More Conservative Cultural Relativism?
Sort of.
I've been ambivalent about Alito until the last week or so when the really damning revelations have started to come out. This NYT story seals the deal for me. Turns out that Alito was a member of an organization called 'Concerned Alumni of Princeton.' Among other fascinatin' deeds--including working to keep females out of the university--the organization asserted the following in its magazine, Prospect:
"Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics."
This, incidentally, as a way of indicating that the policy was bad.
When was this written, you might ask? Such a bizarre comparison might be excusable if it had been written in, oh let's say 1950. But of course it couldn't have been, could it? Turns out it was written in--sit down for this one--1985. Women already had the vote and everything by that time, so you can see how things were already going down-hill...
Now, I have very complicated--and sub-optimally coherent--views about affirmative action. But I'm inclined to be in favor of it so long as it is justifiable on grounds (as it were) of field-levelling. If Smith has led a radically privileged life, Jones has faced severe adversity, and Smith's accomplishments are equal to or only marginally greater than Jones's, I think there is a good argument for preferring Jones in some contexts--e.g. college admissions.
On the other hand, I have little sympathy for arguments from diversity. I haven't written them off entirely, but they seem weak and disingenuous to me. These arguments usually take something like the following form: colleges should privilege under-represented groups because members of over-represented groups will benefit from matriculating with more members of the under-represented groups. This argument is such a mess that I don't even want to get into it here. (Again, though, I haven't written it off entirely, FWIW.)
But the one type of affirmative action I think we should all be able to agree is indefensible is affirmative action for the already over-privileged, which, so far as I can tell, is exactly what CAP is advocating.
CAP seems to think that its actions are justified as attempts to defend "traditional values at Princeton." That's sophomorically ambiguous, and for us to know what's really going on they'd have to made it clear whether they meant that they were (a) defending the traditional values of Princeton or (b) defending, at Princeton, traditional values in some wider sense of the term (Western values, Christian values, American values, or whatever).
Either way, it's going to take more than an appeal to "traditional values" to defend these conclusions.
But the failure of appeals to tradition isn't my real concern here. Rather, I'm interested to point out, once again, how close many conservatives come to being cultural moral relativists. Now, cultural moral relativism (CMR) is a radically mis-understood view. It's one of the lamest moral theories ever proposed (approximately as lame as the divine command theory, and, oddly, a cousin of it), and almost no reputable philosopher thinks of the view as as an open theoretical option. However, even most philosophers don't really understand the view very well--IMHO--and, consequently, they don't really understand in much detail why it actually fails (though they are right that it fails).
But the topic at hand isn't so much why CMR fails but what it is and why the right flirts with the position about as often as the left does. (What I'm about to say is controversial, but I know about as much about this issue as anyone, so I'll feel free to speak as if I know what I'm talking about...) To understand what's going on here, you first have to understand the nature of many errors in reasoning generally and many philosophical errors in particular. Philosphers often mistakenly think that people usually make very clear errors (when they do make errors, that is). But I think that's not true. This becomes clear when you carefully think about the character of the fallacies on the traditional list. Take, for example, the ad baculum fallacy ("appeal to the stick," i.e. an appeal to force). Now, the textbook examples (and here I mean the actual examples in actual textbooks) are usually terrible. If Smith says to Jones "your money or your life," Smith is not obviously committing an ad baculum fallacy. On the common view of fallacies (and here I run roughshod over a bunch of details), fallacies are errors in reasoning. But Smith isn't reasoning at all, nor urging Jones to do so. He's threatening. Better examples involve cases in which harm is threatened as a way to get someone to believe something (e.g. believe this or go to Hell). But even these cases aren't clear. If I say "believe that p or I'll hit you," then I'm a bad person, but, again, am not obviously committing a fallacy. Again, I'm threatening you--providing you (unjustly) with a prudential reason for believing. For this fallacy to be, you know, a fallacy, apparently I have to be somehow asserting or presupposing that by threatening you I am providing you with a logical or epistemic reason to believe--that is, the same kind of reason that good evidence would provide.
To make a long story short (er, too late), when we try to produce an uncontroversial example of an ad baculum, it ends up looking something like this:
You have good logical/epistemic reasons to believe that p
because if you don't believe that p I will harm you.
