Moral relativism is, in its simplest form, the view that since there are no objective
values in the world right and wrong are to be decided entirely by reference to local
custom. What is accepted within one society just is morally right for its members even
if it conflicts with our own deepest held views. There is no vantage point from which
competing moral approaches can be judged. All intervention in other societies on moral
grounds is wrong. In this reading Bernard Williams (1929–2003) reveals the inconsistencies
inherent in such a position.
*
Let us [. . .] look round a special view or assemblage of views which has been
built on the site of moral disagreements between societies. This is relativism,
the anthropologist’s heresy, possibly the most absurd view to have been
advanced even in moral philosophy. In its vulgar and unregenerate form (which
I shall consider, since it is both the most distinctive and the most influential
form) it consists of three propositions: that ‘right’ means (can only be coherently
understood as meaning) ‘right for a given society’; that ‘right for a given
society’ is to be understood in a functionalist sense; and that (therefore) it is
wrong for people in one society to condemn, interfere with, etc., the values of
another society. A view with a long history, it was popular with some liberal
colonialists, notably British administrators in places (such as West Africa) in
which white men held no land. In that historical role, it may have had, like
some other muddled doctrines, a beneficent influence, though modern African
nationalism may well deplore its tribalist and conservative implications.
Whatever its results, the view is clearly inconsistent, since it makes a claim
in its third proposition, about what is right and wrong in one’s dealings with
other societies, which uses a nonrelative sense of ‘right’ not allowed for in the
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Bernard Williams
From Bernard Williams, Morality, An Introduction to Ethics, 1993
first proposition. The claim that human sacrifice, for instance, was ‘right for’ the
Ashanti comes to be taken as saying that human sacrifice was right among the
Ashanti, and this in turn as saying that human sacrifice among the Ashanti was
right; i.e., we had no business to interfere with it. But this last is certainly
not the sort of claim allowed by the theory. The most the theory can allow
is the claim that it was right for (i.e., functionally valuable for) our society not
to interfere with Ashanti society, and, first, this is certainly not all that was
meant, and, second, is very dubiously true.
Apart from its logically unhappy attachment of a nonrelative morality of toleration
or non-interference to a view of morality as relative, the theory suffers
in its functionalist aspects from some notorious weaknesses of functionalism in
general, notably difficulties that surround the identification of ‘a society’. If
‘society’ is regarded as a cultural unit, identified in part through its values, then
many of the functionalist propositions will cease to be empirical propositions
and become bare tautologies: it is tediously a necessary condition of the survival
of a group-with-certain-values that the group should retain those values. At the
other extreme, the survival of a society could be understood as the survival of
certain persons and their having descendants, in which case many functionalist
propositions about the necessity of cultural survival will be false. When in Great
Britain some Welsh nationalists speak of the survival of the Welsh language as
a condition of the survival of Welsh society, they manage sometimes to convey
an impression that it is a condition of the survival of Welsh people, as though
the forgetting of Welsh were literally lethal.
In between these two extremes is the genuinely interesting territory, a
province of informative social science, where there is room for such claims as
that a given practice or belief is integrally connected with much more of a
society’s fabric than may appear on the surface, that it is not an excrescence,
so that discouragement or modification of this may lead to much larger social
change than might have been expected; or, again, that a certain set of values
or institutions may be such that if they are lost, or seriously changed, the
people in the society, while they may physically survive, will do so only in a
deracinated and hopeless condition. Such propositions, if established, would of
course be of first importance in deciding what to do; but they cannot take over
the work of deciding what to do.
Here, and throughout the questions of conflict of values between societies,
we need (and rarely get) some mildly realistic picture of what decisions might
be being made by whom, of situations to which the considerations might be
practically relevant. Of various paradigms that come to mind, one is that of
conflict, such as the confrontation of other societies with Nazi Germany.
Another is that of control, where (to eliminate further complications of the
most obvious case, colonialism) one might take such a case as that of the relations
of the central government of Ghana to residual elements of traditional
Ashanti society. In neither case would functionalist propositions in themselves
provide any answers at all. Still less will they where a major issue is whether
a given group should be realistically or desirably regarded as ‘a society’ in a
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relevant sense, or whether its values and its future are to be integrally related
to those of a larger group – as with the case of blacks in the United States.
The central confusion of relativism is to try to conjure out of the fact that
societies have differing attitudes and values an a priori nonrelative principle
to determine the attitude of one society to another; this is impossible. If we
are going to say that there are ultimate moral disagreements between societies,
we must include, in the matters they can disagree about, their attitudes
to other moral outlooks. It is also true, however, that there are inherent
features of morality that tend to make it difficult to regard a morality as
applying only to a group. The element of universalization which is present in
any morality, but which applies under tribal morality perhaps only to members
of the tribe, progressively comes to range over persons as such. Less formally,
it is essential . . . to morality and its role in any society that certain sorts of
reactions and motivations should be strongly internalized, and these cannot
merely evaporate because one is confronted with human beings in another
society. Just as de gustibus non disputandum is not a maxim which applies to
morality, neither is ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’, which is at best a
principle of etiquette.
Nor is it just a case of doing as the Romans do, but of putting up with it.
Here it would be a platitude to point out that of course someone who against
wider experience of the world may rightly come to regard some moral reaction
of his to unfamiliar conduct as parochial and will seek to modify or
discount it. There are many important distinctions to be made here between
the kinds of thoughts appropriate to such a process in different cases: sometimes
he may cease to regard a certain issue as a moral matter at all, sometimes
he may come to see that what abroad looked the same as something he would
have deplored at home was actually, in morally relevant respects, a very
different thing. (Perhaps – though one can scarcely believe it – there were
some missionaries or others who saw the men in a polygamous society in the
light of seedy bigamists at home.) But it would be a particular moral view,
and one both psychologically and morally implausible, to insist that these
adaptive reactions were the only correct ones, that confronted with practices
which are found and felt as inhuman, for instance, there is an a priori demand
of acceptance. In the fascinating book by Bernal de Diaz, who went with Cortez
to Mexico, there is an account of what they all felt when they came upon the
sacrificial temples. This morally unpretentious collection of bravos was
genuinely horrified by the Aztec practices. It would surely be absurd to regard
this reaction as merely parochial or self-righteous. It rather indicated something
which their conduct did not always indicate, that they regarded the
Indians as men rather than as wild animals.
It is fair to press this sort of case, and in general the cases of actual
confrontation. ‘Every society has its own standards’ may be, even if confused,
a sometimes useful maxim of social study; as a maxim of social study it is also
painless. But what, after all, is one supposed to do if confronted with a human
sacrifice? – not a real question for many of us, perhaps, but a real question
Bernard Williams216
for Cortez. ‘It wasn’t their business,’ it may be said; ‘they had no right to be
there anyway.’ Perhaps – though this, once more, is necessarily a nonrelative
moral judgement itself. But even if they had no right to be there, it is a matter
for real moral argument what would follow from that. For if a burglar comes
across the owner of the house trying to murder somebody, is he morally
obliged not to interfere because he is trespassing?
None of this is to deny the obvious facts that many have interfered with
other societies when they should not have done; have interfered without
understanding; and have interfered often with a brutality greater than that of
anything they were trying to stop. I am saying only that it cannot be a consequence
of the nature of morality itself that no society ought ever to interfere
with another, or that individuals from one society confronted with the practices
of another ought, if rational, to react with acceptance. To draw these
consequences is the characteristic (and inconsistent) step of vulgar relativism.
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