The Journal of Value Inquiry 23:69-77 (1989) �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

Relat iv ism, rationality and repression *

JONATHAN JACOBS

Department of Philosophy, SUNY at Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, N Y 12901

A number of different currents in contemporary philosophy are merging into a steady stream of relativism in ethics. There are powerful incentives to relativism and some of its varieties have considerable appeal. It gets its im- petus from two (among other) sources. First, that philosophical theorizing has not yielded a consistent, complete, unified, objective account of ethics. There is no consensus, at a time or over time, on categories, approaches, or terms of justification. Look, for example, at the multitude of accounts of where moral value resides; acts, motives, outcomes, character and so forth. Second, and relatedly, there is an acceptance of and insistence upon historici- zation. That is, ethics must be seen as tradition or culture-bound: relativized to context and circumstances. History is a swarm of plurality, heterogeneity, and contingency. And even philosophical theorizing must be regarded as in- formed and carried along by it. Ethical views can't have a transcendental, or objective or universal pedigree.

Contemporary relativism has been influenced a good deal by Nietzsche, and in two respects. First his geneaological approach purports to penetrate the motivational, psychological history of moral beliefs, practices and theo- ries. Moral phenomena and moral theories have histories and historical under- standing is crucial to assessing them without the impediments of philosophi- cal rationalizations. Second, the idea of a transvaluation of values liberates us from the oppressive confines of standard categories of analysis and evalua- tion. We can and should actively, actually change our morality, in his view, "morals being understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" comes to be. ''1

The relativism I discuss here is not specifically Nietzschean, nor do I offer anything by way of exegesis of his work. But it has been extremely influential and altered the character of the relativist challenge to objectivity in moral philosophy, in a way we will note shortly.

* This paper was presented at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA on 28 March 1987.

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Criticism of the logic of relativism is abundant and familiar. Bernard Williams in Morality shows how the relativist's principle of non-interference is one his position does not allow him. As he puts it, "The central confusion of relativism is to try to conjure out of the fact that societies have differing attitudes and values an a priori nonrelative principle to determine the atti- tude of one society to another; this is impossible. ''2 This we might call the problem at the " top" when the relativist generalizes. There is also a prob- lem at the "bottom", when the relativist (or if the relativist) gets specific. Walter Stace addresses this in The Concept o f Morals. If values are relative to, then we need some serviceable specification of how to fill in the blank in "to " As he says, "For when once the whole of humanity is abandoned as the area covered by a single moral standard, what smaller areas are to be adopted as the loci of different standards? .... Does the locus of a particular moral standard reside in a race, a nation, a tribe, a family, or an individual? ''3 He concludes that ethical relativism is fatally ambiguous.

I believe these criticisms at both levels are telling. Perhaps a relativism can be formulated that satisfies them, though I doubt it. I am, however, mainly concerned with another dimension of relativism, which I shall identify as its doctrine of liberation.

Relativism about ethics is not new. But the character of much of the recent version of it is. It regards claims to objectivity, universality and ra- tional justification as not only false but threatening. It sees them as a means of control, domination and unfreedom, and advocates itself as liberating. It is not just the exaggerated theoretical claims of "official doctrines" that are unacceptable. It is that they are a cloak for force and fraud. Relativism is gaining momentum as a genuinely practical approach to morality and not just an explanatory one. The relativist critique involves a re-evaluation of values and an exemption from the long-held confines of attempts at objectivity. It presents itself as promoting creativity, expression and tolerance, all held in check by the repression of rationality's myths. It offers not just sustained criticism but a promise of a reconstitution of morality that values diversity, plurality and the rejection of criteria of necessity. It is not enough to recog- nize that such criteria are not forthcoming. We must value and exploit the opportunity to fundamentally alter our conception of the requirements of morality. Relativism rejects the standards imposed by rationality and objec- tivity as not only theoretically unsound but morally corrupt. 4

Once the "absolutist" or rationalist can charge another individual with irrationality, this charge easily slides down the slope to denial of personhood. Not exhibiting the going standards of rationality is tantamount to being something less than a full moral personality. Abusive, discriminatory and even murderous practices can be rationalized on this sort of basis. But, di- versity and difference, in both conditions and conventions, the relativist

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insists, need not be adversarial. Indeed, a consensus on relativism would pro- mote human welfare. It is not just that philosophical understanding will be improved, but the human condition will as well. I will explain why I believe this is not the case.