But almost no one is stupid enough to make this error because almost no one is stupid enough to think that physical harm can constitute an epistemic reason. That is, when you state the argument form with great clarity, almost no one is dumb enough to make it.
But people do commit the fallacy--sort of. That is, they say things that are vague and ambiguous as between a genuine ad baculums (er, ad bacula?) and other arguments. Things that reveal that they are confused as to whether they are trying to make an ad baculum or, rather, do something else. That is, they get caught half-way to a really stupid error, and only their own lack of clarity saves them from making the error in an outright fashion.
That's where CMR comes in. CMR is a position which, in its (according to me) pure form looks something like this:
(CMR) The fact that we have traditionally done A constitutes, in and of itself,
a moral reason for doing A.
Two things to note here: First, this is a position that is so mind-bogglingly implausible that almost no one is attracted to it in its pure form. Second, it's an outrightly fallacious appeal to tradition.
Now, CAP doesn't unequivocally advocate (CMR), but they don't unequivocally not advocate (CMR). It isn't clear what they're doing. They may be Burkean conservatives who think that social institutions are the outputs of long informal experiment, and should, thus, be given some presumption. They could be advocating adherence to tradition--as so many people do--for aesthetic reasons. Or they may be cultural moral relativists. We can't tell from what they write. I will bet you very large amounts of money that they themselves don't know what they really think They're confused. That's the way it is with those who flirt with relativism, both on the left and on the right.
Anyway, as with last night's post, I'm mostly interested to point out that the right wanders semi-wittingly toward CMR about as often as the left does. There are, as I've noted, other reasons on both left and right for valuing tradition, but those reasons are usually not clearly distinguished from relativistic reasons, causing both sides to fall, from time to time, very near to the error of relativism.
Sort of.
I've been ambivalent about Alito until the last week or so when the really damning revelations have started to come out. This NYT story seals the deal for me. Turns out that Alito was a member of an organization called 'Concerned Alumni of Princeton.' Among other fascinatin' deeds--including working to keep females out of the university--the organization asserted the following in its magazine, Prospect:
"Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics."
This, incidentally, as a way of indicating that the policy was bad.
When was this written, you might ask? Such a bizarre comparison might be excusable if it had been written in, oh let's say 1950. But of course it couldn't have been, could it? Turns out it was written in--sit down for this one--1985. Women already had the vote and everything by that time, so you can see how things were already going down-hill...
Now, I have very complicated--and sub-optimally coherent--views about affirmative action. But I'm inclined to be in favor of it so long as it is justifiable on grounds (as it were) of field-levelling. If Smith has led a radically privileged life, Jones has faced severe adversity, and Smith's accomplishments are equal to or only marginally greater than Jones's, I think there is a good argument for preferring Jones in some contexts--e.g. college admissions.
On the other hand, I have little sympathy for arguments from diversity. I haven't written them off entirely, but they seem weak and disingenuous to me. These arguments usually take something like the following form: colleges should privilege under-represented groups because members of over-represented groups will benefit from matriculating with more members of the under-represented groups. This argument is such a mess that I don't even want to get into it here. (Again, though, I haven't written it off entirely, FWIW.)
But the one type of affirmative action I think we should all be able to agree is indefensible is affirmative action for the already over-privileged, which, so far as I can tell, is exactly what CAP is advocating.
CAP seems to think that its actions are justified as attempts to defend "traditional values at Princeton." That's sophomorically ambiguous, and for us to know what's really going on they'd have to made it clear whether they meant that they were (a) defending the traditional values of Princeton or (b) defending, at Princeton, traditional values in some wider sense of the term (Western values, Christian values, American values, or whatever).
Either way, it's going to take more than an appeal to "traditional values" to defend these conclusions.
But the failure of appeals to tradition isn't my real concern here. Rather, I'm interested to point out, once again, how close many conservatives come to being cultural moral relativists. Now, cultural moral relativism (CMR) is a radically mis-understood view. It's one of the lamest moral theories ever proposed (approximately as lame as the divine command theory, and, oddly, a cousin of it), and almost no reputable philosopher thinks of the view as as an open theoretical option. However, even most philosophers don't really understand the view very well--IMHO--and, consequently, they don't really understand in much detail why it actually fails (though they are right that it fails).
