An Argument against the Relativism of 'Inner' Moral Judgments
by
David Thunder
17th April 1998
An Argument Against the Relativism of 'Inner' Moral Judgments
This essay is a response to an essay by Gilbert Harman entitled, "Moral Relativism Defended" [1] in which he makes the case for a particular form of moral relativism, which is based on an analysis of certain kinds of moral propositions or judgments. It is useful to distinguish (as Harman himself does) between the principal thesis of Harman's essay, which lays down certain conditions for the validity of moral 'ought' judgments; and the more contentious claim that moral agreements arise through a process of moral 'bargaining' [2]. I am not concerned with this latter part of his thesis, since it is not an essential part of his relativism. [3] However, I will address his principal thesis, which concerns the form and meaning of so-called 'inner' moral judgments. I will begin by outlining the nature of Harman's thesis, and how he argues for it (1). I will then proceed to identify certain important moral intuitions which Harman implicitly draws upon and which seem to lend weight to his thesis (2). I will argue, however, that it is possible to hold on to these intuitive beliefs and still reject Harman's thesis as an implausible interpretation of moral judgments - one, that is to say, which fails to capture the full meaning of the moral judgments which he has in mind (3). Finally, I will argue that Harman's separation of evaluative (good, evil, just, etc.) judgments from normative (right, wrong, ought) judgments, intended to limit the scope of his relativism, cannot be coherently sustained (4).
1. Harman's main thesis and how he argues for it.
Harman's moral relativism is a "soberly logical thesis - a thesis about logical form" (189 [4]). I infer from this that he does not intend to make any ethical or metaphysical claims of a highly controversial nature. Rather, his thesis will depend on an analysis of the way in which we use and intend moral language. In setting out the limits of his claims, he insists that his thesis does not concern the nature of morality in general, or its validity, but only the meaning of what he calls 'inner' moral judgments, that is, judgments which point to a relation between the agent and a particular action, contemplated, performed, or imagined. He gives as examples of such a judgment, "A ought to do x", and "It was wrong of A to have done x". On the correctness or validity of the moral principles implicit in such judgments, he remains silent. He believes that his thesis does not commit him one way or another on this point:
In particular, I am not denying (nor am I asserting) that some moralities are "objectively" better than others or that there are objective standards for assessing moralities. My thesis is a soberly logical thesis about logical form. (190)
Harman's principal thesis is that "the judgment that it is wrong of someone to do something makes sense only in relation to an agreement or understanding... it makes no sense to ask whether an action is wrong, period, apart from any relation to an agreement." (189-190). Normative 'ought' judgments such as "A should do x" presuppose "certain motivational attitudes" (194) on the part of the agent which are shared by the speaker. In other words, the principles which provide a reason for doing x must be available not only to the speaker but also to the agent for an 'ought' judgment of this form to be valid. The motivational basis of 'ought' judgments leads Harman to categorise them as 'inner' judgments - they implicitly refer to the interior disposition of the agent.
Now, let us restate Harman's thesis in concise form:
Inner judgments of the form, "A ought to do x" presuppose shared motivational attitudes between the speaker and the agent.Inner moral judgments are judgments we make about someone who we suppose "is capable of being motivated by the relevant moral considerations." (190) Examples of inner moral judgments would be 'A should have done x' or 'A was wrong to have done x', where the motivating considerations are of a moral and not merely a predictive or hypothetical nature ('if he wants to kill John, he should use this gun'). Harman takes the sentence "They ought not to go around killing people" as an example. (192). This sentence, he says, is "multiply ambiguous", with at least four possible meanings. Harman is only concerned with the moral "ought to do":
It can mean that one would not expect them to do so (the "ought" of expectation), that it is not in their interest to do so (the "ought" of rationality), that it is a bad thing that they do so (the normative "ought to be"), or that they are wrong to do so (the moral "ought to do"). For the most part I am here concerned only with the last of these interpretations. (192)
Inner moral judgments must be distinguished from non-inner moral judgments such as that A is "evil, a betrayor, a traitor, or an enemy." (90). These are non-inner judgments because they do not depend on any capacity within the agent of being motivated by the same moral consideration(s) as the speaker.
