Moral Relativism Can’t Justify Serious Political Commitment

Fighting for socialism means staying true to ambitious goals in the face of massive setbacks. Those who say morality is a matter of individual preference can’t explain why we would stick it out.

Marcello Mastroianni in The Organizer (1963), directed by Mario Monicelli.

This is the second post in a series on moral relativism and anti-relativism in relation to the socialist project. You can read the first part here.

In my last post, I explained the basic philosophical disagreement between moral relativists and anti-relativists¹, and I said that socialists should be anti-relativists. One reason socialists should endorse anti-relativism, I said, is that we need an objective moral framework to justify our project.

That’s a theme I want to explore at length in future entries. Here I want to explore a closely related but different idea: we need an objective understanding of morality to make sense of our commitment to the socialist political project in the face of daunting challenges and setbacks. Moral relativism cannot make sense of why we would fight for socialism despite the great sacrifices it entails and what often seem like overwhelming odds against us.  

But before I get into the argument for that, a brief recap: Moral relativism is the view that moral truth is relative to a particular individual or group’s beliefs, desires, and preferences. Relativists think, for instance, that when one says “murder is wrong,” they are really saying it is wrong “for them.” They might think that murder is wrong because they have a personal aversion to murder, or because they belong to a cultural group that judges murder to be wrong. Anti-relativists believe that there are at least some objective moral truths. Anti-relativists would say that murder is wrong period, for everyone, across cultural groups, regardless of what any individual thinks or feels about it. 

In this post, I’m focusing on a problem for the version of relativism that says moral truth is determined by an individual’s beliefs, desires, and preferences. I’ll call this individual-focused moral relativism.² I’ll discuss some problems for the culture-based version of the view in other posts.

Opting Out

A common argument against individual-focused moral relativism is that it cannot accommodate the commonsense thought that some moral norms are inescapable.³ That is, most of us intuitively feel that a person who does something monstrous can’t get away with it by professing that they personally don’t have a problem with murder. You can’t “opt out” of the moral prohibition against murder by having wacky preferences. (A similar intuition applies to cultural groups: a particular culture might view slavery as acceptable — say the culture of American plantation owners in the nineteenth-century South — but most of us feel that doesn’t make it ok for people of that cultural group to enslave people.)

I find this argument against relativism to be generally compelling. Relativists usually respond to it by 1) saying that common sense is actually more relativistic than anti-relativists would like to admit, or 2) admitting that relativism has the somewhat anti-commonsense consequence that it can justify murder, but that relativism is a more attractive view overall for other reasons. I don’t find these pro-relativist arguments very compelling either, but that’s a discussion for another time.⁴

Why Keep Going?

I think the problem of inescapability pops up in a distinctive way for socialists — at least those of us fighting for socialism on the hostile terrain of global capitalism in the early twenty-first century. 

We are engaged in a project of world-changing ambition — attempting to create and sustain a society of freedom, equality, and abundance, of a kind humanity has never before seen. Winning that world will mean taking on the most powerful ruling class in history. It will mean uniting ordinary people across lines of class, race, religion, gender, nation, and so on — lines that often reflect long and deeply felt histories of oppression and violence. It means organizing together to take big risks and attempt things we might not have thought possible before. And we have to do all this on a planet undergoing increasingly extreme environmental crises.

Socialism is, to put it mildly, a long shot. And for those of us who devote ourselves to this fight for any length of time, we are bound to experience myriad disappointments, setbacks, and heartbreaks. Many of us sacrifice leisure and financial security — and some even their lives or freedom— for our vision of a better world.

Why do we make such sacrifices, even when our goal seems so unlikely or so far away? I believe it is because we feel a sense of duty to ourselves and to our fellow human beings; we detest capitalism’s brutal exploitation and obscene inequalities and the waste it makes of so many human lives; and we feel called to struggle for a world of true justice, freedom, and equality. 

In other words, I believe we fight for socialism despite everything because we find the struggle for socialism morally righteous. And we find it righteous because it is righteous, objectively. Our commitment to the struggle is not a subjective preference, like a taste for spicy food or a love of free jazz or an enthusiasm for cycling. Our commitment is not something we think we could “opt out” of by revising our preferences or desires, in the way we might try to get over an aversion to a particular cuisine or pick up a new hobby or learn to get along with an annoying relative. 

The reasons we fight for socialism, I think, are inescapable in the way that anti-relativists think morality is inescapable. But moral relativists cannot make sense of this idea. For someone who thinks that morality is a matter of individual, subjective preference, our commitment to the socialist project is in fact something we could opt out of by deciding to have different preferences.

But if I were this kind of relativist, given the challenges and sacrifices involved in being a committed socialist, I would just try to snap myself out of it. If there’s no reason to fight for a better world beyond the fact that I happen to want to — no objective reason — I would be better off learning to want something else.

1. I’m using these terms in ways a bit different from how they’re usually deployed in the academic literature; see my first post in this series for explanation.

2. In philosophy, this sort of view is usually called subjectivism.

3. Sometimes, adapting terminology made famous by Immanuel Kant, philosophers discuss this issue by talking about moral norms being categorical as opposed to hypothetical.

4.  For those interested in reading more on this topic, Derek Parfit provides a rather thorough and persuasive argument against individual-focused moral relativism and related views in Part 1 of On What Matters, vol. 1.