Ethical Relativism vs Preference Utilitarianism

There’s been a provocative discussion going on in the comments section of an earlier post, “Spitting at the conventional wisdom.” Specifically, the conversation has been about a recurring topic on this blog: the nature of morality and the respective merits of relativistic and objectivist understandings of moral claims—a conversation sparked by Darrell’s suggestion that the effort to change hearts and minds on the issue of same-sex marriage requires invocation of objective moral standards.


In this discussion (and elsewhere on this blog), Bernard has been an eloquent voice in defense of relativism. His comments, however, have features that cause me and others like me—probably Darrell among them—to scratch our heads and wonder if we might simply be miscommunicating. That is, I’m led to wonder whether we are using terms like "objectivism" and "relativism" in different senses.

Specifically, Bernard’s comments in the earlier discussion thread are rich with normative language, and I wonder how to make sense of those remarks if I interpret that normative language in accord with what I understand relativism to be. For example, he says the following:

"(The fact that most leaders of social movements were objectivists rather than relativists) certainly doesn't establish social progress requires such leaders. It may well be that incremental change is more positive and lasting than revolutions (and here we must balance the positive achievements objectivists against some of their immeasurable damage, hence my use of Stalin as a possible example)."

An underlying assumption of this remark seems to be that there is such a thing as social progress—that social change can be positive (change for the better) or negative (change for the worse). And the suggestion is made that maybe an advantage of relativist approaches to making social progress is that the changes, while more incremental, are more likely to last.

The difficulty I have with this perspective is that one of the key philosophical challenges to relativism is that, because it makes the subjective preferences of the individual or community the standard of value, and because "progress" is a value judgment (change for the better), relativism seriously truncates the senses in which any social change can count as progress.

If what is "good" for a society and its members is relative to a culture's collective subjective values, then we might say that a culture progresses to the extent that it develops institutions and practices that more effectively realize those values. But no change in the dominant subjective values could count as progress.

And so a slow, negotiated change in the dominant valuation of same-sex relationships wouldn't count as progress in any deep sense. It would count as progress only relative to those individuals who happen to already value such relationships. From the standpoint of those who abhor same-sex relationships, it wouldn't count as progress at all. It's not just that it wouldn't seem like progress to them. It wouldn't be progress. Progress itself is fundamentally relativized.

And one wonders: why should I seek to persuade people to move away from their subjective preferences in favor of mine, if there can in principle be no reason to think that my preferences are any more fitting or appropriate than theirs? Why should I be open to being persuaded, to adjusting my preferences in the light of theirs, if there is in principle no reason why my preferences are any worse than theirs?

As James Rachels and other have argued, it seems as if subjectivism in ethics takes away the possibility of rational discourse about ethical issues. If there’s no sense in which it really is better (or really is worse) to allow same-sex marriage in society than to forbid it, then there’s no sense in which there really are reasons to allow same-sex marriage rather than forbid it (or really are reasons to forbid it). And if there are no such reasons, then if I talk as if I am trying to give you reasons to believe as I do I’m really just engaged in a kind of deceptive use of language (perhaps self-deceptive): I am attempting to present as a reason something that cannot be a reason for the simple reason that in the ethical domain there are no such things as reasons that support one ethical view over another.

And so, all arguments and efforts at persuasion reduce to a kind of psychological manipulation: I attempt to get you to embrace my preferences, not because there is any good reason to do so, but because I want you to; and I try to make it look, falsely, as if there is a good reason to do so in order to more effectively influence your preferences. Since this is done in the absence of any actual reasons to suppose that such a change would be a change for the better, there is no meaningful distinction between reasonable persuasion and pschological manipulation. All of it's nothing but more or less effective forms of the latter.

So can this line of concern be answered? And if so, how? It seems to me that the best way answer to these concerns while staying within the spirit of relativism makes something like the following move: while there’s no such thing as “values” or "the good" apart from subjective preferences, other people's preferences have the same status as my own, shaping the good of other people as surely as my preferences determine what is good for me. And every person’s subjectively-defined good has just as much of a claim on being realized as anyone else’s, implying that there is a reason to attempt to negotiate our way towards policies and practices that do the best job of maximizing preference-satisfactions.

In such negotiations, the fact that someone subjectively values X becomes a reason (all else being equal) for anyone to pursue actions or policies that help to bring about or maintain X. But each such reason must be balanced against a wide array of potentially conflicting reasons in the effort to find that course of action which has the strongest reasons in its favor.

