Comments on “Contextualismo e relativismo na ética”: relativism in ethics

Abstract

It is nearly a commonplace that the truth of moral assessments is relative. Only nearly so, because there is the respectable view that moral assessments do not belong to the kinds of speech acts that can be evaluated for truth or falsity. But there have been attempts – notably by Simon Blackburn and his followers – to make even that view compatible with the commonplace. What makes the statement a commonplace is, of course, a hidden quantification: The truth of moral assessments is relative in some sense. As soon as we start spelling out possible senses of “relative”, we obtain a wide range of claims. Some of them are obviously true. For a start, whether “Polygamy is wrong” is true or false, depends on what we mean by “polygamy”. Further, once meanings are fixed, it also depends on what the consequences of polygamy are (at least for consequentialists in the widest possible sense). There certainly are worlds in which polygamy only spells bliss and there are worlds in which polygamy is desastrous in every single case. So, whether polygamy is actually wrong depends on how things are. These are commonly understood dependencies.