What is ontological relativism?

Ontology is that part of philosophy which investigates the fundamental structures of the world and the fundamental kinds of things that exist. Terms like “object”, “fact”, “property”, “relation” and “category” are technical terms used to make sense of these most basic features of reality. Until Kant, there was widespread agreement on the framework for debates about ontology, and varying accounts of existence, essence, substance and property were articulated and defended. This involved some of the great debates of Western philosophy, for example about the status of universals. However, amid these differences were shared aims (finding out the fundamental nature of reality) and shared methods (dialectical argumentation). Those philosophers who abstained from these debates did so from the position of scepticism, holding that we just don't have the cognitive wherewithal to decide any of these issues. Nevertheless, there was clear agreement on all sides that ontology had to do with portraying the nature of reality: telling it as it really is. Kant upset this consensus. His Copernican revolution introduced a new dimension to the debate. His suggestion was that ontology has to do with articulating the nature of reality as known to human cognition, not as it is in itself. In common with sceptics he denies our access to a world in itself. However, unlike sceptics, he believes there is still a point to doing ontology and still an account to be given of the basic structures by which the world is revealed to us.

Philosophy is an abstract and theoretical discipline. Because of this, many outside it (and not a few within it) think that it has little impact on the everyday life of people. This has been especially accented in recent years, as increasing standards of professionalization mean that philosophers tend to write explicitly just for others in their field and leave the general public in the dark. Nevertheless, philosophy has always had an impact on human culture, shaping currents and tendencies, supplying ideologies, vocabularies and concepts and offering ideals that penetrate to all aspects of society. For example, the works of Aristotle and Aquinas influenced a great number of people over many centuries through the mediation of the Catholic Church. The dialectics of Hegel, turned on their head by Marx, reached a multitude through various socialist movements. The existentialists' analysis of nihilism, meaninglessness and boredom pervaded the literature and cinematic culture of the twentieth century. But what sort of impact could the work of contemporary analytical philosophy have, when at least one critic has noted, “Linguistic philosophy corrupts no one. What it does do is bore them” (Gellner 1959: 218)? Now this is unfair, because the levels of abstraction and sophistication found in analytical philosophy can be found in most of the works of the great philosophers. While it may not immediately seem clear how such technical work might have cultural repercussions, history shows that material just as abstruse has had such an effect. Recent philosophical investigations of relativism seem to be a case in point.

Much of the negative reaction to relativism is connected to issues about truth and the apparent incoherence of attempting to relativize the notion of truth. The great majority of philosophers have taken for granted the idea that truth and falsity are absolute concepts, whatever else may be relativized. However, there have always been those who rejected this view, holding that truth is indeed relative. Some of these have offered penetrating and ingenious arguments as to how and why the notion of truth should be relativized.

The idea of “truth” is intimately connected to a host of other concepts such as “fact”, “reality”, “belief” and “knowledge” and is fundamental to most conceptual schemes. Hence any deep alteration to the concept of truth would have a profound knock-on effect in many other areas of philosophy, especially if the alteration construed truth as relative rather than absolute. We can call the kind of relativism associated with truth “alethic relativism” (from the Greek word for truth, aletheia). Because truth is so enmeshed with so many other philosophical concepts, the lines of argument concerning alethic relativism get quite tangled. Here, then, are some of the issues that need to be addressed. If truth is relative, then it would follow that something could be true here but not there, or the very same thing that is true today could be not true tomorrow. On the surface this looks like a contradiction, but in fact alethic relativism has often been invoked as a way of avoiding contradiction.

Core rationality

Advocates of relativism about rationality

Quite a number of writers have argued for alternative conceptions of rationality, but in many cases it is not clear what this means. A representative group of those views – taken from sociology of knowledge, anthropology, feminist theory and theology – will be discussed in this section. It will be argued that many of the “alternative” views presented can be accommodated within forms of relativism other than relativism about rationality – for example, as conceptual, ontological or epistemological relativism. Following this, a model for a non-relative account of rationality will be presented and defended. The subsequent three sections of the chapter will deal with the major lines of objection to such an account of rationality. The final section differentiates this approach from a famous attack on relativism by Donald Davidson.

