Ethical relativism has been repeatedly advocated in philosophy, for example, by the Greek sophists or by Michel de Montaigne in his essay. To learn more about Michel de Montaigne, let's talk with Georges Van Den Abbeele, Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California Irvine. Michel de Montaigne was a French philosopher who lived in the latter half of the 16th century, best known for his book called Essays, a term he invented to describe a free form of prose composition that meditates on a given subject matter while assuring classic rhetorical formula. Indeed the organization of any of his so-called essays is idiosyncratic enough that the larger work has been studied in recent years, more as an example of incipient autobiography or self-portraiture than as a rigorous work of philosophy. Montaigne himself invites his approach when he declared that he himself is the "matter of his book". Still, his various skepticism and relativism powerfully influenced his contemporaries until Rene Descart in the early 17th century made an explicit effort to refute Montaignan skepticism and establishing his place in unshakable and irrefutable foundation for rational knowledge starting from the certitude of one's own existence incapsulated in his sentence, "I think, therefore, I am." One could cite many reasons from Montaigne's spousal of relativism, but the most compelling seems to be his experience as a jurist at the cour d'assises, more or less equivalent to what we would today call an appellate court that reviews on appeal cases from lower courts. The pro versus contra form of these arguments seems to have encouraged Montaigne to speak from either side of a debate. But it's later evidenced in his essays less as a way to decide which of the two is correct and is a mutual indictment of both. Retiring from the bench at the age of 42, Montaigne retired to a chateau and wrote the three volumes of essays over the next 20 years. In many of these essays, he delights and multiply and examples of differing perspectives occasioned by changes in space, time or circumstance. We decide our religion, for instance, depending as he says, "on which side of the river we are born rather than on some higher principle". Montaigne delights in long lists of the different even contradictory views espoused in concepts of God or in their various medical treatments of disease. Likewise, Montaigne advances the concept of cultural relativism through his appreciation of how the indigenous cultures Europeans encountered in their discovery of the New World supported alternative viewpoints to canonical reasoning or assume common sense. Most ambitiously, Montaigne extends relativism beyond the differences between perceiving individuals, "What you see as red, I might perceive as blue, into the differences of perception within the same individual, I may not be the same today as I was yesterday. For Montaigne, relativism drives his skepticism. While thoroughly familiar with the work of Sextus Empiricus, whose outlines of Pyrrhonism, he clearly admires and cites throughout the essays the lack of any clear criterion to adjudicate between competing perspectival claims is the core of Montaignan skepticism as embodied by his self-assigned emblem of a pair of scales over the words, "What do I know?" It is important that Montaignan skepticism takes the form of a relentless questioning rather than a conclusion in favor of non-knowledge or even simply the suspension of judgment urged by the pureness upon the reduction of any inquiry to two equally valid or invalid conclusions. In the Apology for Raimond Sebond, by far the longest and most ambitious of the essays, Montaigne takes to task the Spanish theologians claim to base the knowledge of God upon rational principles by demonstrating the unverifiability, not only of propositions about God but of all propositions in general. That knowledge of God can be had only on the basis of faith. The unexpected result of this argument, however, is the intellectually portentous and practical exclusion of theology from philosophy. If theology is essentially based in questions of faith, then philosophy has nothing to say about it. On the other hand, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge mean we can only guide our thinking based upon the record of our own necessarily limited perception of things, whose validity cannot be extended beyond that record. Trying to think in this way, essai de francais is the origin of the essays as a project to think based on personal perception. But while this course of thought can be seen on the one hand to collapse into an unproductive solipsism, on the other hand, the rigorous recording and reflection on the world as we actually perceive it is also the basis of empiricism, and the modern scientific method has subsequently articulated and developed by Francis Bacon and others. Ethical relativism is also key theme in cultural relativism. According to it, cultures determine the categories, the beliefs, and values of the individuals who belonged to them, and they do it differently from one another. This makes cultures incommensurable, that is, non-comparable, with one another. Incommensurability, however, engenders the practice of double standard. It is legitimate to evaluate a practice or behavior from an ethical point of view if and only it is produced within one socio-cultural system but not if it is produced in a different one. This practice undermine the attempt to draw a declaration of human rights, which aim to be universal. Yet also from a political point of view, cultural relativism with the attendant practice of the double standard is not a good response. For if our ethical categories are inherently local, just as the stronger cannot motivate their oppression on the weaker on the basis of an alleged ethical superiority as it happened in the colonial era, so the weaker cannot object to the stronger by utilizing values that are local to that culture. In the rest of the module, we will concentrate on ethical relativism as has been discussed within analytic philosophy in the last decades. Let's continue our discussion of moral relativism and explore its limits. According to Gilbert Harman, an Emeritus Professor at Princeton University, moral relativism is a thesis about the truth conditions of ethical judgments. That is, the conditions under which an ethical judgment would be true. According to Harman, the ethical relativists must also maintain that there are many different moral frameworks, none of which is more correct than any other one. This characterization of relativism, however, does not respect the intuition that there is a disagreement about the moral matter at issue between opposite parties to a moral debate. At most, their disagreement would be about which ethical standards to accept. Kolbel's moral relativism is an application to the moral domain of these relativism about truth. So, the very truth of stealing is wrong and not its stress conditions is relative to a given moral framework. As we saw in Module Two, Kolbel's models saves faultlessness but has problems explaining disagreement and retraction. Moral relativism as a form of an alethic relativism can also be framed according to Macfarlane's proposal. But that too has problems as we saw in Module Two. We now look at the meta philosophical issue of whether relativism can be consistently formulated. If we do not relativize claims to a parameter, if one subject holds that p while the other holds that not p and yet none of them is in error, then p and not p will be true together. This violates the principle of non-contradiction which denies that both p and not p can be true together. If we introduce a parameter, we save the principle of non-contradiction because if different subjects utter or judge them true, then the statements in my opinion p and in my opinion not p are not contradictory and can therefore be true together. This strategy I have are as serious difficulties preserving disagreement. Variance of perspectivalism, like Kolbel's and Macfarlane's, have also problems for serving disagreement and faultlessness, intuitions and also the possibility of retraction. Relativism of distance as proposed by Carol Rovane, for instance, holds that certain bodies of truths cannot be embraced together because concepts, theories, and values are not universally shared or even because we inhabit different ethical words. This kind of relativism, however, while maybe applicable to different scientific theories, does not seem right to understand disputes about taste. Many disputes about morals and epistemic facts either where parties seem to understand each other perfectly well. While philosophers will keep trying to find a stable formulation, the long history of relativism of the attempts to formulate it and to refute it does not motivate optimism. The time has probably come to do without it and to provide alternative theoretical accounts which could make sense of anti-absolutist demands while avoiding the risks and pitfalls of relativism itself.
