In his very first lecture in his course “Justice”, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel warns his students (quoting Immanuel Kant out of all people) to not give into moral skepticism as they learn the strenghts and weaknesses of each moral theory. He does so because he is fully aware of tends to happen the vast majority of the time at the end of an introductory philosophy course: students begin using the tools they just learned about to shit all over regular people’s moral principles and personally defaul to a neo-liberal skepticism under the banner of “tolerance and relativism”. Experienced philosophers however know to go beyond the surface, and instead try to pick up the pieces after breaking down our moral presuppositions, to at least attempt to build better ethical frameworks with which we can make decisions as individuals, groups, and societies.

Usually moral relitivism is rejected by mainstream philosophy because it is 1) epistemically self-defeating 2) pragmatically problematic and 3) intuitively incoherent. Establishing that all meta-ethical premises are subjective and thus meaningless becomes immediately problematic because it breaks down the foundation with which we establish normative ethical structures in society. After all, if all moral principles are simply opinions, then there is no rational justification for a society to punish murder for it would be merely the implementation of an arbitrary moral practice with no real truth-value behind it. Furthermore, if we should default to cultural relativism because morality lacks an objective source, then we would also struggle to find objective sources for every other human-driven discipline because anything we would observe would simply fall pray to the naturalistic fallacy, which in turn makes the notion that moral relativism stems for a truth about reality logically incosistent. Lastly, moral relativism is incosistent with our educated intuitions about the world, for we can observe that all non-sociopathic individuals hold ethical principles beyond culturally ingrained practices that are so strong that they can lead to rebellisious behavior in societies where certain practices are mainstream.

Moral relativism however is extremely useful to both help us become more tolerant of ethical standards other than our own, and also by provoking us to create better justifications for our moral intuitions. Yes, we can’t adopt moral relativism as a meta-ethic, but is there a way to rationally deal with moral disagreements? I believe so, specifically in the context of culture.

Evolutionary ethics for example suggests that all humans have some ingrained moral principles that arise out of genetically predisposed behaviors that can be observed across cultures. Women becoming emotionally attached to their children, murder being morally objectionable, theft being reprehensible, and so on. It is true that none of those phenomena are 100% consistent across humanity (after all, Spartans used to throw physically handicapped children off of the top of mountains, genocide happens to this day, and piracy still happens in Somalia). For the most part however, socially benefical behaviors tend to show up with some consistency across the world and across history, and the deviations instead provide an interesting example of how culture practices develop when the conflict with moral intuitions.

Our language for example distinguishes between the act of killing and the act of murder. It’s the reason why we say “killed in self-defense” as opposed to “murdered to survive”. Even genocidial maniacs can only convice others to go along in their crusade against humanity by redefining the relationship between the aggressor and the victim, specifically by dehuminizing “the other”. The same technique was in the caste system, where every social level was almost considered an entirely separate species, or in the case of American slavery where when confronted with the logically incosistency of US law, the Supreme Court declared in Dredd Scott v Samford that “slaves were not human, thus lacked the consitutional right to sue”. Why did people like Kant bother so much with anthropology to rationalize white supremacy? I suspect it’s because naturally humans are not predisposed to believe other humans are objects: it’s something children have to be taught.

Thus, if there are some abstract moral facts our human intutions latch unto, does that imply moral realism is not true? Not necessirly, because there is still a logical gap between the existence of abstract moral facts and our ability to process them correctly and thus derive true ethical standards. Some branches of non-cognitivism after all accept the premise that moral facts can exist: they simply reject the conclusion we as humans can consistently understand them and apply them correctly. Non-cognitivism is thus supported by the overwheming evidence that cultures significantly differ on moral questions not just on an implementation level but also on a fundamental level. The right to privacy for example is a modern example of a fundamental principle that is not shared widely across cultures.

I contend however that moral relitivism can actually be a helpful tool in discovering moral truth.