AR-FAQ - #11

#11 There is no correct or incorrect in morals; you have yours and I have mine, right?

This position, known as moral relativism, is quite ancient but became fashionable at the turn of the century, as reports on the customs of societies alien to those found in Europe became available. It fell out of fashion, after the Second World War, although it is occasionally revived. Ethical propositions, we are asked to believe, are no more than statements of personal opinion and, therefore, cannot carry absolute weight. The main problem with this position is that ethical relativists are unable to denounce execrable ethical practices, such as racism. On what grounds can they condemn (if at all) Hitler's ideas on racial purity? Are we to believe that he was uttering an ethical truth when advocating the Final Solution? In addition to the inability to denounce practices of other societies, the relativists are unable to counter the arguments of even those whose society they share. They cannot berate someone who proposes to raise and kill infants for industrial pet food consumption, for example, if that person sees it as morally sound. Indeed, they cannot articulate the concept of societal moral progress, since they lack a basis for judging progress. There is no point in turning to the relativists for advice on ethical issues such as euthanasia, infanticide, or the use of fetuses in research. Faced with such arguments, ethical relativists sometimes argue that ethical truth is based on the beliefs of a society; ethical truth is seen as nothing more than a reflection of societal customs and habits. Butchering animals is acceptable in the West, they would say, because the majority of people think it so. They are on no firmer ground here. Are we to accept that chattel slavery was right before the US Civil War and wrong thereafter? Can all ethical decisions be decided by conducting opinion polls? It is true that different societies have different practices that might be seen as ethical by one and unethical by the other. However, these differences result from differing circumstances. For example, in a society where mere survival is key, the diversion of limited food to an infant could detract significantly from the well-being of the existing family members that contribute to food gathering. Given that, infanticide may be the ethically correct course. The conclusion is that there is such a thing as ethical truth (otherwise, ethics becomes vacuous and devoid of proscriptive force). The continuity of thought, then, between those who reject the evils of slavery, racial discrimination, and gender bias, and those who denounce the evils of speciesism becomes striking. AECW

Many AR advocates (including myself) believe that morality is relative. We believe that AR is much more cogently argued when it is argued from the standpoint of your opponent's morality, not some mythical, hard-to-define universal morality. In arguing against moral absolutism, there is a very simple objection: Where does this absolute morality come from? Moral absolutism is an argument from authority, a tautology. If there were such a thing as "ethical truth", then there must be a way of determining it, and obviously there isn't. In the absence of a known proof of "ethical truth", I don't know how AECW can conclude it exists. An example of the method of leveraging a person's morality is to ask the person why he has compassion for human beings. Almost always he will agree that his compassion does not stem from the fact that: 1) humans use language, 2) humans compose symphonies, 3) humans can plan in the far future, 4) humans have a written, technological culture, etc. Instead, he will agree that it stems from the fact that humans can suffer, feel pain, be harmed, etc. It is then quite easy to show that nonhuman animals can also suffer, feel pain, be harmed, etc. The person's arbitrary inconsistency in not according moral status to nonhumans then stands out starkly. JEH

There is a middle ground between the positions of AECW and JEH. One can assert that just as mathematics is necessarily built upon a set of unprovable axioms, so is a system of ethics. At the foundation of a system of ethics are moral axioms, such as "unnecessary pain is wrong". Given the set of axioms, methods of reasoning (such as deduction and induction), and empirical facts, it is possible to derive ethical hypotheses. It is in this sense that an ethical statement can be said to be true. Of course, one can disagree about the axioms, and certainly such disagreement renders ethics "relative", but the concept of ethical truth is not meaningless. Fortunately, the most fundamental ethical axioms seem to be nearly universally accepted, usually because they are necessary for societies to function. Where differences exist, they can be elucidated and discussed, in a style similar to the "leveraging" described by JEH. DG

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime. Romain Rolland (author, Nobel 1915)