Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault

forty years ago you had the telly televised debate on the Dutch TV with Michel Foucault probably the most influential contemporary French intellectual you said that you had never met anybody so amoral and indeed is widely viewed as the main defender of post-modernism and moral relativism but what is wrong with that don't you see that ethical norms vary widely across space and time sleeping subjugation of women repression of homosexuals have been accepted in many cultures and still are here it is a scandal to make caricatures of the Holocaust but it is considered admirable to make caricatures of the Prophet in Han it's the other way around the terrorists of the Israelis are the freedom fighters of the Palestinians Muslims think that their halogen is truly Universal and Christian things likewise but for their religion while secularists think secularism is the only solution isn't truth itself including scientific truth always the effect of regimes of truth as Foucault call them that are inextricably linked to power isn't there something both parochial and imperialist in asserting one's own value system as being good to the universal and good if there are truly objective and universal moral norms how do you discover and justify them moral relativism it's a it's a little difficult to discuss it's a little bit like discussing skepticism there there are no skeptics you can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can in fact be a skeptic they wouldn't survive for two minutes if they were so they're not and I think pretty much the same is true of moral relativism there are no moral relativists there are people who profess it you can discuss it abstractly but it it doesn't exist in ordinary life and to sharpen the discussion level you should recognize that the concept moral relativism ranges over quite a broad spectrum so the form of moral relativism which is totally uncontroversial of course it's true there are as quote this there are the ethical norms that vary widely over space and time and that's a stab servation of fact nobody denies that similarly every other aspect of humans varies quite widely so for example human visual systems that can vary quite widely in the way they function depending on early experience that it's been shown by experiment enough with humans but with other animals with essentially the same visual system that you can change you can change them radically just by early experience every biological system and I assume we're biological organism so our moral values and ethical systems are also biological systems every one of them can vary quite widely depending on experience that's not controversial so for example the human visual system can be varied experimentally so that it will have distant different distributions of receptors that respond to horizontal and vertical lines and that will give very different perception you can show it with cats and monkeys we have same visual system on the other hand you can't turn a human visual system into a an insect visual system as you change experience and this is quite general across the biological domain including moral systems there are there's a range of options that's possible this variation within that range but there are also limits to the range and in fact this takes us to the there's a tendency to move from the uncontroversial concept of moral relativism to a concept that is in fact incoherent and that's to say that moral values can range indefinitely that belief which is held is literally incoherent it's based on the assumption that moral values reflect culture but then that raises the next question how does a person acquire how does a person acquire it's that his or her culture you don't get it by taking a pill you'd get your culture you acquire your culture by observing a rather limited number of behaviors and actions and from those constructing somehow in your mind the set of attitudes and beliefs that constitute your culture but that act is very much like learning a language or like developing a visual system or in fact like finding a scientific theory it's a matter of making a great leap from scattered data to some outcome and that leap is made essentially the same way by all individuals a given relatively fixed experience and it's only possible if you have extensive built in innate structure just as you can develop a human rather than an insect visual system only if it's guided by genetic instructions very specific ones the same is true of acquisition of language of acquisition of arithmetic or capacity acquisition of a culture hence acquisition of moral values but that means that the most extreme form of moral relativism is actually committed to the belief in universal values namely those that set the frame in which this tremendous leap from data scattered data to a complex relatively fixed system can take place that's why the extreme version of moral relativism which is common and I think Foucault professed it is simply incoherent if you adopt that position you are committed to far-reaching universal values and their existence those that just as if you are studying the visual system and you discover that it can vary over a wide range you're nevertheless in fact by that very fact that committed to the belief that there are fixed innate genetically determined constraints that set the framework in which it can develop and that sort of guide the development of the structure even though allowing a certain degree of variation and in fact I think that the I won't talk about post-modernism that's beyond my capacity to discuss but just keep the post-modernism which at least has the merit of being incoherent I'm not sure that post-modernism even reaches that far but it reminds me of a famous comment of a physicist Wolfgang Pauli who apparently pretty acid person and used to say sometimes when someone proposed something that's not even false you didn't get that far but the take these examples a slavery subjugation of women repression of homosexuals and let's forget about a variety of cultures just think about our own in our own culture not that far back these were all perfectly accepted dorms so it takes a repression of homosexuals at one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century Alan Turing who also was a war hero in Britain he's one of the people who really saved Britain from the German assault he was instrumental in developing the techniques that did decoded the German signal so the British were able to determine where the Bombers have gone ahead and so on and so forth he was a killed by the British government by a forced treatment to cure his disease of homosexuality well it wasn't that long ago I mean that wasn't when I was a graduate and you know doesn't seem very long ago to me that's inconceivable now totally inconceivable moral values have advanced I would say that what it means is that we have penetrated more deeply into our own actual moral values and seen as the moral sphere extends that some things that were considered completely normal and admirable are so atrocious you can't even think about them and the same is true of slavery subjugation of women has very recently overcome one way to go yet but changed dramatically in the last 30 40 years as I mentioned beginning just with consciousness-raising groups that brought women to recognize that what they took to be normal and necessary and even unacceptable is in fact completely that should be totally rejected okay that's same thing widening of the morals here the same is true of slavery a little bit earlier they're still our slaves estimated thirty million or so in the world but it's regarded as reprehensible and totally unacceptable and in fact if you look at the history of overcoming of slavery in the West it was substantially moral arguments incidentally it's not that the slave owners had no arguments they did and it's worth attending to those arguments in fact some of them really have never