Every idea, whether or not it's accurate, is based on other ideas, itself, some mixture of the two, or nothing. Relativism has a lot to do with ideas and implications, so I'll say a little on that subject before I get back to why it's important.
Because ideas are only anchored to each other, all ideas are ultimately "floating in space" in a sense, and the entire corpus of human knowledge is not "well supported" as a whole. Put another way, the "infallible" process of logical deduction (applying what we know) is worthless without the "fallible" process of logical induction (predicting what's "probably" true).
There are, however, ideas well worth believing. Bertrand Russell says, "the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it". This is the trick to all of our ideas: our basic, fundamental assumptions are so simple or necessary that it's not worth considering the alternatives. For instance, many of our ideas are based on reliable sensory experiences. If our sensory experiences are so misleading that there's no way to follow them to the "real truth", then the "real truth" will be irrelevant until that changes. It doesn't matter if everything is a dream unless and until we wake up or find a good reason to question it all. So there is a legitimate basis to many ideas, just not one that's supported by evidence, technically speaking.
Now back to relativism. It's my contention that you can't get from a moral statement to a non-moral statement. The implications of a moral statement ("X is good") are also moral statements ("we should do X", "there's not enough X"...). The nearest thing to non-moral conclusions would be explicit responses ("I will do X"). These responses also depend on other moral statements ("I do things that are good"), and they have a decidedly non-universal sense to them. Moral statements can also be related to God in significant ways ("God wants me to do X"), but that only extends the "moral statement bubble" as opposed to penetrating it, because they're still a type of moral statement and lead to more of the same ("God says to do good", "God is good", I will do what God says to do").
My belief is not that God-based morality is empty or flawed, or even that it's necessarily on equal footing with moral relativism, but that relativism is no more self-defeating or contradictory than moral universalism. Neither system minimizes the personal responsibility to make decisions, act on one's convictions, or seek the truth, although relativism leaves a few extra unknowns as far as how to go about it.
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2 comments:
My preferred theoretical basis of ethics is to define X such that I prefer the statement: "I prefer X, and I prefer that everyone prefers X as well".
This is a loop: X is itself defined as the statement "I prefer X, and I prefer that everyone prefers X as well", leaving us with
"I prefer "I prefer X, and I prefer that everyone prefers X as well", and I prefer that everyon prefers "I prefer X, and I prefer that everyone prefers X as well" as well.
It's like hooking a videocamera to a TV and filming the TV. :)
Hey, glad somebody's reading and commenting =).
That's pretty much my basis, too, although the word "prefer" seems a little too weak in connotation, IMO. Maybe something like "I value X, and would like for everyone to value and push for X as well". It is a bit recursive, but I find in practice that the echoes seem to die down too quickly for the term "infinite" to really apply.
I think it's important, too, to be able to accept someone's values as actually valuable and significant without insisting they're inherently universal or eternal. It sounds like you're on board with that idea from your comment.
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