends on how we read the metaphysics of rationality, namely whether our rationality as a genuine part of our selves, or as an abstraction.)

I think this commonality has some importance: it captures the idea that idea that we are in some sense morally beholden to ourselves rather than to something alien, something about which we could ask “Why should I listen to it?”

But I think in the end natural law does a better job being a non-alienating ethics. For we have good reason to think that my moral beliefs and values are etiologically largely the product of society around me and accidental features in my life. If these beliefs and values are what grounds my moral obligations, then my obligations are by and large the product of society and accident. (Think of the common philosophical observation that we do not choose our beliefs, but catch them like one catches a cold.) If I had lived in a different society with different accidental influences, I would have had different obligations on relativism. The obligations are, thus, largely the result of external and accidental influence on my cognition.

On the other hand, on natural law, my obligations are grounded in my individual human form which is my central and essential metaphysical constituent. Granted, I did not create this form for myself. But neither is it an accidental result of external influence—it defines me.

I think that as a society we feel that the variability of our individual beliefs and values makes us more autonomous if relativism is true. But once we realistically realize that this variability is largely due to external influence, our intuitions should shift. Natural law provides a more real autonomy.

Of course, on a theistic version of natural law, my form comes from God. Yes, but on orthodox Aristotelianism (which I am not sure I completely endorse) it is not an alien imposition, since I have no existence apart from that form.

Two kinds of moral relativism

A moral relativist has a fundamental choice whether to define moral concepts in terms of moral beliefs or non-doxastic moral attitudes such as disapproval.

In my previous post, I argued that defining moral concepts in terms of moral beliefs leads is logically unacceptable.

I now want to suggest that neither option is really very appealing. Consider first this case:

1. Bob believes he ought to turn Carl in for being a runaway slave. But his emotions and attitudes do not match that belief. He hides Carl and feels morally good about hiding Carl despite his belief. (Bob may or may not be like Huck Finn.)

A relativist who defines morality in terms of beliefs, has to say that Bob is doing wrong in hiding Carl. That seems mistaken. It seems that mere belief is less important than actual attitudes. Thus, if something is to define morality for Bob, it is his attitudes, not his mere beliefs.

So far, we have support for a relativist’s defining moral concepts in terms of non-doxastic moral attitudes. But now consider:

2. Alice thinks of herself as a progressive, and thinks that racism is wrong. Nonetheless, her moral attitudes do not evince genuine disapproval of racist behavior, say when she is with friends who tell racist jokes.

If we define right and wrong in terms of non-doxastic moral attitudes, then our implicit biases unacceptably affect what is morally right and wrong, so that racist behavior turns out to be permissible for Alice, her beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding.

So, neither approach is satisfactory.

A vicious circularity in one kind of moral relativism

It’s just occurred to me that simple moral relativism on its face just makes no sense as a metaethical position. It holds:

1. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one believes the action to be morally required.

But here we have an account of a property, namely moral requirement, where the account makes use of that very property.

Here’s another way to put the point. The moral relativist presumably also accepts:

2. What it is for an action to be morally forbidden is that one believes the action to be morally forbidden.

Now, claim (1) says the same thing about the morally required as (2) says about the morally forbidden. Thus, (1) cannot be a correct account of the morally required, since the morally required and the morally forbidden are different. A correct account of X cannot say about X the same thing that a correct account of Y says about Y when X and Y are different!

In other words, the morally relativist metaethicist needs some replacement for “believes the action to be morally required/forbidden” in (1) and (2) that does not employ the concepts of the morally required and forbidden.

Related point: Here is a way to see that (1) is not the right definition of moral requirement. Suppose I am wrong about what I believe, and so I believe that I believe that A is morally required, but in fact I don’t believe that A is morally required. (Perhaps I would like to be the sort of person who believes that A is morally required, and by wishful thinking I come to believe that I believe it, but in fact my actions belie my alleged belief, and I don’t actually believe that A is morally required.) But if to be morally required is defined as to be believed to be morally required, then believing that A is believed to be morally required is believing that A is morally required. So, I cannot have a case where I am wrong in believing that I believe that A is morally required. But clearly I am fallible in my introspection!

A better move, then, for the relativist seems to be to replace beliefs with other attitudes, such as:

3. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one have an attitude of moral disapproval towards refraining from the action.

