{"id":140294,"date":"2019-08-12T12:01:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T11:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=140294"},"modified":"2019-08-11T11:42:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-11T10:42:54","slug":"that-was-then-this-is-now-oh-yeah-the-problem-of-anti-relativism-in-political-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/that-was-then-this-is-now-oh-yeah-the-problem-of-anti-relativism-in-political-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThat Was Then, This Is Now.\u201d \u201cOh, yeah?\u201d The Problem of Anti-Relativism in Political Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris\u2019s criticism of Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing of school children in his younger days as a Delaware senator is the latest example of anti-relativism in the sphere of political morality.\u00a0 Anti-relativist thinking insists that certain values approved by the speaker are constant and unchangeable.\u00a0 This means that behaviors that we now believe are wrong were always<\/em> unacceptable, and should always have always been recognized as such.\u00a0 It often implies that people who committed these wrongs deserve punishment whenever and wherever they are caught, no matter where or when their misbehavior occurred.<\/p>\n

Anti-relativism\u2019s opposite, moral relativism, can be summed up in the phrase, \u201cOther times, other customs.\u201d\u00a0 Historical eras, social conditions, and cultural environments change, altering commonly accepted definitions of right and wrong.\u00a0 Pascal illustrates this with a short dialogue:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do you kill me?\u201d . . . <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat!\u00a0 Do you not live on the other side of the water?\u00a0 If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner.\u00a0 But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just.\u201d[i]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the moment, anti-relativists are generally on a roll.\u00a0 For example, #MeToo advocates and others protesting sexual harassment believe that regardless of what forms of sexual behavior older social norms tolerated, the harassment of women was always an unpardonable assault on their freedom and dignity.\u00a0 \u201cOther times, other customs\u201d is therefore no defense to a charge of sexual predation.\u00a0 And predatory behavior, even if it occurred in the past, suggests a need for present punishment.<\/p>\n

Similarly, when it comes to judging racist acts and attitudes, it makes no difference that the U.S. Constitution long tolerated slavery, that large numbers of whites believed that treating Black people as property was a fine idea, or that respectable \u201cscientific\u201d opinion considered large immigrant groups, from the Irish and Italians to the Jews and Chinese, racially inferior to native whites.\u00a0 From the Quakers on, some<\/em> people always understood that racism was evil \u2013 an understanding that should have been shared by everyone, including those Confederate leaders whose carved images are now being justly toppled from pedestals across the country.<\/p>\n

Non-partisan note:<\/em> these examples may suggest that to be anti-relativist is to be liberal or leftist.\u00a0 Not so!\u00a0 Whether on the left or the right, anti-relativist attitudes tend to develop when people\u2019s opposition to some behavior perceived as wrong is intensified by a history of failure by others to recognize it as wrongful, persistence of the behavior among a substantial number of contemporaries, and a dramatic event suggesting that it will continue indefinitely in the future.\u00a0 Few religious conservatives, if any, consider the legality of abortion in the United States for almost fifty years, or the strong majority support for Roe v. Wade<\/em>, to be valid defenses to the charge of murdering the unborn.<\/p>\n

Anti-relativist thinking on one side of a conflict tends to generate it on the other, a dynamic that creates what the analyst Oliver Ramsbotham calls \u201cradical disagreement.\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 By breaking down or obstructing dialogue between conflicting parties, this can set the stage for violence.\u00a0 Consider, for example, the Supreme Court\u2019s Dred Scott<\/em> decision (1857), a famous piece of judicial overreach that declared that Congress was powerless to abolish slavery in the U.S. territories.\u00a0 By raising the specter of a westward-expanding, ineradicable slave power, Dred Scott<\/em> helped turn public opinion in the northern states toward anti-relativist militancy, further increasing the likelihood of civil war.<\/p>\n

At this point, a #MeToo\u2019er, an anti-racist, or an anti-abortion advocate might well raise a loud objection:<\/p>\n

