War on relativism

Ah, Christmas-time. It's the time of year when I write on some vaguely "living together happily" type theme.

I'm fairly sympathetic to the war-on-moral-relativism that some corners of the philosophy blogosphere engage in. Some people do hold the view very naively, and some such naive views are both false and harmful.

But, I have two worries.

First, I wonder if the popularity of relativism is over-hyped. Having taught moral philosophy to first-years this semester, I noticed that very few were relativists. Most thought it was unsustainable (along with every other theory we've done, but that's beside the point). Perhaps we're attacking a view that's already dead?

Second is a broader, more interesting point. There are some perfectly respectable moral relativists. Gilbert Harman, for instance, is a clever guy, and he's a moral relativist. Now, you might say that popular naive moral relativism is very different to Harman's theory. But this isn't fair. People who don't study philosophy and who are naive moral realists are probably equally holding crap versions of potentially reasonable views. The same point applies to almost any view: Naive Christians certainly hold some bizarre views (e.g. the age of the earth), but so do naive atheists ("scientism"). Should we have a war on naivety instead? Why make a special effort in the case of moral relativism?

There's a broader issue at stake here: Should academics with an interest in popular opinion strive to influence the lowest of low believers, or the best of the best? Attacking only the most naive versions of the worst views seems like it's unfair to those who hold more sophisticated versions of those views. But attacking the most sophisticated version of a view can result in all sorts of other problems: You might merely attack one specific variant of a view rather than it as a whole, or fail to sway popular opinion at all on the issue. But weren't these things our very aim to begin with?

So it's a puzzle. On the one hand, some people hold very unjustifiable naive views. On the other hand, most of those views have sophisticated counter-parts, and it's not quite fair to attack only the (popular) straw-man.