hey guys welcome back uh before we begin uh one thing i hope you all did well on your exams uh other than that i also want to mention that my friend has her two-year-old over and so you might be hearing some screaming from downstairs um he is rambunctious but adorable yeah so that i don't know if y'all heard that but there's a perfect case uh so if that starts to be bothersome i do apologize but um we're gonna make do but yeah so before we begin uh reading uh williams i think we should first cover the uh chapter uh two of our textbook says pages 14 to 31 i believe and it begins with this quote from ruth benedict that says morality differs in every society and is a convenient term for socially approved habits this does a good job of capturing what cultural relativism really is and so begins by giving these accounts of like the clatians who uh in order to honor the dead would actually eat their body or the like their bodies um versus the greeks who in order to honor the dead would have these big funeral pyres and cremate them and so herodotus uh mentioned this in his uh account of history and so uh what you have here are two very different moral practices right to the greeks it was a disgrace to eat the dead and to um the clinicians it was a disgrace to just burn the debt and so uh you know here it seems like we have this perfect case of two very different moral codes and so cultural relativism you know how can we know which one's right it seems like maybe they're both right or they're you know morality is nothing more than just cultural behavior that's uh cultural relativism for you uh similarly talks about the eskimos um which i think it's supposed to be inuit now but the inuits uh would um often do uh infanticide and just kill the elderly and the reason for that was because you know it's very hard to um you know they would go they travel long distances and oftentimes without any food uh food was very scarce you know in such a cold climate um and so the uh children that weren't gonna make it um i think often they would like kill a lot of their female children in particular because it was the males that would go out and do all the hunting and so at least a male could contribute to the food but the female would just be taking the food so they do a lot of infanticide and if the elderly just got too sick they'd just leave them uh in the past to die of starvation or thirst or something and so that seems very cold and callous i'm sure there's a terrible pun there with cold but you know it's like it seems that's a very different culture from what we would say where we should care for children we should care for the elderly right um especially compared to like honor cultures where uh they actually care for the elderly um and place the elderly is the top of society where you know in more individualistic cultures uh like we have here in america like yeah we expect wisdom from our elderly but also they're not really um in peak working conditions so we don't treat them uh as the top of the food chain right they're out of their prime so we say and so this all argues for cultural relativism uh and so here's this quote from 16 that says to call a custom correct or incorrect would imply that we can judge it by some independent or objective standard of right and wrong but in fact we would merely be judging it by the standards of our own culture no independent standard exists every standard is culture bound so that's this idea of uh that's this idea of cultural relativism like we would say um yeah it's important that the clatians ate their dead right um but what are we judging it on we're judging it on you know 21st century american culture right so of course we're gonna think that's horrendous because that's not a part of our culture and so that argument is that you're not actually appealing to anything objective you're just appealing to your own cultural senses and so it's cultural relativism right it's just everything there is no objective standard that we can look at we can only look at our own um standards so to speak so the following claims have been emphasized by cultural relativists different societies have different moral codes the moral code of a society determines what is right within that society so if society says that a certain action is right then that action is right at least in that society there's no objective standard that we that can be used to judge one society's codes as better than in others uh there are no moral truths that hold for all people at all times the moral code of our own society has no special status uh it is but one among many is arrogant for us to judge other cultures we should always be tolerant of them so that's the main kind of takeaways or points of cultural relativism argues uh you know like here's a difference argument the greeks believed it was wrong to eat the dead whereas the clatians believed it was right to eat the dead therefore the eating the dead is neither objectively right nor objectively wrong it's merely a matter of opinion which varies from culture to culture or you know the inuit saw nothing wrong with infanticide whereas americans believe that infanticide is immoral therefore infanticide is neither objectively right nor objectively wrong it's merely a matter of opinion which varies from culture to culture clearly these arguments are variations from one fundamental idea they're both examples of a more general argument which says different cultures have different moral codes therefore there's no objective truth and morality right and wrong are only matters of opinion and opinions vary from culture to culture so this is called the cultural differences argument it's important to note the cultural differences argument so