Ethical Relativism for Chads

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Imperative Ethics

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One thing that you’ll find when talking to liberals is that they don’t have a very deep worldview. Not even just your average redditor who thoughtlessly inherits his society’s assumptions (which is kind of based), but even the Steven Pinker types who are supposedly intellectuals don’t end up much deeper no matter how hard they try.

One knee-jerk idea that has bafflingly wide currency is ethical subjectivism. The idea is that each man decides what to value for himself, and there are no real prescriptions to be made here, just as there aren’t in aesthetic preference—I like strawberries because I do, end of discussion. The liberal will often try to square “to each his own” with his revulsion toward fascism, usually by some sort of brainfart whereby fascism is all like, trying to tell me what to do and stuff, and that’s like, mean and scary or something. This is the “paradox of tolerance”.

When I was debating reddit communists I would come across this ethical theory—that everyone decides for themselves what’s ethical. It struck me as not only dumb but also self-defeating. Quite clearly ethics, if it is anything at all, is working out what governs or binds action. When you say “should” or “ought”, as in “you ought to welcome those refugees”, you’re talking about something binding, something that isn‘t optional. The problem is that you can’t both be the source of binding precepts and also the one being bound. You can have goals and intentions, but you can’t command yourself. The whole idea makes no sense, because you could always overrule yourself. In that case, nothing you decide is truly ethical, because it can’t hold you to any course of action.

Ethics, if it’s remotely intelligible, has to come from outside you. You can’t be both subject and sovereign—this is the basic insight of absolutism. If you internalize this insight, you’re already halfway toward solving ethics. This article is a guide to imperative ethics, which provides that solution.

I have tried to avoid this problem of ethical subjectivism ever since. You’d think that the best way to avoid it would simply be to say that ethics is what is true full stop. But this doesn’t actually solve the problem. Quite the reverse—if anything, it makes the problem permanent and insoluble. Thinking of ethics in terms of TRVTH guarantees subjectivism. It’s the ultimate source of the is-ought problem, the problem of moving from statements of fact to statements of right.

The problem is, in a nutshell, mistaking ethical statements for statements of fact. And this error in turn depends on the assumption that statements of fact are the most basic statements there are.

As an easy way into this, suppose you wanted to learn some language you don’t know, like Swahili. If I handed you a Swahili dictionary and told you to learn Swahili, could you do it, just from the dictionary alone? Obviously not. You need some sort of “Rosetta stone”, some foothold before you can even start. What about learning your first language? This presents us with a much harder problem, because there’s nothing to translate from.

If your mother said to baby-you, “see that big hairy thing? that’s your father”, you would never learn anything. It’s too complex. The way that she teaches you is to point to your father and say “Dada”. Eventually you join the thing and the sound, and presto!—you’ve discovered Dad. Soon you gather a few other rudimentary concepts, and these serve as your basic foundation from which you derive the whole rest of the world. But it all comes back to the pointing. This is what we call ostension—pointing to the thing in question. When Mom points and says “Dad”, she is defining ostensively. This is your conceptual bedrock.

Ostensive utterances are grammatically simple—they consist of a name alone. And yet, baked into that utterance is something more: they contain an implied command. The command implied in our example is to take that thing over there to be ‘Dad’. The command brings in something new: an action. At its most basic, a command is just a single verb, such as “go!”, but it always at least involves some sort of action—"take X to be Y”.

Notice that we have not yet arrived at anything like a true statement. “Go!” cannot be true or false. Pointing at something and commanding someone to call that ‘Dad’, cannot be true or false. Ostensives and commands are not measured in terms of true or false, but in terms of apt or inapt. The boy who cried wolf was using an inapt ostensive, and suffered for it. If you command your child to “go” in front of a busy road, bad things will happen. It’s appropriate for some people to do some things in some cases, and not others. “Aptness” is what we call agent-relative.¹

Before moving on, let’s recap. We have not got anywhere near truth, and yet, we already have every basic tool in our conceptual toolkit. All concepts are just names, and all names depend on ostensives and commands, which are agent-relative.

At some point you might take two names and join them together. You have the name “Rover” for your best friend since forever. You also have the name “dog” for a four-legged furry thing with sharp teeth, bad breath, and fierce loyalty. At some point you notice that “Rover” and “dog” are in some sense the same, and you say “Rover is dog”. This isn’t going to win any Pulitzer prizes, but congratulations, you have just uttered your first proposition.² “Rover is a dog” is an utterance that is apt or inapt like the others, but we now have something new involved: the special kind of appropriateness of a proposition that we call truth. We have finally arrived at a statement of fact. Facts are agent-neutral or “universalist”—their aptness, or “truth”, doesn’t depend on who utters them or to whom.