Hold on!\u00a0 You say that anti-relativism may intensify conflict and increase the chances of violence, but what\u2019s the alternative?\u00a0 To forgive sexual predators because their behavior was once winked at?\u00a0 To go easy on racists at a time of rising white nationalism and xenophobia?\u00a0 To let the innocent unborn be sacrificed?\u00a0 If you compromise with evil, you become complicit in violence, too.\u00a0 De-escalating conflict is often a worthwhile goal, but not if it means perpetuating some great social wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was then, this is now.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cOh yeah?\u201d\u00a0 The relativist\/anti-relativist contradiction poses an apparent dilemma.\u00a0 If moral standards are relative to time, place, and culture, a villain on one side the water (or in one historical era), as Pascal said, is a hero on the other side.\u00a0 It may seem excessive, then, to condemn people for behavior that was generally considered acceptable, or at least not intolerable, at the time and place they engaged in it.<\/p>\n

Think again about Joe Biden.\u00a0 In the 1970s Biden was a civil rights advocate popular with Delaware\u2019s African-American community, but one who disapproved of \u201cforced busing\u201d as a way of desegregating the public schools.\u00a0 At the time, a number of far-seeing politicians understood that if liberals in power failed to end de facto school segregation (which was always linked with gross underfunding of Black schools), this would condemn several generations of children of color to an inferior education, with devastating social consequences.\u00a0 But only a few felt strongly about this.\u00a0 Most of Biden\u2019s constituents and most Democrats in Congress agreed with his defense of the \u201cneighborhood schools\u201d principle.\u00a0 As a result, Kamala Harris\u2019s attack on him, which seems perfectly justifiable in some respects, still has the air of an ex post facto <\/em>indictment.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther times, other customs\u201d is one horn of the dilemma.\u00a0 The other is that, however pro-civil rights politicians like Biden claimed to be, those who did not<\/em> understand that racism was structural, and who were unwilling to fight to disrupt and change the interlocked system of segregated schools, neighborhoods, jobs, public services, and political opportunities, can rightly be accused of perpetuating racism.\u00a0 After all, the existence of such an interlocked system was the whole point of the Kerner Commission Report, which declared in 1968 that America had become \u201ctwo societies, one white and one black.\u201d[iii]<\/a>\u00a0 To the extent, then, that institutionalized racism is considered a long-term self-sustaining wrong, the anti-relativist position seems justified.<\/p>\n

And yet . . . relativism vs. anti-relativism turns out in the end to be a false dilemma.\u00a0 We are not compelled to choose one set of assumptions or mode of consciousness and suppress the other.<\/p>\n

To begin with, moral relativism does not eliminate all moral continuities.\u00a0 Although changing social and cultural conditions do alter people\u2019s definitions of right and wrong, the resulting redefinitions reflect continuities as well as transformations: a process Hegel called the dialectic.\u00a0 Pascal\u2019s transformation \u2013 the killer on one side of the water who is a hero on the other \u2013 is as extreme as relativism gets, since he was trying to convince readers that only in God can one find an unchangeable moral order.\u00a0 Even here, however, one can respond that whether a war is just or unjust is not<\/em> established by what one\u2019s government, culture, or historical era thinks.\u00a0 A continuous stream of ethical inquiry developing over three millennia begins by condemning the killing of other people, then discusses whether exceptions to this rule are warranted, and finally (if exceptions are admitted) describes the \u201cjust war\u201d exceptions.<\/p>\n

Of course, ethical practices change over time.\u00a0 In the days of feudalism, most Europeans would not have been shocked to see armed knights knocking each other about or marching off to kill Muslims in a holy crusade sanctioned by the Church.\u00a0 But there was dissent about this even then, and the objections made \u2013 that the war was not fought in a good cause, that it was not necessary, and that the violence was disproportionate to the ends sought \u2013 would be familiar to modern people concerned with the same issues.<\/p>\n

The point is that moral relativism, properly defined and exercised, is modified by moral continuity.\u00a0 One could call this \u201crelative relativism.\u201d\u00a0 It means that you can maintain a passionate commitment to core ethical and political values, and still appreciate the impact of local (temporal and cultural) standards on people\u2019s behavior.\u00a0 Does this mean that you need to forgive wrongdoers for doing wrong because times and circumstances have changed?\u00a0 Not at all \u2013 but It does suggest that taking those circumstances into account in evaluating people\u2019s behavior will produce a deeper, more nuanced understanding than unmodified moral judgment.<\/p>\n