The history of ethical theorizing does exhibit diversity, change and he- terogeneity. There are markedly different traditions, some of which super- cede others, some persisting and changing to varying degrees and even co- existing with others. There is not anything like universal agreement on ethi- cal matters, and there is even disagreement over how to formulate the issues. Basic conflicts of conception are a persistent and pervasive fact. And it does help to understand a theory to know the history and circumstances of its formulation. We gain valuable insights in these inquiries. History and philoso- phy need not be hostile to each other. But they are made so if their relation is construed as territorial. It does help us to see how Kant came to his theory of ethics to study Kant's life. And conditions in seventeenth century Britain, including Hobbes' personal situation increase our understanding of the genealogy of Leviathan. But the increase in understanding should not tempt us to dissolve philosophical theorizing into historical sociology or anything else. Lack of consensus and the importance of history, tradition and context are not proof against the merit and necessity of distinctively philosophical approaches.

Here the relativist may object that I have inaccurately described the case. He will argue that he is not displacing philosophy but rather, revealing and exhibiting its true nature. Even the very standards of rationality that are both the starting point and ideal of philosophical theorizing are labile and local. They are inventions of essentially historical and context-bound crea- tures. None of them is fixed, privileged or authoritative. And to see and admit this is not a loss but a gain; a gain in possibility, opportunity and freedom. Ahistorical theorizing is an escape attempt that must be futile, or a defensive clinging to principles and commitments that inevitably lose their contextual justification. The relativist need not settle for a sort of historicism, arguing that tradition and context explain moral beliefs and practices. He can go further and argue that understanding the power of these factors enables us to overcome them. This is the direction in which relativism tends if it is sincerely adopted as a thought and action guiding conception. To be free of the bogus demands of objectivity, rationality and universality is to enter a realm of free self-assertion and expression. That is, by pene- trating the veneer of authoritativeness of philosophical theories we can see the alternative; that morality is something we make and we are free to fashion it as we please. Notions of objectivity and rational justification are fictions that can be employed with coercive force. Genuine morality demands free- dom from these illusions and restraints~

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So the relativist reties on history for two purposes; to explain the distor- tions that have mishapen morality and to supply the insights to guide our- Selves out of the grip of our historical legacy, lee don't have to be victims of the conceptions that guided people in the past, and sacrifice ourselves at the altar of Reason.

This type of relativism leads to a morality of exemption. Because ethical standards don't have a justification which is rationally compelling or even rationally defensible, the very idea of standards of judgment and evaluation is evacuated of sense. There may be standards for procedure and execution, but not for creation and invention. And morality is the product of the latter. The relativist will balk at the suggestion that his position on morality is that "anything goes." He wants liberation not chaos. But the overthrow of rationality leaves open and unanswerable the question "Who is exempt and how does one know?" And failure here will transform liberation to chaos.S

What non-arbitrary place can the relativist stop and say "liberation goes this far, but not further?" He has denied that there are universal or rational standards. Presumably, unless he goes in for nihilism he values such things as sincerity, active and not merely affective concern for the good of others, self-realization, justice and other morally relevant values. But he wants these to have a character which is not shaped by rationally specifiable constraints. And, underlying this demand may be the claim that there isn't such a thing as human nature that fits or yields such constraints.

This question of human nature is a helpful focus for the controversy~ Rationality has been tied to conceptions of distinctive human goods and means to realize them. A corrupt version of rationality will license repression; self-imposed and repression of others. It will impose certain ordering prin- ciples, and typically involves a hierarchical scheme of capacities, needs and ends. None of these is adequately faithful to the facts they organize.

Human nature, the relativist argues, is plastic, and it is repressive to impose upon it principles that cannot have the authority they claim. There just is no way human nature is that any ethical theory can capture and express and employ as a foundation for itself. But even the relativist is going to have to resort to at least some sort of boundaries. He will want as part of his moral perspective some type of principle of tolerance, or open-mindedness, or accomodation; but one that does not license everything. He will need limits. They will not be explicated in the way, say, Kant explicated them, as essen- tially grounded in rational nature. Or, the way Hobbes grounded them in the enlightened, long-view conception of rational self-interest. Such criteria are examples of the alleged objectivity and universalization that the rela- tivist rejects. Wherein will his limits reside? Are there any moral commitments for the relativist that are not optional or arbitrary?

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The difficulty here is that while the relativist argues that morality is con- structed, and not discovered and is without objective foundation, he leaves himself without a perspective from which to construct morality. Apart from commitments which are personal, morality can't have shareable standards except accidentally. Moral disagreement dissolves into simple differences, without common criteria of evaluation, dispute and resolution. But this is not a morality of liberation it is a liberation from morality.

The relativist will respond that this overstates the situation. If relativism were true or adopted as a practical attitude, our world of morality would not dissolve into a conceptual and semantic state of nature or chaos of in- dividual subjectivism. The relativist insists on the need to understand the historical sources and influences of our moral beliefs and practices so that we can free ourselves of myths, illusions and the sheer inertia of such be- liefs and practices. But he also can acknowledge that morality and social conventions are basically conservative and all moralities, just by virtue of existing, involve at least relatively stable traditions.

