Objectivity

Recll that we saw last week that Mackie objects (among other things) to the idea that anything could be objectively prescriptive. Since he thinks morality must be objectively prescriptive, he thinks that nothing could be morality. In last class and this one we are looking at two different ways of rejecting the idea that morality has to be objectively prescriptive, and hence which are ways in which the argument for the Error Theory would fail. We can reject this idea by rejecting that morality must be prescriptive, or we can reject it by rejecting the idea that morality must be objective.

Moral Relativism

It is a common trope that college sophomores all endorse some kind of moral relativism, endorsing claims like ‘everything is relative, man - even whether everything is relative’. Most university professors who teach ethics think that this is not a particularly coherent view and that it is not well-motivated. But Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman argued for most of his career that there are intelligible and coherent forms of moral relativism, and that we have some substantial reason to think that some kind of moral relativism is true. (Harman has now retired but he was one of my supervisors in graduate school.) Our reading for today was the first thing that he wrote about this topic, and it was published originally in 1975 - right around the same time that Foot and Mackie were thinking about similar problems in different ways.

Reading

For class we are reading Harman’s paper, ‘Moral Relativism Defended’. This paper is about twenty pages long. It is packed with different ideas and terminology and we won’t be able to talk about everything, but as you read, ask yourself how Harman would respond to Mackie.