By way of illustration, consider the continuing controversy over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. forces at the end of World War II.\u00a0 I remember the wild enthusiasm that greeted these horrific events in 1945, when they promised the end of the fighting without the need for a U.S. invasion of Japan.\u00a0 Many years later, critical thinkers like Gar Alperovitz convinced me that the decision to kill more than 200,000 defenseless Japanese, almost all of them civilians, was morally indefensible.\u00a0 According to these historians, the decision was driven more by the American leaders\u2019 desires to keep Russia out of the war in Asia, demonstrate U.S. military supremacy, and take vengeance on the Japanese than by the need to save lives by obviating an invasion.[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

The immorality of the nuclear bombings still seems clear to me, but it is equally clear that few people in Europe or America were troubled by such scruples at the time.\u00a0 The bloodbaths of World War II made large-scale massacres seem normal, and Japan\u2019s brave and fanatical defense of her Pacific islands suggested that any invasion of the homeland would produce vast numbers of casualties.\u00a0 Furthermore, most Americans violently hated the \u201cJaps,\u201d in part because of U.S. racism, in part because of the cruelty of the Pacific War and Japanese mistreatment of occupied peoples and POWs.[v]<\/a>\u00a0 Finally, the war in Europe had ended four months earlier, and Americans were demanding an end to the struggle in Asia.<\/p>\n

None of these factors, in my view, justified the mass killings, but they help explain why many otherwise decent people could approve a campaign of ultra-violence.\u00a0 When we argue today about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the tendency is for these \u201crelative relativist\u201d understandings to vanish, and for both sides to take hard anti-relativist positions.\u00a0 Defenders of the bombings insist that they were entirely justified and label those who question this decision weak-minded, unpatriotic, or disloyal.\u00a0 Critics insist that they were crimes against humanity reflecting a moral blindness on the part of many Americans, including the current defenders.\u00a0 The conversation stops.\u00a0 The Enola Gay<\/em>, the B-52 bomber that annihilated Hiroshima, is thus displayed at the U.S. Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport, Virginia, without the slightest mention of the issues in dispute.<\/p>\n

This leaves us with a hard question.\u00a0 Can we pull back sufficiently, not from moral passion, but from anti-relativist simplification, to continue the conversation?\u00a0 This isn\u2019t easy, since it means holding two perspectives in mind simultaneously.\u00a0 With regard to Joe Biden, for example, it means understanding at one and the same time that Biden\u2019s refusal to support more radical anti-racist measures in the seventies helped perpetuate systemic racism, and<\/em> that that refusal seemed reasonable to many people at that time, either because they didn\u2019t understand that racism was systemic or didn\u2019t care to challenge the well-established status quo.<\/p>\n

Keeping these two perspectives in mind may not be a walk in the park, but it\u2019s not that difficult either.\u00a0 Suppose that one practices this, and then asks what the consequences of Joe Biden\u2019s opposition to busing should be for his political career, including his current effort to become the U.S. President.\u00a0 Here, one ought to hear a warning voice: \u201cNot so fast!\u201d\u00a0 This is because the answer is not<\/em> dictated in a mechanical way by analysis of Biden\u2019s past behavior and its social context.\u00a0 It depends upon how one evaluates what the former senator should have known and done in the earlier period, and what he has learned or not learned since then.<\/p>\n

This same dual consciousness is essential even for dealing with a character generally recognized as reprehensible, like the predatory film producer Harvey Weinstein.\u00a0 There can be no question of excusing Weinstein\u2019s abuses of power.\u00a0 His defenses based on various women \u201cconsenting\u201d to his sexual advances are unconvincing, at least to me.\u00a0 Even here, however, it is essential not to lose sight of the social context.\u00a0 In earlier decades, the Hollywood studio system was violently exploitative; the \u201ccasting couch\u201d was an institution joked about and widely accepted by those not victimized by it; and the general social atmosphere of which Hollywood was both product and creator was based on the sexual objectification and humiliation of women.<\/p>\n

Should Weinstein have known he was abusing his power for purposes of sexual exploitation?\u00a0 Certainly.\u00a0\u00a0 Was there a system in place that tolerated and even encouraged this sort of behavior?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 One can<\/em> keep in mind both a venal producer\u2019s oppression of his would-be employees and the socio-cultural system that some people (probably including Weinstein) thought justified, or softened condemnation of, this oppression.<\/p>\n

