Wrestling with relativism: Bernard Williams argued that one's ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn't mean that everyone is right

[Celerity]

https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-williams-moral-relativism-and-the-culture-wars





Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact that what counts as adultery, for example, differs around the world? In Lust in Translation (2007), the contemporary writer Pamela Druckerman chronicles how the rules of infidelity vary ‘from Tokyo to Tennessee’. It can be tempting to conclude that the correct answer to moral questions is ultimately settled by convention, perhaps like matters of etiquette such as how to eat your food. For Herodotus, the recognition of cultural difference led him to declare, echoing the words of the Greek poet Pindar, that ‘custom is king of all.’

The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory. Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur throughout Williams’s work. First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to arguments over relativism.



Consider the following memorable scene in Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends (2017). The central character, Frances, who is sleeping with Bobbi, rejects her friend Philip’s insistence that ‘in basic vocabulary she is your girlfriend.’ Frances is right to resist Philip’s attempt to put a familiar label on things: she is trying to live in a way for which there aren’t words yet. Elsewhere in the book, Frances questions not only the word ‘couple’ but even the term ‘relationship’ to depict her life with Bobbi. If she isn’t sure how to describe her complicated situation, it’s in part because it doesn’t easily fit into the grids of conventional thought. She wants, to use an image from James Joyce, to ‘fly by’ the nets of language.

The words your society uses, as Frances is highly aware, shape the self you can become. Language is loaded with ethical expectations. If you agree that you are in a ‘couple’ with someone, for instance, then that commonly (though not always) carries with it the expectation that you will not be in bed with anyone else. That norm can be challenged, and has been, by those who are in open relationships. However, if you are trying to live in a way that is new, and doesn’t fit into accustomed categories, then it’s likely that you will be misunderstood and deprived of social recognition. Even so, as the American philosopher Judith Butler has argued in Undoing Gender (2004), there are situations where it’s better to be unintelligible than to force oneself into the existing menu of social options. If everyday language can sometimes feel oppressive, it’s perhaps because it is inescapably descriptive and evaluative: it tells you not just how things are, but how they should be. If you are someone’s ‘girlfriend’, for instance, then a vast number of beliefs kick into action about how you should behave. This is why Frances is so wary about accepting the label.

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