General

Morality is down to the individual or a set group of people. It can never be universal as everyone has different beliefs, religions, upbringings and outlooks on lives.

Also what might be morally right today may not be tomorrow.

There is no such thing!!! That is why no one here can give a definition or even an answer to the question.

Do you believe that whether morality is relative or universal is relative or universal? Might morality be relative for you and universal for me? And, if so, how would that work, exactly? If not, how would the meta-universality of morality be capable of being consistent with the relativity of morality?

Moral relativism doesn't make sense since according to its own principles it cannot deny relativism on a meta-ethical scale, therefore cannot deny universal ethical theories.

For morality to be meaningful it must be objective. What is the point in a morality which changes by the day, or between cultures and people? How can morality hold any truth or value when everything is permissible? How can judgements be made?

Surely morality must either be universal (though not necessarily attainable, thus cultures/people may interpret and practice differently and sometimes wrongly), or there is moral nihilism, whereby there are no moral truths.

Morals shmorals.

Softgirl - quite.



You don't need to know what I believe in to answer my questions, as my questions were about your proposition (in so far as the one word "relative" alone is a proposition), not my beliefs.

The purpose of my question was to show the logical impossibility of moral relativism, as it is impossible to have meaningful answers to the questions consistent with the relativist answer (for exactly the reasons that Softgirl explained).




Why do my questions require you to know anything about what I believe?

Elanor - is the proposition that truth is a social construct true? Is the truth of that proposition also a social construct? If it is a social construct, it would be possible for there to be a society in which truth is not a social construct, but universal; but if something is universal, it must by definition be universal to everyone, not just the members of that society. In other words, your statement, "truth is a social construct" can only be true if truth is not, in fact, a social construct, meaning that it cannot be true at all.

I think that you have misunderstood the inherent universality of the very assertion that you are making (and it is also not directly relevant to my specific point about truth not being logically capable of being a social construct).

On truth as a social construct: your assertion that "that society would be wrong" is a statement with a truth value. By making a statement with a truth value about the question of whether truth is a social construct, you are making a statement that carries with it the necessary implication that there are truths about things quite aside from any given social construct, as, if there were not truths quite aside from any given social construct, it would not be meaningful to conceive of a society that held truth not to be a social construct to be right or wrong. Accordingly, your own assertion carries with it by necessary implication a proposition that contradicts the underlying claim that you are making, viz. that truth itself is a social construct. (Indeed, any meta-claims about truth that deny its universality are inherently unsustainable for that very reason, in that all meta-claims about truth rely on the universality of truth to have any meaning).

It is of course correct that, relativity per se is not inherently opposed to universality: the concept of half, for instance, is both inherently relative (if X is half of Y, the size of X is necessarily relative to the size of Y) and inherently universal (all instances of half are instances of the same universal mathematical constant). Similarly with morality: the answer to the question, "should I tell the police that my neighbour murdered my grandmother?" is in some meaningful sense relative to the situation at hand: the answer will probably be "yes" if one's neighbour did in fact murder one's grandmother, and "no" in all other cases; but this is not generally what people mean when they refer to morality being "relative" (although this is usually not explained clearly). "Moral relativity" is usually taken to mean the far more extreme idea that the truth of any moral proposition is relative to the opinion about the truth of that very proposition held by any given person (or, alternatively, arbitrarily defined group of people). For the same reason that the proposition "truth is a social construct" is logically necessarily incoherent (and not merely contingently wrong), so is that thoroughgoing form of what, as Softgirl points out, turns out not just to be relativism but moral scepticism.

"Universal to" I am afraid is a contradiction in terms. Nothing can be universal "to" anything: if a thing is universal, it, by definition, cannot be limited to any class or subset of things.

But, if you are referring to morality here rather than truth, it is not quite clear what you mean about its relationship to things which are not human: by definition, things that cannot make decisions in the light of understanding of how those decisions may affect other things that can make like decisions cannot be moral or immoral: a volcano's eruption is neither moral nor immoral, nor is a comet's orbit nor a bacterium's reproduction. That these things are not moral or immoral is universally true in the sense that it is logically entailed by the nature of morality and by the nature of the things in question. This is not about moral relativity at all, but what it actually means for something to be capable of being moral or immoral.



This is not what you actually wrote: you wrote, "truth is a social construct" without any qualification.

The point that you do not seem to have grasped is that for it to be true that it is possible for an entire society to be wrong about anything, truth cannot, as a matter of inevitable logic, be a social construct. If truth really was a social construct, the truth of literally any proposition (including any proposition about whether truth is a social construct) would be whatever any given society deemed it to be. This would allow for a society to deem it true that truth is not a social construct, in which case it would really be true that truth is not a social construct. That, of course, makes the original proposition that truth is a social construct inherently self-contradictory and thus necessarily incoherent.

The truth value of your claim that truth is a social construct cannot but be universal, as any proposition about the inherent nature of truth necessarily is. Claiming that the truth value of your claim about what it means for anything to have a truth value is somehow confined to some subset of the population compounds rather than reduces the incoherency.




Language is relative in the sense that the relationship between any given utterance and meaning is determined by a specific subset of a social context: but the truth of any given proposition about a specific language in a specific place and time is universal: that the word "dog" in fact refers to a particular type of animal rather than a bendy yellow fruit in English speaking countries in the early 21st century is a fact that is universally true, and will remain true even if the words "dog" and "banana" become interchangeable by the 22nd century.