Once again, it is worth noting that these perspectives present, but do not decide, the further question of how to translate a more complex understanding of human behavior into some sort of present judgment.\u00a0 They do not, for example, determine whether and how the offender should be punished.\u00a0 Because these issues are<\/em> complex, they are matters to discuss and work out in discussion with other people, rather than leaping to a conclusion dictated by hard relativist or anti-relativist assumptions.\u00a0 In this way, dual consciousness leads away from knee-jerk either\/or responses toward dialogue.<\/p>\n

What is there in our culture, I wonder, that induces us to switch off one mode of consciousness when operating in the other?\u00a0 I do not think that this is a product of brain function.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a situation like the psychological experiment of the \u201clady and the goblet,\u201d where the observer has to see either one image or the other but can\u2019t perceive both simultaneously.\u00a0 Perhaps, people switch off one mode or the other because they have already decided either to condemn or forgive someone, and this provides a way of keeping their thinking consistent and worry-free.\u00a0 Pascal has something to say about this, too:<\/p>\n

The will is one of the chief factors in belief, not that it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect in which we look at them.\u00a0 The will, which prefers one aspect to another, turns away the mind from considering the qualities of all that it does not like to see; and thus the mind, moving in accord with the will, stops to consider the aspect which it likes, and so judges by what it sees.[vi]<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes.\u00a0 Even exercising a dual consciousness, one is probably going to emphasize either one mode or the other depending upon what one want to accomplish in the end.\u00a0 Even so, refusing to suppress either perspective \u2013 resisting the temptation to keep things simple \u2013 not only enriches our understanding, it allows us to engage in conversations about these matters with other people, including some who may not share our own moral sensitivities.\u00a0 I hardly need emphasize how important this sort of dialogue is to global society at the moment.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell: we don\u2019t need anti-relativism to define evil and fight to eliminate it.\u00a0 On the contrary, to promote the good effectively, in concert with each other, we need the understanding that a dual consciousness provides.\u00a0 \u201cMen make their history,\u201d said Marx, \u201cbut they do not make it just as they please.\u201d\u00a0 People are responsible for their actions, but they act in a social context.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible to keep both perspectives in mind at the same time.\u00a0 Not only possible but necessary, if we hope to build a moral community.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Blaise Pascal, Pensees <\/em>#293\u00a0 (Penguin, 1995)<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Oliver Ramsbotham, Transforming Violent Conflict: Radical Disagreement, Dialogue and Survival <\/em>(Routledge 2010)<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report <\/em>(Bantam, 1968), p. 10.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> In 1945, a proposal that the U.S. order a demonstration of the atomic bomb to be witnessed by Japanese leaders was rejected by President Truman, as was the suggestion that Hiroshima be leafleted to warn civilians that the city would be destroyed.\u00a0 The idea that the war might be ended quickly by demanding something less than \u201cunconditional surrender\u201d was never even considered.\u00a0 See Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: and the Architecture of an American Myth<\/em> (Knopf 1995).\u00a0 By contrast, the Wikipedia entry, \u201cThe Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,\u201d defends the bombings without citing the Alperovitz study in its bibliography (en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atomic_bombings).<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> These themes are treated thoroughly in John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War<\/em> (Pantheon, 1986)<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Pascal, Pensees <\/em>#9<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is<\/em> a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University<\/em> in Virginia.<\/em>\u00a0 His recent book,<\/em> Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed was published by Routledge in 2017<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anti-relativist thinking insists that certain values approved by the speaker are constant and unchangeable.\u00a0 This means that behaviors that we now believe are wrong were \u2018always\u2019 unacceptable, and should always have always been recognized as such.\u00a0 Anti-relativism\u2019s opposite, moral relativism, can be summed up in the phrase, \u201cOther times, other customs.\u201d\u00a0 Historical eras, social conditions, and cultural environments change, altering commonly accepted definitions of right and wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":103021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[120,290,651,802,109,287,103,985,70],"class_list":["post-140294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-conflict","tag-culture","tag-justice","tag-morality","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-racism","tag-social-justice","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}