Barry Barnes and David Bloor (see, for example, Barnes & Bloor 1982) have defended relativistic views about rationality, using themes from the sociology of knowledge. They reject universalist conceptions of rationality, holding that there are only local ones available, relative to context, culture, historical epoch and so on. They argue for this by insisting on the importance of investigating the empirical conditions under which beliefs arise for an agent, and showing how these are always local and particular. To counter the obvious objection that such a project merely focuses on causes rather than on reasons and so has nothing to say about rationality, they challenge the cause-reason distinction.

Responsibility and Reactive Attitudes

Human beings, unlike rocks, raccoons, and rainstorms, are sometimes subjects of moral responsibility. But which human beings are responsible for their actions, and when? These are notoriously incorrigible questions, and I won't say much here to make them easier. Indeed, I raise them because my arguments exacerbate the difficulty: I advocate eschewing central forms of character assessment, while responsibility attribution seems to presuppose such assessments.

According to Hume, a person is responsible only for actions that proceed from her “characters and disposition”; to attribute responsibility is to attribute behavior to an enduring feature of character. People apparently have a more intimate relation to behaviors that are an “expression of their character” than to behaviors that are not such expressions; my impassioned political activism says rather more about me than does my paying the electric bill, and it seems perfectly natural that I get credit (or blame) for the one and not the other. If such intuitions lead to a view like Hume's, situationism undermines responsibility attribution.

There is at the start a straightforward way to evade this problem: The situationist can endorse a consequentialist “social-regulation” approach to responsibility (see Watson 1993: 121). For the consequentialist, holding people responsible is justified by its results: If blaming you effects better behavior, I am justified in doing so, whatever sort of person you are (see Smart 1961).

Précis

I'm possessed of the conviction that thinking productively about ethics requires thinking realistically about humanity. Not everyone finds this so obvious as I do; philosophers have often insisted that the facts about human psychology should not constrain ethical reflection. Then my conviction requires an argument, and that is why I've written this book. The argument addresses a conception of ethical character long prominent in the Western ethical tradition, a conception I believe modern experimental psychology shows to be mistaken. If I'm right, coming to terms with this mistake requires revisions in thinking about character, and also in thinking about ethics.

It's commonly presumed that good character inoculates against shifting fortune, and English has a rich vocabulary for expressing this belief: steady, dependable, steadfast, unwavering, unflinching. Conversely, the language generously supplies terms of abuse marking lack of character: weak, fickle, disloyal, faithless, irresolute. Such locutions imply that character will have regular behavioral manifestations: the person of good character will do well, even under substantial pressure to moral failure, while the person of bad character is someone on whom it would be foolish to rely. In this view it's character, more than circumstance, that decides the moral texture of a life; as the old saw has it, character is destiny.

One response to my position is an incredulous stare: It would be more than remarkable, this unflinching gaze implies, if our time-honored notions of character were so empirically undersupported. At the same time, I risk bored yawns: The sort of behavioral variability I've been going on about is familiar to everyone, including the character theorist. Then I must beware the dreaded “Oh yeah?”/“So what?” dilemma: All philosophical positions look false on some readings and uninteresting on the others (Sturgeon 1986). In this case, the “oh yeah”er flatly rejects situationism, while the “so what”er denies that situationism pressures a suitably nuanced reading of characterological moral psychology. Given the evidence, I'm confident that “oh yeah” represents a doomed heroism; the situationist tradition has progressed beyond a point where cavalier dismissal is an intellectually responsible retort. Nor does “so what” seem particularly promising; major strains of both characterological moral psychology and personality psychology feature commitments unsettled by situationism. But this is not yet to say that these commitments are widespread outside the academy; maybe people's everyday conception of moral personality is more sophisticated than that of those who write about character for a living. Rather than making arguments with broad resonance, perhaps I've merely scored a few points in a game of academic ping-pong. This conjecture evinces an appealing populism, but it wants for evidential support, as will become clear with a survey of the experimental literature on person perception.