On this version of relativism, our moral beliefs can be incorrect. For it is quite possible for our attitudes of moral disapproval to fail to match our moral beliefs. And this is especially true if (3) is the right account of moral requirement. For we can easily be self-deceived about whether in fact we exemplify an attitude of moral disapproval, and hence we can be self-deceived about whether the action is wrong. The moral relativist now owes us an account of moral disapproval that does not depend on first order moral concepts, and that’s tough, but at least we don’t have a vicious circularity like in (1).

Community norms

One of our grad students brought to my attention a question I never thought about: Which communities have genuine authority? (Furthermore, this needs to be fine-grained as the question of which communities have genuine authority in which respect.)

If I move to a neighborhood with a home owners’ association, and the neighborhood tells me that zip lines are forbidden, that is presumably an authoritative norm. But if I move to neighborhood without any such association, and all my neighbors come and tell me that zip lines just aren’t done around here, and that I am not to build one, the command not to build a zip line is just bluster. I may have reasons of peaceful coexistence or prudence not to build a zip line, but the command does not constitute an authoritative norm.

The question of what conditions a state-like entity has to satisfy (say, not being radically unjust) to have authority has been very widely discussed. This isn’t my area of philosophy, but I feel that the question of which non-state communities have authority is much less discussed. Here, think of clubs, committees, religious congregations, families, neighborhoods, Internet forums, etc. And it’s not just a question of when, say, a neighborhood is being unjust. There may be nothing unjust about having a standard that forbids zip lines, but nonetheless if the community lacks authority, that standard is not an authoritative norm, and has no reason-giving force (beyond reasons of peaceful coexistence or the like).

And of course the question needs to be more fine-grained. Even with a home owners’ association, the authority of the neighborhood only applies to a limited number of things—it cannot, for instance, govern the content of private conversations inside the house.

The problem is particularly pressing for anyone who is a social relativist about some domain and thinks that norms of some sort (e.g., moral, aesthetic, or epistemic) come from community standards. For intuitively not every community standard is authoritative.

Taste and cross-cultural encounters

After visiting the British Museum yesterday, I find it rather hard to take seriously the argument for the relativity of beauty from the diversity of taste. It seems clear that just as C. S. Lewis has argued for a moral core cutting across cultures, one can argue that there is an aesthetic core across cultures.

There is, however, an interesting apparent difference between the diversity of taste and the diversity of morals. I think a cross-cultural encounter involving a difference of taste regarding the best cultural artifacts—by each culture’s own standards—should typically lead to a broadening of taste. But a cross-cultural moral encounter should not typically lead to a broadening of morals. Very often, it should lead to a narrowing of morals: for instance, one culture learning from the other that slavery sex is wrong.

Why this difference? I think it may come from a difference in quantifiers.

As Aquinas already noted (in a somewhat different way), to be morally good, an action has to be good or neutral with respect to every relevant dimension of moral evaluation. If it is good with respect to courage and kindness and generosity, but it is bad with respect to justice (Robin Hood?), then the action is plain wrong. Thus as new dimensions of moral evaluation are discovered, as can happen in cross-cultural encounter, we get a narrowing of the actions that we classify as morally good.

On the other hand, for an item to be beautiful, it only needs to be beautiful with respect to some relevant dimensions of beauty. A musical performance is still beautiful on the whole even if the orchestra is dressed in dirty rags, and a painting can be beautiful even if it reeks of oil. Thus as we discover new dimensions of beauty, we get a broadening of the pieces that we classify as beautiful.

Marriage as a natural kind

Thesis: Marriage as a natural kind of relationships is a better theory than marriage as an institution defined by socially instituted rights and responsibilities.

Argument 1: On the institution view, we have to say that people in most other cultures aren't married since they don't have the same socially instituted rights and responsibilities. That's bad, since they say they're married when they learn English. The natural kind view holds, instead, that people in different cultures are referring to the same kind of relationship, but may get wrong what is and is not a part of the relationship.

We do not automatically accept educational credentials from other cultures. Thus, being medically educated in France does not automatically make one count as medically educated in the U.S. And being medically educated in 5th century France would make one not one whit medically educated in 21st century France (imagine a 5th century doctor who travels in time). In other words, being medically educated is always indexed to a set of standards. But we don't think of marriage in this way, with a few notable exceptions, such as polygamy or same-sex marriage. Getting married in India is sufficient for being married in France. Why? If one thinks of getting married as assenting to a set of rights and responsibilities, then getting married in India shouldn't be sufficient for being married in France, or vice versa.

