Wrestling with relativism

Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that
doesn’t mean that everyone is right

Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the
Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make
of the fact that what counts as adultery, for example, differs around the world? In Lust
in Translation (2007), the contemporary writer Pamela Druckerman chronicles how the
rules of infidelity vary ‘from Tokyo to Tennessee’. It can be tempting to conclude that
the correct answer to moral questions is ultimately settled by convention, perhaps like
matters of etiquette such as how to eat your food. For Herodotus, the recognition of
cultural difference led him to declare, echoing the words of the Greek poet Pindar,
that ‘custom is king of all.’

The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that
a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory.
Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some
of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the
ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur
throughout Williams’s work. First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent
feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to
arguments over relativism.

Consider the following memorable scene in Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with
Friends (2017). The central character, Frances, who is sleeping with Bobbi, rejects her
friend Philip’s insistence that ‘in basic vocabulary she is your girlfriend.’ Frances is right
to resist Philip’s attempt to put a familiar label on things: she is trying to live in a way
for which there aren’t words yet. Elsewhere in the book, Frances questions not only
the word ‘couple’ but even the term ‘relationship’ to depict her life with Bobbi. If she
isn’t sure how to describe her complicated situation, it’s in part because it doesn’t
easily fit into the grids of conventional thought. She wants, to use an image from
James Joyce, to ‘fly by’ the nets of language.

The words your society uses, as Frances is highly aware, shape the self you can
become. Language is loaded with ethical expectations. If you agree that you are in a
‘couple’ with someone, for instance, then that commonly (though not always) carries
with it the expectation that you will not be in bed with anyone else. That norm can be
challenged, and has been, by those who are in open relationships. However, if you are
trying to live in a way that is new, and doesn’t fit into accustomed categories, then it’s
likely that you will be misunderstood and deprived of social recognition. Even so, as
the American philosopher Judith Butler has argued in Undoing Gender (2004), there
are situations where it’s better to be unintelligible than to force oneself into the
existing menu of social options.

If everyday language can sometimes feel oppressive, it’s perhaps because it is

inescapably descriptive and evaluative: it tells you not just how things are, but how
they should be. If you are someone’s ‘girlfriend’, for instance, then a vast number of
beliefs kick into action about how you should behave. This is why Frances is so wary
about accepting the label.

Perhaps the clearest example of how language can be at once descriptive and value-
loaded is in the case of what philosophers have come to call thick ethical concepts.
Think of words such as ‘friendly’, ‘mean’, ‘aggressive’, ‘rude’, ‘impatient’, ‘brutal’ and
so on, and notice how these terms evaluate behaviour positively or negatively at the
same time as they describe it. Thick ethical concepts are named by contrast
with thin ethical concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘should’ and ‘ought’. These highly abstract
terms are almost purely evaluative and don’t seem to describe any specific actions.
Rather, as the American philosopher Christine Korsgaard has put it in The Sources of
Normativity (1996), they seem like those gold stars used at school that can be stuck
upon anything.

The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles
over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society. Should sexuality
be conceptualised in terms connected with sexual purity and restraint (‘sanctity’,
‘chastity’ and so on) or in terms of sexual self-expression and experimentation
(‘liberation’, ‘kink’ and so on)? This brings home the fact that ethical words and
concepts are not just abstract ideas: they are the product and expression of different
ways of living. Seen this way, the political intensity surrounding what is sometimes
disparaged as ‘arguments over words’ makes total sense. The culture wars are concept
wars over how best to live.

We all use ethical concepts in the broad sense I have introduced. People who think
that they can live without values are failing to think through what that would really
mean. But if we all, inevitably, evaluate our experience, we don’t all do so in the same
way. In a recent podcast on the lessons from the Roman Empire, the historian Tom
Holland stressed the dramatic contrast between the sexual mores of ancient Rome and
those of the modern West. This is just one, perhaps already familiar, example of the
commonplace fact that ethical norms vary across, as well as within, cultures.
Moreover, even ethical concepts that are superficially shared can be understood in
deeply different ways. Consider how respect is shown in a nod of the head: it can
symbolise respect as a form of mutual recognition, or respect as deference to
another’s superior strength.

Call it the anti-Humanist Fork: relativism or religion?