Perhaps I haven't yet gotten to the heart of things. I've been trying to show how ethical reflection can — and should — get on with less reliance on notions of character. But I've had relatively little to say about how this proposal relates to a central facet of ethical life. While I've gone on a bit about the “reactive attitudes,” I've been pretty quiet about the phenomenology of moral emotions — how the moral life feels, as it were, rather than how it is judged. But I need to say something, for if the moral emotions take some of their shape from the moral psychology of character, my skepticism about character threatens to reshape or, rather, misshape, emotional life. Here, as elsewhere, I think my revisionary ambitions promise more good than harm; if people could tutor their emotional tendencies as I suggest, our emotional economy would be a healthier one. This is a rather imperious declaration on a large topic, and I won't — can't — here do all the work required to validate it. Rather, I try to motivate my contention mainly through consideration of shame, an emotional syndrome that has been prominently associated with the ethics of character.

Guilt, Shame, and Self-Regulation

A central difficulty for ethical thought, at least since Plato's famous discussion in the Republic, is the problem of how to secure appropriate conduct when it is not possible to implement effective sanctions on misbehavior.

Given the enduring kinship of false belief and moral disaster, ethical perspectives associated with demonstrably inaccurate descriptive claims invite skepticism. For instance, the difficulty with racism is not necessarily the ethical proposition that groups having different attributes are due differential treatment — no problem about so distinguishing children and adults — but rather that the descriptive theories motivating differential treatment, as in the case of race and intelligence, have tended to gross error. I've been saying that character ethics is likewise associated with an erroneous descriptive theory: an empirically inadequate moral psychology. But in cases more philosophically delicate than racial pseudoscience, such as the case at hand, the appropriate relation between descriptive and ethical claims is difficult to ascertain. To loosely paraphrase Hume (1978/1740: 469), the situationist Is does not straightforwardly imply any ethical Oughts. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that situationism does matter for ethics. In the concluding chapters, I explain why.

Ethical Revisionism

Character is not the proprietary interest of Aristotelianism, but also figures in Kantian (Darwall 1986: 310—11; Herman 1993: 111), contractualist (Rawls 1971: 440—6), and consequentialist (Railton 1984: 157—8) ethics, as well as in prephilosophical ethical thought.

The 1990s were a good time for virtue. Not because people behaved especially well; like other decades, the decade saw its share of moral lapses, from the horrific to the pathetic. The difference was that folks were talking about virtue more often, and more earnestly, than they had in generations. Rather churchy tomes on character began to shoulder aside sex and scandal on the best-seller lists, and virtue, as one columnist put it, was in fashion.

By then, virtue — at least talk of virtue — had been fashionable in academic philosophy for some time; philosophers in English-speaking university departments have been calling for increased attention to such notions since the 1950s. Of course, this agenda was something less than radical even then; neoteric discussion of virtue and character has antiquarian roots, most especially in Aristotle's monumental Ethics. The new wisdom, apparently, is much the same as the old wisdom.

I regard this renaissance of virtue with concern. Like many others, I find the lore of virtue deeply compelling, yet I cannot help noticing that much of this lore rests on psychological theory that is some 2,500 years old. A theory is not bad simply because it is old, but in this case developments of more recent vintage suggest that the old ideas are in trouble.

Rameau's nephew, it seems, is a bit of a cipher: by turns foolish and sagacious, dissolute and upstanding, beggarly and magisterial. Diderot (1966: 58) would have us question the nephew's sanity; radical personal inconsistency seems to signal a breakdown of mental health. Yet it's not crazy to think that someone could be courageous in physical but not moral extremity, or be moderate with food but not sex, or be honest with spouses but not with taxes. If we take such thoughts seriously, we'll qualify our attributions: “physical courage” or “moral courage,” instead of “courage,” and so on. Would things were so simple. With a bit of effort, we can imagine someone showing physical courage on the battlefield, but cowering in the face of storms, heights, or wild animals. Here we go again: “battlefield physical courage,” “storms physical courage,” “heights physical courage,” and “wild animals physical courage.” Things can get still trickier: Someone might exhibit battlefield courage in the face of rifle fire but not in the face of artillery fire (Miller 2000: 54—9). If we didn't grow sick of it, we could play this little game all day. Such sport is more than simpleminded diversion, however; it is the beginning of an empirically adequate alternative to globalism. But I've not yet fully established the need for such an alternative: There are defensible interpretations of the data more friendly to globalist conceptions of character than is mine. Nevertheless, I’d like to think I’ve come by my views honestly; comparing the going alternatives, I now try to show, gives us good reason to favor my way of doing things.