it follows from cultural relativism well we could no longer say that uh the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own uh however if cultural relativism were true then we would also be barred from criticizing others more harmful practices secondly we can no longer criticize the code of our own society third the idea of moral progress is called into doubt um you know if we say it's better it's better by what standards right we're only going to be saying it's better by our own standards or the standards of um the future right um so an example this might be yeah we thought it was horrendous that they would just let people kill each other for sport you know in the roman coliseum um we think that we've evolved since then but that's because we're judging it by our current sensibilities right if we're to judge it by you know ancient roman sensibilities we've gotten cowardly and weak um they might argue and so we haven't evolved we've devolved according to ancient roman practices uh so then 2.5 why is there less disagreement than there seems to be cultural relative relativism starts by observing that cultures uh differ dramatically in their views of right and wrong but how much do they really differ it is true that there are differences but it's easy to exaggerate them often what seems at first to be big differences turns out to be no differences at all so i mean take the calations and the greeks right um when eats dead one burns the dead it seems like a pretty drastic difference but in reality both of them uh have share the same value of honoring or respecting the dead um for the clatians they thought they're honoring or respecting the dead by eating them and for the greeks they thought they were honoring or respecting the dead by burning them in a funeral pyre and so if you look at it like yeah they have very different practices but it comes from the same value um and we might think that you know the infanticide of the inuits is you know that they don't value human life but even then they only did it because they realized um if they kept all these children that weren't contributing so to speak then everyone would die out and so it's because they valued the life of the group that they would uh practice this behavior and presumably if they ever came across a large amount of food um and reliable source of food then they wouldn't have practice such things so even then they still value human life um some values are shared by all cultures like caring for children honesty um there's almost always a rule against murder the general point here is namely that there are some moral rules that all societies must embrace because those rules are necessary for society to exist um okay i think that's most of what i wanted to cover here uh 2.8 looking back at those five claims uh how they fared in the discussion so they respond to them uh here we must bear in mind the difference between what a society believes about moral and what is really true the moral code of a society is closely tied to what people not society believe about morals however those people in that code can be wrong so presumably if we can come to ascertain some type of moral through reasoning independent of experience then we could say yeah like they practice something differently but according to reason like they are wrong um so that does seem like a valid approach to take so ending on 31 cultural relativism provides an antidote for this kind of dogmatism when it tells the story the greeks and galatians herodotus adds for if anyone no matter who were given the opportunity of choosing amongst all the nations uh of the world the set of beliefs which he thought best he would inevitable inevitably after careful consideration of their relative merits choose that of his own country everyone without exception believes his own native customs and the religion he was brought up in to be the best realizing this can help broaden our minds we can see that our feelings are not necessarily perceptions of the truth they may be due to cultural conditioning and nothing more thus when we hear a criticism of our own culture we find ourselves becoming angry and defensive and might stop and remember this then we'll be more open to discovering the truth whatever it might be we can understand the appeal of cultural relativism then despite its shortcomings it is an attractive theory because it is based on a genuine insight that many of the practices and attitudes we find natural are only cultural products moreover keeping this thought in mind is important if we want to avoid arrogance and be open to new ideas these are important points not to be taken lightly but we can accept them without accepting the whole theory um so like an example that might be um in some cultures it's perfectly fine to eat horse right whereas that's very taboo in america and you know barring the idea of whether or not vegetarianism or veganism is an ethical place to be like let's just take it for granted that um it is ethical to eat meat um if that were the case then we can realize that yeah it's not that it's immoral to eat horse but it's just taboo like some cultures allow it but our culture like that seems weird or that seems gross right so we can accept that while still saying like yeah like murder is wrong uh regardless of culture time you know what have you and so uh what you know the rachels are arguing is that they're not for cultural relativism but they do think that cultural relativism gets to this underlying truth that a lot of the things that we take to be maybe moral or normal at least are nothing more than just cultural practices um so uh i mean that is the argument that they give and they give the appeal for and the criticism there