
English: 
Under the influence of various strains of Postmodernism, many now also insist that morality is relative.
And since morality is relative, certain people often add, we should withhold criticism of those who don't share our values.
For example, we in the West may believe in various human rights. But that's just our value system.
It's not grounded in any form of objectivity.
Relativism, or at least the most disturbing kind of Relativism,
identifies 'true' with 'seems true to us' or
defines 'true' as 'true in a perspective' or 'true in a particular language'.
Now, that kind of relativism would make contrary claims of differing traditions or cultures equally valid.
Relativism would say each claim is true because the truth of a claim is now

English: 
Under the influence of various strains of Postmodernism, many now also insist that morality is relative.
And since morality is relative, certain people often add, we should withhold criticism of those who don't share our values.
For example, we in the West may believe in various human rights. But that's just our value system.
It's not grounded in any form of objectivity.
Relativism, or at least the most disturbing kind of Relativism,
identifies 'true' with 'seems true to us' or
defines 'true' as 'true in a perspective' or 'true in a particular language'.
Now, that kind of relativism would make contrary claims of differing traditions or cultures equally valid.
Relativism would say each claim is true because the truth of a claim is now

English: 
relative to the people or culture who assert it, and there's no universal
or perspective- or culture-independent truth
to serve as the standard from which any culture-dependent claim can be criticised.
Not only will this throw Realism out, it would also mean anyone or any group with power
can claim that their view is as true as any other.
In effect, anything goes.
It's always seemed to me to be a supreme irony
that these two figures 
[Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre], 
who spoke out with such passion  on worldwide causes.
and particularly against universal wrongs and crimes against humanity, were both ultimately subjectivist's about value,
believing that all judgments about right or wrong were matters of personal taste and expression
and subjective choice. Of course, both men argued that such a Subjectivism was

English: 
relative to the people or culture who assert it, and there's no universal
or perspective- or culture-independent truth
to serve as the standard from which any culture-dependent claim can be criticised.
Not only will this throw Realism out, it would also mean anyone or any group with power
can claim that their view is as true as any other.
In effect, anything goes.
It's always seemed to me to be a supreme irony
that these two figures 
[Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre], 
who spoke out with such passion  on worldwide causes.
and particularly against universal wrongs and crimes against humanity, were both ultimately subjectivists about value,
believing that all judgments about right or wrong were matters of personal taste and expression
and subjective choice. Of course, both men argued that such a Subjectivism was

English: 
perfectly consistent with making strong personal commitments 
—after all one can have feelings, if you will.
And if one had strong feelings about something, then one had the right to express them.
They did have strong feelings.
But a question arises about what causes you might be committed to, if Subjectivism is true.
Russell himself frankly admitted if someone disagreed with him and felt differently, say a committed Nazi or a Stalinist,
he had no principled argument to show that he was right and they were wrong
because there was no objective right or wrong about the matter at all. And Sartre comes to similar conclusions about ultimate existential choices.
Arguing, that for such choices, we make the thing right by choosing it. It's not the other way around.
Now notice,
just (a) something to remember

English: 
perfectly consistent with making strong personal commitments 
—after all one can have feelings, if you will.
And if one had strong feelings about something, then one had the right to express them.
They did have strong feelings.
But a question arises about what causes you might be committed to, if Subjectivism is true.
Russell himself frankly admitted if someone disagreed with him and felt differently, say a committed Nazi or a Stalinist,
he had no principled argument to show that he was right and they were wrong
because there was no objective right or wrong about the matter at all. And Sartre comes to similar conclusions about ultimate existential choices.
Arguing, that for such choices, we make the thing right by choosing it. It's not the other way around.
Now notice,
just (a) something to remember

English: 
when someone says, as
(one) one often hears, 'Nobody has the right to impose their view or their truth on anyone else'.
Someone who says that is not a Relativist.
Someone who says that is making a claim of universal tolerant morality.
A relativism of the above kind, that we've been describing,
would say instead, 'Well, if your culture says it's right to impose your view on others, then it is right for you—
even if it's wrong for the culture you're imposing on.
Paul Bogosian is based at New York University while relativist's, he argues, are in the grip of a fundamental confusion.
The idea that a moral truth can depend on a background moral code is...
incoherent when you really get down to what it means.

English: 
when someone says, as
(one) one often hears, 'Nobody has the right to impose their view or their truth on anyone else'.
Someone who says that is not a Relativist.
Someone who says that is making a claim of universal tolerant morality.
A relativism of the above kind, that we've been describing,
would say instead, 'Well, if your culture says it's right to impose your view on others, then it is right for you—
even if it's wrong for the culture you're imposing on.
Paul Bogosian is based at New York University while relativist's, he argues, are in the grip of a fundamental confusion.
The idea that a moral truth can depend on a background moral code is...
incoherent when you really get down to what it means.

