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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

• jebarker 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the point being made. Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent morality of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal morality. But how does that allow for the fact that different cultures do have different moral codes and that those do change over time?
  • ch4s3 3y ago
    I think he’s proposing a universal moral grammar, or something to that effect. I’m not sure it’s particularly convincing but I can’t say I take a particular side on this.
  • reedf1 3y ago
    I think his point is not that there is an absolute moral landscape or that moral relativism can't exist in abstract. But that morals are so deeply held, that they shape your being and understanding of reality. So on a day to day basis you would feel revolted against something that appears to be immoral in another culture despite being able to logically pare out that it is okay in their system of morality.
    • jebarker 3y ago
      Ah, I see. So you can understand why another culture holds a particular moral position but you still _feel_ it to be immoral yourself. That makes sense. But how does that tie to the sparse data and acquisition of morality?
    • lambdasquirrel 3y ago
      I don’t think it’s that radical in a sense but trying to argue it is. When you think about it though, we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery. So we have folks like Washington freeing the slaves in his will, which of course his wife walked back on, and he probably had an idea that she might do that too. And yet people are able to jump through mental hoops to justify it anyway. We tell ourselves, well it was okay during their time. They probably said the same thing to themselves too. One day I’m sure our ancestors will curse us for bringing about the environmental disaster that was the end of days.
      • mcpackieh 3y ago
        > we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery From where did that secret sense of guilt come? Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all performative, cynically done for the sake of his reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the inside, inspiring a real sense of guilt. I think that is congruent with the theory that some small kernel of universal morality exists in all humans capable of feeling empathy, derived from that innate empathy instinct. People can be conditioned to ignore it, and this explains much of the variability in human morality across cultures. A slave owner can ignore that part of his mind that empathizes with the slaves because ignoring it is socially and financially convenient. Some can be needled and prodded into acknowledging it, while many go their entire lives with this empathy buried and ignored. But however ignored, that kernel of universal morality still exists in them. It's universal to humans because we're all the same species of social ape evolved to have instincts which facilitate social cooperation, particularly empathy. This morality is universal in the sense that all humans have the theoretical ability to access it within themselves, but actually doing so obviously isn't universal. (Actual psychopaths, if such people even exist, may be the exception. If they truly lack the ability to empathize they would be unable to tap into this otherwise universal morality. Furthermore, the empathy instinct is not as perfect as might be wished; in almost all people empathy is felt more strongly for people who are close (socially and geographically.) Less empathy is felt for people who are distant or "other". Innate empathy has limits, and therefore universal morality is woefully flawed and incomplete.)
        • pixl97 3y ago
          Heh, yea, trying to use the internal feeling of guilt as a basis is a path to complete failure in my eyes. This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things that at least to me make no sense?
          • mcpackieh 3y ago
  • the_gastropod 3y ago
    > He identifies “a tendency to move from the uncontroversial concept of moral relativism” — that, say, certain cultures at certain times hold certain moral values, and other cultures at other times hold other ones — “to a concept that is, in fact, incoherent, and that is to say that moral values can range indefinitely,” tethered to no objective basis. The existence of a tether is what he’s focused on here, it seems to me.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    Possibly the article is poorly written? It doesn't seem to make sense. Either Chomsky is saying something quite academic or the article hasn't captured the point.
  • LindeBuzoGray 3y ago
    It can be seen in an individual. A boy is raised in rural Oaxaca, Mexico. He works on a farm, speaks Copala Triqui and no Spanish. Then when he's 14 his family moves to east Los Angeles. As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change. It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard, one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation. But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.
    • jebarker 3y ago
      I don't think it's obvious that those traits, e.g. not stealing, are universal or part of some fundamental moral grammar. It just means they're common and widespread.
      • LindeBuzoGray 3y ago
        Not stealing, but as I said, stealing from one's friends. Most cultures frown on that.
        • epups 3y ago
          If you had to qualify it with "most", then it isn't universal. Moreover, I don't think morality is what applies only to your friends.
          • gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
            Well the qualifier could be the writer’s way of stating that he or she lacks knowledge of every society. After a brief search I can find no society that approved of stealing from peers.
  • throw310822 3y ago
    Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing moral* with language: > Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent language of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal language structure. But how does that allow for the fact that different languages do have different grammars and that those do change over time?
    • msla 3y ago
      Which, again, is a poor argument in that Chomsky never demonstrates his central conceit: Is there a poverty of the stimulus? Here's a review of a book that makes the case that children need, and use, plenty of stimulus to learn new linguistic constructions: https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky/ https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky... > It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech. But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them. They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it. > A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate. They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural. Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something. They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.