Harman uses a number of examples to support his thesis that 'inner moral judgments' presuppose a shared capacity between speaker and agent to be moved by 'the relevant moral considerations.' It is in appealing to our intuitive response to these examples that Harman advances his claims. For the moment, we will consider one of his examples - that of a murderer going about his 'work' with no moral qualms.
...suppose that a contented employee of Murder, Incorporated was raised as a child to honor and respect members of the "family" but to have nothing but contempt for the rest of society. His current assignment, let us suppose, is to kill a certain bank manager, Bernard J. Ortcutt. Since Ortcutt is not a member of the "family", the employee in question has no compunction in carrying out his assignment ... it would be a misuse of language to say of him that he ought not to kill Ortcutt or that it would be wrong of him to do so, since that would imply that our own moral considerations carry some weight with him, which they do not. (191)
The basic intuition which Harman draws on here is that when we say that somebody should do something, we attribute a moral duty to them, and it is difficult to conceive of somebody being bound by a moral duty or obligation which "carries no weight" with them, or is, from their point of view, of no consequence.
From this example and others, Harman identifies two important characteristics of inner judgments which, it may be said, constitute their 'logical form':
a. "...they imply that the agent has reasons to do something." (193)
b. "...the speaker in some sense endorses these reasons and supposes that the audience also endorses them." (193)
For Harman, 'having reasons to do something' can be explained by the possession of "goals, desires, or intentions" (193-194) on the part of the speaker and agent respectively. A Kantian might reply that the moral ought is based on reason, which is universal, and that therefore motivations of this sort do not decide the content of moral duty. If the Kantian is right, then Harman's relativistic interpretation of the moral 'ought' can be countered by the universal demands of reason. Harman, however, explicitly assumes "the Kantian approach" to be wrong. (194) for the purposes of his argument, and does not argue this point further.
2. Certain moral intuitions seem to lend weight to Harman's thesis.
Two important intuitions seem to lend weight to Harman's relativistic thesis. The first is the logical dictum that 'ought implies can', which the following example brings out quite clearly: It makes no sense whatsoever to say to a man stuck in a 20 metre pit with no means of escape that he 'ought' to escape. As Meiland and Krausz point out, "[T]he oddity here is not logical contradiction in a direct, explicit way, the way in which "Jones is six feet tall and Jones is not six feet tall" is a direct contradiction." [5] Instead, the affirmation of possibility implicit in the judgment (namely, of escape) is contradicted by the negation of that possibility within the world to which that judgment is applied. To take another example, one could not proclaim without contradiction that it is the moral duty of parents to turn their children into geniuses, since one cannot be morally bound to do what is simply impossible.
It is such examples which make Harman's thesis so attractive. After all, how can we impose a duty on someone which that person is incapable of recognizing? How can it make sense to say "A ought do x", when we know full well that A does not share the motivational attitude required to see the value, desirability, or duty of doing x? By this, we are really saying that a person should not be attributed with a duty of which they are ignorant (that, is, which they are incapable of recognizing).
The second intuition which Harman implicitly draws on is the following: when we say that it is wrong of someone to do something, this seems to be a way of blaming someone or of saying that they are accountable for what they have done. In ordinary language, we may say that they should 'face the consequences' or be held responsible for what they do or omit to do. If an agent pleads ignorance (or somebody does so on his behalf) of a moral principle, or simply says that such a principle 'carries no weight' with him, there are two possible reactions. The first is to judge the agent's ignorance to be culpable or blameworthy. We may say that the agent wilfully defied the basic requirements of morality for selfish or short-sighted reasons, and as a result, chose to act badly or irresponsibly. Alternatively, the agent, through a series of bad choices, has distorted his moral conscience and is no longer capable of being motivated by sound moral principles (perhaps we could say this of a sadist). In both cases, we can attribute culpable ignorance to the agent, that is, we can say that the agent ought to have known his duty to do x. Implicit in this proposition is the judgment that the agent ought to have been motivated by the relevant moral considerations, ergo, the agent ought to have done x. This class of judgments suggests that we can coherently blame an agent by invoking moral principles which the agent is not motivated by.