Argument 2: The natural kind view explains how we can individually and as a society discover new rights and responsibilities involved in marriage. The institution view leads either to constant abolishment of the old institution and replacement with a new one, or to a stale conservatism. We learn about the rights and responsibilities of marriage experientially and not just a priori or by poring over legal tomes. That is how it is with a natural kind like water.

Argument 3: Suppose we see someone from a patriarchal culture who is failing to care for his sick wife (or at least someone he calls a wife). We might well say: "It's your duty as a husband to take care of her." On the institution view, he can respond: "No, it isn't. It would be my duty to take care of her if I were her husband-per-American-rules, but I am her husband-per-Patriland-rules, and in Patriland wives take care of their husbands and husbands do not need to take care of their wives." But on the natural kind view, we can say: "You tried to marry her, and marriage does require taking care of a sick spouse, regardless of who is of what sex. So either you succeeded at marrying, in which case you have this responsibility, or you failed at marrying, in which case you don't have the rights you thought you gained." On the institution view all we can say is: "You're in a corrupt and sexist institution, and you should divorce to stop supporting it. By the way, you're right that you have no role duty to take care of her."

Argument 4a (for conservatives): If you take the institution view, you play into Wedgwood's argument for same-sex "marriage".

Argument 4b (for liberals): If you take the institution view, you cannot advocate same-sex marriage, but only same-sex "marriage". You have to adopt the very revisionery position that marriage should be abolished, albeit replaced with something very much like it, namely marriage*, since marriage is defined by the social understanding, and that has included opposition of sexes. Moreover, such a view leads to unhappy consequences. Once we have replaced marriage with marriage*, we can't say that our grandparents are married*, only that they are married, and since marriage* is the only relationship available after the revision, you can't do what your grandparents did. Moreover, even allowing our grandparents to stay married is problematic if marriage is an unjust institution. So probably the state needs to dissolve their marriage, leaving it up to them whether to marry*. This is a politically untenable and unhappy view. A much better view is that marriage is a natural kind, and we were simply wrong in thinking marriage is only for people of the opposite sex. This (and Argument 3, too) is a species of the general point that relativistic theses run the danger of leading to stale conservatism.

On a relativism about beauty

Consider a naive relativist theory on which, necessarily,

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful.

This cannot be a complete theory about beauty.  After all, exactly the same theory can be given for ugliness:

• y is ugly to x if and only if x takes y to be ugly.

Since nothing has been said that distinguishes beauty from ugliness, the theory cannot be complete.  

Moreover, there is a further oddness about the theory as I've given it.  According to the theory, the fundamental concepts are relational: being beautiful (or ugly) to.  But on the right hand side of the biconditionals we have the monadic beautiful (or ugly).  If someone fully accepts the theory, she won't take anything to be beautiful simpliciter, but only beautiful to her.  So, perhaps the relativist should say:

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful to her.

One serious problem with this is that then nothing is beautiful to the self-conscious objectivist, since the self-conscious objectivist takes nothing to be beautiful to her--she does not have any relational "is beautiful to" predicate.

And consider another problem.  Suppose I am essentially logically omniscient, so that if p and q are logically equivalent, then it is an essential property of me that I believe p if and only if I believe q.  Applying this to the biconditional, I get:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I take y to be beautiful to me.

But to take something to be beautiful to me is just to believe it is beautiful to me.  So:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I believe that y is beautiful to me.

But that is surely wrong: logical omniscience should not imply omniscience about my internal states.

Maybe, though, I am being too cognitivist about "takes y to be beautiful to her".  Maybe to take y to be beautiful isn't to believe anything about y but to have a certain appreciative attitude to y.  That takes care of the problem of the objectivist and the logically omniscient individuals.  

But we still have another problem.  Imagine that I love Mozart.  I go to a Mozart violin concert, and then during the intermission I get a message about a family emergency and I need to go home.  The first part of the concert was beautiful to me.  Tomorrow I hear that the second half of the concert was even better in the respects I appreciate.  I conclude that I missed some beautiful performances.  But on the appreciative attitude version of "takes", that's false.  For the second half of the concert wasn't beautiful to me, since I didn't take it to be beautiful in the appreciative sense.  