So the perspective from which to inspect and revise moral beliefs and practices is from within the tradition. There is no tradition-free stand point. Conceptions of rationality, objectivity and justification and what count as good reasons and so on are informed by traditions outside of which no criteria for such judgements are available. And the relativist understands that while he is overthrowing a tradition, freeing morality from a history of corruptions and misconceptions, he can claim that he is not promoting the dissolution of morality. He is seeing his way clear of the snares of the tradition to initiating a new one. Even what are regarded as characteristic human goods, needs and excellences must be seen to be labile, unfixed and relative to traditions. So, the relativist insists that he has not forfeited a point of orientation from which to reconstitute morality. All morality is tradition- bound. The point is to see that no tradition does or could embody a privi- leged rationality or objectivity.

I think this relativist rejoinder is about half-right. Of course, moralities are embodied in traditions of belief and practice. That is the manner of their existence in a historical world. But it would be a mistake to regard morality as essentially tradition-bound or to confuse its being historical with his- toricizing it. The error of the tradition-bound approach is that it is unable to disentangle notions of good, for example, from being "good according to the tradition." That is, there is the danger of complacency of a sort displacing criticism and argument. If morality is essentially tradition-bound, then the ultimate justification for a practice is "this is what we do." There may be an extensive explication of that, and a detailed story of how the tradition is to be understood. But practices will, in the end, be justified by the facts of their being engaged in. And relativism cannot consistently rule anything out

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of the acceptable arena of what is done. Moreover, traditions are often con- siderably complex, ill-def'med, open-textured and fragmented. They are susceptible to multiple, fuzzily-related identifications (Judeo-Christian, Catholic, Western, Democratic, Post-industrial, Eastern Liberal Establishment, and so on). As such they supply a rich and heterogeneous stock of vocabula- ry, precedents and criteria that one may avail oneself of. While such appeals are to an extent unavoidable, they may also easily be substituted for the rigors of judgement. We must give due weight to tradition in understanding morality, but it would be a crude and fallacious reduction that assimilated the latter to the former.

It may be that rationality is guilty of the crimes relativism accuses it of. But it is also that which makes morality (and not just moral theory) possible. The possibility of morality in no sense entails its success. By "reason" or "rationality" here I do not mean to suggest that there is a simple dilemma; that we have relativistic chaos or Platonic heaven. Rationality and objectivity are notions which can be given sense without requiring a transcendental dimension. They must be elaborated and articulated. They are not self dis- closing. They are revisable in the sense that they are to be worked out his- torically, and through approximation. That th6y have a history, as does hu- man nature is not to say they are merely historical. To say that human na- ture is a rational nature (among other things) is not to say it has a timeless, fixed essence accessible to intellectual insight. It is to set us a focal problem and one which is focal to morality. And to say that humans prize rationality is not to make it the only or the eminent value. But it is a value which is inseparable from the possibility of morality.

Striving for rationality is striving for both an authority and an appeal. It is typically the abusive aspect o f authority that is observed, and the appeal that is discounted because of the abuses. But the appeal that rationality makes is to the possibility of common understanding, without which agree- ment and consensus are forfeited. Rationality can be a consensus notion and is not inevitably repressive. Its authority can be legitimized insofar as it ap- proximates to consensus without coercion. Both the character of rationality and human nature need to be articulated. Historical, sociological and cultural facts o f diversity and difference are not evidence of the impossibility or ir- relevance of this. They are considerations that need to be included in i t , in the process of formulating a moral perspective on and for ourselves.

That we do not have a satisfactory conception of what sort of rationality morality demands does not imply that it demands none, or that the demand is fraudulent. Moral considerations are authoritative: not in that they are always decisive, or that they are prior to other considerations. But a limiting condition of our nature is that moral considerations are unavoidable. To have a rational conception of them involves explicating why our nature confronts

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us with them and what it can tell us about their contours. It is to begin with an examination and appraisal of what it is that unifies the diversity of moral outlooks and concerns. It needn't be a conception that levels them into a single concept of good or principle of motivation. But it will make possible a more thorough and effective appreciation of what is involved in anyone's having a moral perspective. And this seems to me to be an issue which while involving personal commitment, is not merely subjective and while informed by context, not merely local and contextual. It is rationality that enables us to have traffic across different contexts and perspectives. The function of reason here is not to frustrate differences but to enable us to understand them. And the principles of its employment are not given at the start, in a finite, fixed, privileged list. But without striving to explicate and exercise the authority of rationality in its function of rendering morality intelligible we are left not just with a multitude of irreconcilable interpretations, but with nothing identifiable to interpret.