From such a perspective, it becomes possible to reject certain preferences, to view them as ultimately bad reasons on which to act. Some preferences effectively "drag down" our potential for maximizing preference-satisfaction, since they are preferences about the preference-satisfaction of others. More precisely, some people prefer that certain important preferences of others not be satisfied. This creates a conflict among preferences. Not all such conflicts "drag down" the potential for maximizing preference satisfaction (for example, I prefer that pedophiles not satisfy their preference for child sex partners; but in this case, we know that children who fall prey to pedophiles suffer long-term affects that negatively impact their prospects for maximizing preference satisfactions of their own).

In many cases, however, there can arise good reasons to oppose such conflict-generating preferences and to encourage those who have them to take steps to change those preferences--for example, by cultivating and practicing empathy. More broadly, we might argue that the more widely people practice empathy—the more their actual preferences are shaped through the practice of empathy—the less conflict there is among our preferences and the more preferences it becomes possible to satisfy. This, then, becomes a reason to call empathy “good” in a sense that isn’t just an expression of personal preference, and to use empathy as a standard for assessing the merits of individual preferences.

But none of this is relativism as I (or most moral philosophers I know) would define it. It's preference utilitarianism. Preference utilitarianism is a moral theory which holds each person's (and, arguably, animal's) preferences to be reasons for anyone to favor actions that satisfy those preferences (all else being equal). And this means that what is right is determined by what has the best reasons in its favor, not by what any person happens to prefer—even if the preferences that are out there in the world serve as the basis on which moral reasoning is done. Subjective preferences become, on this theory, objective reasons for action: That Joe prefers that X come about is treated, on this theory, as a reason for anyone to favor the realization of X in the absence of any competing reasons against X.

There are many who explicitly label themselves relativists who, when I listen to what they have to say or read what they write, sound to me as if they are actually preference utilitarians. This is the case with some of the regular commenters on this blog. Which leads me to wonder whether they are using "relativism" in a broader sense than I do--or whether, perhaps, they are a bit unsure themselves about whether they find relativism or preference utilitarianism more attractive.

Thoughts?

Some Earlier Distinctions Summarized and Applied to Morality

I think it may be helpful to summarize some points from my last “distinctions” post and bring them to bear explicitly on the question of “objective morality.”


Given the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity offered in that earlier post, it should be clear what I mean by the term “objective morality.” Put simply, I have in mind the conjunction of the following two theses: (1) Some moral judgments are true and others are false; (2) What makes a moral judgment true (or false) is never merely the fact that the one making the judgment is in certain subjective states (most notably in possession of certain attitudes and preferences) with respect to what the judgment addresses.

In other words, if the judgment at issue is “Rape is wrong,” the fact that I disapprove of rape is not sufficient to make rape wrong. If rape is wrong (which I am convinced it is) then what makes it wrong is more than the mere fact that I happen to disapprove of it. By implication, the mere fact that someone else happens to approve of it is insufficient to make rape right “for them.” In short, to be an objectivist about morality is to hold that subject S’s approval/disapproval of action A is not sufficient to render A moral/immoral “for S.”

There are two important points I want to stress about “objective morality” conceived in this way—points that I think it is crucial to keep in mind for the sake of avoiding confusions of various sorts. Both points have been made in other posts, so this is largely an exercise in recapitulation and reframing.

First, to say that morality is objective in the indicated sense is not to say that human subjectivity plays no role in constituting morality. This was part of the point I was hoping to make with my earlier April Fools Day post about amusement. In order for there to be such a thing as “the funny”, there have to be creatures like us who react to things with amusement. In the absence of such creatures having such subjective responses, nothing would be funny. Funniness exists only in relation to risible beings. (I love the word "risible").

But it doesn’t follow that something is funny just in case one is amused by it—that, in other words, being in a subjective state of amusement is sufficient to make it true “for you” that it is funny. It doesn’t follow because it’s possible that Linda Zagzebski is right about emotions: they are “ways of seeing” things in the world (to be amused is to see something as funny; to be offended is to see something as rude) that can fit their intentional objects or not (in something like the way color experiences can fit with what is going on in the physical world—such that when you see something as red, you might be mistaken if, in fact, something has broken down in your color perception mechanisms so that color experiences no longer track the ways in which different objects differentially reflect different wavelengths of light).