A familiar response is to amend the right-hand-side of the biconditional to replace "I take y to be beautiful (to me)" with "I would take y to be beautiful (to me) if I experienced y."  But probably not.  After all, had I stayed for the second half of the concert, worries about the family emergency and guilt that I am enjoying someone's fiddling while my home burns (literally or figuratively) would have spoiled my enjoyment of the concert.  Of course this is just a special case of the problems that go under the head of "the conditional fallacy."  

So we would have to idealize: I would take y to be beautiful if I experienced y in ideal observing circumstances.  But as the above example shows, the ideal observing circumstances need to include being in the right mental state.  We better not define the right mental state as the one in which one's appreciation is correct, since then our theory isn't subjectivist any more.  And given that what one appreciates can be so heavily dependent on one's emotional state, it seems that at this point matters are hopeless.  

And all the same goes for similar theories about morality.

Cognitivist normative and metaethical relativism

Cognitivist normative moral relativism is the thesis that for all x and A:

1. x morally ought to A if and only if x believes that she[note 1] morally ought to A.

(Notice that one then has to drop "ought implies can".) Cognitivist normative moral relativism is a thesis at the normative level that tells us what, in fact, is obligatory.
Cognitivist metaethical moral relativism wants to add to (1) a parallel account of what it is to have a moral ought. I want to spend this post thinking about whether this can be done. The simplest attempt is:

2. What it is for it to be the case that x morally ought to A is for x to believe that she morally ought to A.

But this is viciously circular, since "morally ought" appears on both sides of the definition.
But perhaps there is some way of redescribing the belief without mentioning its content. Maybe, for instance, there is some "pragmatic" account of what it is to believe that one morally ought to A in terms of patterns of emotion and behavior. But that threatens to become a non-cognitive account, and it is cognitivist moral relativism that we're looking at. (Maybe, though, one has a pragmatic account of all belief and cognition? If so, then maybe one can run this line.)
Or maybe there is some other "ought" that one can put in the definiens in (2). Perhaps, what it is for it to be the case that x morally ought to A is for x to believe that she simply ought to A, or for x to believe that she all things considered ought to A. Let's take the second option for definiteness—any similar proposal will have the same problem.
Then, the belief that one morally ought to A and the belief that one all things considered ought to A either are or are not the same belief. If they are the same belief, our modification of (2) remains circular, since "all things considered" is just a synonym for "morally". And if they are not the same belief, then we get an account that surely conflicts with (1). For if they are not the same belief, then someone could believe that she morally ought to A without believing that she ought all things considered to A. By the analogue of (2), it is not the case that she morally ought to A, and by the analogue of (1), it is the case that she morally ought to A.
So, it is difficult to come up with a cognitivist relativistic metaethical theory that neatly matches (1). One might give up on cognitivism, but then one needs to modify (1), since (1) commits one to beliefs about what one morally ought. The other move is to accept (1) but couple it with a non-relativistic metaethics. For instance, it is prima facie coherent to conjoin (1) with:

3. What it is for x to morally ought to A is for God to command x to A.

If one wants one's normative ethics to hold necessarily, one should then say that necessarily God commands everybody who is capable of moral beliefs to do what they believe they ought to do and that he commands nothing that goes beyond that. Such a metaethically absolutist normative relativism is fairly coherent, but also not plausible. Why think that God commands this and nothing beyond this? Similarly with other views, like natural law or virtue ethics, that one can plug in metaethically. The resulting theory may be coherent, but it does not appear plausible.
But there is one version of the theory that is kind of interesting. Suppose that

4. Necessarily, if God made persons other than himself, then out of a concern for their moral life he made them in such a way that they believe that they are morally omniscient, where x is morally omniscient provided that (x believes that she ought to A) if and only if x ought to A, and x knows that she ought to A if and only if x believes that she ought to A.

One could couple (4) with any metaethics compatible with theism, and then one gets (1) as a consequence. Of course, on its face, (4) appears pretty implausible when conjoined with a non-relativistic metaethics. There seems to be too much moral disagreement. To make (4) plausible on non-relativistic metaethics, one might have to combine (4) with a view on which people have all sorts of moral beliefs that they apparently don't know about. But notice that at this point we've departed quite far from the spirit of relativism.

