Moral Relativism, Anti-Relativism, and Democratic Socialism

Many on the left hold that morality is relative, and depends on your cultural upbringing or personal choice. But is that enough to sustain our commitment to socialism?

The Temperate and the Intemperate by Valerius Maximus, circa 1475–1480

At some point, you’ve probably had a moral or political disagreement with someone that resulted in one of you saying something like, “Who’s to say what’s right or wrong, anyway?” In other words, the conversation got to a point where the very idea of objective rights or wrongs was called into question. 

This question — about what, if anything, makes it the case that certain actions or behaviors are good or bad, right or wrong — is also one that moral philosophers continue to debate. And I think it’s one that has major stakes for socialists. It goes to the heart of 1) what justifies our political project, 2) what sustains our commitment to it in the face of long odds, and 3) what means we think are permitted in pursuing the end of winning socialism.

In this post, I want to lay out the different philosophical positions one can take on this question, and say just a little bit about why all this matters for socialists. In future posts, I plan to say more about the different positions, how they bear on the three questions above, and what view I think socialists should take.

Relativists, Anti-Relativists, and Nihilists

There are a range of nuanced and complicated answers to the question of whether there are objective moral truths, and if so why. For simplicity’s sake, we can divide the answers into three major camps.

The first camp is relativist.¹ It says there are no objective facts about right and wrong; that what makes an act right or wrong is just a matter of what people happen to think or feel. For instance, if i have a strong aversion to torture, that would mean that torture is wrong from my perspective, or “wrong for me.” Relativists would reject the idea that you can say that torture is wrong absolutely.

Some relativists argue that morality is relative to a culture rather than individual beliefs or preferences. On this view, what matters is whether an entire cultural group judges an action to be right or wrong — for instance, if a certain culture regards premarital sex as wrong, then it is wrong from the perspective of that culture, or wrong for members of that culture.

I think many liberals and leftists today are some kind of relativist — or at least think they are, as judging by the many conversations I’ve had with friends and comrades that end in a skeptical question about how we can make objective judgments of right and wrong at all. It’s also a fairly popular view among modern philosophers. Richard Rorty is a recent example, and more controversially, Friedrich Nietzsche and postmodern philosophers including Michel Foucault are often read as relativists. Karl Marx can also be seen as advocating a kind of moral relativism (more on that later).²

The second camp is anti-relativist.³ It says there are objective facts about right and wrong that are independent of what people think of them, sort of like mathematical or logical truths. That 2+2=4 is true whether or not you or anyone else believes it; the same is true, the anti-relativist says, of claims like “torture is wrong.” 

There are fewer prominent defenders of anti-relativism today, though most major moral philosophers in the Western canon — from Plato and Aristotle to John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill — were anti-relativists. The view is common among religious philosophers and theologians. Recent and contemporary left-wing philosophers who are anti-relativists include Jürgen Habermas, G. A. Cohen, and Norman Geras. I would also say Alasdair MacIntyre — a prominent intellectual influence on the contemporary political right (and among some on the left), whose own political views are a bit harder to pinpoint — is an anti-relativist.

The third camp is nihilist.⁴ It says that morality is a fiction or illusion — that nothing is really good or bad, right or wrong, at all. Marx can also be read this way (though I’d argue that it’s a bad reading). It’s a very uncommon view among moral philosophers, though it pops up in fiction sometimes. And conservative religious philosophers sometimes argue that, if you don’t believe in God, you logically ought to be a nihilist. As the character of Dmitri Karamazov puts the thought in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “But what will become of men then . . . without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?”

The Socialist Case for Anti-Relativism

Why does all this matter? It might seem like an obscure academic debate with little practical relevance — though the frequency with which it comes up in almost everyone’s debates about right and wrong suggest that interest in the matter goes beyond academia. But I think socialists especially have some skin in this game. As I mentioned above, I think there are a few big reasons we should care about this.

I’ll start with just one for now. The relativist vs. anti-relativist (vs. nihilist) debate is important to answering the question of why we fight for socialism in the first place. Some would argue that we’re socialist because we — the working class in a broad sense, or even humanity in general — have a material interest in winning a socialist world. Our lives would be easier and more fulfilling if society’s resources and free time were more equally shared. 

As I’ve argued before, I don’t think this is a compelling answer on its own:

On the whole and “in the long run,” the working class’s interests may best be served by socialism. But for individual workers in the here and now, organizing to build socialism is far from the only way to advance their interests. They might (and typically do) adopt individualistic strategies, eschewing collective action in favor “keeping their heads down,” working hard and scrimping and saving. Or workers might organize collectively around more parochial or tribal lines to hoard economic resources and opportunities — by trying to exclude workers of different races, ethnicities, or genders from getting certain jobs, for instance.

My take is that we fight for socialism not just because it is in workers’ interests, but because we think winning socialism is the morally best way for workers to advance their interests, and less directly, the interests of all of humanity. But to back that up, I believe, we need to think that morality is real, and that we have some objective idea of right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil.

In future posts, I hope to argue that there are good reasons for thinking morality is real, and that we should be anti-relativists about it. And I will try to convince you that this is important for sustaining our commitment to a socialist political project in the face of massive challenges and setbacks, and for making sure that our project doesn’t degenerate into the moral monstrosities — e.g., Stalinism — that we’ve seen left-wingers succumb to in the past.

1. For the sake of simplicity, I’m departing from the typical terminology that academic philosophers use here. They usually call those who think morality is dependent on an individual person’s attitudes subjectivists; cultural relativism is the term reserved for those who think moral truths are relative to a culture. Both views are usually classified as versions of anti-realism, i.e., the view that moral facts are in some sense “not real,” or less real than facts about the natural world (the earth is round) or mathematics (2+2=4).

A close relation of relativism is expressivism: roughly, the view that moral judgments are expressions of desires or feelings — something like the way “Ow!” is an expression of pain — rather than statements of fact. For expressivists, saying “torture is wrong” is a bit like saying “Boo, torture!”

2. Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, at least at certain points in their careers, argued that morality was a matter of individual choice — but also, paradoxically, that the value of individual choice should lead everyone to adopt respect for human freedom as a fundamental moral value. This view has much in common with the interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s ethics that Christine Korsgaard has argued for in recent decades.

3. In the parlance of academic philosophy, these kinds of views are usually called objectivist or realist.

To be clear, almost all anti-relativists admit some degree of relativism: the exact shape that moral norms take will vary with cultural context and individual particularities. There might be a universal moral norm against dishonesty, for instance — but what counts as dishonesty might vary quite a bit from one cultural context to another. In many places in the United States, for instance, people do not actually expect a forthright response to greetings like “How’s it going?” and would not charge you with being dishonest if you say, “I’m doing well” even when you feel like shit.

4. Philosophers sometimes call this kind of view an error theory of morality, or moral fictionalism.