  • empath75 3y ago
    I think he's making two slightly related points. 1) That while it's possible to talk about moral relativism in the abstract, nobody in their own life is a complete moral relativist, which is to say that they will have _some_ moral system that they live their life by, even if they completely recognize the arbitrariness of it. 2) Moral systems have large degrees of freedom, but they _are_ constrained, and he thinks some of those constraints might be innate. For example, while all forms of violence can be approved of in some society, it's always _conditional_. You could _imagine_ a moral system where arbitrary extreme violence against anyone and anything including yourself and your family would be perfectly moral, but you won't see that in any real society. There are always some conditions under which violence is acceptable.
  • cannabis_sam 3y ago
    Regardless of whether there exists any underlying universal morality, why would shifts along cultural and/or time axises preclude it?
  • gnramires 3y ago
    Here's my take on the problem. Say there's are a pair of cultures, each celebrating a celestial event like Equinox or Solstice. In culture A, the tradition is that at solstice you should wear red shirts. Suppose they're not extreme about it, but they may look at you concerned or disappointed that you're not respecting their tradition for wearing a red shirt on that day. In culture B, the tradition is to wear a blue shirt instead. If you go to culture B (from culture A), and wear a red shirt at the day, people will find it strange and be disappointed. Does that mean one of those cultures is right in an absolute sense, and the other is wrong? I think at least in a "good enough" sense, maybe not. I think in many cases it comes down to non-unique solutions -- more than one culture can be good. Either case may be fine. However, I think we can with progress in philosophy, science, etc.. critique cultures as a whole: we can try to define what is good. Not only that, but I think in the sense of what is good, then yes: I think we should converge on common, more or less universal principles. Within the same principles, a universe of cultures can exist; furthermore, variety itself is arguably part of goodness. If everything is the same, then we might be missing out in serious ways, both in immediately practical terms of different viewpoints fostering new innovations (if everyone thinks exactly the same... everyone has mostly the same ideas), and also in a cultural, aesthetic sense of life being more interesting with more than one 'cultural way', so to speak. Yet cultures should mostly agree on common universal principles (at least in some 'assymptotic', aspirational sense -- principles should be agreed more and more, and disagreements ought to become more minor). You may observe 'Ok, but those principles are just the product of the culture you started with!'. I think that's somewhat fair. But I think universal principles are kind of 'natural' in a certain sense -- I think there is a unique set of principles that is capable of unifying concepts like science, truth, morality, sustainability, art, culture -- as far as reason can go. If you look at mathematics, it is universally agreed whether a statement should be true or not. And we don't expect a different culture to find it differently. It's really surprising, I think, that reason should be able to tell anything about culture, but, although it's in some senses extremely difficult (specially if you're thinking of proving anything practical/concrete, like whether an art piece is beautiful or not), those things should all be accessible to reason. This is in no small part because the processes that happen in our own minds can be studied -- and the study of mental processes is in the end what can provide a great unification of all sciences and arts (although in practice like I said it's too difficult in the near term). We can understand the nature of happiness, unhappiness, beauty, motivation, and so on, in a very solid way, in the same way we can study the behaviors of particles, control systems, processors, materials, knots, and so on (there are some important details to this study that are too long for this discussion[1]). (I think both Chomsky and Focault would probably agree on this point eventually) That's not to say you can't have cultures that refuse all that, potentially until they 'die'. It's also not to say you couldn't have some weird culture that does mathematics in a different way and they try to persistently live with grave inconsistencies. This would make their mathematics fragile, and probably far less useful -- the point where we call it 'totally unreasonable, pointless'. But it doesn't seem impossible that they could be totally unreasonable. This seems to undermine the notion of universality. If universality doesn't mean all cultures share the values, not even that all cultures would converge or even agree on those values, what could it mean? I think universality only means (in the context of ethics) that a culture with a sufficient set of tools/principles, procedures and systems do eventually converge on common principles. It's basically a basin of attraction of principles (and practices), that needs a minimal set for bootstrapping. So what is this minimal set? And critically, do we even have it? I think it can be summarized as consistency, or truth. By requiring that language be logically consistent, and enforcing the notion of truth (across reason[2], individual and collective decision-making), plus of course being sentient beings ourselves (that allow us to recognize and understand truths related to sentience, which I think are at the root of all that matters[3]), we get science, we become able to talk with each other reasonably, we become able to agree, we become able to investigate, etc.. By demanding that ethical principles have some (and eventually rigorous) consistency, we can get to moral truths: if my (literal) brother and my neighbors are both human beings, why should I only help my brother and not my neighbor? How am I fundamentally different from others that I should be more important? (egotism), etc.. What makes it hard, fundamentally, is that sometimes those demands come into conflict with our instincts, or even major aspects of our society, so we can dangerously veer off this path. I think we have it, and another name for it might be Enlightenment, both in the sense of western culture, and eastern cultures (e.g. in buddhism). Are we enlightened yet? :) (I would say we're mostly on the path to