David Brooks on Relativism, Liberalism, and Terri Schiavo

[1] Brooks’s Central Claims
In today’s [oops. Now yesterday’s. Sorry. Too lazy to finish this yesterday.] NYT, David Brooks incorrectly suggests that the position of most liberals on the Terri Schiavo case commits them to moral relativism. In this post I’ll explain what Brooks gets wrong, as well as note something important that he gets right.

Brooks writes:

“The central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable peoplewill differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste.You are saying, as liberals do say, that society should be neutral and allow people to make their own choices. You are saying, as liberals do say, that we should be tolerant and nonjudgmental toward people who make different choices.

What begins as an appealing notion - that life and death are joined by a continuum - becomes vapid mush, because we are all invited to punt when it comes time to do the hard job of standing up for common principles, arguing right and wrong, and judging those who make bad decisions.”

There’s something right and something wrong in what Brooks writes here.

What he’s right about is this: liberals have at least some weak tendency to slide into some incoherent mish-mash of moral relativism and moral nihilism. (Conservatives do, too, actually, but that’s a different story for a different time.)

He’s wrong, however, to say that this is an inevitable consequence of liberalism, or of the common liberal position on the Schiavo affair. This is more complicated, and has to do with messy details about reason, justification, complexity, borderline cases, and the nature of moral relativism and moral nihilism. These questions are difficult, and I don’t think we should blame people for getting confused about them, or for skimming over details when they are writing at the op-ed level. (That courtesy should be extended not only to Brooks, but to me as well, since it is almost inevitable that there will be some confusions and simplifications in what I’m about to write.)

First, some background.

[2] Objectivism, Relativism, Nihilism
Roughly, moral objectivism is the view that there are at least some objectively right and at least some objectively wrong answers to moral questions. (No, this is not a proper definition, but we’re operating at the op-ed level here. If we’re going to get anything done, we can’t worry about the really nice niceties.) Roughly, moral nihilism is the view that there are no right or wrong answers to moral questions. Objectivism and nihilism are fairly easy to get at least a rough, intuitive grasp of.

Moral relativism is a far, far weirder position, and consequently much harder to get even a rough, intuitive grasp of. Roughly, moral relativism seems to be the view that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, but these are relatively right and relatively wrong. Paradigmatically, their rightness or wrongness depends on individual belief or cultural tradition. This cannot be the view that nothing is really right, but that we call things right if we like them or if they are approved by our culture; that view is moral nihilism. Moral relativism is probably incoherent, and it would take more time than I have and more patience than you have to articulate a position that might legitimately be called relativistic—a position that does not ultimately degenerate either into covert objectivism or covert nihilism. So I won’t even try to do that here.

Fortunately, we don’t have to try to understand what moral relativism really is, since almost everyone—Brooks included—who talks about “relativism” probably really intends to be talking about nihilism. This becomes clear when we look carefully at Brooks’s central claim. Again, it is:

“Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste.”

Now, when someone says that some issue is a matter of “mere taste,” what they usually mean is that there are no truly right answers concerning that issue. To the question “which is better, chocolate or vanilla?” the answer is supposed to be: neither is better, it’s purely—and merely—a matter of taste. No right answers, no wrong answers. Nothing but preferences.

So, though Brooks identifies this as “relativism,” it’s apparently really nihilism he has in mind.

Correcting for this little problem and putting his principle in its appropriately general form we get:

(B) If we admit that there are decisions that ought to be left up to the
most-affected parties, then we must admit that moral nihilism is true.

There are two important claims at issue here, forming the antecedent and consequent of this conditional:

(A) In at least some cases, decisions ought to be left up to those
who are closest to/most profoundly affected by the decision.

And

(N) Moral nihilism is true: no answers to moral questions are either
right or wrong.

Brooks’s central claim, (B), is equivalent to the following:

(B’) If (A) is true, then (N) must be true.

That is to say, Brooks’s central claim is that, if we think that Schiavo-type decisions should be left up to the relevant family-members, then we are committed to moral nihilism. In the next section we will see that this is false.

[3] Objectivity, Indeterminacy and Complexity
Once we have the clarified version of Brook’s claim, (B’), in front of us it is, in fact, fairly obvious that it is false. There are at least two (and, in fact, more) reasons why one might leave a decision up to the most-affected parties.

First, one might be a nihilist. I suppose that reasoning goes something like this:

(1) Since there are no right or wrong answers about the case in question, there is no way to criticize any decision anyone might make, hence no reason to impose a decision on anyone.