English: 
And there are two, at least two, main considerations that drive this. One of them is that when you ask yourself,
'Look, what kind of a judgement is it to say, not this is wrong, but this is wrong relative to a code',
it looks as though the judgement that
relativises the wrongness or the rightness of an act or a background moral code is just a descriptive remark not a normative remark of any kind.
So, what you're saying is that when somebody says, 'Look, this is a relative moral judgment—it's relative to my culture',
from another perspective that's just a sociological fact. It's no longer moral at all.
It's just purely describing the belief that they happen to hold relative to other beliefs that are common in that culture.
There's no moral element left there is to go.
That's the claim. Although people have this feeling that they're somehow occupying some midway position, where they've retained some use of moral vocabulary
but are somehow relativising it to their background convictions. Really what they've done is bleached it of all moral or normative content.

English: 
And there are two, at least two, main considerations that drive this. One of them is that when you ask yourself,
'Look, what kind of a judgement is it to say, not this is wrong, but this is wrong relative to a code',
it looks as though the judgement that
relativises the wrongness or the rightness of an act or a background moral code is just a descriptive remark not a normative remark of any kind.
So, what you're saying is that when somebody says, 'Look, this is a relative moral judgment—it's relative to my culture',
from another perspective that's just a sociological fact. It's no longer moral at all.
It's just purely describing the belief that they happen to hold relative to other beliefs that are common in that culture.
There's no moral element left there is to go.
That's the claim. Although people have this feeling that they're somehow occupying some midway position, where they've retained some use of moral vocabulary
but are somehow relativising it to their background convictions. Really what they've done is bleached it of all moral or normative content.

English: 
And the way we can see this is by seeing that somebody else, who intuitively holds a very different normative position,
is completely able to agree with these relativised moral judgements. Now, how could that be if there was any real moral content there to begin with?
So, if I say slavery was morally permissible in 18th-century England, I'm merely describing
the facts about how people behaved.
That seems right. Doesn't it. I mean, we'd have to say that
we're doing a correct history.
And it would obviously not involve any moral endorsement whatsoever.
Now, if we wanted to add some element of condemnation or approval
to all that—which is what you would need to do in order to bring the normative back into play—,
how would you do that without compromising the relativism, the anti-absolutism, that you've now tried to embrace?
If you do it by saying, 'and by the way, some of these codes are correct, incorrect', and so forth,
well, that will get you back into

English: 
And the way we can see this is by seeing that somebody else, who intuitively holds a very different normative position,
is completely able to agree with these relativised moral judgements. Now, how could that be if there was any real moral content there to begin with?
So, if I say slavery was morally permissible in 18th-century England, I'm merely describing
the facts about how people behaved.
That seems right. Doesn't it. I mean, we'd have to say that
we're doing a correct history.
And it would obviously not involve any moral endorsement whatsoever.
Now, if we wanted to add some element of condemnation or approval
to all that—which is what you would need to do in order to bring the normative back into play—,
how would you do that without compromising the relativism, the anti-absolutism, that you've now tried to embrace?
If you do it by saying, 'and by the way, some of these codes are correct, incorrect', and so forth,
well, that will get you back into

English: 
the soup of trying to explain what these absolute attitudes are about, given that you don't think that there are an absolute
facts out there, or if you did that in some more non-cognitive way by saying,
'Well, (this is) this is simply how I prefer to live, then we can acknowledge that it as an option,
but that would really be to have given up normative vocabulary altogether and substitute into this place
the language of power and of fact. When you relativise, it looks as though you lose the subject matter.
If the modern project of the Enlightenment sought to justify realism from purely rational grounds,
that abstracted from all cultural and traditional resources,
and if that has failed, in other words, if Descartes, Locke, Kant, and others
tried to ground and prove the existence of knowledge
—independent of accidental factors
like where you were born, what your cultural tradition is...

English: 
the soup of trying to explain what these absolute attitudes are about, given that you don't think that there are an absolute
facts out there, or if you did that in some more non-cognitive way by saying,
'Well, (this is) this is simply how I prefer to live, then we can acknowledge that it as an option,
but that would really be to have given up normative vocabulary altogether and substitute into this place
the language of power and of fact. When you relativise, it looks as though you lose the subject matter.
If the modern project of the Enlightenment sought to justify realism from purely rational grounds,
that abstracted from all cultural and traditional resources,
and if that has failed, in other words, if Descartes, Locke, Kant, and others
tried to ground and prove the existence of knowledge
—independent of accidental factors
like where you were born, what your cultural tradition is...

