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Relativism and Superassertibility
Manfred Harth
In this paper, I shall explore the prospects of a shape of relativism in ethics that is supposed
to be an alternative to the relativist account of truth that recently emerged in semantics,
which relativizes the truth predicate by adding an extra parameter for a perspective, a
context of assessment or the like. This alternative is based on an epistemic account of ethical
truth as superassertibility; and the straightforward road to relativism then is to hold that two
contradictory propositions may be both stably assertible relative to divergent starting points
of information. Yet this sort of relativism requires a relativization of the truth predicate –
which was to be avoided from the outset. I’ll discuss the following response to this problem:
limiting relativism to epistemic relativism conjoint with an account of ethical truth as
monadic superassertibility – thereby denying the possibility that two contradictory
propositions may be both stably assertible – and a restriction to intuitionistic logic. I’ll
conclude that this account, which I call Anti-realist Epistemic Relativism, yields a promising
approach to ethical relativism that presents an alternative to semantic truth-relativism.
1. The Role(s) of Faultless Disagreement
1. The idea that in some area of thought and language there may be genuine disagreement in
which nobody can be accused of having failed or of having done something wrong or of being
mistaken etc. – for which the term “faultless disagreement” has established in the literature –
plays a crucial role in the philosophical debate about relativism. Yet there are at least two
different roles to play for faultless disagreement depending on the region of discourse one is
concerned with. For discourse about matters of taste, humour and the like it has a
motivational role. That is, the possibility of disagreement in which nobody needs to be wrong
is a widespread intuition, or arguably the pre-theoretic view, about matters of taste or
humour that should be explained by a semantic theory. For other regions, notably for ethical
discourse, with which I’m concerned here, the possibility of faultless disagreement plays a
different role: it doesn’t seem to be the common pre-theoretic view or a widespread intuition
that has to be explained by semanticists – quite the contrary, many ordinary people seem to
be inclined to think that in a disagreement about morals one party has to be wrong, although
it might be hard or in some cases even impossible to find out which one is. Nevertheless,
some people are inclined to think otherwise, and we may call them relativists. So one way to
be an ethical relativist is to claim that for moral matters faultless disagreement is possible –
this is the second role of the possibility of faultless disagreement: it defines a relativist
position. That is, ethical relativists of that shape maintain that there may be ethical questions,
e.g. the question whether or not abortion is always morally wrong, to which more than one
correct answer can be given: Alice might belief that abortion is always wrong and Bob might
belief that it is not, and neither of them needs to be at fault. However, simple considerations
show that faultless disagreement thus conceived is not possible; it gives rise to contradiction,
which is proved by the following Simple Deduction (cf. Wright 2002: 105):
(1) A believes that P and B believes that not-P Disagreement
(2) Neither A nor B has made a mistake Faultlessness
(3) ∀X: If X believes that P, and not-P, X has made a mistake Error Principle