That’s right you did say that. On 30 Dec 09 you said “they got transferred into another folder where I was accumulating largely off-topic things before I transferred them somewhere else, and have since tragically disappeared – I know, because I was trying to recover them all just yesterday. Don’t tell Gavin. He might get upset.” I’d asked you because I’d noticed that the caches of the major search engines no longer held copies, which is impressive given the files had only been removed for about a month.

Now you’ve got them back and you have a problem with Matt commenting on the strangeness of their disappearance? That is a bit rich isn’t it? Let’s take a look at the false impressions you leveled at Matt in your opening and subsequent paragraphs:

“Matt Flannagan, who blogs with his wife Madeleine at MandM, contributes to a New Zealand-based conservative think-tank called Thinking Matters.”

You establish an association between Matt and conservative think-tanks (and me).

“These ‘conservative think-tanks’ crop up from place to place and the term is usually a euphemism for frustrated and atavistic reactionists who want to take away rights from women, homosexuals, and other minorities and restore power to the patriarchy.”

You then establish an association between conservative think tanks and “frustrated and atavistic reactionists who want to take away rights from women, homosexuals, and other minorities and restore power to the patriarchy.”

“Some of the members of Thinking Matters don’t appear to be noticeably different in this regard.”

Ooh, I wonder who you could possibly be referring to. Just in case it is not clear the next line reads:

“In a talk available on YouTube, Matt Flannagan attempts to argue against that phantom nemesis of all conservative think-tanks, what they term ’moral relativism’.”

Matt Flannagan strongly desires to take rights away from women, homosexuals, other minorities because he is patriarchal and this is his real reason for opposing moral relativism.

Your next post adds to this:

“Back to Matt Flannagan’s tirade against moral relativism”

You establish an association between Matt and opposition to moral relativism.

“ – that producer of such moral outrages as equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution, and all those other things that cause your average member of a conservative think-tank to worry about all night in bed.”

You state that people opposed to moral relativism oppose “equality for women, freedom of homosexuals from legal persecution” etc and you bring up the conservative think tank again.

Again just in case the connection between Matt and these oppressive things is not clear enough, a few lines later you add:

“When Matt fantasizes about some weird behaviour (and his favourite suggestion, for some reason, is a person who rapes, tortures and ‘chops up’ women…), “

You imply that Matt is some frothing at the mouth bigot who lives to seek the oppression of women, gays and minorities, who fantasizes about raping, torturing and killing women and your issue is that he questioned the plausibility of your files vanishing both from your computer and the caches of the major search engines? You seriously begger belief. Matt wrote these posts before you and I had that conversation. Further, you had that conversation with me, not with Matt. Matt and I are different people and you call him patriarchal!.

.-= My last blog-post ..Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic =-.

I disagree, cultural moral relativism is defined as follows: Cultural Ethical Relativism: An action is wrong for a person, if and only if, that person’s society or deems that action wrong.

This definition is a bi-condition. The right side of the bi-condition describes an epistemological scenario, a society believes or deems and action wrong. The left condition describes an ontological situation where the action actually is wrong. What relativism contends are that these two situations stand in a particular relationship: they are logically equivalent.

It does not follow from this, however, that there is no distinction between an action being deemed wrong by a society and an action actually being wrong for members if that society. For two reasons, first not all relationships of logical equivalences are relationships of identity; causal relationships, for example, exist where one event causes another, the two events are co-extensive and once cannot occur without the other yet they are not the same event. Similarly in meta-ethics there can be supervenience relationships where two distinct properties are always instantiated together yet they remain distinct properties. Second, even if the two properties are identical, so that the property of actually being wrong and the property of being believed to be wrong by ones society are the same property, it does not follow that there is no conceptual distinction between the properties. The evening star and the morning star are the same object, yet it does not follow there is no conceptual distinction between them. The former is the star one sees in the evening, the latter the star one sees in the morning. Morning and evening are not the same thing and so one can recognize that these descriptions have different meanings in an important sense while acknowledging that they both refer to the same object. Hence, your suggestion that according to relativism there is no distinction between what a society believes is wrong and what is actually wrong is false and appears to be based on a failure to understand the meta-ethical issues.