English: 
so, if that enlightenment project has now failed, okay;
then we must either accept—this is what McIntyre says—
that power,
not truth,
should adjudicate our value questions. And he labels that with the name of...
Nietzsche.
That's Nietzsche's notion of the 'will to power',
or we have to go back to a different kind of rationality,
the rationality of the Ancients and the Medievals. In other words,  what McIntyre says very straightforwardly is, if..
if the Enlightenment project of
Modernity has run into a dead end, then the only options are Nietzsche or Aristotle
They thought in fact this is what rationality had come to mean at least in the 20th century
That rationality is simply the ability to fit means to ends
so,
if I'm trying to decide

English: 
so, if that enlightenment project has now failed, okay;
then we must either accept—this is what McIntyre says—
that power,
not truth,
should adjudicate our value questions. And he labels that with the name of...
Nietzsche.
That's Nietzsche's notion of the 'will to power',
or we have to go back to a different kind of rationality,
the rationality of the Ancients and the Medievals. In other words,  what McIntyre says very straightforwardly is, if..
if the Enlightenment project of
Modernity has run into a dead end, then the only options are Nietzsche or Aristotle
They thought in fact this is what rationality had come to mean at least in the 20th century
That rationality is simply the ability to fit means to ends
so,
if I'm trying to decide

English: 
how many people to kill in the house next door or,
you know, what's it? — or how many houses in my neighbourhood to burn down, and I calculate how much gasoline
I'm going to need, etc. that's perfectly rational. My goal may be insane, but if
reason is just the instrumental
process that gets me
from where I am now to whatever goal I've chosen
in steps that make sense—if that's all reason is, then what I'm doing is rational even if my ultimate goal is crazy.
So, if we reinterpret ethics,
so that it becomes an expression of emotions, it turns out we don't have any ethical disagreements anymore.
If I say someone is evil and you disagree with me, I'm just booing them and you're cheering them,

English: 
how many people to kill in the house next door or,
you know, what's it? — or how many houses in my neighbourhood to burn down, and I calculate how much gasoline
I'm going to need, etc. that's perfectly rational. My goal may be insane, but if
reason is just the instrumental
process that gets me
from where I am now to whatever goal I've chosen
in steps that make sense—if that's all reason is, then what I'm doing is rational even if my ultimate goal is crazy.
So, if we reinterpret ethics,
so that it becomes an expression of emotions, it turns out we don't have any ethical disagreements anymore.
If I say someone is evil and you disagree with me, I'm just booing them and you're cheering them,

English: 
and that is not a cognitive form of disagreement, i.e. there are no genuine beliefs involved
because, after all, you could agree that I approve or disapprove of what I do.
So, you can say 'yes' from your point of view that person is evil, but from my point of view. They're good. End of discussion.
So, this type of Logical Positivism
makes ethics and political philosophy very hard to do. In fact, it makes it more or less
redundant.
And, equally, if we press this idea that there is a fact-value distinction—and we can argue about facts not about values—,
then we're ruling out intelligent, ethical, and political discourse.
One option for avoiding postmodernism is to recapture a notion of rationality that is—
unlike the modern Enlightenment notion—tradition that incorporates traditional ancient elements,

English: 
and that is not a cognitive form of disagreement, i.e. there are no genuine beliefs involved
because, after all, you could agree that I approve or disapprove of what I do.
So, you can say 'yes' from your point of view that person is evil, but from my point of view. They're good. End of discussion.
So, this type of Logical Positivism
makes ethics and political philosophy very hard to do. In fact, it makes it more or less
redundant.
And, equally, if we press this idea that there is a fact-value distinction—and we can argue about facts not about values—,
then we're ruling out intelligent, ethical, and political discourse.
One option for avoiding postmodernism is to recapture a notion of rationality that is—
unlike the modern Enlightenment notion—tradition that incorporates traditional ancient elements,

English: 
to turn, as MacIntyre put it, to Aristotle instead of Nietzsche  or postmodernism.
That's how McIntyre thought of Postmodernism as essentially the Nietzschean will to power.
There are other philosophers who believed the Enlightenment conception can be retained if reconceived
and without falling into Postmodernism.
It's interesting that these thinkers converge on Pragmatism.
We've already seen Rorty take Pragmatism as the ultimate form of Postmodernism—
really an end to philosophy's search for truth altogether. That's how Rorty interprets it.
But a number of thinkers have found in Pragmatism, and its attendant Naturalism, a means of justifying a chastened
pragmatic realism,
a realism which holds that our knowledge is perspectival
and dependent on human activity—hence pragmatic—yet nevertheless
grasps realities that obtain independent of the mind

English: 
to turn, as MacIntyre put it, to Aristotle instead of Nietzsche  or postmodernism.
That's how McIntyre thought of Postmodernism as essentially the Nietzschean will to power.
There are other philosophers who believed the Enlightenment conception can be retained if reconceived
and without falling into Postmodernism.
It's interesting that these thinkers converge on Pragmatism.
We've already seen Rorty take Pragmatism as the ultimate form of Postmodernism—
really an end to philosophy's search for truth altogether. That's how Rorty interprets it.
But a number of thinkers have found in Pragmatism, and its attendant Naturalism, a means of justifying a chastened
pragmatic realism,
a realism which holds that our knowledge is perspectival
and dependent on human activity—hence pragmatic—yet nevertheless
grasps realities that obtain independent of the mind

English: 
—and do this all without Foundationalism.

English: 
—and do this all without Foundationalism.