However—and this is the crucial case--one might be an objectivist but recognize that the case in question is complex and difficult. This reasoning goes something like this:

(2) Although many moral issues are perfectly objective and determinate, there are at least some problem cases—borderline cases, or cases in which principles conflict, or cases of genuine indeterminacy, or cases which are just too complex for us to figure out. In such cases, reasonable people can disagree without obvious error. Since the most-affected people are most intimately acquainted with the facts in the case, and since they will be the ones who will have to live most closely with the consequences of the decision, they are the ones who should make it.

Since liberals may be (and usually are) reasoning as in (2), Brooks’s central claim, (B)/(B') is false. Thus (A) does not commit us to nihilism (or, for that matter, relativism).

[4] Tolerance Etc.
Once we clear up this confusion, it’s easy to understand Brooks’s related worries about tolerance and suspension of judgment. If you accept (A), he writes:

“You are saying, as liberals do say, that society should be neutral and allow people to make their own choices. You are saying, as liberals do say, that we should be tolerant and nonjudgmental toward people who make different choices.
What begins as an appealing notion - that life and death are joined by a continuum - becomes vapid mush, because we are all invited to punt when it comes time to do the hard job of standing up for common principles, arguing right and wrong, and judging those who make bad decisions.”

Although philosophically astute liberals are saying that society must allow people (or families) to make their own choices, we are saying this not because saying so (or thinking so) makes it so (relativism), nor because there are no right or wrong answers (nihilism), but, rather, because the relevant (and perfectly objective) facts and principles do not unequivocally and uniquely determine a conclusion in the relevant cases.

In the Schaivo case in particular, it is that fact that (as Brooks admits) life and death are joined by a continuum that makes the application of the relevant principles difficult or possibly even indeterminate. In a case in which A and B lie on a continuum, there simply will be no clear line between the two, and decisions under such conditions are inevitably hard.

But cases in which reason underdetermines the choice between two incompatible options are common and in no way entail relativism or nihilism. Think, for example, of cases in which doctors offer their patients a choice between two treatments because neither treatment is clearly better. For example, one treatment might be more effective than another but have much more serious side-effects. In some such cases neither decision will be obviously superior. Reasonable people can disagree here, not because there are no facts of the matter independent of our choices, but, rather, because the two treatments are--objectively speaking-- approximately equally good. Reason is not impotent or relative in such cases—it rules out, e.g., eating dirt or going to a witch doctor or taking neither treatment or standing on your head. In fact, it will rule out almost all possibilities, narrowing things down to a very narrow range of rationally permissible actions. But to expect reason somehow to magically distinguish between two equally good courses of action is to expect reason to be unreasonable—to make an arbitrary ruling when the evidence indicates that the options are equally well-supported. Having narrowed things down to a small set of approximately equally reasonable courses of action, however, there is nothing left for reason to do but stand back and say “you are permitted to do any of these things.” Note that no one thinks that oncologists are relativists or nihilists simply because they often offer their patients choices between aggressive, taxing treatments and more conservative, less taxing ones.

The claim that hard cases should be decided by those most closely affected is, in fact, a claim which forms a central part of at least some justifications of democracy. The Constitution sets down certain principles that are taken to be more-or-less beyond dispute (e.g. that we have rights to free speech and press, due process, etc.), and leaves the rest to us to decide. It’s not because the Founders were relativists, nor that they were nihilists who thought that there were no facts of the matter about e.g. whether theft should be a crime or what marriage should be like. It is, rather, at least in part that they recognized that as questions become more detailed and less clear, it is reasonable to leave the requisite judgment calls up to those who are most affected—i.e. the electorate. So if Brooks were right, our very commitment to democracy might commit us to relativism or nihilism.

[5] The Schiavo Case as a Toss-Up
In the case of Ms. Schiavo, I think we have to admit that either keeping her body alive or allowing it to die is rationally defensible in this case. I actually believe that the latter course of action is notably more reasonable, but it’s a close enough call that I can understand how rational people of good will could believe otherwise. In cases where so much is at stake, such disjunctive conclusions are, unfortunately, difficult for some people to accept. As a result, people often end up arguing passionately for one course of action over another which is, objectively speaking, approximately equally well-supported. This is a blueprint for disaster when emotions run high.

[6] What Liberals Can Learn From Brooks
In Brooks’s defense, however, I think he is right that many philosophically unreflective liberals do tacitly presuppose the truth of nihilism or say things that seem to commit them to it. Brooks’s essay would have been stronger and more helpful if he’d have focused on this more modest and important point, warning liberals against the possibility of unconsciously sliding into indefensible meta-ethical positions. Instead, he mistakenly thinks that this slide is inevitable.