On the other hand, there is a second possible reaction to an agent who pleads ignorance, or somebody who pleads ignorance on his behalf. This is to say that under the circumstances, the agent could not have possibly known the moral principles required to do a given action or refrain from a given action. Of course, we may say that the ignorance of the agent was to a greater or lesser degree, culpable. But the limiting case which we will consider is that of an agent of whom it simply makes no sense to say that he is responsible for failing to do his duty. For example, somebody who is brought up as a prostitute, or somebody who is taught to steal from an early age, may be wholly unaware, through no fault of their own, of the moral principles which their actions may be judged by. In cases like these, is it really possible to say, "It is wrong of her to prostitute her body", or "It is wrong of him to steal"? I will attempt to address these questions as part of my response to Harman's thesis.
3. Some of Harman's basic intuitions are correct, but his thesis remains an implausible interpretation of moral judgments.Harman's moral relativism is a "soberly logical thesis - a thesis about logical form" (189). So, at least, Harman claims. I will argue, however, that Harman's thesis is in reality a controversial one, which though taking a logical form, is constructed from an untenable interpretation of the meaning of certain moral propositions. Harman offers a particular interpretation of what he calls moral 'ought' judgments. Indeed, there is nothing inherently inconsistent about this interpretation. However, I believe he focuses on one possible implication of 'ought' and 'right and wrong' judgments and neglects other implications. The net result is a heavily skewed interpretation of the 'moral ought'.
The aspect of the moral 'ought' which Harman focuses upon is the one which comes out most clearly in his own examples of a moral judgment which is not 'full-fledged', that is, one to which the speaker is not fully committed:
Someone may say..."As a Christian, you ought to turn the other cheek; I, however, propose to strike back." A spy who has been found out by a friend might say, "As a citizen, you ought to turn me in, but I hope that you will not." In these and similar cases a speaker makes a moral "ought" judgment that is explicitly relative to motivating attitudes that the speaker does not share ... If reference is made to attitudes that are not shared by the speaker, the resulting judgment is not an inner judgment and does not represent a full-fledged moral judgment on the part of the speaker. In such a case we have an example of what has been called an inverted-commas use of "ought." (195)
Even though Harman denies that these are examples of inner judgments, I propose to take his idea of an 'inverted-commas' use of 'ought' and show how, if slightly modified, it can be used to describe Harman's conception of an inner judgment. Let us take his second example:
... if we learn that a band of cannibals has captured and eaten the sole survivor of a shipwreck, we will speak of the primitive morality of the cannibals and may call them savages, but we will not say that they ought not to have eaten their captive. (191)
Here, Harman is suggesting that a proviso or condition of the validity of an 'ought' judgment is that the agent, tacitly or otherwise, affirms the principles which can give him a reason to act in the prescribed way. Since a cannibal is unaware of, or does not recognize, a principle such that the killing of a defenceless human being to be eaten is wrong or ought not be done, the cannibal has no reason to desist from the act in question and therefore we cannot say that it is wrong of the cannibal to do what he does. This sort of reservation results from an 'inverted-commas' employment of 'ought' since the speaker implicitly limits the scope of his 'ought' judgment to those persons who are suitably motivated.
