all right hello everybody so you should have already seen the video where we talked about James Rachel's and his objections to cultural moral relativism um relativism broadly is the view that uh whatever a culture believes about morality makes it the case that that claim about morality is true right so for instance if having an abortion is okay in Japan if it's if if that's a cultural practice and but not okay in Argentina then that means that uh uh the the actual morality of abortion is made True by the cultural practice right so it would be morally permissible to have an abortion in Japan and morally wrong to have an abortion in Argentina right so um this is a claim about uh uh uh the status of morality um and so we're going to be talking primarily about cultural moral relativism but we could also distinguish cultural moral relativism from Individual moral relativism that says that if you believe something that's what makes it true so if you think that it's morally wrong to have an abortion then if you were to have an abortion that would you would be doing something morally wrong only because you believe it though right so So today we're going to be looking at Shaw's paper he's going to give three objections uh one objection to individual moral relativism and two objections to uh um cultural moral relativism so first of all if individual moral relativism were true we could never say that we were wrong about them previously held moral belief okay so so if suppose that I believe that abortion is morally wrong okay and then and then I uh uh maybe read some articles you know kind of you know expand my horizons say and then all of a sudden I believe that abortion is okay in many cases maybe most cases right I uh I would be tempted to say that I was wrong about the morality of abortion before right but that we can't we couldn't say that if individual moral relativism is true well why can't we say that if individual moral relativism is true we can't say that we can't say that we were wrong because things are true or moral beliefs are true and false in virtue of believing them so when I believed that abortion was morally uh wrong I was absolutely right about it and then when I changed my mind that and I said that abortion is morally okay most of the time um I uh I'm also that's also true right so so merely in virtue of my thinking it makes it true so it but it seems really natural to want to say things like look I was wrong before or what I used to believe is not true right um but if individual moral relativism is true this is not in a coherent way of talking um about uh these issues right we would say that yeah I was I was right before and I'm just as right now too right that seems odd so if we if we are individual moral relativists then we can't really make sense it's kind of like the James Rachel's point we can't really make sense of our own individual moral progress right Okay so here's a second concern and the second objection is to cultural moral relativism right so it's not about whether or not you believe something rather it's whether or not the culture believes something that's what makes something true or false right a moral claim true or false so we run into a fuzziness problem here and fuzziness here is is like um uh kind of an in-between state right uh where where you're not really one way and you're not really the other way so the question is is what percentage of the population must adopt a moral view before we can say the culture believes X right uh so so suppose that in America uh half of the people suppose that America is one culture and we can debate that right but just suppose that it is um so we have American culture and suppose that half of the people in America believe that abortion is morally wrong and the other half of people believe that abortion is morally permissible and is okay how do we determine which uh uh what to go with right how do we determine the morality of abortion given that there's only part of the population that believes that right so is it is it 50 that seems too too low right is it 90 right so 90 percent of the people have to believe that abortion is morally wrong in order to uh in order for it to be the case that it is morally wrong to have an abortion so it's just not clear what the number is and then if you also if you have a culture of people who are split on an issue you don't get any normative guidance right um and so that seems to be a major problem with cultural moral relativism and our last objection is what I'm calling the problem of multiple cultures so uh again this is a an objection to cultural moral relativism so so one one thing to note is that many of us belong to a number of cultures laughs for instance I may be say a Muslim and I may also live in Seattle right and so if there's a general sort of uh Seattle culture and then there's my own uh sub population of Muslims that live in Seattle right I am a part of two very different cultures okay so it may be the case that that these cultures give us conflicting moral Norms right so a moral Norm is just like it's wrong to have an abortion or it's okay to have an abortion right so so consider an example the American Catholic in Manhattan so suppose that uh you're a Catholic person and suppose that you also live in Manhattan well it happens to be the case that the Catholic Church condemns uh abortions as immoral in the overwhelming number of cases right so generally speaking abortion is immoral according to the Catholic church but in Manhattan culture many people probably maybe most people believe that it's okay to have an abortion at least sometimes right so so you have two conflicting moral claims it's never okay to have an abortion and it's sometimes okay to have an abortion and you as an individual belong to both of these cultures both Manhattan and both uh the Catholic church right your Catholic culture and your New York culture so uh how do we decide which culture takes priority right when we get conflicting uh moral claims like this and it seems like we don't have any reason to prefer one culture over the other and and so we actually don't get any normative guidance um nobody there is no um there's no actual rule about abortion because both of these rules are true because you're part of both of these cultures and and so it seems like uh cultural moral relativism leaves us high and dry in these cases um okay so in this lecture we've covered uh an objection to individual moral relativism and then two objections to cultural moral relativism from the shaw piece thank you so much foreign