Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

RELATIVISM AND SUPERASSERTIBILITY 57
5. In concluding the paper, I’ll briefly discuss the question as to whether the relativist
proposal constituted by features (a) to (d) really builds up a relativist position in ethics that
deserves its name. For, prima facie, it may be objected that, after all, the proposed shape of
epistemic relativism is merely that: epistemic relativism – and as such an innocent and far too
weak position to be properly called relativist. Almost nobody thoroughly concerned with such
meta-ethical issues would deny that there might be ethical propositions, maybe e.g. those
presented by moral dilemmas, that are stably undecidable through and through for anybody
deliberating on it. However, this objection would be serious if, and only if, epistemic
relativism would be combined, or combinable, with (the possibility of) rampant realism, i.e.
the thesis that for any P there is a matter of fact about whether or not P, a fact that is
represented by a true belief, though possibly a fact that we might be unable to discover. For
epistemic relativism conjoint with (the possibility of) rampant realism indeed would be an
innocent shape of ethical relativism. Yet, since our epistemic conception of ethical truth
conjoint with logical revision entails a kind of anti-realism, a proponent of the shape of
ethical relativism proposed here – let’s call it Anti-realist Epistemic Relativism – is in a
position to deny rampant realism and thus to rebut the objection. But, again, is it really what
we were seeking: ethical relativism? How could one tell? After all, when does a position
deserve to be called relativism? Beyond our minimal constraint – which demands that the
account must not entail that any ethical question has just one correct answer, by which
epistemic relativism conjoint with rampant realism is ruled out as a kind of relativism – there
seems to be no general, unprejudiced criterion for relativism. Certainly, if one simply defines
genuine or true relativism as relativism about truth – “One is only a relativist if one takes the
accuracy of some assertions or beliefs to vary with the context from which they are assessed
(the ‘context of assessment’)” (MacFarlane 2011: 443-444) – or, what amounts to the same
thing, as the possibility of faultless disagreement, then our proposal is not genuine or true
relativism. But once we abstain from that preconception the proposal made in this paper may
be an interesting approach to ethical relativism. For the question as to whether it really is
relativism doesn’t make sense. The discussion, I think, has shown that this is merely a
terminological issue.
Be that as it may, in this paper, I tried to show that for the ethical domain Anti-realist
Epistemic Relativism is at least a plausible position and, after all, the best we can get as an
alternative to the other forms of relativism, notably (semantic) truth-relativism. Whether it is
good enough to meet one’s relativistic demands and suffices to embrace one’s relativistic
intuitions – that’s a question anybody has to answer for herself. Anyway, Anti-realist
Epistemic Relativism seems to be a position attractive for those with relativistic inclinations
who are nevertheless sceptical as regards the prospects of truth-relativism and contextualism,
let alone expressivism and related positions that deny the truth-evaluability of ethical
judgements.
Manfred Harth
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Manfred.Harth@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
References
Binderup, Lars 2008: ‘Brogaard’s moral contextualism’, The Philosophical Quarterly 58, 40–
415.
Boghossian, Paul 2006: ‘What is relativism?’ in P. Greenough and M. Lynch (eds.) 2006, 13–
37.
Capps, Lynch and Massey 2009: ‘A coherent moral relativism’, Synthese 166, 413–430.