The forfeiture of rationality does not magically transform conflict into plurality and disagreement into diversity of interpretation. It denies to them a common arena of interaction and resolution. Rationality does not require elimination of differences. But it does supply to differences standards of in- terpretation. The standards do come from us; they are not a dispensation from a world outside experience and time. But they provide us with terms of mutual acknowledgment. And this is what I mean by objectivity in the ethical context; reasoned agreements on reciprocal attitudes and commit- ments. These do not solve moral problems, they enable us to identify, for- mulate and address them. 6

The appeal to rationality is an appeal to authority, of a sort. It is an appeal that accepts the principle that moral beliefs and practices can be better or worse in a manner determined by shared acknowledgements. The relativist denies either that there are any or that if there are, that and how they matter is contingent. In matters of morality as in matters of belief people typically like what they are accustomed to. We don't like to think of our attitudes and practices as lacking or unamenable to justification. We fill the lack with rationalization and dogmatic claims to objectivity. We want our views to be authoritative and to prove their soundness in resolving disagreements. The relativist is quite right that dogmatic standards of objec- tivity and criteria of rationality have not lived up to their pretensions, and have been used to license all variety of awful beliefs and practices. But the way out of this history of errors is not to transform morality by freeing it from rational constraints and commitments. Rather than freeing us of an illusion it would turn moral interpretation into a kind of unguided atten- tion, having no focus beyond what in fact we do, and prefer. It may be that there are not two kinds of facts in the world, the "plain-old" facts and nor-

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mative facts. There are only the "plain-old" facts. But they can still consti- tute considerations for or against certain actions and attitudes and practices which are rationally assessible. Not that close inspection reveals special moral properties of them, but that persons can appeal to them as grounds for shared acknowledgments about what to do, how to live and why. The constraints that render these acknowledgments rational and lend objectivity to them are not self-presenting, or self-evident. But lack o f self-presentation does not imply the impossibility of articulation and explication, and of making real distinctions between what we prefer and what is best. Relativism denies by assertion or at least implication that such constraints and such distinctions are possible. And this dramatically alters the nature of moral attitudes and commitments. In the end, it gives them no internal authority except weight of preference, and no external authority except weight of convention. This has just the opposite effect of being liberating. For it means anyone can claim a license to be cruel or unjust, or selfish or whatever without the question of its validity even arising. Justification is senseless, argument is dispensable. Theoretical claims to rationality and objectivity are seen by the relativist as unsustainable. They lead in the practical sphere to repres- sive action. They have been used to justify genocide, racism, economic ex-. ploitation, and all manner o f exclusion, punishment and indecency. To an extent the historical record is with the relativist. But it is simply not true as an empirical matter that waiving claims to rationality will morally improve people. But that is not the chief point. Rather, relativism as a characteristic of moral practice will devour what it purports to redeem. It renders senseless conceptions of moral personality, criteria of moral judgement, standards of human goods and needs, and the coherence and point of moral reasoning. It does not free us from repression. It frees us from any distinctively moral requirement to recognize it or do anything about it.

Notes

1.

2. 3. 4.

F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans, W. Kaufman. (Vintage Books, 1966), p. 26. B. Williams,Morality (Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 23. W. Staee, The Concept o f Morals (Macmillan, 1937), pp. 51-52. A. Maelntyre discusses relativism .and power in his APA Presidential address, in APA Proceedings, Sept. 1985. He argues that there is a conception of rationality that can supply a rejoinder "to those post-Nietzschean theories according to which rational argument, enquiry and practice always express some interest of power and are indeed the masks worn by some will to power" (p. 19). It is Nietzsche I have chiefly in mind as the spiritual father of the sort of relativism discussed here. I make no claim as to whether he would be gratified with the current shape of his legacy.

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5.

6.

Even Nietzsche thought that herd morality was well suited to the herd; but it ought not oppress the strong of spirit. So he did have a kind of morality of exemption, or privilege. This enshrines the idea of fundamental moral inequality, and also re- leases judgements of moral worth from any authority except the warm glow of sub- jective conviction. I think there is a tendency for people (especially opponents of objectivity and ra- tionality) to think of rationality as involving a closed, fixed, set of necessary and sufficient criteria which admit of direct and effective application. Rationality is not like that, and it needn't be. Nor should the authority of rationality be con- strued as intrinsically repressive. Indeed, it needs and values criticism and revision. Our conception of rationality is not antecedent to experience and problem formula- tion and solving. Certain very general features of it may be, but to seek rationally justifiable solutions is not to arbitrarily restrict the terms of what counts and to what extent. It is an undertaking aimed at attaching intelligible significance to these notions. Being rational is something we do, something we work at. It is not a mechanical application of an algorithm,