Relativism and Rape

A redated post.


I had a teacher at Arizona State who told me that in one culture rape is considered perfectly OK, so long as you do it at the right time. In the morning, it's forbidden. In the afternoon, it is frowned upon. At night, it is perfectly OK, since a woman who is away from the protection of her husband is asking for it. (He never said which campus fraternity he was referring to).

If cultural relativism is true, the rules of that culture, with respect to rape, are justified. There is no "court of appeal" that is over and above that culture and out culture that would permit us to say that their views on rape are wrong and ours are right. For us to suggest that they are "really" wrong in permitting rape is to elevate the rules of our culture to a kind of cosmic status they cannot have. It is to be intolerant.

Consciousness-raising assumes that there is an up, and a down

If someone believes that, for example, women should be basically enslaved and treated as inferiors, are they mistaken about that? Feminists talk about consciousness-raising. But, of course, consciousness-raising is only possible if there is an up, and a down.

Boghossian on moral relativism

HT: Bob Prokop

What is means to say something is a matter of opinion

What does it mean to say that something is a matter of opinion? You could mean

1) Claims about subject matter X can neither be true nor false absolutely. Thus, a typical matter of opinion in this sense would be the question of whether McDonald's burgers are better tasting than Burger King's. There can't be any sense of saying that someone erroneously believes that McDonald's burgers are better when they are not, since each person's personal taste decides it for them. This would be a personal, as opposed to a cultural relativism.

Or, you could mean

2) Rational persons can disagree about subject matter X. An reasonable person, examining all of the relevant evidence, could decide the question either way. So, for example, with the question of whether there is life on other planets equivalent in intelligence to our own, many people think that we are not in a position to settle the question for sure one way or the other. However, the question has a true-or-false answer, but we are not in a position to determine which, because we don't have enough information. The question of whether or not there is a God is sometimes thought of being a matter of opinion in sense 2, but most would agree that either there is a God or there isn't.

Relativism, slavery, and human rights

I guess the big question for relativism is whether a culture or society's basic moral principles could be wrong or false. According to relativism this is impossible. Societies from the Egypt of the Pyramids to the antebellum South practiced the enslavement of other human beings. Were those societies making a moral mistake? Was there something they didn't realize about people and their rights that they should have?

Or, let's try this statement from our Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
If liberty is impossible where there is enslavement, then if this sentence is true, then the practice of enslaving people is wrong (a point that, notoriously, was not put into practice by Jefferson himself, who was himself a slaveowner). The Declaration says that we have rights regardless of what society says. If relativism is true, the society giveth rights and society taketh rights away. There is nothing you can appeal to over and above society that says that we really have rights that our society is denying us.

If there are no objectively binding moral obligations, then there are no objectively binding human rights, because rights logically entail moral obligations on the part of people who are expected to respect those rights.

Rape and culture

In many parts of Africa, being raped is blamed on the woman. In this news story, a 8-year-old was attacked in West Phoenix by fellow Liberian refugees, and now the parents are shunning her for bringing shame upon the family. If morality is relative to culture, then this is OK. Or maybe it's not OK, because these people have come to America?

Relativism and tolerance

One surprising result is that if relativism is true, then it is a virtue to be tolerant of other cultures just in case your culture approves of tolerating other cultures. If it doesn't, then you are supposed to be intolerant. So relativism doesn't lead to tolerance, it can just as easily lead to intolerance.

Cultural Relativism and Imposing Values on Others

If cultural relativism is true, then what that means is that the statement "It is wrong to impose your values on people of other cultures" just means "My culture disapproves of my imposing my values on people of other cultures." Which may or may not be true! So if what relativism attempts to do is prevent people from imposing their values on others, it's a dismal failure.

The canon within the canon, ethical relativism, and ther problem of evil

Yes, for me the sacrificial love of Christ is the canon within the canon. If that's cherry picking, so be it!
Ron: It appears to me that debate about moral realism (or objectivism) vs. moral relativism to be fruitless. I think everyone at heart knows that moral values really exist and aren't just subjective constructions. Otherwise, atheists wouldn't point out all the bad events in Christian history. Why would Dawkins point out the moral evils of Christians if he didn't believe that morality was something absolute and not just a cultural or biological product?
VR: Precisely. And if relativism is where naturalism leads, it lets the air out of the argument from evil. I've often wondered why the argument from evil is often thought to be somehow stronger than your average argument. It points to an explanatory gap in the theist's understanding of the world, but there are plenty of arguments that point out explanatory gaps for naturalism.
What I come up with is that, on the face of things, it allows the atheist to hang on to his or her moral purity. It presumably lets you call evil evil, and not have to fit it into some broader pattern in which it is good in some sense. But if this comes from a naturalist, and if Lewis is right that naturalism is going to lead logically to some kind of moral subjectivism, then it seems to me that that advantage disappears. You can't say of the Amalekite massacre that it is really, truly, honest to goodness evil.