This week’s
vanilla argument is a refutation of personal relativism by Professor David Oderberg in his book Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach. Personal relativists believe the rightness
or wrongness of moral statements are relative to each person; morality is subjective
opinion rather than objective fact. With this bit of background, the argument
is as follows:
“First, there
is a semantic problem. A proposition of the form ‘Doing X is wrong’ uttered by
P (for some action or type of behavior X and some person P) is, according to
the personal relativist, supposed to mean
no more nor less than ‘P disapproves of doing X’: the latter statement is
claimed to give the meaning or analysis of the former. But “P
disapproves of doing X’ cannot, on this analysis, be equivalent to ‘P believes
that doing X is wrong’, since doing ‘Doing X is wrong’ is precisely what the
relativist seeks to give the meaning of;
in which case the analysis would be circular. On the other hand, the relativist
might again analyse the embedded sentence ‘Doing X is wrong’ in ‘P believes
that doing X is wrong’ as ‘P believes that doing X is wrong’, and so on, for
every embedded occurrence of ‘Doing X is wrong’, thus ending up with an
infinite regress: ‘P believes that P believes that P believes…that doing X is
wrong.’ This, of course, would be no analysis at all, being both infinite and
leaving a proposition of the form ‘Doing X is wrong’ unanalyzed at every stage.”
Read that
argument through a couple times and let it sink in! Do you see the circular reasoning and the infinite regress?