Relativism does not deny that there are things that are actually wrong, nor does it deny that one can make true statements about what is actually wrong. What it contends is simply that what is actually wrong is co-extensive with what a society believes is wrong. I am afraid it is your comments that display a fundamental misunderstanding of relativism as well as a failure to understand some basic distinctions in meta-ethics and not mine.

So again I put to you that you have ignored my fundamental challenge. According to relativism, what a society believes is wrong will actually be wrong for members of that society and what a society believes is right will actually be right for members of that society. Hence if relativism is true then it is actually right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the state. Note that what this conclusion states is not the truism that medieval societies believed it was right to do this, rather it is the conclusion that it actually was right for Inquisitors to do this. This is an implication of relativism and I maintain that this implication is false.

If you wish to defend relativism you need to either deny that societies exist that believe/believed religious persecution of this sort is/was permissible or maintain that religious persecution actually is permissible. Neither claim is terribly plausible. Ignoring the dilemma and expressing a misunderstanding of relativism and the conceptual distinctions involved does not address this dilemma. Likewise, neither does making snarky remarks about “conspiracy theories” and people who are “right wing.”
.-= My last blog-post ..Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I =-.

Be good.
.-= My last blog-post ..Conferences: Towards a Unified Science of Religion and The Bible and Critical Theory Seminar – Buy One, Get One Free! =-.

Your replies continue to demonstrate a quite fundamental misunderstanding of what “right” and “wrong” means under moral relativism. Your comments labour under the false assumption that there is some objective “wrongness” about an action – that is, you continue to smuggle in a moral objectivist understanding of morality. Your error results in your false distinction between what actions a society or individual deems to be good or bad and the goodness or badness of those actions. Simply put, there is no such distinction to be made. Your error also results in your false distinction of so-called “ontological” and “epistemological” considerations. Again, simply put, the distinction is false: there are no ontological considerations whatsoever in a subjective morality; morals do not exist as facts in the world. Your talk of alternative moral opinions as “things” “A” and “B” shows that you continue to misunderstand moral relativism on its own terms. One cannot call another person’s morality “true” or “false” in the way that one would call the existence of a thing or event “true” or “false” – it is only “true” or “false” according to some subjective standard. As we are dealing with subjective standards, not objective ones, it is quite logically possible for an action to be (subjectively) deemed both “true” and “false” at the same time. Your attribution of “absurdity” to such a scenario only shows that you are yet to appreciate moral relativism on its own terms (you keep slipping in objectivist assumptions).

As a result, you are asking all the wrong questions. To engage with the position of a rigorous moral relativist understanding of the world, you need to at least appreciate that the worldview has no objective standards. Your continued assumption that moral relativism has objective standards impedes any philosphically rigorous discussion of moral relativism.
.-= My last blog-post ..Conferences: Towards a Unified Science of Religion and The Bible and Critical Theory Seminar – Buy One, Get One Free! =-.

Well that pretty clearly misrepresents the argument I gave. My conclusion was not the trivial claim that some actions are deemed right and wrong by different societies rather my claim was that actions actually are right and wrong for members of those societies.

[1] Action A is right for a person if and only if their society approves of A.

[2] The Inquisitors Society approved of burning heretics at the stake.

Therefore,

[3] It was right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake

The conclusion here is not that some people believed the Inquisition was correct, it is that it was right for the Inquisitor to burn people at the stake.

When you claim that the contention is “false” that wife-beating, racism, religious persecution, etc is permissible, you are using a different meaure of “false” from that in [3]. For in [3], these behaviours are “right” according to the measure of a certain society. But your use of “false” appears to be according to the measure of your own personal morality. In any case, it is “falseness” measured according to the measure of something other than the original society’s. What you cannot validly conclude is “both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions”.

No, I mean true and false in the normal sense. A statement is true if what it affirms is in fact the case. So returning to the case of the Inquisitor who in 1523 burned a heretic to death, were the Inquisitor’s actions right or wrong? I maintain that the answer “it was right” is false, it is not the case that his actions were morally right.

For you have smuggled in a second measure of “true” and “false” morality, yet the validity of your argument depends on their consonance. This is a quite clear fallacy of equivocation which, as a result, makes your argument invalid.

