Arguing about ethics is arguing about the place of the end of the rainbow: something which is one thing from one point of view, and another from another. Or, to put it another way, any particular set of standards is purely conventional, where the idea of convention implies that there are other equally proper ways of doing things, but that we just happen to have settled on one of them. I loved Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers. The philosopher in Jumpers tells us that ‘certainly a tribe which believes it confers honor on its elders by eating them is going to be viewed negatively by another which prefers to buy them a little hut by the sea.’ He also goes on to point out that in each tribe some notion of honor, or some notion of what is fitting to do, is at work.
Certainly, there is the law of custom AND it is also necessary for there to be some rule. This suggests a limitation to relativism. For given this, there come into view norms or standards that are transcultural. For example, in the United States and Europe they drive on the right and in Britain and Australia on the left, but in each country there has to be one rule, or chaos will reign. Funerary practices certainly vary, as Darius showed us in yesterday’s posting, but perhaps in every community since who knows when there have been needs and emotions that require satisfying by some ritual of passing. If an airliner of any country goes down, the relatives and friends of the victims feel grief, and their grief is worse when there is no satisfactory ‘closure’ – say by identifying and burying those who have died. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone [a must read, I believe for anyone interested in ethics and morality] our heroine is torn between two unyielding demands: she must obey the king, who has forbidden burial to his dead opponent in battle, and she must bury her brother, who was among them. The second demand wins, and not only the ancient Greeks, but we today, understand why. The play translates across generations. Antigone’s sense of honor makes sense to us.
So we are faced with a distinction between the transcultural requirement ‘we need some way of coping with death’ and the local implementation ‘this is the way we do it here.’ This is what qualifies relativism. If everybody needs the rule that there should be some rule, that itself represents a universal standard. I can then suggest to you, gentle reader, that the core of ethics is universal in just the same way. Every society that is recognizably human will need some institution of property (some distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘yours), some norm governing truth-telling, some conception of promise-giving and promise-keeping, some standards retraining violence and killing. It will need some devices for regulating sexual expression, some sense of what is appropriate by way of treating strangers, or minorities, or children, or the aged, or the disabled. It will need some sense of how to distribute resources, and how to treat those who have none. Across the entire spectrum of life, it will need some sense of what is expected and what is out of line, if not out of bounds. For us human beings there is no living without standards of living. This suggests part of the answer to relativism, but by itself it only gets us so far. For there is no argument here that the standards have to be fundamentally the same. There might still be the ‘different truths’ of different people.
Searcher-Seeker 