But the topic at hand isn't so much why CMR fails but what it is and why the right flirts with the position about as often as the left does. (What I'm about to say is controversial, but I know about as much about this issue as anyone, so I'll feel free to speak as if I know what I'm talking about...) To understand what's going on here, you first have to understand the nature of many errors in reasoning generally and many philosophical errors in particular. Philosphers often mistakenly think that people usually make very clear errors (when they do make errors, that is). But I think that's not true. This becomes clear when you carefully think about the character of the fallacies on the traditional list. Take, for example, the ad baculum fallacy ("appeal to the stick," i.e. an appeal to force). Now, the textbook examples (and here I mean the actual examples in actual textbooks) are usually terrible. If Smith says to Jones "your money or your life," Smith is not obviously committing an ad baculum fallacy. On the common view of fallacies (and here I run roughshod over a bunch of details), fallacies are errors in reasoning. But Smith isn't reasoning at all, nor urging Jones to do so. He's threatening. Better examples involve cases in which harm is threatened as a way to get someone to believe something (e.g. believe this or go to Hell). But even these cases aren't clear. If I say "believe that p or I'll hit you," then I'm a bad person, but, again, am not obviously committing a fallacy. Again, I'm threatening you--providing you (unjustly) with a prudential reason for believing. For this fallacy to be, you know, a fallacy, apparently I have to be somehow asserting or presupposing that by threatening you I am providing you with a logical or epistemic reason to believe--that is, the same kind of reason that good evidence would provide.
To make a long story short (er, too late), when we try to produce an uncontroversial example of an ad baculum, it ends up looking something like this:
You have good logical/epistemic reasons to believe that p
because if you don't believe that p I will harm you.
But almost no one is stupid enough to make this error because almost no one is stupid enough to think that physical harm can constitute an epistemic reason. That is, when you state the argument form with great clarity, almost no one is dumb enough to make it.
But people do commit the fallacy--sort of. That is, they say things that are vague and ambiguous as between a genuine ad baculums (er, ad bacula?) and other arguments. Things that reveal that they are confused as to whether they are trying to make an ad baculum or, rather, do something else. That is, they get caught half-way to a really stupid error, and only their own lack of clarity saves them from making the error in an outright fashion.
That's where CMR comes in. CMR is a position which, in its (according to me) pure form looks something like this:
(CMR) The fact that we have traditionally done A constitutes, in and of itself,
a moral reason for doing A.
Two things to note here: First, this is a position that is so mind-bogglingly implausible that almost no one is attracted to it in its pure form. Second, it's an outrightly fallacious appeal to tradition.
Now, CAP doesn't unequivocally advocate (CMR), but they don't unequivocally not advocate (CMR). It isn't clear what they're doing. They may be Burkean conservatives who think that social institutions are the outputs of long informal experiment, and should, thus, be given some presumption. They could be advocating adherence to tradition--as so many people do--for aesthetic reasons. Or they may be cultural moral relativists. We can't tell from what they write. I will bet you very large amounts of money that they themselves don't know what they really think They're confused. That's the way it is with those who flirt with relativism, both on the left and on the right.
Anyway, as with last night's post, I'm mostly interested to point out that the right wanders semi-wittingly toward CMR about as often as the left does. There are, as I've noted, other reasons on both left and right for valuing tradition, but those reasons are usually not clearly distinguished from relativistic reasons, causing both sides to fall, from time to time, very near to the error of relativism.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:24 AM
20 Comments:
Aren't moral arguments inherently as ad hoc as "my granddad did it thus"? You propose some metric of good and you pick a desired distribution and you rank-order societies, the first two steps being arbitrary as far as I can tell. (Yeah, yeah, this is the argument from ignorance, so what?)
I think I follow you, WS. A conflation of tribalism and superstition---Princeton worked for "us" doing all the things it has always done, so to change anything might result in a destruction of the whole thing.
Sort of "magical thinking"---except instead of wishing something will magically happen, fearing that any change will magically collapse something like it's a house of cards.
Like if we screw in the slightest with Social Security, which is now an orthodoxy; opposing any change is a conservative, not a "progressive" position.
Quite right about so-called lefts and rights. Each defend their orthodoxies, and reticence toward change can be seen as the virtue of prudence, in proper Edmund Burke fashion. (Perhaps any change in Social Security would make things worse and not better.)