enlightenment, although we haven't yet been able to discover and agree on some principles and truths that are very important to our lives -- we are on the path but still far from the ideals) This is such a beautiful and important notion to me, I think it might be worth it to call this God (i.e. this enlightenement, this path to truth/science/everything that is good that can be known) -- with capital G, and why not worship and protect this notion. [1] The difference is that you need sentient beings and our experiences of ourselves to be able to understand truths about sentience. In a way we are, and have to be, both subject and scientist, and this is a little different from strict views of science. [2] I've talked so much about reason/truth that I think I should mention intuition too. Intuition is the practical means of thought. Intuition can be thought as large leaps of logic that may be uncertain and/or non-trivial. Most of our language statements don't actually follow from one another immediately in the sense of logic, instead they tend to jump many steps at once, or we even make propositions that are unproven (in mathematics we tend to use intuitive leaps to find proofs and then fill in the gaps with formal statements). Many things in life are actually not so important that we need to prove an ideal solution, usually good enough is enough. Still, this process and language itself relies on the infrastructure of logic, truth and consistency to work; and in many cases, involving important decisions, we can reduce uncertainty and improve decisions by refining our steps, and giving more solid arguments (approaching truth with greater confidence). [3] Just to be clear, I'm far from proposing we become naive logical machines. Those would probably be both ineffective, and neglect taking into account the experience of being itself. Even fantasy is important in this sense, but I think we should be careful to keep fantasy separate from reality as much as reasonable (phenomena like 'Santa Claus' and psychological quirks notwithstanding). Fantasy is good and reasonable in a way! Same goes for things like arts, games, sports, leisure. Should be made from self-sustainable good feelings.
• boffinAudio 3y ago
  All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. For example - there is no such thing as "Europe", unless enough people get together and agree that this thing that doesn't really exist, does exist and shall be named "Europe". "Europe" isn't a physical element, it isn't a naturally occurring substance - it is instead a human cultural construct which only persists for as long as the word continues to be used as intended. Chomsky, who I think understands this very basic principle very well, nevertheless seems to dance around this fact because its not very savory - it implies that all human life is fiction - and nobody gets paid large sums to make that observation by those cultures inclined to make their own lies persist longer than others - even if its true. "Perhaps we do have the freedom to speak, think, and act however we wish — but that very freedom, if Chomsky is correct, emerges only within strict, absolute, wholly un-relative natural boundaries." Essentially, our freedom is expressed as the ability to choose which cultures to perpetuate and which to deny persistence, by simply ceasing to perpetuate the lie that is that thing, in the first place. Yes, all human experience is a fiction. It may not be obvious now, but I would wager it'll be obvious to every single one of us, one of these days, right in the last seconds of our own lives, when our own individual fallacies cease to persist... if only there were a way for Chomsky to confirm this, when his time comes.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    > All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. This seems wrong. It's not a lie to give something a name. Why not say "All culture is a truth which only persists in the re-telling", given it is true we call Europe Europe?
    • robotresearcher 3y ago
      This is a much better take, and elegantly expressed by that flip. Going further: Europe is a dynamical system that is stable enough relative to human experience to have a name. The feedback loop that maintains the system that is Europe includes human behavior, which includes thoughts and speech. Chemical elements are also dynamical systems, held together without humans in the loop. Everything we have a name for is like this. The truth and reality of helium and Europe is the same at this level of description. A problem with this level of description is that it is kind of overpowered: if everything can be considered a dynamical system, then we aren't saying much about the differences between things. Analogously, it's true that evolution explains biology. But there's still a useful science of biology - we don't just point to living things and say 'evolution made that' and call it a day. Hence while I'm pretty confident about the dynamical systems stance being fundamental, there's plenty of room to slice things up further with other concepts. They just need to bottom out successfully into dynamics. Evolution does this, for example. Can morality bottom out this way? Perhaps the theory of iterated games is a connection?
• ajuc 3y ago
  I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face? Some objective "faceiness"? Or just that we have overfitted neural networks in our heads? You can get hit in a particular way and stop recognizing faces. Or morality. What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set. Well duh.
  • twoodfin 3y ago
    What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.
    • dsego 3y ago
      Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?
      • botanical57 3y ago
        To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice. Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.
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• vehemenz 3y ago
  Moral relativism is the most absurd form of moral realism, which is itself an absurd position. I'd be more interested in an explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent people, who are more than capable of reasoning for themselves and holding well-defended, sensible positions, find themselves attracted to moral realism, a truly mystical belief that offends science, reason, and grade school grammar.
  • hotdogscout 3y ago
    Why do you think it is absurd? I'd think a moral relativist could support science, reason, and grade school grammar while also believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true.