(For more on this, see Zagzebski's book, Divine Motivation Theory).

The point is not to argue here that Zagzebski is right about emotional fittingness, but simply to stress that the fact that our subjective states are bound up with moral judgments is not enough to conclude that they aren’t objective in the sense I have in mind.

My second point is that to say morality is objective is different from saying that it is absolute. The former is about whether there is more needed for the truth of a moral judgment than the attitudes and preferences of the one making the judgment. The latter is about whether what is true of something in one context is necessarily true of it in all contexts. As I noted in a comment on my earlier post, even if the boiling point of water varied enormously from case to case, such that it was true of water that it boiled at precisely 100˚C only in very rare but specifiable contexts, it would still be objectively true that it boiled at 100˚C in those contexts.

To think of this distinction in connection with morality, it may be helpful to think of it in connection with a particular ethical theory. I choose one that I do not personally accept, but which has the virtue of being easy to quickly explain: A simple version of preference utilitarianism in its act utilitarian form. Act utilitarianism holds that the right action to perform in any situation is that act which, among all the available courses of actions, has the best results for all affected. But what makes the results “best”? For the simple preference utilitarian, the value of an action’s consequences is a function of the actual preferences of the individuals affected. In other words, preference utilitarianism has an entirely subjective standard of value: what is good for me is determined by my preferences; what is good for you is determined by yours, etc.

But the utilitarian is convinced that it is not rational for me, in decision making, to prioritize my good just because it is mine. I must extend equal consideration to the good of all. And your good is what it is based on your preferences, not mine. And this means your good is, for me, an objective fact I must come to grips with: My preferring that you prefer Bellini to Lady Gaga does not make it true that you prefer Bellini to Lady Gaga. And so, what is true about the general good is determined almost entirely apart from my subjective preferences (which only determine what is good for me). And what is right for me to do is whatever maximizes the good of all affected—in other words, whatever does the most to satisfy the most preferences (typically weighted in terms of importance to the person).

Now as I said, I introduce this theory solely because it is a fairly simple one to understand, and hence one that can be introduced quickly for the sake of applying the absolutist/objective distinction to morality. What I want to do is suppose—purely for the sake of argument—that this form of utilitarianism is correct. If it is correct, what that means is that a judgment such as “John’s lying to Susan about his affair was wrong” is true or false based not merely (or even mainly) on the subjective attitudes of the one making the judgment, but based on the actual effect that John’s lying to Susan had on the welfare of everyone effect, where their welfare is conceived in terms of their actual preferences. And so, “John’s lying to Susan about his affair was wrong” is going to be either objectively true or objectively false, depending on the actual effects of the lie in the specific case.

But it should be clear that, given this version of utilitarianism, the moral status of lying will be highly context dependent. We will have to look at instances of lying on a case-by-case basis. In one set of circumstances lying may be the thing that does the best job of satisfying the most preferences. In another it may not. And so, if this theory is right, the moral status of lying will be highly context-dependent; but in each case, whether the lie is moral or not will depend on its total impact on preference-satisfactions, not on the approval or disapproval of the one making the judgment. Those who make moral judgments can therefore be mistaken. They can disapprove of what is right and approve of what is wrong—because the truth or falsity of such moral judgments is more than a matter of taste. Even though moral truth is highly contextual on this theory, it remains objective in the indicated sense.

I should also note how this theory is related to culture. Clearly, culture strongly influences our preferences. As such, cultural context becomes enormously significant for determining what is right and wrong. But it doesn’t follow that morality is determined by culture. If the preference utilitarian theory is right, whole cultures can be mistaken in their moral judgments. For example, a culture might maintain that the enslavement of blacks is morally acceptable—but if the preference-satisfactions enjoyed by the beneficiaries of slavery are outweighed by the thwarting of the slaves’ preferences, the practice would be wrong despite the culture’s endorsement. Put another way, in this theory cultural context plays a role in what is morally true, but culture cannot dictate moral truth.

Even if you reject this species of utilitarianism (as I do, for reasons I won’t get into here), you might still believe that this theory is onto something. You might think (as I do) that the effect of one’s actions on human welfare is part of what makes them right or wrong, and that human preferences are part of what constitutes human welfare (and hence that welfare is partly a function of culture). And if so, then you will think that context—including cultural context—will play a big role in determining what is right or wrong. And so you will not be a moral absolutist. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be an objectivist.