The fact of moral diversity therefore raises the issue of moral relativism. This, too, has
become a part of the culture wars, especially as these debates have played out in the
United States. Many moral traditions are based on the idea that there are universal
values, perhaps rooted in human nature. Perhaps you yourself were raised with the
universalist idea that there is a single true morality that applies to everyone,
everywhere. But if living many different ethical ways of life is natural to human beings,
then this encourages the idea that humans create multiple ethical worlds, and that
ethical truth is relative to the world in question. Moral truth, like the truth about
etiquette, simply varies from place to place. So far, so bad, for universalism.
When battles over moral relativism have featured in the culture wars, they tend to be
framed in the following way. One side of the argument celebrates cultural diversity
and unites this with an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of values. This is
the outlook popularly associated with postmodernism, identity politics, and the
rejection of universalist tradition. However, this seemingly ‘relativistic’ destination is
precisely what alarms the moral conservative. Hence the other side of the culture
wars: if there is no common human standard upon which to ground moral
universalism, then something beyond the human is needed. This is the side of the
culture wars associated with the need to return to religion, and a morally reactionary
response to social diversity.

These debates about the sources of morality have become part of mainstream culture.
The old-school secular humanist, faced with the difficulty of finding a universal basis
for a human-centred morality, is presented with a dilemma: either choose a culture-
centred ethics, or return to a God-centred one. Call it the anti-Humanist Fork:
relativism or religion? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the
United Kingdom, recently stated in the New Statesman magazine that ‘The modern
humanist is likely to be a far more passionate defender of cultural variety than their
predecessors.’ What he didn’t dwell upon is the following irony: that proper
recognition of moral diversity has tended to undermine the universalism upon which
humanism is typically founded.

It’s important to note that diversity of belief doesn’t by itself entail relativism. After all,
different cultures have held different beliefs about the shape of the Earth. Does it
follow that there is no non-relative fact of the matter and that all we can say is that the
Earth is truly round relative to one culture, and truly flat relative to another? If your
friend said the Earth was flat, you would perhaps show them the photo known as ‘Blue
Marble’, taken as the Apollo 17 crew made its way to the Moon in 1972. If you are
wealthy and extravagant enough, you might book them on a trip to space. You are
unlikely to ‘go relativist’.

Being a non-relativist about the shape of the Earth, however, doesn’t require you to be
a non-relativist about everything. Moral relativism remains an option. As we have
already seen, if you combine the idea that Human beings construct ethical reality with
the claim that How humans construct ethical reality varies between cultures, then
moral relativism becomes hard to avoid. Indeed, those who are quick to move from
observing the diversity of moral beliefs to embracing moral relativism are perhaps
already inclined to think that morality is a cultural construct whereas the shape of the
Earth is not. Others are drawn to relativism about morality because they think it a
wiser, more tolerant outlook. As someone might say: ‘They have their way, we have
ours, and that’s all there is to be said.’

Bernard Williams (no relation to Rowan) argued incisively against what he called
‘vulgar relativism’ in his first book, Morality (1972). A leading figure in English-language
philosophy, he later popularised the term ‘thick concepts’ that I introduced earlier (he
was the first to use the term in print, in 1985). Williams had a deep sense of the
cultural and historical variety of ethical life. But he also saw that the typical way that
moral relativism was taken to support toleration, notably by some anthropologists at
the time, was fundamentally incoherent.

Perhaps, at least for a violent society, war is the answer

The vulgar relativist, Williams says, thinks that whether something is ‘morally right’
means ‘right for a given society’. As a result, to discuss whether, say, sex with multiple
partners is morally right, you must first ask: right for whom? There is no universal
answer: polyamory will be permitted, indeed celebrated, in some times and places,
and morally denounced in others. This is the insight that is supposed to lead to a
tolerant outlook. Indeed, the vulgar relativist, as described by Williams, holds
that, because morality is tied to a way of life, ‘it is wrong for people in one society to
condemn, interfere with, etc, the values of another society.’

The problem for vulgar relativism, as Williams goes on to show, is with the status of
the principle of toleration. If it’s right to be tolerant, and ‘right’ is relative, then we
must ask: right for whom? After all, if an aggressive warrior society is debating
whether it should interfere with its neighbours, then according to its values the answer
might be a definite ‘Yes, we should interfere.’ Perhaps, at least for a violent society,
war is the answer. The point, as Williams makes clear, is that you can’t coherently say
that All moral truth is relative to a culture and espouse a non-relative moral rule that
all cultures should respect one another. The vulgar relativist is putting forward
toleration as a universal moral principle, but this is flat-out inconsistent with moral
relativism itself.

Vulgar relativism is ‘absurd’, Williams concluded, but this can give a misleading
impression: he took seriously many of the ideas that underpin moral relativism. In fact,
he agrees with the moral relativist that ethical reality is a human construction, and, like
the relativist, he emphasises the variety of moral outlooks. Some moral and religious
traditions hold that moral reality is as objective and universal as facts about the shape
of the Earth. Williams certainly didn’t think this and went so far as to call his own
moral position ‘nonobjectivist’.

