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RELATIVISM AND SUPERASSERTIBILITY 51
available to T at t, i.e. a set of non-moral beliefs that would be, in the world as it actually is,
generated in T at t by investigating in sufficiently favourable epistemic circumstances. The
second problem, however, is more intricate. Yet here is what I think should suffice as a
solution for the ethical domain. First, in definition (S), i.e. in the second half of the definiens,
it is quantified over all enlargements and other forms of improvement of some state of
information. So something has to be said about the range of this universal states-ofinformation
quantifier. The following seems to be a plausible restriction: any enlarged or
otherwise improved state of information, as any state of information mentioned or quantified
over in the definition, is conceived of such that it is accessible to somebody at some time in
the world as it actually is. That is to say, enlargements and other forms of improvement are
conceived of as, in principle, achievable in this world by human beings. Moreover, we may
think of the process of enlargement or improvement as an endless tree the root of which is the
state of information available to somebody at some time and the knots are states of
information such that any state on the tree is better than its predecessors. Since in what
follows, I’ll consider enlargement to be a special case of improvement, I’ll simply talk of
improved or better states of information. So, the crucial question is, when is a state of
information better than another? It is natural to think of improving of one’s state of
information in terms of increasing one’s knowledge or successively approaching the truth.
However, as regards the moral part of information at least, i.e. the relevant set of moral
beliefs, we cannot conceive of improvement as a process that, inter alia, enhances the moral
knowledge or approaches the ethical truth, since then our characterization or grasp of the
nature of ethical truth in terms of superassertibility would be defective, viz. circular: in order
to grasp the nature of ethical truth in terms of superassertibility we already need to have a
grasp of what constitutes the truth of a moral belief, i.e. a grasp of the nature of ethical truth.
Moreover, employing the idea of approaching the truth runs counter to the idea of relativism.
So in defining the concept of improvement of moral “information” we must avoid notions
such as of knowledge or truth. A straightforward definition then might be given in terms of
increasing coherence (cf. Lynch 2009: 172): improving moral information, i.e. a set of moral
beliefs, is increasing its coherence. 4 As regards the non-moral, empirical part of information,
however, we can make use of the concept of knowledge or truth, i.e. empirical truth, provided
that empirical truth isn’t identified with superassertibility. That is to say, the process of
improvement of a state of information is the process of improving the morally relevant nonmoral,
empirical knowledge, i.e. acquiring true empirical information relevant for one’s
moral judgements and abandoning false empirical beliefs, while increasing the coherence of
the overall state of information. Superassertibility thus conceived comes close to Lynch’s
concept of concordance (Lynch 2009: 176); in fact, concordance is a special case of
superassertibility, which is neutral with respect to the question as to what constitutes ethical
warrant or what type of epistemology in ethics should be adopted – coherentism or
fundamentalism. If one takes, as I do, coherentism to be the preferable epistemology for
ethics, ethical superassertibility as defined above is concordance.
3. So ethical truth may plausibly be conceived of as superassertibility thus defined. But how
does relativism come into this epistemic picture of ethical truth? The straightforward answer,
which also is the answer of the two main proponents of an epistemic conception of truth in
ethics, Lynch (2009) and Wright (2006), runs as follows. To conceive of ethical truth as
superassertibility is a form of ethical relativism since the following is a possibility: a
proposition P is stably assertible for thinker A, i.e. warrantable in A’s currently accessible
state of information and remaining so no matter what improvements are made to it, and not-
4
For the problem how to define coherence see Lynch 2009 (164-168) and his list of “coherence-making
features” (167), which are: mutual explanatory support, predictive power, simplicity, completeness and
consistency. So a framework grows in coherence iff, on balance, it shows more of these features or some
of them to a greater degree (ibid.: 171).