Since Harman's thesis is about a particular phenomenon of moral language and its 'logical form', and not (intended to be) about moral truth, all that is necessary to disprove it is to show that moral judgments of the form "A ought do x", or "It is wrong of A to do x" are coherently made without reference to the motivations of the agent. I hope to show that Harman's interpretation of the moral 'ought', and 'right and wrong' judgments is restrictive and does not give expression to the full meaning of such judgments. My counterthesis is roughly this: the judgment "A ought do x" may refer implicitly to certain motivational attitudes shared by the speaker and A which recommend x, but does not necessarily do so. The judgment "A ought do x" does indicate a certain relation between A and x but this is not necessarily a motivational one. The concept of moral obligation or duty can coherently be invoked even in the absence of motivating reasons on the part of the agent. I am not denying that "A ought do x" implies that there is a good reason or reasons for A to do x; these reasons, however, ultimately derive from the nature of the act and the nature of a moral agent. These reasons will continue to hold true whether the agent is motivated by them or not. The capacity to be motivated by the relevant considerations is not a necessary ground for the validity of a moral ought judgment.
I will defend this counter-thesis by examining more closely the judgment, "The cannibals ought not to have eaten the sole survivor of the shipwreck." First of all, against Harman, I would argue that the 'oddity' of this judgment derives from its self-evidence both for the speaker and the audience. It seems as unnecessary to vocalise this judgment as to say, "John ought not to have attacked his neighbour, unprovoked, with a pick-axe." Secondly, assuming that the cannibals are 'genuine' and have no qualms about what they are doing, it is incumbent upon Harman to explain why we feel we can make such a judgment. His explanation (though not given in relation to this specific example) is that 'ought' has another usage, which may be contained within the form, 'A ought do x':
This is the use which occurs when we say that something ought or ought not to be the case. It ought not to be the case that members of Murder, Incorporated go around killing people; in other words, it is a terrible thing that they do so. The same thought can perhaps be expressed as "They ought not to go around killing people," meaning that it ought not to be the case that they do, not that they are wrong to do what they do. (191-192)
This substitution is convenient for Harman's thesis, but it cannot capture the force of the moral ought as we use it. It effectively reduces it to a vague aspiration about "how I'd like the world to be", or "in an ideal world..." This reduction is counterintuitive and I do not believe it can be justified by Harman, given how his arguments heavily depend on intuitive evidence. Arrington argues forcefully against such a reduction.
It seems counterintuitive...to suggest that "Cannibalism is morally wrong" means nothing more than "The world would be a better place if there were not cannibalism in it." For one thing, we may not have a moral obligation to make the world a better place, but we surely do have a moral obligation not to engage in cannibalism. In asserting that cannibalism is morally wrong, part of what we are asserting is that everyone has an obligation to refrain from this kind of behavior. [6]
Later, Arrington makes the simple point that our moral behaviour alone is indicative that our moral judgments have a strong universalistic element (remember, Harman's thesis is about the form and meaning of (certain) moral judgments, not about their truth content).
Our propensity to proclaim to everyone in the world that cannibalism is morally wrong constitutes evidence against Harman's claim that we can issue moral 'oughts' only to those who share our moral principles. [7]
It seems, then, that Harman's explanation of why we do use the moral ought with reference to people who do not share our motivations is counter-intuitive. This raises the question, can an 'ought' judgment express a moral obligation or duty without presupposing the requisite motivation on the part of the agent? I believe that it can. Let us consider for a moment the example of Hitler, which Harman refers to himself.