No I meant true in the normal sense of the word above. BTW here you appear to confuse epistemological questions of how one can know and measure what is true with ontological questions of what is true. I was simply making the ontological claim that it is not true. I said nothing about how one can measure it.

Matt’s equivocation can be demonstrated by identifying the two different questions resulting from the double meaning of “right” as either (1) right for their society; or (2) right for me.

No I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it. A simple yes or no answer will do.

If Matt meant, ‘do you believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so within their own system of morality, given that their society approved of this practice?’, then I would answer, yes, of course. Assuming a society in which such a practice is considered “good”, the actions are indeed “right”.

But I did not ask if it was right according to their society’s norms. I asked if they themselves were right to do it.

The defence for such actions is not even difficult to imagine, as they were given a wide defence in various medieval, rennaissance, and reformation texts. If one had the particular mindset of an Inquisitor, one would reason, as many in fact did, that the evil of the risk to the many souls who would be damned to an eternity in the fires of Hell, through listening to the lies of a heretic, outweighed the evil of the death of the single heretic. So, it would be argued, killing the heretic is “good”.

Actually I suspect this is a caricature of what Inquisitors actually argued but that’s another topic.

But if Matt meant, ‘do you (within your system of morality) believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so, given your system of morality objects to such a practice?’, then I would answer, as a quite consistent and expected answer, no, of course not.

But I didn’t ask this, I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it.

If confronted with such a practice today, due to my horror and disgust at killing and torturing people for effects which are in my opinion imaginary, I would even attempt to persuade or even force these other people to act differently. For I have a different notion of “right and wrong” than they do, and I am quite attached to it. Such is moral relativism.

I did not ask you what you would say if it occurred today. I asked if it was right for the Inquisitor to do it.

This does raise another issue. Suppose the person who was doing it today was part of a society that endorsed it? Suppose a citizen of an Islamic state was going to execute a woman for apostasy to Judaism, would it be right for this citizen to kill the woman in question today? Cultural relativism entails that it would be.

Understanding the difference between one person’s notion of “right and wrong” and another person’s notion is central to an understanding of moral relativism itself. I do not think it is a distinction Matt has yet grasped.

Err no. It is quite easy to understand that different people have different notions of right and wrong. What is a mistaken is to slip from this to the claim that right and wrong are relative to people’s notions. This was one of the arguments I criticised in my talk which you conceded was clearly fallacious.

The same failure is evident in Matt’s discussion of wife-beating, and in his rigid and unrealistic conception of the “infallibility” of moral relativism – both reveal his failure to consider that one person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality can contradict another person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality.

Again no. They actually show awareness of a self-evident logical principle. That is if two things, A and B, are logically equivalent then it is impossible for one to be the case and the other not the case. It follows immediately from this that if wrongness is equivalent to being contrary to society’s norms then it is impossible for society’s norms to be wrong.

Simply asserting over and over that I “don’t get it” and citing nice pejorative terms like “rigid” and “unrealistic” does not actually address this argument.

In any case, Matt has failed to identify the “absurdity” that he sought to prove, and which was necessary for his argument to have succeeded. There is no absurdity whatsoever. There is only the predictable coincidence between societal structure and beliefs and society’s morals.

I identified the absurdity in my post. It is absurd to state that it was right for inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake. You have nicely evaded the question by addressing questions that I did not ask.

[1] Action A is right for a person if and only if their society approves of A.

[2] The Inquisitors Society approved of burning heretics at the stake.

Therefore,

[3] It was right for Inquisitors to burn heretics at the stake.

Premise[1] is a definition of relativism, [2] is clearly true (and you granted it) [3] clearly and self-evidentially follows from [2], so given this, I’ll ask you again, was it right for Inquisitors to burn people at the stake?

Pejorative terms, side issues, red herrings, sarcasm, etc do not address this nor does confusing ontology and epistemology or interpreting my comments in ways I did not make them.
.-= My last blog-post ..Contra Mundum: Confessions of an Anti-Choice Fanatic =-.

As in your last post, I don’t think you have offered anything new to your original argument (which misfired).