of cultural relativism so i wanted to bring up this bernard williams um excerpt because i read this in grad school and i believe that this is one of the best cases i've ever seen made for cultural relativism and so a little bit of background here um there is this view that uh rorty has um i want to make sure that is his namely double check i think it's richard rorty for ironism yeah richard rorty uh american philosopher came up with this practice called uh ironism which is this idea that um let's take the uh roman example for a case so ironism is basically this idea that um we believe that it would be better to have objective standards rather than subjective standards but the great irony is that we can never escape our own subjective standards objective meaning it's true uh independent of your cultural context or context in general your subjective context subjective means it's dependent upon the subject so it's the context right um so if we're talking about objective it's true regardless of what we think or believe or where we're brought up subjective is all that kind of contextual stuff dependent upon who we are as the subject so i mean we would always like it to be better for us to have some objective standard right like in mathematics how two plus two is objectively four you know it's not subjective whereas something like um vanilla ice cream is the best like that's subjective that's just i don't even know that's my personal opinion but like let's say that's my personal opinion right that doesn't mean it's objectively true but it's just for me true um so like we want to base everything uh on objective standards we think objective standards are better but subjective standards uh we can't escape our own subjective or subjectivity and so like yeah we would like to say that and that's a great irony and that's where ironism comes from for rorty the great irony is that we're always chasing after objectivity but we can never escape our own subjectivity and so what williams does is give almost this exact same scenario but he says why do we actually think objectivity is better shouldn't we value subjectivity and i'll we'll get into it in this article but um that's the main argument that he's going to be making is subjectivity would actually be better than objectivity and so yeah again taking uh the roman case for example um i go on some tangent sometimes i apologize but taking the roman case for example rorty would say we can never know um which you know culture is better more morally speaking you know the ancient romans or our modern day sensibilities um and again looking at it like of course we would think we're better but it's because we're raised in this place where like we think that it's wrong to just have people kill each other for sport um whereas for the romans they would think that we've gotten soft and weak because of this and so we can't know whether or not we're evolving or devolving or anything like that even though we're constantly seeking for some sort of objectivity so that's ironism and bernard williams says hey look if philosophy is about living the good life then the best way for us to live is dependent upon our context you know living the good life in 21st century america is going to look drastically different than living the good life in third century china um and so why should we value objectivity over subjectivity when it's a subjectivity that will show us how best to live the good life so that's bernard williams main thesis here and that's what he's arguing for with uh this idea of cultural relativism so just kind of breezing through a few things the question is what models or ideals or analogies should we look into look to uh in thinking about the ways in which philosophy should be done it's an application to our present circumstances of a more general and traditional question which is notoriously itself a philosophical question how should philosophy understand itself and then later on in philosophy there had better be something that counts as getting it right or doing it right and i believe that this must still be associated with aims of philosophy of offering arguments and expressing oneself clearly aims have been particularly emphasized by the analytic philosophy though sometimes in perverse and one-sided manners and then moving on here talking about this he says that's fine so long as it's not assumed that uh what the dead have to say to us is as much the same as what the living have to say to us so this is talking about from paul greis uh how he used to say we should treat great and dead philosophers as we treat great and living philosophers as having something to say to us and so he's like yeah like that's fine but um they don't have as much to say like you know plato's great he has some things to still tell us right but he lived 2 400 years ago he doesn't know what it's like to live in 21st century america right so contemporary philosophers are going to naturally have more things to say because they understand what it's like to live in you know the age of modern communication in the internet and cell phones et cetera et cetera so that's why it says you know reading something by plato though had come out in mind last month an idea which if it means anything at all i mean something that destroys the main philosophical point of reading plato at all like it just it's asinine he's arguing to read plato is the same as we're reading a contemporary philosopher like that's just why would that make sense at all there's an enjoyable passage by collingwood in which he describes how the old gang of oxford realists as he called them notably pritchard and joseph would insist on translating some ancient greek expression as moral obligation and