Perhaps Williams’s respect for the moral relativist’s motivations emerges most
strikingly in the following passage from his middle-period book Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (1985):

If you are conscious of nonobjectivity, should that not properly affect the way in which
you see the application or extent of your ethical outlook? … If we become conscious of
ethical variation and of the kinds of explanation it may receive, it is incredible that this
consciousness should just leave everything where it was and not affect our ethical
thought itself. We can go on, no doubt, simply saying that we are right and everyone
else is wrong (that is to say, on the nonobjectivist view, affirming our values and
rejecting theirs), but if we have arrived at this stage of reflection, it seems a
remarkably inadequate response.

Williams argued for appropriate recognition of the cultural and historical location of
one’s ethics and combined this with a shrewd sense of when moral assessment has a
point and when it doesn’t. This took him close to the spirit of relativism – in fact, he
even espoused what he called a ‘relativism of distance’.

The danger with an acute feel for history is that you can end up trapped in a relativist
bubble

The belief at the heart of Williams’s relativism of distance is that it doesn’t makes
sense to assert the truth of one’s moral outlook across the entire span of human
history. He would have supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for
example, but at the same time questioned the value and wisdom of mentally applying
it to warrior cultures thousands of years in the past. There was no need, Williams
urged, for a ‘relativistic vow of silence about the past’ but on the other hand,
‘comments about it are not obligatory, either.’

Writing in The New York Review in 1998, Williams gave memorable expression to these
ideas and sentiments:

Must I think of myself as visiting in judgment all the reaches of history? Of course, one
can imagine oneself as Kant at the Court of King Arthur, disapproving of its injustices,
but exactly what grip does this get on one’s ethical thought?

Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century moral philosopher, believed that everyone knew the
same universal moral law, so that it was always intelligible to appeal to its presence.
Williams, for the most part, thinks that what makes ethical sense is more culturally
limited. When we look inside, what we find is not the moral law, but our historically
formed identity.

The danger with an acute feel for history is that you can end up trapped in a relativist
bubble. But if Williams shared the relativist’s sense of the culturally rooted nature of
ethical life, he also wanted to incorporate into his moral philosophy the kind of critical
tools that mean you don’t have to accept the worst things associated with moral
relativism: either that ‘anything goes’, or that societies can’t assess and evaluate each
other, or that you must accept the status quo in your own society.

Williams’s great late work Truth and Truthfulness (2002) celebrated the virtues
associated with the pursuit of truth. There is no objective and universal morality,
according to Williams, but moral philosophy could still draw on the fact that some
truths, like the shape of the planet, are objective and universal. If a moral outlook
depends on blatant falsehoods, then it can be undermined by revealing the truth. To
reject the claims of climate-change denial, for instance, you don’t have to debate
whether there is an objective truth about morality. It’s enough to know that there is an
objective truth about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what has
happened to global annual temperature since the Industrial Revolution, and so on.

Williams had little time for the idea, associated with postmodernism, that all of reality
is a cultural construction. Humans have dramatically reshaped the Earth but they
didn’t create the planet they live on. Ethical reality is constructed via interaction with
‘an already existing physical world’ that is not a cultural product. He tussled on
numerous occasions with the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who, in the latter
decades of the 20th century, became a kind of cultural figurehead for postmodernism
in the academy. In fact, when I was a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, I spoke to Rorty about the contrast between his ideas and those of
Williams. ‘Yes,’ Rorty said, Williams’s view chimed more with common sense but, as
Rorty unforgettably concluded, ‘I want to change common sense!’

Like Rorty, however, Williams did emphasise the culturally constructed nature of
ethical life. Influenced by the 19th-century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, Williams
became particularly interested in conceptual genealogy as a method in philosophy.
What this means, in a nutshell, is that you can trace the origin and development of a
concept or idea – liberty, for instance – to see whether the resulting narrative
encourages use of the concept in question or whether it debunks it.

A concept’s history helps you understand whether you want to be part of

the conceptual tribe that uses it

Think about this in relation to culture wars debates over love and sexuality. Not
everyone will want to avoid, like Rooney’s character Frances, traditional concepts
connected to romance. But conceptual genealogy invites you to reflect on the history
of a word or concept such as ‘girlfriend’ and decide whether you want to continue to
employ it. You might come to decide that, as Oscar Wilde in 1895 said about
blasphemy, it ‘is not a word of mine.’