But I would not damn Alito for membership in any group. (I believe the first question was whether to make Princeton co-ed, something that Vassar resisted, too.)
Groups get out of hand in a hurry. Now, if he were a Kleagle of it or something like that, like, say, Senator Robert Byrd, that's a different story.
You lost me, Azael.
First, I noted that I think the important AA argument is the "levelling of the playing field" argument, not the diversity argument.
Second, if you don't think that the diversity argument I mention is real, but, rather, a straw man, all I can do is assure you that it isn't and invite you to read the literature more widely. Or come to campus and listen to one of the affirmative action discussions in our faculty senate. So your straw-man charge is silly.
Third, well, you're right, there's what they say and what they do. But their real motives, I think, are mixed. Some just use moral argument as a smokescreen to pursue self-interest, and some don't. These others really are motivated by ideas, muddled though they might be.
Rilkefan,
Well, relativism survives in part on just such arguments as you are offering...roughly: Gosh, moral theory is a baffling thing! So if not relativism, what then?
Yeah, moral theory is hard, but when we rank moral theories in terms of how promising and likely to be true they are, relativism comes way, way low down on the list. Some versions of Kant, Aristotle, and utilitarianism seem to remain the lead contenders.
No, no all moral theories are arbitrary or ad hoc, though none is uncontroversial or clearly true. That doesn't mean we can't pick out the biggest losers, e.g. CMR and the DCT.
No, ordering societies isn't always arbitrary, though some such orderings are, of course. Some societies, for example, are worse by any reasonable standard you choose, and even a majority of the people in that society would agree.
Finally, if it were all arbitrary, then that would show that relativism is false. Relativism isn't the view that all such "orderings" are arbitrary, but, rather, that there are (magically and incomprehensively) a large (perhaps infinite) number of right orderings.
Relativists don't think there is NO moral truth, they think there's LOTS of it.
Good point, tvd, and I realized this later in the day--that is, that we can't draw strong conclusions about Alito from his membership in this group, only weaker ones.
When'd he stop associating with it, if ever, I wonder?
"Some societies, for example, are worse by any reasonable standard you choose, and even a majority of the people in that society would agree."
Aren't you getting "reasonable" from some nether region? What if a majority of people are a little unhappy but the rest are ecstatic?
Still don't see how you avoid picking a metric and a distribution function out of a hat.
Well, I don't mean to imply that it's not a difficult problem, but it's not nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. A society that, for example, kept everyone ignorant, unhealthy, unfree, and unhappy has nothing to be said for it. To deny this seems simply to lapse into skepticism. You can do that if you like, but then the same considerations that drive you to skepticism in the moral realm drive you to skepticism everywhere else, too. And global skepticism is not a view that most try to defend...you neither, right, Rilkefan?
Besides, to get the right perspective on this issue you need to emphasize the other point: the points you raise are *skeptical* ones, not relativistic ones. Relativists do not believe that societies cannot be non-arbitrarily ordered according to their goodness. The relativist thinks that they CAN be non-arbitrarily ordered--the relativist is not a skeptic. The relativist thinks that there are LOTS of non-arbitrary ways to order them. That's the position farthest away from the skeptical position you are defending, not closest to it.
According to the skeptic, this question is too hard to get right; one way to understand relativism is as the view that the question is too easy to get wrong--every answer you pick is (magically) correct (which means that, among other things, it's non-arbitrary).
Winston,
I thought you might appreciate this perspective on CAP and what it saw as its mission for Princeton.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/11/alito_and_cap.html
For my money, if Alito disavows the group's principles, a la Byrd and the KKK, I don't think it should be a huge issue now.
Maybe ignorance etc. are the highest good, out of aesthetic reasons or otherwise.
JFTR, I'm a hard-core determinist and antiplatonist, and alternate between skepticism and nihilism, assuming those represent the belief in the impossibility of knowledge and the irreality of values.
Yeah, well, although I disagree with all those positions, at least I can respect them. Skepticism and nihilism are interesting positions. Determinism...well, dude, what about, er, a little thing I like to call *20TH-CENTURY PHYSICS*? Determinism is, like, so refuted.