then point out that aristotle or whoever it was what had an inadequate theory of moral obligation it was like a nightmare calling would said in which one man uh one met a man who insisted on translating the greek word for a trireme as steamship and then complained that the greeks had a defective conception of a steamship so he's saying like look like our cultures are just completely different um why should we try to read them as having the same understanding as we in expressions for words as we use today i've already started talking about philosophy uh being this or that and such and such being central to philosophy and this may already have aroused suspension suspicions of essentialism as though philosophy had some entirely distinct and timeless nature from which various consequences could be drawn so let me say it once i do not want to fall back on any such ideas so he gives up this idea of essentialism and he starts to talk about wittgenstein um and how he rejected essentialism so to talk briefly about wittgenstein uh he went on this uh whole idea of how can we best explain words and so what like especially words like knowledge like what does it mean to know something and so he'd come up with this perfect definition but for every definition he'd come up with it actually wasn't perfect because you can always use some sort of way in which we're using the word knowledge um but differently and so he would have to you know edit and revise his definition but his definition could never capture every time and every utterance or instance of the word no and so because of that he actually gave up on writing some sort of definition and instead basically went from a dictionary to treating words more like a thesaurus so um you know uh round or no um let's take uh i'm trying to think of a good example but let's take uh hot right so hot could mean uh having um a lot of energy in it it could mean you know attractive like in the case of breath it could mean that uh bad right hot could mean angry um so instead of trying to give the perfect definition the word hot he would just give these different words that it is used similarly as so it became more like a thesaurus and so what he's saying is you can't have this objective understanding of any words you can only understand them in their context um and in fact like this is kind of the main argument against analytic traditions so what he says is what i have to say since it is a itself a piece of philosophy is an example of what i take philosophy to be part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life and so our intellectual activities and the situation which we find ourselves sony tart starts to talk about scientism and goes against scientism which scientism is basically this idea that we should treat philosophy as a science and try to look at everything objectively um there's a lot of great quotes here again like should have done the reading uh so then he talks a much more substantive issue here so here it says analytic philosophy had become increasingly dominated by the idea that science and only science described the world as it is in itself independent of perspective to be sure there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism nevertheless the idea that science leaves no room for independent philosophical enterprise has reached a point in which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that it all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like and he's saying it's hard not to see this as a large non-sequitur why should the idea that science and only science describe the world as it is in itself independent of perspective mean that there is no independent philosophical enterprise that would follow uh only on the assumption that there is an independent philosophical enterprise its aims is to describe the world as it is in itself independent of perspective and why should we accept that i admit to being rather sensitive to this non-psycho secretary because in the course of putnam's book i myself am identified as someone who views physics as giving us the ultimate metaphysical truth i've never held any such view and i agree entirely with putnam on rejecting it however i have entertained the idea that science might describe the world as it is in itself that is to say give a representation of it which is the largest possible extent independent of the local perspectives or idiosync with in idiosyncrasies of inquires representation the world as i put it uh as it is anyway such a representation is i called in my jargon the absolute conception of the world whether it's attainable or not whether the aspiration to it is even coherent are of course highly disputable questions and then he says miami introducing the notion the absolute conception was precisely to get uh the point get around the point to which one can describe the world without describing it and to accommodate the fundamentally kantian insight that there simply is no conception of the world which is not conceptualized in some way or another my idea not that you could conceptualize a world without concepts the idea is that when we reflect on our conceptualization of the world we might be able to recognize from inside it that some of our concepts and ways of representing the world are more dependent than others on our own perspective so again focusing on perspective and it says here the object of distinguishing such a representation of the world might possibly be incoherent but is certainly not motivated by the aim of transcending all description and cons conceptualization but he says a lot of the scientism does and he thinks that that's not how society should or science should work or at least philosophy rather sorry um then