...it sounds odd to say that Hitler should not have ordered the extermination of the Jews, that it was wrong of him to have done so. That sounds somehow "too weak" a thing to say. Instead we want to say that Hitler was an evil man. Yet we can properly say, "Hitler ought not to have ordered the extermination of the Jew," if what we mean is that it ought never to have happened; and we can say without oddity that what Hitler did was wrong. (192)
If my analysis is correct, the oddity of saying 'Hitler ought not to have ordered the extermination of the Jews' is of the same order as the oddity which attaches to my saying, 'John really ought not to have attacked his neighbour with a pick-axe.' The oddity can be explained by the apparent absurdity of vocalising a moral judgment whose self-evidence is overwhelming to all but the perverse. However, this is not Harman's explanation. He argues that the judgment sounds too 'weak' "not because of the enormity of what Hitler did but because we suppose that in acting as he did he shows that he could not have been susceptible to the moral considerations on the basis of which we make our judgment. He is in the relevant sense beyond the pale and we therefore cannot make inner judgments about him." (193) This line of argument seems to me both implausible and dangerous. Implausible, because it very much exaggerates the sense in which Hitler is thought to be 'beyond the pale'. After all, it is precisely because a being with similar moral faculties to our own was involved that we are so shocked, in a way in which we are not by a natural disaster, for example, or an attack by the beubonic plague. Dangerous, because it seems to leave little room for an attribution of personal responsibility if we assume that a perpetrator of evil "could not have been susceptible to the [relevant] moral considerations." (193).
Nevertheless, as we have seen, there do seem to be cases in which we hesitate to hold a person responsible for a given action, cases in which a person may legitimately plead 'inculpable' ignorance. In such cases, it may seem unduly harsh to say that it was wrong of A to do x, or that A ought to have done x. However, consider the proposition, "What A did was wrong." Does this proposition make no sense if A is incapable of being motivated by the relevant moral principles? I think not. Indeed, it is our persistence in calling the action wrong regardless of motivational considerations which is evidence against Harman's thesis. Harman's response that 'wrong' in this case means something like, "It ought to be the case that...", or "It is terrible that A did x", fails to express the general moral imperative implicit in the judgment. What Harman has done is to focus on one aspect of moral language to the exclusion of another. When the words 'ought' and 'wrong' are used to imply blame, they are relative to motivation and knowledge. However, in so far as they imply general duties, obligations, and truths-claims about moral agents and acts which derive from the universal qualities of a moral agent or a human being, they transcend particular motivations and attributions of culpability to the agent. Thus, Harman's thesis is relativistic in an 'innocuous' sense, as Arrington argues. Yes, it points out that we cannot blame somebody for something which is not their fault, but no, it does not remove the general maxim, "One ought to do what is right", which for various reasons, may be misapplied, misinterpreted or even rejected by a moral agent. Thus, we could still say of the inveterate thief who is wholly ignorant of his crime that he ought not steal, implying, of course, "if only he knew that what he is doing is (objectively) wrong," though not necessarily implying that he is to blame for his actions:
... when we tell people with whom we disagree that cannibalism or Nazism or slavery is morally wrong, we see ourselves as putting them straight. And that we can quite properly say these things and at the same time stop short of saying that it is morally wrong of them to engage in such actions shows only that correcting/enlightening is one thing and blaming another. Blaming...is relativistic in an innocuous sense; correcting does not seem relativistic in any sense. The relativity of blaming affords no grounds for a doctrine of moral or epistemological relativism. [8]
As for the 'ought implies can' argument, it is possible to distinguish between general capacities, such as the capacity to deliberately do good and to desire the good of another person, which are capacities of the human species, and particular dispositions and capacities, which are the product of a whole range of factors from individual choices renewed and altered over time, to upbringing, to personality. If there were a general or congenital psychological incapacity to do good or to perform a certain action, x, then we could never affirm it as a moral duty, as it would amount to a physical impossibility. On the other hand, we must carefully distinguish between what is absolutely beyond the capacities of the human agent in general, upon which moral claims cannot be based; and what is, for one reason or another, beyond the capacities of a particular moral agent. I agree with Harman that without goals, intentions or desires of one kind or another, morality would be impossible. [9] However, I would argue that the purposes, goals and intentions of a given agent at any particular point in time (and, by implication, the goals which are excluded from the agent's horizon) are by no means arbitrary from a moral point of view. If goals were purely a matter of personal preference, the whole basis and thrust of moral ought judgments would be undermined. I would argue that our moral ought judgments presuppose a basic distinction, however difficult to hammer out in practice, between authentic goods or goals, and goals which are not conducive to the authentic good of the agent or anyone else.