been answered and the fact that they're not answered gives us some insight it's always in fact in general contrary to the views of the extreme moral relevance relativists moral disagreements can be debated you don't just have to scream at each other you can look at the arguments try to find some common ground at work from the common ground and try to reach a conclusion that's immoral interchange and it's often successful so it takes slavery one of the arguments during the american civil or of the slave owners which is a serious argument is that they argued that they are more moral than northern industrialists and for a very simple reason they own their workers and therefore they take care of them that just as if you own a car you'll take care of it northern industrialists rent their workers and they don't take care of them they have no responsibility for them just as if you rent a car you probably won't take care of it so therefore slavery is more moral than than a capitalist industrial policy and actually I think there's some merit to that argument but instead of concluding from it that save slavery is legitimate that we should conclude what working people in the north in the century and a half ago we should draw their conclusion was a very common belief among working people in the United States that wage labor is fundamentally no different from slavery the only difference is its temporary in fact that was such a popular view that it was a slogan of the Republican Party it was Abraham Lincoln's view you could read it in the New York Times it's taken a long time to drive that understanding out of people's heads and I don't think it's driven very far I think it's right below the surface and it continually comes out it's like just a comment on this idea about regimes of truth I suspect we're going to agree about this but I mean I think Fugo Foucault wildly exaggerated again there's a kind of a truism which is not controversial that power systems have some effect on the way the scientific work proceeds and can be accepted and so on sometimes it's at the extreme it's a Stalinist biology okay that had an effect there's corporate influences on how drug trials are conducted that's true there are professional risk constraints actually I've lived through them in my entire life when I started my own professional work I couldn't publish because it was too inconsistent with accept that ideas in fact the first book I wrote in 1955 it didn't come out for 20 years and it came out then it was submitted but rejected it came in out later just as kind of like for historical interest but then filled and developed it grown so sure that happens but it's marginal and there are self-correcting procedures in the sciences which worked pretty well not perfectly but pretty well so there is an element of you know power relations that enter into say scientific work but to talk about regimes of power it seems to me radically overstating the case the real question is whether you can regard these differences within a framework of progress in the sense that some cultures are features of culture are better than others I mean the real question of cultural relativism is is one whether you think progress implies as you said an underline and an underlying innate sense for instance a sense of justice or whether these cultural choices are wholly arbitrary with none being better than it but I mean that's the real issue it was cultural relativism but whatever you believe about that there is a fixed basis there must be a fixed basis otherwise you can't acquire our culture in the first place and that fixed basis has to be determinative narrowly determinative now that fixed basis gives our actual human cult moral values now if you take a look if you raise the question about progress yeah I think there is progress and I think it's valuable to look at our own Street so we're not talking about the imperialist conquest our own history shows that there is moral progress and in fact the very examples that were given strongly Illustrated slavery subjugation of women repression of homosexuals all of this wasn't very common perfectly well accepted in Western culture not very far back in the case of say Tory it was 50 years ago it's now all regarded as completely unacceptable I think that's evidence you know it's not in human discussing human affairs you don't have proofs we don't understand enough but I think this is and there's much more like it is evidence that somehow as our own history culture develops we penetrate more deeply into our actual real cultural and normal normative values and we expand the moral sphere to in fairly definite ways these three examples are are good illustrations of it they're plenty language I would like to respond to that because you see this is exactly what you're expressing there is exactly the point of view of the Enlightenment which is so rejected nowadays in the name of other cultures because if you speak of polkas without a whole cultures and you say this took a long time etcetera etcetera and now we look at it as a progress but when you encounter other cultures that have not undergone these so-called progress they will reply to you that your progress is actually regression let me give you an example take almost sexuality suppose there is a sacred book religious book that says that this is a sin if you allow that sin the community will be destroyed partly because to allow that sin is to allow for unholy Jews behavior and to allow for skepticism and if skepticism spreads than the religious culture is going to be destroyed I have seen that in my own country in my own life with the Catholic culture now we are going to yeah I know but suppose a Muslim doesn't want to see their culture going the same way the Catholic has in this country or the Jews or some other sort of more traditional community of the Catholics whatever he remains of them I mean you see what you say to them you say your whole culture should go because I'm a section should be free in fact that I say the same thing in my own culture it's it's a it's a sin in Jewish culture yeah you know okay but then thought it has been that it's sin and Jewish culture I wouldn't have asked some Nazi to come along and force force it to be abandoned no but I think that in the course of time in the course of thinking through your own values these things are overcome our own culture is a good example homosexuality was considered not a sin it was considered a pathology a sickness okay and that's recent we've come to understand it's not a sickness and if I had the idea that it was and that you should kill people as you know these understandings universe should be potentially universal just like all cultures I think it even goes potentially universal and I think the good reason to believe it because even if you're the most extreme moral relativist you are presupposing universal moral values and those can be discovered in fact in recent years there's even empirical work trying to investigate them across culturally with children and so on now it's basically a scientific question and we know that there's we have good reason to expect that there's going to be an answer a part of the reason is just almost logic you can't acquire a culture without having a rich in built-in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data to whatever it is that you acquire and that's virtually logic and I think a look at our own history gives good illustrations for example looking at just the very examples that are given here it's been a long battle but over time in fact last couple of centuries there's been a very consistent change and the change is not without conflict but it's going in a particular direction and I think you can even understand the direction the direction is towards that more tolerance of variation and and more opposition - coercion and control I think that's a very definite tendency and I think it suggests something pretty strong about what our fundamental moral values are