start talking about the hate gillian thing he says what perhaps he does think is the conjunction of two things first that philosophy is as good as it gets and is no way inferior to science and second that if there were an absolute conception of the world a representation of it which was maximally independent of perspective that would be better than more perspectival or locally conditioned representations of the world now the first of these assumptions as it were half true although philosophy is worse than natural science and some things such as discovering the nature of the galaxies uh it is better than natural science at other things uh for instance making sense of what we are trying to do in our intellectual activities but the second assumption i've described to putnam that if there were an absolute conception it would somehow be better than more perspectival representations is simply false again why would we want to look for an objective uh instead subjective is better that's his point here even if this were all possible to give an account of the world that was minimally perspectible it would not be particularly serviceable to us for many of our purposes such as making sense of our intellectual or other activities or indeed getting on with most of those activities for those purposes in particular and seeking to understand ourselves we need to accept concepts and explanations which are rooted in our more local practices our culture in our history and these cannot be replaced by concepts that we might share with very different investigators of the world hold on sorry i'm trying to catch my voice the other mistake um is to suppose that there's such contrast one set of these concepts those of physical science are potentially universal and they're up taking usefulness and it follows from this that they're somehow intrinsically superior to moral local conceptions which are humanly and perhaps historically grounded again that's his he thinks that that's just absolutely wrong i shall not try to say any more about this aspect of the subject here uh except to repeat yet again the platitude that it is not in general human cultural practices that are explained by natural selection rather a universal human characteristic of having cultural practices and human beings capacity to do so is precisely the fact that variations and developments and cultural practices are not determined at an evolutionary level that makes the human characteristic of living under culture such an extreme extraordinarily uh evolutionary success and then the style defense is also intellectually misguided for the same kind of reason that we should already have met that it assumes that offering an absolute conception is a real thing that really matters in the direction of intellectual authority but there is simply no reason to accept that once again we are left with the issue of how to make the best sense of ourselves and our activities and that in issue includes a question indeed it focuses on the question of how the humanities can help us in doing so so again like if we're wanting to understand how to live the good life and how our life should best be uh centered we must focus on culture we must focus on um the subjective the independent or the objective is not better in fact it's inferior for this kind of thing of course scientific concepts have a history but on the standard view though the history of physics may be interesting it has no effect on the understanding of physics itself it's merely part of the history of discovery and then one condition of its being so lies in a familiar idea which i would discover which i put like this the later theory or more general outlook uh makes itself make sense of itself and of the earlier outlook another transition from the earlier to the later in such terms of both parties uh the holder of the earlier outlook and the holders of the later have reason to recognize the transition as an improvement i shall call an explanation which satisfies this condition vindicatory so again that's this idea that like a vindicatory understanding of history would be that both the romans and us today would see that yes our understanding is better today we've progressed we've evolved and so that would be a vindicatory understanding of history but why would we assume the romans would think that right in fact they probably wouldn't think that um so he goes against his vindicatory understanding of history and also vindicatory understanding of history is important to note all right part five philosophy identity rate is thoroughly familiar with ideas which indeed like all others have a history but have a history which is not notably vindicatory i shall concentrate for this part of the discussion on ethical and political concepts though many of the considerations go wider if we ask why we use some concepts of this kind rather than others rather than say those current in an earlier time we may deploy arguments which claim to justify our ideas against those other ideas ideas of equality and equal rights for instance against the ideas of a hierarchy so he's going to take to task this idea and in fact argue that ethical and political concepts um are notably not vindicatory that we're not actually progressing so to speak there are indeed or have been stories that try to vindicate historically one or another modern conception in terms of the unfolding of reason or a growth in enlightenment or a fuller realization of freedom and autonomy which is a constant human objective and there are others such as stories of unpopular at the moment particularly in the widescreen versions offered by hagel and marx the real question concerned our philosophical attitude toward our own views one reason uh