Praise and relativism

Hartry Field agrees with Putnam that values are non-factual. Of course, there is a fact of the matter about whether x values F, but there is no fact of the matter about whether x's valuing F is correct. This includes epistemic values. Field thinks this is not a problem. One simply relativizes epistemology to an "evidential system". Then, making use of a non-relativistic concept of truth, one defines the reliability of an evidential system. Finally:

if there is any "highest epistemological praise" it will be something like "is justified relative to some highly reliable evidential system" (or "is justified relative to all highly reliable evidential systems", or some such thing). This isn't really an adequate formulation of what "the highest epistemological praise" (if there is such a thing) would be, for (among other things) reliability is not the only feature we want our evidential systems to have; but it gives the general flavor. (Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), p. 564)

Field is cautious about whether there is any such thing as the "highest epistemological praise". His caution could have two sources: he could be cautious about whether there is such a thing as "high epistemological praise" or about whether there is such a thing as the "highest epistemological praise". I shall take the latter to be his worry. Thus, on my reading, Field thinks there is such a thing as high epistemological praise, and to give it is to say something of "the general flavor" of the claim that a belief is "justified relative to some highly reliable evidential system (jrtshres)".

But now let me raise this question. What makes saying that a belief is jrtshres be a case of praise, while saying that it is justified relative to some evidential system (jrtses—note that every belief has this property) or that it was acquired during a full moon (adafm) are, presumably, not praise?

To answer this question we need to figure out the sense of the word "phrase". I see two prima facie plausible answers. On the first, to praise something is to attribute to it a property that is valued (individually or socially)—this is the relativistic notion of praise. On the second, to praise something is to attribute to it a property that is in fact valuable—this is the objective notion of praise.

Let's start with the second. This clearly has difficulties. Thus, it is easy to imagine (and I remember a claim that there is a code of honor among Russian thieves according to which this is so) a criminal subculture where to say that something was earned through honest work got is not praise, even though it is the attribution of a property that is in actual fact valuable. Similarly, it seems to be genuine praise if I say, misunderstanding the aim of checkers: "Great! You've just managed to get yourself into a position where you have no valid move." Nonetheless, there may be a sense of "objectively correct praise" on which to praise something is to attribute to it a property that one believes to be objectively valuable. But then by engaging in epistemic praise, we are presupposing something incompatible with Field's relativism about epistemic values—we're taking a belief's being jrshrtes to be objectively valuable.

On the other hand, here is a difficulty for the relativistic notion of "praise" as a reading of what Field is claiming. It seems that on a relativistic notion of praise, what is going to be the highest epistemological praise is not that a belief is jrtshres, but that it is justified according to one's own evidential system (on the individual relativist reading—the social case needs a modification in the argument). The evidential systems in Field's paper embody different individuals' evidential values, and so if one praises by attributing properties that one values, then one will be praising compliance with one's own evidential system.

I suppose Field could object that it is possible to see one thing as valuable for one's own beliefs and another as valuable for another's. Perhaps one sees epistemic caution as good in one's own case but values incaution in others, being glad that others explore crazy hypotheses, as that gives one a richer fund of ideas to work with. This example, by itself, is no good, though. Instrumentally valuing something that others do, on account of its benefits to oneself, is not really praise (unless one has an overinflated ego and one equates oneself with God or the universe or something like that). It is not, for instance, praise for the conman to say, once the con is done: "You have made me rich", though the conman values being rich. It would, on the other hand, be more like praise for the conman to say to someone: "You have made yourself rich." As long as we see others as being relevantly like ourselves, it does not seem that we can coherently praise in another what we do not value in ourselves.

Moreover, let's simplify and assume that what it is to value something is to have a certain kind of preference for it. A more sophisticated theory of subjective value will need a more sophisticated version of this argument, but I suspect the basic point will still be possible to make. Then on the relativistic reading, the force of the praise comes down to something basically like one's preference for jrtshes beliefs. But the following statement seems to me to be performatively inconsistent: "I praise you for F, because I prefer F." The relativism in the second clause undercuts the praise in the first. Epistemic praise, however, can be made both of oneself and of another. If made of another, one can hold back on the "because I happen to prefer jrtshes beliefs" clause. But if we praise ourselves in a clear-headed way, then we cannot hold back on it, and we indeed are being performatively inconsistent.

Of course, if to value something is to believe that it is objecitively valuable, the performative inconsistency disappears. But Field cannot take this route.

If all this is correct, we get a more general result: If relativism about values is correct, praise is insincere, manipulative or in some way inconsistent.