    • vehemenz 3y ago
      > believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true. Moral relativists are moral realists, meaning that they believe that moral truths are dependent, in part, on the culture in which the truths are being evaluated. So I don't think what you're talking about is moral relativism but rather, the fact that different cultures may have slightly different moral beliefs, which is obviously true. For actual objections to moral relativism, aside from the usual objections to moral realism that undercut all of these: https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#H4 https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#H4
      • hotdogscout 3y ago
        You're right, I assumed moral relativism meant something else. Thanks.
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  • LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    I agree that moral relativism is absurd, but I don’t see any problem with moral realism. I think many intelligent people understand the boundaries of our knowledge in the domain of consciousness, cognition and agency and thus they don’t jump to conclusion that morality doesn’t exist on the grounds that there is no equation for it in string theory.
• epups 3y ago
  There almost certainly isn't a universal moral code. For every abominable act you can think of - murder, slavery, even genocide -, we can find examples of human groups that glorified them, usually by evoking religion, group affiliation or a mix of both.
  • debok 3y ago
    How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify. Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must necessarily exist outside of the groups that glorifies the things you correctly call abominations. Edit: typos
    • hotdogscout 3y ago
      If there are states/governments where Murder, Slavery and Genocide are fine, can you say it is universal if it cannot be applied in that place? What are the conditions for a universal morality?
      • debok 3y ago
        What do you mean by "cannot be applied"? Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and governments are wrong by the universal moral code condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a universal moral code.
        • hotdogscout 3y ago
          With that definition any moral code can he universal. I can support legalized murder and condemn everyone who doesn't, therefore creating the grounds to condemn anything else. Some religions practice human sacrifice, including of children.[1] My opinion is we're better off arguing there's a better moral code based on a number of arbitrary parameters (freedom, resource creation, comfort, longevity, equality, merit, envy management, violence management, respect for tradition, respect of minorities, etc). I can't see how you can declare a universal code of conduct, I can see how you can declare a technocratic liberal one. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul...
• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I've read that Chomsky can be pretty nasty to his debate opponents, but he's amazingly congenial in this video. It really makes me wish I could spend hours and hours chatting with him. I've run across a handful of philosophers: Chomsky, Peter Kreeft, etc. who can stay really chill during a debate. It's seems like a superpower for keeping discussions productive.
  • throw__away7391 3y ago
    He's very dismissive and disrespectful to anyone who isn't fawning over him. If you interview him and interlace praise and admiration for him, yes he's gonna be congenial.
    • pydry 3y ago
      Dismissive and disrespectful to people who are dismissive and disrespectful of him... what a monster.
      • rfrey 3y ago
        Not being a sycophant is not the same as being dismissive and disrespectful.
      • throw__away7391 3y ago
        Have you watched any of these debates? In all that I have seen him participate in the other party was gracious and patient, assuming good faith even when there was little evidence of such, generally far more polite than I could manage.
        • pydry 3y ago
          I havent seen any debates where he wasnt equally polite. I'm familiar with tone policing as a concept though, and Im not surprised it has been applied to Chomsky.
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• bluecalm 3y ago
  Morality is a mechanism that helps with following some rules within a society without spending excess resources on enforcing them. It evolved in small groups (in comparison to the size of societies today). If you accept this view on what morality is then it's pretty obvious there ought be some universal rules as human groups have a lot in common and some rules universally help with survival of a group. "Don't kill your peers" is one example. "Don't take their property without their consent or some process" is another although it can only arise in groups advanced enough to come up with the concept of property. Then there is a whole set of rules related to sex and reproduction which are again pretty universally needed for the group survival but can be established in various way - there more than one solution giving a chance for group's survival unlike in "don't kill your peers" case. I am yet to meet a fundamental moral relativist who claims we can adopt any rules we please but a position that there are many set of rules that arised to help with the purpose of group's survival is both common and imo obviously correct. There is in fact an underlying mechanism for moral rules (group survival) which those rules stem from in one way or another. There might be better or worse set of rules and they might be different depending on environment a given group exists in. "Don't kill your peers" is going to be there but "Don't kill the weakest members of the group so the resources can be saved" not necessarily so. It seems to me that Chomsky is arguing against a very narrow and strict definition of moral relativism here or I am not getting his point.