You spend a good deal of time defending an argument, or rather two closely related arguments (which you term ‘Cultural Ethical Relativism’ and ‘Individual Ethical Relativism’ respectively). But each of these arguments only gets you to the conclusion that certain actions are deemed “right” or “wrong” by certain individuals or societies. This is no different from the claim of moral relativism: certain actions are indeed deemed “right” and “wrong” under the analysis of moral relativism. Your argument – and I congratulate you most sincerely for its overall soundness – gets you nowhere at all.

You seem to appreciate this, as you then add a further premise and a further conclusion, a conclusion which itself is at odds with moral relativism. Your argument is invalid. I am referring to this further argument:

“Now I maintain that the contention that it is permissible for a person to beat their wife, be racist, engage in religious persecution, commit rape and chop people up is false. It is not morally permissible to do these things; hence, as both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions they themselves are false.”

When you claim that the contention is “false” that wife-beating, racism, religious persecution, etc is permissible, you are using a different meaure of “false” from that in [3]. For in [3], these behaviours are “right” according to the measure of a certain society. But your use of “false” appears to be according to the measure of your own personal morality. In any case, it is “falseness” measured according to the measure of something other than the original society’s. What you cannot validly conclude is “both cultural ethical relativism individual and ethical relativism entail false conclusions”.

For you have smuggled in a second measure of “true” and “false” morality, yet the validity of your argument depends on their consonance. This is a quite clear fallacy of equivocation which, as a result, makes your argument invalid.

Your equivocation is only continued when you ask:

“Does [Deane] believe, for example, that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so given that their society approved of this practice?”

Matt’s equivocation can be demonstrated by identifying the two different questions resulting from the double meaning of “right” as either (1) right for their society; or (2) right for me.

If Matt meant, ‘do you believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so within their own system of morality, given that their society approved of this practice?’, then I would answer, yes, of course. Assuming a society in which such a practice is considered “good”, the actions are indeed “right”. The defence for such actions is not even difficult to imagine, as they were given a wide defence in various medieval, rennaissance, and reformation texts. If one had the particular mindset of an Inquisitor, one would reason, as many in fact did, that the evil of the risk to the many souls who would be damned to an eternity in the fires of Hell, through listening to the lies of a heretic, outweighed the evil of the death of the single heretic. So, it would be argued, killing the heretic is “good”.

But if Matt meant, ‘do you (within your system of morality) believe that Inquisitors who burned heretics to death at the stake were right to do so, given your system of morality objects to such a practice?’, then I would answer, as a quite consistent and expected answer, no, of course not. If confronted with such a practice today, due to my horror and disgust at killing and torturing people for effects which are in my opinion imaginary, I would even attempt to persuade or even force these other people to act differently. For I have a different notion of “right and wrong” than they do, and I am quite attached to it. Such is moral relativism.

Understanding the difference between one person’s notion of “right and wrong” and another person’s notion is central to an understanding of moral relativism itself. I do not think it is a distinction Matt has yet grasped. The same failure is evident in Matt’s discussion of wife-beating, and in his rigid and unrealistic conception of the “infallibility” of moral relativism – both reveal his failure to consider that one person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality can contradict another person’s idea of a “mistaken” morality. So I don’t need to repeat myself in so much detail concerning the rest of Matt’s reply. Contrary to his misunderstanding, I repeat that it is only within a particular mindset – one shared to some extent with others in one’s society – that one can call another morality “mistaken”. And one does so, not through “tolerance”, which I have little time for, but through a positive disrespect for other cultures, one usually fueled by horror or disgust rather than any purely rational analysis.

In any case, Matt has failed to identify the “absurdity” that he sought to prove, and which was necessary for his argument to have succeeded. There is no absurdity whatsoever. There is only the predictable coincidence between societal structure and beliefs and society’s morals. Now, there is no decisive proof from ‘what is’ to there meta-ethical theory of moral relativism – but there is also no disproof. And once Matt’s equivocation is exposed, there is also no valid argument against moral relativism whatsoever.
.-= My last blog-post ..The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity =-.

This is an excellent post dealing with issues concerning cultural and individual ethical relativism:…