This analysis offers a more plausible explanation of why we feel quite entitled to say of someone like Hitler - even if he does not share our motivations - that he was wrong to do what he did, or that what he did was wrong, period. On this analysis, by saying that he was wrong to do what he did, we are not merely saying that it was a terrible thing to happen; nor that Hitler's own principles forbade it; but that the very goals and principles which led Hitler to do what he did were wrong in the sense that he ought not to have affirmed them. Here, we are not restricted to saying that he was 'an evil man'; we are saying that his purposes, goals and commitments were evil, even if he himself (in his own perverse way) considered them to be good. To take a less extreme example, we can continue to affirm that the child brought up to steal at every opportunity is doing something which is wrong (which he ought not do), that is, inconsonant with the natural goals of a human being living in society (be they social cooperation, trust, or friendship with others), while acknowledging that the child has not deliberately chosen the wrong course of action. In this limited sense, the action is wrong but the child is not wrong to do what he does.
In short, the explanation I am offering of so-called 'inner' judgments is that they assume goals and goods which are inextricably bound up with human nature, and which must guide our judgments regardless of the immediate motivations which we may or may not attribute to the agent. My claim is something like what Philippa Foot argues for in her essay, "Moral Relativism"
Granted that it is wrong to assume identity of aim between peoples of different cultures [and I would say between people in general]; nevertheless there is a great deal that all men have in common. All need affection, the cooperation of others, a place in a community, and help in trouble. (164)
4. Harman's relativism must apply not only to normative moral judgments (right, wrong, ought), but also to evaluative judgments (good, evil, just, etc.).Harman emphasises at an early stage that his relativism is restricted to what he calls "inner judgments" which concern the rightness or wrongness of a person's act, and which describe some kind of relation between the agent and the act. His relativism is not meant to apply to non-inner judgments, such as "the judgment that someone is evil or the judgment that a given institution is unjust." (190). The question is, can Harman's relativism be contained and prevented from 'infecting' judgments of what is good, evil, just or unjust? Is there a sufficient difference between 'inner' and 'non-inner' judgments to justify Harman's refusal to extend his relativism to 'non-inner' judgments? Arrington believes that there is not, arguing that 'non-inner' judgments (what Harman calls 'ought to be' judgments), just as much as 'inner' judgments, presuppose shared standards. Therefore, there is no good reason to restrict Harman's relativism to 'inner' judgments:
Only judgments of what one morally ought to do are claimed by Harman to be relativistic, not judgments about what one evaluatively ought to do. But this distinction has an artificial air to it. If, as Harman suggests, we use the evaluative ought to say something equivalent to "The world would be a better place if there were no cannibalism in it," we might wonder why Harman's relativistic argument would not apply here as well. This judgment seems to commend a world without cannibalism. Commending something usually means that we recommend that people prefer or choose that thing, which in turn presupposes that the people to whom it is addressed have some reason to prefer or choose it. Could we not say, in Harman-like fashion, that these reasons can only come from the standards of goodness of the people addressed? If so, it would follow that if the people addressed do not share our standards, they have no reason to prefer or choose what we commend... if it is improper for us to make an inner judgment about what a person morally ought to do when that person does not share our moral principles, it should be equally improper for us to make a judgment using the evaluative ought when addressing a person who does not share our standards of goodness. [10]
Here, Arrington has argued that Harman cannot have it both ways. If normative moral judgments of right and wrong must appeal to shared motivations or reasons to act, normative evaluative judgments which commend a situation as desirable or good must equally appeal, at the very least, to some shared standard or understanding of what is 'good'. Thus, there is no ground for calling 'ought to do' judgments relativistic and still leaving open the possibility that 'ought to be' judgments are non-relativistic.