• gremlinunderway 3y ago
  This article really sucks at actually engaging with the really extraordinarily interesting debate between Foucault and Chomssky. I mean, even the introduction is a giant leap of logic (the premise that Chomsky was refering to Foucault as an extreme moral relativist). I think as time goes on, it's been interesting to see more of what Foucault was saying as becoming more and more interesting. The ability of power to generate the field or domain (what he called an "episteme") which defines the unconscious rules for research is something I think still being exposed regardless of any innate morality. Besides, I think Chomsky's argument regarding "advancement" of morality to be so value-laden as to be sort of meaningless. There are more slaves in existence now than any other period of human history, and this "advancement" is still barely all that stable enough given the politics of Western countries which still maintain large (millions of people) cultural groups who absolutely would stop or even reverse this advancement given the chance. Also its kind of ironic that Chomsky brings up Turing, because what we're talking about here is a scientifically-driven field which saw homosexuality as an illness and identified medical procedures as the cure which led to Turing's death. Why is it that every decade we continue to identify fields of science, (which in his framework should be at the forefront of discovering this innate human nature and morality) that are the vanguards of extreme oppression? Why is it that science is consistently, across cultures and political systems, a domain that is almost always intrinsically tied to the justification and defense of the power structures of that culture? Soviet lamarckism, American global electronic surveillance, Western pathological views of homosexuality and psychology are all examples where science was twisted into merely a domain of power, exactly like Foucault described throughout history. Most would hand-wave these away as "not real science", but what even is real science then? I mean god, we're still discovering new gaps in scientific knowledge that are so large and incomprehensible that we can barely even begin to know what outcomes they have lead to. The reproducibility crisis in medicine, psychology and other domains is portrayed as a sort of minor inconvenience rather than the shattering of one of the core and principal tenets of science in its production of knowledge.
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• dale_glass 3y ago
  I disagree. Moral relativism is very much a thing. But it's just a muddled matter. To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined. Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done, but it was done proudly, with selfies taken for remembering the "good times" later. I find that on the long term the discussion tends to coalesce towards children. Well, in most wars out there children suffered from it. Even in WWII, you can bet that there was an American or Russian bomb that killed a German child, and you won't find a lot of either feeling all that conflicted about their actions. The atomic bombs are a tad controversial, but still find plenty proponents of that the horrific slow deaths they inflicted on quite a few people (including children) were in the end for the greater good. So far I think about the closest to an effective "objective moral rule" I've heard is that it's immoral to torture children for fun. But when I think of it that's almost a tautology -- It works out to "It's immoral to cause harm without a good reason", more or less. Or, if the objection here is that a given individual finds their own code as rigid and unyielding, I don't think that's really true either. Amazing horrors are committed by soldiers in wars even well outside of their own direct duty, and moral compromises of all sorts have been made for the sake of diplomacy.
  • LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    > To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined. That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativity. Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn’t be bad but being a slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural background that is different then and now. It’s not about people disagreeing on what constitutes bad actions or conditions per se. Everyone understands that people disagree on stuff. It doesn’t make one a moral relativist in any useful notion of that word.
• coldtea 3y ago
  "Chomsky offers facile counter-argument to a much more nuanced take by Foucault, who he'd never be able to really grasp because of his continental mindset"
• mushufasa 3y ago
  I think what Chomsky is saying here "rhymes" with his theory of Universal Grammar (UG). The UG belief is that there are a finite set of "primitives" of language, and all human languages have grammar syntax that are the permutations of those primitives. This is actually pretty clearly the case for programming languages -- primitives like addition/subtraction, methods, objects, etc. -- are chosen by language developers in different doses, and we group languages together based on these grammatical syntax choices (e.g. functional family of languages, declarative/imperative languages). It sounds like Chomsky is claiming morals work the same way; there are a finite set of things that humans find reprehensible or good. Per that, certain cultures at certain times may have different permutations of what they group into the 'reprehensible bucket,' but the set of choices is constrained.
  • voxl 3y ago
    Even if you admit the hypothesis, that there is a finite set of _expressible_ moral statements. That does not impose a universality to a particular selection. Just like there is not one-true-programming language, regardless of there being a finite number of them, there is not one-true-moral truth. You could say "well just combine _all_ the programming languages!" and you will have almost everyone hating it (except perhaps you yourself), just like with moral codes.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Eh, this sounds like they are trying to say that the halting problem is reducible. Simple finite components can generate infinite, non-halting answers.