Many ideas associated with love, in particular marriage, have historically had very little
to do with romance. As Stephanie Coontz’s work Marriage: A History (2005) illustrates,
‘most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and
political institution’ to be based on love. That’s a much more recent idea.
Understanding the history of a concept helps you understand whether you want to be
part of the way of life – call it the conceptual tribe – that uses it. Sometimes, joining an
institution involves modifying its concepts for the better, as in the case of gay and
lesbian marriage.

Truthfulness can be bracing, especially when focused on abuse of power. Williams

drew on the tradition of philosophy known as critical theory, which stresses the
examination and criticism of social structures. He writes:

[I]f one comes to know that the sole reason one accepts some moral claim is that
somebody’s power has brought it about that one accepts it [and it is] in their interest
that one should accept it [then] one will have no reason to go on accepting it.

No doubt one of Williams’s most admirable and enduring qualities was his desire to
make philosophical room for inconvenient truths and the potentially startling clarity of
speaking truth to power.

Williams argued that all human societies have a need for basic notions of accuracy and
sincerity: the traits that combine to form the virtue of truthfulness. This introduced an
element of universalism into his worldview. However, while the need for truthfulness
is universal, Williams again made clear that different cultures have and will build
differently on the need. He ends Truth and Truthfulness with the hope that the more
‘courageous, intransigent, and socially effective forms’ of the virtues associated with
truth will live on.

It’s fair to say, strange as it sounds, that Williams’s defence of truth and truthfulness
was an unfashionable undertaking in the humanities at the time. He was prescient,
writing at the end of his life and at the turn of the millennium, about the various forms
of truth denial that would emerge (or re-emerge) in the 21st century. Think of how the
age of the internet, of which he saw only the beginning, would make Holocaust denial
common again. Indeed, in a passage now widely shared online, he wrote about how
the internet ‘makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find
each other and talk only among themselves.’

Moral criticism must often take the form of making the plain truth widely known. But
what if some arguments do ultimately come down to disagreements over values?
Perhaps disputes over climate change, for example, go much deeper than familiarity
with the relevant science can remedy. Williams says little about rational argument over
values themselves, perhaps limited by his worldview according to which principles ‘do
not admit of any ultimate justification’ (as Korsgaard puts it). Williams also expressed a
worldly scepticism about what moral arguments can be expected to achieve. ‘What
will the professor’s justification do,’ he wrote, ‘when they break down the door, smash
his spectacles, take him away?’

He never thought moral philosophy could make ethical life any easier than it is

Williams’s work manifested the tension that one sees in the larger culture wars over
values: between the desire to acknowledge what seem like universal and indisputable
evils, and the desire to leave behind the legacy of universalism. He did, for instance in
a book chapter titled ‘Human Rights and Relativism’, suggest that there are some very
basic moral wrongs that almost all human beings recognise, even if elsewhere in his
work he adamantly rejected the idea of a universal Moral Law.

Compare his outlook with that of the moral philosopher Derek Parfit, his longtime
Oxford colleague. Parfit really did believe that ethical facts are as objective and
universal as facts about the shape of the Earth, and searched for moral arguments that
would convince everyone. In Shame and Necessity (1993), Williams argued, in contrast,
that it makes more sense to pursue ‘social and political honesty’ than a ‘rationalistic
metaphysics of morality’. If Williams had little time for Rorty’s postmodernism writ
large, he also did not share Parfit’s hope (now associated with the Effective Altruism
movement) that the study of ethics could become transformed into a science of
morality, which would then be applied to solve the world’s problems.

Truthfulness, conceptual genealogy, comparative ethical study: these ingredients give

Williams’s philosophy of value its critical bite. There are many resources left for ethical
and political criticism after moral philosophy fully emerges from what Williams called
‘the shadow of universalism’ – or so he endeavoured to show. His aim was to hold on
to the vital distinction between what is and what ought to be while maintaining that
norms about what ought to be are themselves ultimately cultural creations. His
position, in this respect, is akin to the view that human beings create the norms about
what counts as good and bad art rather than discover mind-independent and timeless
truths about beauty.

Williams never thought that moral philosophy could make ethical life any easier than it
is. Nonetheless, he offers a vision of how philosophy, allied with other disciplines such
as history, can provide both criticism and support for one’s ethical orientation in the
world. And in his engagement with moral relativism, he doesn’t just point to a middle
way between his contemporaries Richard Rorty and Derek Parfit. He offers an example
of how to make one’s way through the culture wars.