I would like to argue for the same conclusion on slightly different grounds. It is very difficult to make sense of a judgment that "it is wrong of A to do x" unless we can appeal to some evaluative judgment in its support. For example, consider the judgment, "He ought not to have overcharged his customers." Now, for the sake of argument, let us concede that there must be a shared set of appropriate motivations for this judgment to be valid. What makes us attribute obligation in this matter to the tradesman? How can we explain the principle that you 'ought not overcharge your clients'? Surely, we believe that it is unjust or evil ('wrong') to break a professional bond of trust? Implicit in a moral ought judgment is the judgment that an action or practise is good, evil, just or unjust. In other words, so-called 'inner judgments' conceal an appeal to objective standards such as goodness or justice. When we say that someone ought to do something, we ordinarily imply that the action in question will somehow conduce to the good of the agent, the good of another person, the good of society, and/or the good of the world. Some good will arise out of the action. Otherwise, 'ought' judgments must stand on their own, independent of our conception of what is good and evil, just and unjust. This kind of demand is implausible, to say the least. Inner judgments must have a foundation in one's conception of the good. By making inner judgments depend on contingent motivational considerations, and thus relativising them to the dispositions of the agent, Harman also, albeit unwittingly, relativises judgments of good and evil. By insisting, on the other hand, that judgments of good and evil, justice and injustice, may be non-relativistic, he is committed to admitting the possibility that moral 'ought' judgments may also be non-relativistic, since they are based on judgments of good and evil. If Harman's relativism were consistent with itself, it would extend to 'evaluative' judgments, since they are the basis of what he calls 'inner' judgments.
If these arguments are successful, they have shown that Harman's thesis that moral 'ought' judgments must implicitly refer to motivations on the part of the agent is untenable, and that, contrary to his own intentions, he is committed by his own thesis to relativising 'non-inner' as well as 'inner' moral judgments. My counter-thesis has consisted of two parts: first, that people do use moral language frequently in such a way as to impute moral imperatives to people who may or may not be motivated by the same moral principles. Secondly, that there is nothing contradictory or inconsistent about applying an 'ought' judgment to agents who have differing moral motivations from our own. The principles which an agent happens to be motivated by at any given point in time are not a decisive moral consideration. Rather, the 'ought' judgment we apply to such an agent is derived from a conception of the authentic good of the agent and other relevant goods, which must be distinguished from the goods which that agent happens to be motivated by.
END
REFERENCES
[1] Jack W. Meiland & Michael Krausz, Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 189-204
[2] Harman himself puts it forward as a 'hypothesis', which he does not claim to prove but which he hopes to show is a plausible explanation of certain moral principles which we hold. cf. "Moral Relativism Defended" in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral , p. 196: "...I put this forward as a hypothesis, since I cannot pretend to be able to prove that it is true..."
[3] Robert Arrington makes this point in Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism , p. 211.
[4] Page references in parentheses refer to Gilbert Harman's essay, "Moral Relativism Defended" in Meiland & Krausz, Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)
[5] Meiland, Jack W. & Krausz, Michael, Relativism: Cognitive and Moral , pp. 186-187
[6] Arrington, Robert, Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism , p. 218
[7] ibid., p. 219
[8] ibid., p. 220
[9] Relativism: Cognitive and Moral , p. 194: "...I assume that the possession of rationality is not sufficient to provide a source for relevant reasons [to act in a certain way], that certain desires, goals, or intentions are also necessary."
[10] Arrington, Robert, Rationalism, Realism and Relativism , p. 220
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arrington, Rober L., Rationalism, Realism and Relativism: Perspectives in Contemporary Moral Epistemology (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 5
Foot, Philippa, "Moral Relativism" in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 152-166
Harman, Gilbert, "Moral Relativism Defended" in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 189-204
Harman, Gilbert, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)
Lyons, David, "Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence" in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 209-225
Meiland, Jack W. & Krausz, Michael, Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)