Culture Wars, Ethics, Sally Rooney and Love and Marriage:

 I have held off on this post for a long time, it may be a while longer before I finish it. All I know is I need to start, and that Wrestling with relativism made an impact on me.

Let me say I have not read Bernard Williams. If that disqualifies me from talking about ethical relativism, then so be it. It's not like that will make me shut up. Ignorance usually does not inhibit the giving of opinions.

Who is Bernard Williams that animates much of Wrestling with relativism?

Bernard Williams (no relation to Rowan) argued incisively against what he called ‘vulgar relativism’ in his first book, Morality (1972). A leading figure in English-language philosophy, he later popularised the term ‘thick concepts’ that I introduced earlier (he was the first to use the term in print, in 1985). Williams had a deep sense of the cultural and historical variety of ethical life. But he also saw that the typical way that moral relativism was taken to support toleration, notably by some anthropologists at the time, was fundamentally incoherent.

And the part of his argument that caught my attention:

The vulgar relativist, Williams says, thinks that whether something is ‘morally right’ means ‘right for a given society’. As a result, to discuss whether, say, sex with multiple partners is morally right, you must first ask: right for whom? There is no universal answer: polyamory will be permitted, indeed celebrated, in some times and places, and morally denounced in others. This is the insight that is supposed to lead to a tolerant outlook. Indeed, the vulgar relativist, as described by Williams, holds that, because morality is tied to a way of life, ‘it is wrong for people in one society to condemn, interfere with, etc, the values of another society.’

This is the creed of anthropology, and I find nothing wrong with it as a response to moral colonialism. I think Polynesia meeting the Calvinism of America is Exhibit A for the behavior being curbed in this creed. Furthermore, polyamory or no polyamory, what is moral for a given society needs to be judged by the survival needs of that society. But what of individuals?

The problem for vulgar relativism, as Williams goes on to show, is with the status of the principle of toleration. If it’s right to be tolerant, and ‘right’ is relative, then we must ask: right for whom? After all, if an aggressive warrior society is debating whether it should interfere with its neighbours, then according to its values the answer might be a definite ‘Yes, we should interfere.’ Perhaps, at least for a violent society, war is the answer. The point, as Williams makes clear, is that you can’t coherently say that All moral truth is relative to a culture and espouse a non-relative moral rule that all cultures should respect one another. The vulgar relativist is putting forward toleration as a universal moral principle, but this is flat-out inconsistent with moral relativism itself.

And now for the culture wars:

 The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society. Should sexuality be conceptualised in terms connected with sexual purity and restraint (‘sanctity’, ‘chastity’ and so on) or in terms of sexual self-expression and experimentation (‘liberation’, ‘kink’ and so on)? This brings home the fact that ethical words and concepts are not just abstract ideas: they are the product and expression of different ways of living. Seen this way, the political intensity surrounding what is sometimes disparaged as ‘arguments over words’ makes total sense. The culture wars are concept wars over how best to live.

The "how best to live" seems to me both a societal problem and one for individuals. Sexual purity is presented as an abstract principle, but it is one that for me implicates society - unbounded female sexuality increases the danger to society from mouths society cannot feed. The Pill provided a safeguard against such a danger. It does not address the impact upon individual's conscience of meaningless sexual encounters.

Then there are the societal costs incurred by spread of STDs.

The following quotations describe an either/or regime. I have never taken well to either/or situations, they strike me as ultimatums and I am definitely not good with being senselessly ordered about, so this set my teeth on edge.

When battles over moral relativism have featured in the culture wars, they tend to be framed in the following way. One side of the argument celebrates cultural diversity and unites this with an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of values. This is the outlook popularly associated with postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of universalist tradition. However, this seemingly ‘relativistic’ destination is precisely what alarms the moral conservative. Hence the other side of the culture wars: if there is no common human standard upon which to ground moral universalism, then something beyond the human is needed. This is the side of the culture wars associated with the need to return to religion, and a morally reactionary response to social diversity.

These debates about the sources of morality have become part of mainstream culture. The old-school secular humanist, faced with the difficulty of finding a universal basis for a human-centred morality, is presented with a dilemma: either choose a culture-centred ethics, or return to a God-centred one. Call it the anti-Humanist Fork: relativism or religion? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, recently stated in the New Statesman magazine that ‘The modern humanist is likely to be a far more passionate defender of cultural variety than their predecessors.’ What he didn’t dwell upon is the following irony: that proper recognition of moral diversity has tended to undermine the universalism upon which humanism is typically founded.

Again, I suggest there is a unity underlying morality - that which has allowed humanity to flourish. Where subsets do not endanger the wilder society, where the subset is faced with coercion and not persuasion, there feels to me something immoral in attacking the subset's morality.

We are all ethical creatures, or expected to be (so sayeth the felon while listening the morning news about Donald J. Trump):

The words your society uses, as Frances is highly aware, shape the self you can become. Language is loaded with ethical expectations. If you agree that you are in a ‘couple’ with someone, for instance, then that commonly (though not always) carries with it the expectation that you will not be in bed with anyone else. That norm can be challenged, and has been, by those who are in open relationships. However, if you are trying to live in a way that is new, and doesn’t fit into accustomed categories, then it’s likely that you will be misunderstood and deprived of social recognition. Even so, as the American philosopher Judith Butler has argued in Undoing Gender (2004), there are situations where it’s better to be unintelligible than to force oneself into the existing menu of social options.

As to Sally Rooney, love and marriage:

Think about this in relation to culture wars debates over love and sexuality. Not everyone will want to avoid, like Rooney’s character Frances, traditional concepts connected to romance. But conceptual genealogy invites you to reflect on the history of a word or concept such as ‘girlfriend’ and decide whether you want to continue to employ it. You might come to decide that, as Oscar Wilde in 1895 said about blasphemy, it ‘is not a word of mine.’

Many ideas associated with love, in particular marriage, have historically had very little to do with romance. As Stephanie Coontz’s work Marriage: A History (2005) illustrates, ‘most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution’ to be based on love. That’s a much more recent idea. Understanding the history of a concept helps you understand whether you want to be part of the way of life – call it the conceptual tribe – that uses it. Sometimes, joining an institution involves modifying its concepts for the better, as in the case of gay and lesbian marriage. 

As a former lawyer, elt mse say that marriage was not about love, it was not even about sex, procreation was a tool and not an end, because the purpose of marriage was the acquisition of and retention of property. Think about the morality of all that.

I ned to end at this point. These points need to be thought more fully by better minds than mine. I cannot help but think one side of the culture wars fights on the wrong ground. I prefer thinking it is the retrograde, those who wish to impose a morality that no longer applies to the survival of humanity but only preserves the power of their subset.

sch 11/27