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 708,755

Rating: 4.8476305 out of 5

Keywords: Relativism (Belief), Moral Relativism, Noam Chomsky (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Michel Foucault (Author), Value (Literature Subject), Moral philosophy, Progress, cultural relativism, Postmodernism (Literary School Or Movement), Morality (Quotation Subject), Ethics (Quotation Subject)

Id: i63_kAw3WmE

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/RoboticWater]

Sometimes I feel like philosophy memes are really strawman-y. Like, I'm confident that most relativists wouldn't disagree that realistically, there are morals you can get pretty much everyone to agree with; that's simply empirical fact, but Chomsky seems to regard the theoretical framework of relativism as Sargon would a "kill all men" tweet. I feel like he just wants to dunk on "those absurd relativists."

Yes, pragmatically there are likely numerous constraints on morality imposed by biology, but theoretically speaking, that doesn't matter. These constraints are still arbitrary, even if they are destined to arise due to fundamental physical laws (which, I don't even know if we can definitively say, given that our only frame of reference is humanity). That most biological entities can agree that they'd rather live (most being a very operative word here), doesn't suddenly make living an objective moral, just a relatively agreeable one. Would moral relativists disagree with this? Half of philosophy has got to be just taking moral questions to theoretical extremes—in this case, perfectly relative, incompatible morals—but the other half is reframing these theoretical axioms in pragmatic contexts.

Also, the question posits "morals change over space and time," and Chomsky says "our morals changed over time" like it's a retort. Was it supposed to be a counter-claim? Yes, we learn morals like a language and language changes over time in a constrained fashion, but isn't one of the fundamental properties of language literally arbitrariness?

[u/dkmsnake]

Philosophy noob here. These were what I understand to be his main points/arguments:

"Humans are biological systems";
"Moral systems are biological systems";
"Biological systems can function in a given range, but there are limits to that range";
"Acquiring morals from culture is only possible given the innate biological structure of humans: what can be acquired by this innate structure is limited by the limits of the structure itself - genetics dictates how it works, and therefore, the low number of possible results in terms of acquiring attitudes and behaviors".
"There has to be a set of basic principles from which culture, and morals, derives, like a logical conclusion from a set of premises"

Maybe I'm wrong, but the entire argument sounds circular. You get your morals from culture, and that process is limited by the culture itself and the limitations of the human body; therefore you can only get a certain set (although variable) of normative claims. In other words - the set of normative claims you get is the only possible set of normative claims you can get, with some room for variation, but not a lot. That's kinda of a "no shit Sherlock" statement.
While he doesn't speak of "objective" and "subjective" in the video, that last point is the foundational one, and the one I disagree with the most. He expands in the video to something like "Because you can observe multiple different cultures arriving to similar conclusions, there as to be a set of fundamental premises or principles there are being used", which would kinda make them "objective", in a sense. My objection would be that the main point in determining whether moral claims are objective or not is not so much what they are, per se, but where their content comes from.
You could make the argument that a group of humans running around murdering each other over petty shit is "worst" then the same group of humans working together, building and gathering and in general helping each other. A normative claim like "Killing is wrong". This is basically culture, in the sense Chomsky uses it: we agree that the outcomes of certain actions are "better" then the outcomes of other actions, so we teach the kids we eventually have to do those "better" actions; as they grow, they have the potential to eventually change their minds on what actions are "good" and "bad". But this whole thing is a practical process, not an "objective" one. The majority of people agreeing (or disagreeing) that "Killing is wrong" does not make this claim "objective" in any sense I understand "objective", at least. It would only be objective if you could demonstrate the content of "Killing is wrong" the same way you can demonstrate, say, the mineral composition of a rock (and here I'm hoping we agree the mineral composition of a rock to be objective knowledge).

His example of language even functions the same circular way - "car" means "car" because there's only a limited amount of articulated sounds humans can make, so eventually you would arrive at "car" for what it describes. No shit. Bu the fact that "car" refers to a thing with four wheels and "table" refers to a thing with four legs that does not mean that those specific sounds for those specific things are a logical/objective deduction. That explanation is largely practical, not really objective.

Hope this makes any sense and I didn't contradict myself too much.