• HerculePoirot 3y ago
  The main question of the second essay is the ethnocentrism often criticized in my anthropological perspective. Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" willingly imagine that they owe nothing to the West since they vehemently attack it. In reality, their perspective is the most Western that has ever existed, more typically Western than that of their opponents. The revolt against ethnocentrism is an invention of the West, nonexistent elsewhere. Its first great literary success is the famous essay by Montaigne on "The Cannibals," which is already over four hundred years old. The author's anti-Western rhetoric, not always in good faith, is the starting point of a long war against only one ethnocentrism, of course, that of the West itself. This endeavor produces its most beautiful masterpieces in the 18th century and resurfaces, more virulent than ever, after the Second World War. What characterizes the most recent phase is the abandonment of the elegance and humor of the great ancestors, in favor of very 20th-century neologisms, such as the word "ethnocentrism" itself. The rococo trinkets of the Enlightenment era are covered with a slightly thick veneer. Where Montesquieu said, "How can one be Persian?" our contemporaries roar "against Western ethnocentrism." The essence of the debate has hardly changed. "This debate is, moreover, legitimate. Western culture is ethnocentric too, it is obvious, as ethnocentric as all the others and in a more brutally effective way, of course, because of its power. It is not a matter of denying this, but why not also recognize an irrefutable historical evidence at the same time? Unlike all other cultures, which have always been straightforwardly and unapologetically ethnocentric, we Westerners are always simultaneously ourselves and our own enemy. We are the supreme Majesty and the opposition to His Majesty. We condemn what we are, or believe to be, with often ineffective fervor, but at least we try. What is happening today is another example of the passion for self-criticism, which only exists among beings touched by Judeo-Christian civilization." Excerpt from "The One by Whom Scandal Comes" by René Girard
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  • olddustytrail 3y ago
    That doesn't sound like Irish culture at all. Or Hebridean. Or Icelandic. By Western, does he perhaps mean "almost Western but then a little bit East, and not all the cultures obviously" or something?
• recursivedoubts 3y ago
  "There are no valid absolute moral positions" is itself an absolute moral position. We don't need to appeal to language or darwinian survival characteristics or whatever to refute it, a reasonably educated 12 year old can understand why it can't be true. Say what one will about "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", at least it is internally consistent.
• some_random 3y ago
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• effed3 3y ago
  Agree. probably morality is deep rooted by evolution, is basic for -survival-, even today, is a necessary tool to build social structures where we can live better. skepticism is shallow, can express only in a more limited contingency, and in small doses serve to build deeper knoveledge, and maybe a deeper morality. Different cultures appear to differ at surface levels, having different habits forged by different local environments, but being stables (or slow changing/adapting) this set of ideas/knoweledges reveal a wide similarity at deep level: this deep level is not relative, is just on top of levels like dna, cells, anatomy, is the ability to develop knowlewdge, can be the language, the walking, the relation is a group.. relativism is shallow in the big perspective of evolution, a deep relativist probably is an extinct one. But today extintion come from the opposite direction, not nature but ourselves.. but this is another story.
• fmajid 3y ago
  Reminiscent of the famous (if apocryphal) story of Ludwig Wittgenstein challenging Karl Popper to mention a moral rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker
• aa1234556 3y ago
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• lsy 3y ago
  It's weird to hear Foucault described as "amoral" when he himself claimed to be a moralist [1]. What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a potentially infinite range. But to assert that the morals don't come from God is not to say that morals are not valuable or worth having. As Foucault puts it, "What is good, is something that comes through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work." 1. http://www.critical-theory.com/read-me-foucault-interview-in-a-sense-i-am-a-moralist/ http://www.critical-theory.com/read-me-foucault-interview-in...
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  • thsksbd 3y ago
    Well, after raping countless boys in N. Africa and helping introduce HIV in the continent, I'd say he's IMmoral. EDIT Add citation: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...
    • rovolo 3y ago
      Foucault was working in Tunisia from 1966-1968. HIV is thought to have spread to NYC in '71, and SF in '75 which is where Foucault probably was infected. AIDS was first clinically described in '81, and Foucault died in 1984 from AIDS.
  • jancsika 3y ago
    > What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a potentially infinite range. I didn't get the sense he's saying morals are handed down by nature, rather that the potential range is not infinite. E.g., consider that research where the primate gets angry and starts rejecting its boring food pellets-- and in fact throwing them at its handler (!)-- because the other primate is consistently receiving all the delicious grapes. We humans surely share and exhibit some similar social behavior. That truth doesn't determine exactly how a culture will conceptualize and enforce a sense of morality. But it does mean some theoretical moral systems just won't work in practice. E.g., history hasn't left us with examples of well-fed kings with no king's guards during famines. So if you're a radical whose theories rely on humans asblank slates on which infinite moral systems may be applied (after the revolution, probably), you're going to have a bad time in the real world. Digression: I have no idea how this truism fits in with Chomsky's political ideas about anarcho-syndicalism.
• 31337Logic 3y ago
  I admire Chomsky but I'm afraid this particular argument isn't very convincing. He merely asserts his position but does nothing (substantial) to defend his position. In what way is moral relativism a logical contradiction? "...even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.” That's not true at all. I don't presuppose universal moral values. And if I do, they can still be compatible with a relativistic description. (e.g. I can say they're relative to my current understanding, or relative to our collective shared understanding). And as a linguist, he himself should know best that language usage here matters. What do we mean by "discovered" or "universal moral values" anyway. Clear all that up first before trying to eliminate moral relativism with a broad brush.