However, you cannot simply use this analysis of the meaning of utterances and translate it directly to ideas about morality, as language, unlike morality, is merely symbolic: a word has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, and cannot be conceived of as having any meaning, unless and until someone somewhere positively decides to give it a meaning (and I do not mean to imply that a specific person must purposely plan to give meaning to a word: but some people must actually give a word a meaning). By contrast, the proposition that a person's decision is moral or immoral is perfectly meaningful even before anyone has previously formed an opinion about the morality or otherwise of doing such a thing: the proposition that something is moral or immoral is something that has meaning by itself, and is not merely a reference (as a linguistic construct is) to some other meaning.

Your attempt to compare morality to language appears to be a form of moral positivism (i.e., a claim that morality is whatever people decide that it is). That is not a tenable description of the nature of morality: if morality (that is, morality itself, not the word "morality" is nothing more than whatever people decide that it is, the nature of the thing that people are making decisions about, by definition, can be nothing other than the outcome of other people's decisions about morality, which comprises other people's decisions about other people's decisions and so on to infinite regress and therefore logical incoherency. Moral positivism of this sort necessarily entails a denial of the existence of morality (other, perhaps, than as an illusion): what Softgirl I believe described as "moral nihilism".

I should add that it is not absolutely clear that this is actually what you mean, and apologies if it is not, but the attempted comparison with language (which comparison is, for the reasons given above, invalid) suggests that this is what you are suggesting.



It is not clear precisely what you are attempting to claim, but do not confuse, on the one hand, it being practically difficult to discover what in fact is moral with there being no "what in fact is moral" to discover. Without elaboration on the nature of the limits to which you refer when you write, "we are limited in how universal a claim we are able to make", it is difficult to extract any clear meaning from the above.

Let me try to get a more precise idea of what you mean to determine whether there is a substantive difference between us or whether we actually agree in substance and differ merely in expression.

Your reference to morality being symbolic for an aggregate of experiences suggests that you mean that the concept of morality is, in your view, a construct of the same sort as that of oneself or a dog; is that correct? You use the word "construct" here - do you mean this differently from the idea of a concept? A concept of a dog is, in some sense, a construct, but the thing of which it is a concept - a dog - is a real thing. It is useful, but not strictly necessary, to have a concept of a dog to understand things about dogs and know true propositions about them (one could in theory instead simply know all about the molecules that make up a dog and the interactions between them and between that and the environment, but that would be much less efficient).

Do you think that this is somehow distinct in principle from the concept of, for example, half; or is your position simply that it is much more complicated in fact?

When you write of truth being a social construct, do you mean anything more than that the language used to communicate true statements is a social construct? Do you imagine that it is possible to have truth and falsity without a society, for example: a single person stranded for years on a desert island with no remaining social context: can he or she have in her or his mind propositions that can meaningfully be true or false? Is the social part of "social" construct significant here, or are you referring merely to the existence of concepts, which may or may not be shared socially?

Is the proposition that 1 + 1 = 2 is true a social construct? Presumably, you do not suggest that mathematics itself is a social construct, as mathematics is inherently more fundamental than societies by orders of magnitude (and the things that people use to represent, communicate and understand mathematics are, of course, quite distinct from mathematics itself: the meaning of the symbol "2" and its equivalence to "II" is a social construct, whereas the actual number 2 is not).

I am wondering whether you may be conflating two quite separate things and considering that they are identical when they are not (but I am not sure whether you are doing this, which is why I have asked the questions). I am wondering whether you are conflating, on the one hand, the mental or symbolic representations of a phenomenon in the world with the phenomenon itself. Take volcanoes, for example: volcanoes are actual things that exist in the world, and did exist in the world long before anything capable of having ideas about anything ever did exist. Now that people who are able to have ideas exist, both actual volcanoes and ideas about volcanoes (including at least one concept of a volcano, possibly with differing conceptions) also exists. Indeed, it is possible (although in this case unlikely) that what I mean when I am referring to a "volcano" is not the same as you mean when you refer to a "volcano", but that does not mean that the thing that each of us is referring to when we speak or write of "volcanoes" does not exist quite independently of our idea about it. If we are actually meaningfully communicating about volcanoes, we must have a shared understanding of what we mean when we refer to a "volcano" (which might mean me understanding that you use the word in a way different to how I use the word, providing that I understand what you mean when you use it and you understand what I mean when I use it). We might even come from very different societies that have very different ideas about volcanoes , but, once we work out what those different ideas are, we can understand each other and communicate information about actual volcanoes in a meaningful way.

Whatever your understanding of the word "volcano", you are capable of understanding what I mean when I refer to a "volcano", and what I mean when I write that it is not true that volcanoes comprise nothing more than apple pies stacked on top of one another.

You might point out that the idea of apple pies is based on a concept referring to a hugely complicated amalgam of various molecules of various ingredients and likewise a volcano, but you would accept, I think, that there is an actual thing, however it may be conceived, to which I am referring when I am referring to a volcano, and statements about that thing have meaning, and some of those statements may be consistent with how actual volcanoes are, and some, such as that it is made of apple pie, are not.

Morality, volcanoes and apple pies all exist in the world and all have actual properties: in so far as it is possible for one person to communicate to another person information about those things that can be understood by the person receiving that information, it must be so that the information can be accurate or inaccurate, and therefore the statement true or untrue. The accuracy of the information, assuming that it has been understood as intended, is based, not on a social construct (though the means for its communication is likely to involve some social construct), but in the relationship between the content of the understanding of the meaning of the communication and the object of that communication. Indeed, nothing else is capable of being consistent with the possibility of anybody communicating any meaning to anyone at all.

Does your idea of truth as a social construct, as you put it, contradict these basic tenets about the nature of information itself? If so, precisely what does it entail about what it means to communicate or understand?