Undergraduate moral relativism and tolerance

One of the puzzling features of undergraduate moral relativism is that students seem to think that their moral relativism in some way either supports or is required by a notion of tolerance for other people's practices and beliefs. This is puzzling because, after all, if relativism is true, then if I believe or society believes (depending on whether the relativism is individual or social) that someone's variant practices and beliefs should be squelched and the person should be punished for them, then this is the right thing for me or for society to do. In fact, this consideration is a good reason to abandon relativism.

Still, it is a good question why it is that students hold together the doctrines that (a) moral relativism is true, and (b) moral relativism connected with tolerance. Do we just want to say that they are massively irrational[note 1], or that this is just an effect of original sin, or is there a more proximate and specific explanation?

I want to offer two different hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that students confuse together the concepts of culpability and wrongness. A person may do wrong, but not be culpable for it if she does not know that what she is doing is wrong and she is not culpable for this ignorance. Conversely, a person may do the right thing, under at least one description, but still be culpable, if she erroneously believes it to be wrong. A certain tolerance goes together with considerations of inculpability. If someone is engaging in some immoral activity but doing so inculpably, then it makes sense to be tolerant, provided that undue harm to society does not result. From the claim that the Nazis believed what they did was right, the relativist laboring under a confusion between culpability and wrongness concludes that what the Nazis did was not wrong (for them). However, interestingly, in one's own case, what one believes to be wrong and what is culpable come very close (there is still a gap since one can do what oen believes to be wrong but be non-culpable on grounds of internal or external compulsion), and hence the confusion does not significantly affect a lot of first-person deliberative behavior. Thus, a typical individual relativist still tries to figure out what is the right thing to do, and consults with others, even though this makes no sense given that whatever she believes to be right is guaranteed to be right.

The second hypothesis is different. Consider first a relativism about an area of life that does not expressly involve ethics, say esthetic or gustatory relativism (what is beautiful or tasty to me may not be beautiful or tasty to you, and there is no objective, mind-independent beauty or tastiness). This kind of relativism does support quite a bit of tolerance. If Century Sundae is not tasty to you in the way it is to me, I should not impose it on you, and I should be tolerant of your desire to eat the mildly repellent (to me) Chunky Monkey. Here, the relativism is sufficiently limited that it does not undercut, but instead supports, tolerance.

As a result of this, one might conclude that relativism in general supports tolerance about the praxis that is relatively evaluated. However, in the special case where the relativism is moral relativism, this does not hold. The reason that esthetic or gustatory relativism supports tolerance is because of objective moral principles concerning respect for differing preferences and views. But once the relativism becomes moral relativism, these principles are undercut, a fact one might easily miss.

Or maybe they are not entirely undercut. After all, if one is a "nice" person who believes that one should be tolerant of people with differing practices, then individual relativism renders this belief self-justifying. But of course individual relativism would equally render the opposite belief self-justifying.

Plato on knowledge and teaching

For a long time, based largely on the Meno, I've been under the impression that Plato interdefines knowledge and teaching. Here is the idea:

1. Teaching is the imparting of knowledge.
2. Knowledge is what can be taught to every one who is willing and has sufficient learning abilities.

If this is right, then Platonic knowledge is never essentially private. It cannot be essentially indexical, since you cannot believe the same thing I do when I believe that I am six feet tall, arguably. Nor can it be of something essentially temporal: I cannot teach you that I am presently writing this post, because by the time you learn it, it may no be longer true, and hence it may not be knowledge. Neither can knowledge be of culturally relative facts. That this piece of jewelry is beautiful is something I may simply be unable to teach a Spartan, and she may be unable to teach me that that amphora is elegant.

Platonic knowledge thus must be of a non-indexical, atemporal, non-relative reality. And all this follows from Plato's understanding of teaching.

Moreover, teaching is not indoctrination. It is not the mere transmission of opinion or even the turning of knowledge into opinion. It is the imparting of knowledge, so that she who is taught can herself in turn teach. The evidence that the teacher has must itself be evidence that can be imparted to the student. Thus, the evidence, too, must be non-indexical, atemporal and non-relative, accessible to people of all times, cultures and social classes (think of the slave boy) who have sufficient ability. This does not require the theory of recollection--a divinely implanted faculty or knowledge that we receive by illumination at conception will do the trick, too--but does seem to require something special and universal like it.

Furthermore, a part of what it is to teach is to show how the knowledge withstands Socratic questioning--this questioning, thus, is a part of the teaching process, and the knowledge must be something that can survive this.

Or so, on this reading, Plato thinks. Whether it is all true is another question.