for this is that in many cases the content of our concepts is a contingent historical phenomenon this is far more than one reason uh to take a case on which i am presently working the virtues associated with truthfulness uh i think it is clear that while there is a universal human need for quality such as accuracy and sincerity uh the form of these dispositions and of the motivations that they embody are culturally and historically various moreover there are some such virtues such as authenticity or integrity of a certain kind which is a whole a manifestly contingent cultural development they would not have evolved at all if western history had not taken a certain course for both these reasons a reflective understanding of our ideas and motivations which i take to be by general agreement a philosophical aim is going to involve historical understanding so we have to understand that it's not this objective you know reasoning thing that we're getting to it we have to understand how it came to evolve this way it's historical and it's non-vindicatory and then starting in part six if it is a contingent development that happens to obtain here and now uh and can we fully identify with it is it really ours except in the sense that we and it happen to be in the same time and same place so that's his argument um saying like how can we really say it's ours it's just something that's kind of thrust upon us because of the culture and the time that we're born in to some extent this is one version of a problem that has occurred uh in european thought since historical self-consciousness struck deep roots in the early early 19th century a problem that reflection versus commitment of an external view of one's beliefs as opposed to an internal involvement with them a problem as it might be called of historicist weariness and alienation it might be a testimony to the power of this problem that so many liberal philosophers want to avoid any question of the history of their own views it may also be significant that this connection that so much robust and influential political philosophy comes from the united states which has no history of emerging from the ancient regime since roughly speaking it emerged from it by mere act of coming into existence so here's where he's talking about rorty one philosopher indeed an american philosopher who has raised the question with the local tradition is richard rorty uh and he has suggested that the answer to it lies in irony that quoi are acting as political actors we're involved in the outlook but acting as reflective people for instance as philosophers we stand back and in a detached and rather quizzical spirit see ourselves as happening to have that attachment the fact that qua should come so naturally into formulating this outlook shows as almost always in philosophy that someone is trying to separate the inseparable in this case the ethically inseparable and the probable and probably the psychologically inseparable as well unless the ironist joins the others the outlook that rory calls common sense and forgets about historical self-understanding altogether in which case he can forget his irony and as well and indeed does not need it so again what he's saying is rory is saying that we're trying to act that when we think of ourselves as political actors we're involved in the outlook but when we're reflecting and thinking upon it and acting as a reflective kind of person we stand back in a detached and rather quizzical spirit see ourselves as happening to have that attachment because we just happen to be born in that time and place and he's saying you can't when you're saying well when we act like political actors we're involved in this outlook but when we're acting as philosophers um we are detached and just see that we happen to have these things you know he's saying you can't separate this you know it just it is one of the same it's not something that we can separate this pros the problem comes from the idea that a vindicatory history of our outlook is what we would really really like to have and the discovery that liberalism in particular has a kind of contingent history that it does have is a disappointment which leaves us with at best uh a second best so that's ironism right but once again why should we think that precisely because we are not unencumbered intelligences selecting and principle among all possible outlooks we can accept that this outlook is ours just because of the history that has made it ours or more precisely has both made us and made the outlook as something that is ours we are no less contingently formed than the outlook is and the formation is significantly the same we in our outlook are not simply in the same place at the same time if we really understand this deeply understand it we could be free of what is indeed another scientific illusion that is there are jobs as rational agents to search for or at least move as best as we can towards a system of political and ethical ideas which would be the best from an absolute point of view a point of view that was free of contingent historical perspectives um so he's saying that is a scientific illusion that this is not attainable and we shouldn't even want to attain it we should look at it from our contingent historical perspective and that makes it better so that is uh in a nutshell the defense for uh cultural relativism that williams gets and i know that this is a lot heavier than we've read before um and probably will be one of the toughest readings there's a couple before few uh tough readings coming up but again i think he does such a great job laying out the case um for cultural relativism um and yeah so that's gonna be it for today uh i will see y'all tomorrow