  • speak_plainly 3y ago
    It's a logical contradiction in a simple way: If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a universal position. Further, you end up in a position of equivalence of all claims and generate major contradictions. I will go out on a limb on the universal moral values claim and I think again it's pretty simple: The existence of even the most basic objective truth, such as 1+1=2 would imply by its existence a frame of reference by which all claims can be evaluated against. This constrains the scope of relative claims, as you pointed out, but also implies an actual truth or set of standards with which you can evaluate anything. It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is possible that it could be discovered.
    • Barrin92 3y ago
      >If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim no it wouldn't because meta-ethical statements express objectives claims about moral values, they are not themselves normative or moral claims. It is equivalent to pointing out that everyone is a relativist in regards to their favorite flavor of ice cream. That statement is itself verifiably true or false.
• taylorbuley 3y ago
  LLM language learning has showed that many of the "strict rules" of modern linguistics are both contrived and unnecessary.
• TheGigaChad 3y ago
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• amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I’m not educated in philosophy, except my interest in natural philosophy, so I may be completely confused here. My sense is that morals are based on values that were instilled in humans in the evolutionary milieu. Half a million years of living as bands of Hunter gatherers. But these values are not completely consistent. For example, we think that stealing from others is wrong, but we also think that not sharing is wrong. These are rules of thumb that evolved in Hunter gatherer societies. So we have inconsistent values, and which values are most preeminent differ depending on what society we are in. On top of this are sex roles and sexual morality that were developed because of the needs of agricultural societies, which were very different than what was needed to survive as Hunter gatherers. So there are a wide variety of moralities that individuals can settle on as they try to make sense of all these contradictory impulses.
  • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    I don't believe morals have much to do with an inheritance of values, mostly because mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they are or what religion they possess. Sure, some things change, but theft, murder, lying, etc... they're pretty universally seen as wrong. And in the instances where they AREN'T seen as inherently wrong, it's usually a class-based stance that still sets them apart. Even if you steal from other groups, don't steal from OUR group. Even if you wiped away all knowledge but the very basics on survival, these would come back in short order as societal hierarchies are redeveloped.
    • JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
      > mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they are or what religion they possess > murder ... pretty universally seen as wrong I have no idea how you could be even passingly familiar with societies like the Mongols or Aztecs and believe this to be true.
      • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
• zilchnotta 3y ago
  "Moral" is a problematic word with religious baggage. If you exclude the words "right", "wrong", and "ethical" from the debate, you make things easier as well. If you simply use the word "strategy" instead, most heated arguments vanish. Yes, there are foundational social strategies that exist in every successful human culture. It's pretty easy to account for why that is the case, and no reason to oppose the idea that such commonalities exist. And looking at the other side of the argument, "strategic relativism" isn't that inflammatory either, of course you'll find unique and situationally inspired strategies too.
  • codexb 3y ago
    This, exactly. I think most people don't even realize why they feel something is right or wrong or what it even means for something to be "moral" At our core, everything we feel is based off self-preservation -- for ourselves, offspring, family, mates. Instinctually, the concept of what is "morally right" comes down to "what strategy will ensure my self-preservation best". Most humans are smart enough to realize that a strategy made up of a lot of win/lose confrontations is unlikely to end well in the long run. Ergo, morality is simply the current best strategy for individual self-preservation given the current state of human knowledge.
  • aionionio 3y ago
    If you refuse to engage with a challenging concept and instead talk about something else entirely, you make things easier. Go figure. Strategy helps us decide which actions will help us reach a goal. It does not tell us what that goal should be. It has practically nothing to do with morality. Human societies adopt different means but they also work towards different ends.
    • codexb 3y ago
      The only goal is self-preservation. It's universal. All individual "moral" decisions are based on this one goal.
      • aionionio 3y ago
• scoofy 3y ago
  I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary. When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem. The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider myself someone with strong ethical viewpoints. However, when the foundation of ethics is based on feel, then there are serious problems, because it stands to reason that folks who have a different feel are entirely justified in their ethical standards (assuming good-faith and good reasoning). At that point, we have the problem that almost every ethical theory (I would argue the concept of ethics), must be universalizable. That is, if something is wrong for me, it should be wrong for someone else in my position (not necessarily everyone). This is completely impossible when ethics are ultimately based on feel. Now, Chompsky here is basically saying, come on, we have innate instinctual ethical views. I generally agree with him, but it ultimately doesn't matter. If ethical theory is simply instinctual, the same meta-ethical problem exists, it's just that the founding axiom that most folks will have is that the "normal" ethical view is the "correct" view... it's a fine axiom, we needn't argue about it, but it's still arbitrary, and effectively amounts to might makes right.