And if by 'anti-platonism' you mean nominalism or conceptualism...well, can't go with you there, either...but what do I know?
Anyway, all those points aside, at least you and I (and every other thinking person) should be able to come together and deride relativism...
Maybe this is just confusion on my part. I'd think standard moralism says you can distinctly rank societies, moral relativism says you can't - that one moral system is as good as the next. So the latter is consistent with saying there is no such thing as a non-arbitrary moral ranking, which I think means there are no moral rankings.
What do I mean by arbitrary? You want to say society x is more moral than y. Well, let's say a moral is a set of 0) a set of people 1) a metric of individual good 2) a map from distributions of good across the set of people to [0,1] where 0 is dystopic and 1 is utopic. You have to make up the metric and you have to make up the map and I'll be sitting here saying, what about this metric or this map?
Re determinism, back when I was a physics grad student this wasn't a big point of interest but we did learn a 100% deterministic way of doing QM via Feynman.
I wasn't denying one can say things about morality - for example, this map is continuous, or that metric (actually, I should say good-function) is bounded by foo for society bar. You're saying (I think) that these maps and functions are significant somehow. To me, a moral relativist says that each society has a particular map, usually non-identical to other societies' maps. That seems like a reasonably sensible statement, like saying the French speak French. The significant part for non-relativists is what escapes me.
Anyway, this wouldn't be the first time I've totally failed to understand this issue. But my training is to look at the question in terms of math, and if you can phrase your point in that language I'm more likely to get it.
Prepping for class, but just one point quickly:
Remember, Rilkefan, Hilzoy and I are not saying that CMR is true, we're just trying to articulate the view clearly. So *we're* not saying that the "orderings" in question are significant (though *they* (the CMRists) are).
Whether the orderings/evaluations are significant or not depends on what determines them...what makes the things in question acquire the satues they (allegedly) have.
If it's just tradition/repetition, then, no, these evaluations/orderings cannot be significant, ergo CMR is false.
That's my take on it... Again, we are agreeing that CMR is nutty, we're just trying to get clear on what, exactly the view is.
This is probably a quasi-futile project, incidentally, b/c (a) no known version of the view makes much sense and (b) there are so many radically different views that get identified as "relativism" one place or another.
...er, 'status', not 'statues'.
(statuses?)
The question comes down to one's view of man. If human nature is totally mutable, then culture and acculturation become the only shaping hand. Behaviorism, as it were.
If man has an enduring nature, then one social convention can be better than another (or better than none at all). The same can be said of any transcendent "truth" such as "justice is better than injustice."
(It is to Derrida's credit that he decided that latter statement was "true.")
But that X can be essentially better than Y is a proposition rejected by relativism.
T,
Actually, I think that the malleability point is related but separate.
The CMRist need not take any view about the maleability of humans. Strictly speaking, it's a view according to which murder could be right "for" a culture even if it contained people just like us.
Leftist relativists *tend* to also hold the maleability doctrine, but needn't do so.
Again, though, "relativism" is such a vague, polysemous, misunderstood and misused term that it's almost impossible to try to sort out what they "really" believe... They usually don't consider any of these issue in enough depth to recognize the distinctions we're dealing with.
True, dat. The problem with defining relativism is that it means something different to everybody.
Form meets function. :-)
You might be right about "malleability," although I would hardly let the relativists define anything, for the aforementioned reasons.
That is, they get caught half-way to a really stupid error, and only their own lack of clarity saves them from making the error in an outright fashion.
BTW, WS, I really liked that riff. Quotable, regardless of context.
Thanks, Tom.
I actually think that's an important quasi-methodological observation, and I keep trying to make it in print, but nobody's buying. It's a kind of problem that arises in lots of contexts. For example, the standard textbook list of fallacies contains a bunch of 'em (e.g. *ad miseracordium*, *ad baculum*) which, when stated very clearly, are so idiotic that almost no one could every actually make them. But what that means is that one is almost never justified in charging someone with that fallacy. The pure form of the fallacy serves, then (or so I argue) as a kind of touchstone for finding out what the person *is* actually arguing. (goes like: well, you can't mean THIS, so what DO you mean?).
Gosh, you should see some of the innane responses I've received regarding this point from journal referees...
Thanks for the responses above. I'd like to continue this discussion at some other time.
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