  • eynsham 3y ago
    I think you’re confusing epistemic problems for metaphysical problems. It’s quite plausible that any axioms we come up with are merely ‘based on feel', but there can be a truth ‘based on feel’ ultimately inaccessible to us except ‘[by] feel’. That inaccessibility does not make the underlying truth arbitrary; it merely makes our attempts to work it out arbitrary.
    • afwef 3y ago
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    • Liminal_Ledge 3y ago
      There is no truth coming from "feel". Our brain chemicals are designed in a way that suits evolution best, not to mention that there is absolutely no consistence in these feelings on an individual level (to a smaller degree) and on the the temporal and cultural level. What you are saying assumes that brain chemical reactions have an ability to hint at some sort of truth. The idea itself sounds closer in nature to religious arguments. And I think if this was indicating a truth of some sorts, the differences morals doesnt sell this idea to me personally.
• rufus_foreman 3y ago
  I must not be getting it. "how does a person acquire his or her culture? You don’t get it by taking a pill. You acquire your culture by observing a rather limited number of behaviors and actions, and from those, constructing, somehow, in your mind, the set of attitudes and beliefs that constitutes culture." If you grew up in a different culture, you would have different attitudes and beliefs. That's...moral relativism, as far as I understand it. What am I missing?
  • avereveard 3y ago
    Nothing much. There's lot of extrapolation done and that "rather limited" is doing a lot of work here, as if one is not embedded in his own culture daily.
• notShabu 3y ago
  All societies worship life differently, all death cults are alike. Seeking absolute consistency logically leads to worshipping Shar
• Varqu 3y ago
  I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars [https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fights-in-a-more-humane-way-than-the-usa-in-iraq/ https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight...]
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  • wunderland 3y ago
    Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?
    • tjrgergw 3y ago
      Such as?
      • krapp 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes Or just a top 5: - Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general) - No Gun Ri massacre, Korea - The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam - My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the most violent and horrible ways it seems.) - Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which was waged under false pretenses to redirect American bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from Saudi involvement in the attacks.) - Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal compared to everything else. Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes, but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war crimes and therefore commits the most simply because it can get away with it. If other countries were in America's shoes, they would probably be committing war crimes just as often.
• tjrgergw 3y ago
  Why are we talking about Foucault anyway? Anything written about ethics before 1859 was missing a piece so crucial, it's garbage.
  • dundarious 3y ago
    I don't think Chomsky is so old to have debated that Foucault on Dutch television.
    • tjrgergw 3y ago
      Ok just found on wiki. Paul-Michel Foucault. Never heard of him. Thanks for the correction.
      • dundarious 3y ago
        The video is linked in TFA.
• lucideer 3y ago
  > He draws a natural comparison between this process and that of language acquisition, which also depends on “having a rich built-in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data to whatever it is that you acquire. That’s virtually logic.” And so, “even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.” I'm not saying Chomsky's conclusions are wrong, but I don't see any evidence for them in this article. It seems predicated on the above: drawing a "natural" comparison between acquiring language and acquiring moral values, but there's no basis stated for that comparison. What's "natural" about it? They may be similar processes but how are we assuming that out of hand? Chomsky is a linguist & honestly this seems like a protection of realities within his own primary field of knowledge, onto separate fields, with scant justification of the similarities. Again, the fields - and processes - may well be comparable, but nowhere does this seem to be interrogated.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  tl;dr "the body works a certain way so morality works a certain way" / "morals are advanced now because we're more tolerant" Basically what he's saying is we are biologically wired to have certain morals and they are converging on some kind of ideal position. This seems so obviously false that I must be missing something. Human civilization and society has to do with biology, for sure: we get hungry, scared, envious, hateful, desireful, etc; we need protection so we gather together and help each other; when we gather together a form of competition arises along with a form of collective. Clearly humans do certain things because of how our bodies are wired. But within those structures (the "limits" Chomsky was talking about, I imagine) we have an almost infinite capacity for imagination that dictates our behavior (morality being an idea that inspires behavior). You can come up with almost any kind of reason to justify your own kind of morals and what actions are the result. "I need to eat your child's still-beating heart so the imaginary man in the sky will bring rain for my crops!" There's no biological narrative behind that, this dude just made some shit up and everyone went along with it because collective behavior. Human civilization and society isn't relative, but morality is.
• exogenous 3y ago
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• silent_cal 3y ago
  Alasdair MacIntyre set me straight on this issue in his book "After Virtue".
• 3seashells 3y ago
  Well, as long as Noone ascribes agency to the unwashed masses of eastern Europe, who rejected the antipode to American imperialism. That would be quite unmoral-relativistic. Honestly Chomsky political stances are by now casting in my eyes doubt on his academic works. How can someone who blatantly engages in American - diabolism be expected to produce differentiated results in linguistic research? The Chomsky hierarchy might have layers missed by him , for all I care.
• deleted 3y ago
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