The reason we’ve given this autistic sketch is to stress that truth comes very late to the party. In other words, “is” statements, or statements of fact, are far more complicated than they seem. They are nowhere near the beginning. You can’t learn Swahili by looking at a bunch of squiggles and joining them to other squiggles, nor by joining one series of vocal clicks and pops to another. Something must always be in place first. What’s already in place are names, which are embodied commands. Commands enjoin you to do something; they are “ought” statements—you ought to take this to be your father, and so on with the rest of the names.

The proposition “you ought to welcome those refugees” is only ethical because it conceals a command. It’s a statement about an ethical statement—it parses out to “XYZ authority commands you to welcome refugees”. It can be true or false that XYZ did command that; the command “welcome refugees” can’t be true or false. There are no ethical propositions, only metaethical propositions.

So ethical statements are always ultimately commands, and commands are not true and universal, but appropriate and agent-relative. If we insist on purely propositional ethics, we can never get to a bonafide ethical statement. It would be like insisting on a forest without trees. This is the famous is-ought problem. In trying to rescue universalist ethics, we lose ethics.

There have been many attempts to salvage propositional, i.e. universalist ethics. Some have simply ignored the problem, but this doesn’t solve it. One ingenious solution has been teleology, but this too has failed.

Teleology is the idea that everything has a telos, or purpose, built into it. This way, the teleologist can make all ethical statements propositions, because he can simply say that the “ought” points to the purpose of a thing. Sex has the purpose of producing children he says, so sex ought to be for that. Government has the purpose of securing the common good he says, so government ought to be limited to that.

But this doesn’t avoid imperative (command-based) ethics, because a purpose presupposes an intention. Whose intention? The authority commanding you to reserve sex for procreation, etc. So it’s redundant, but it’s worse than that. No longer is it possible to simply obey the command—now we have to consider the authority’s intention, and whether the law or the command really does serve that intention.

This is how the intentions of the framers of the US constitution inevitably become twisted into sanctioning gay marriage and worse. The law is generally clear; the purpose of the law is always up for debate. The law must become a “living document”, meaning contaminated with our own intentions. All this brings us back to what we were trying to avoid—the ethical subject as lawgiver, and thereby unbound by law. Teleology does not escape imperative ethics, it only destroys ethics by putting propositions above commands. But law and command are prior to propositions, so it brings us back to ethical subjectivism.

Imperative ethics forecloses on subjectivism, but it makes ethics agent-relative. These are not the same thing. Subjectivism is “you decide what the law is”; relativism is “different laws for different people”. Laws and ethics are just commands, and commands are objectively right (or apt), but not objectively true, because commands can’t be true or false. To try and make them so is to destroy ethics.

Imperative ethics also forecloses on moral progress. If ethics were a kind of knowledge, it would be cumulative, like all branches of knowledge. After all, we don’t use ancient biology, or physics, or medicine, because like all bodies of knowledge, these have progressed. But since ethics is not a kind of proposition, it is not a kind of knowledge. And so we can eliminate the idea that new ethics is better than old ethics the way new dentistry is better than old dentistry. Quite the reverse, actually—former authority trumps later authority, because the latter depends on the former.

Perhaps most importantly, imperative ethics solves the is-ought problem, or the problem of moving between “is” statements of fact, and “ought” statements of right. Quite simply, you can’t go from “is” to “ought”, because the “ought” is primordial and the source of the “is”. But you can, and indeed must, go the other way. This upends all philosophy since the classical Greeks, who began with metaphysics and moved to ethics. They had it exactly backwards—good comes before true, because what is truth if not what’s good to believe?

Ethics, properly understood, is first philosophy. It is also totally regressive. Perhaps most disturbingly, it is agent-relative. We have been taught for many centuries to view ethical relativism as wishy-washy, but there is nothing wishy-washy about different standards for men and women, father and son, Englishman and Chinese. Equality is for kindergarten, not grown men.

1. As usual, etymology is a help here. “Apt” comes from Latin apere, “to fit”, relative to something else, naturally. “Appropriate” comes from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own”.

2. The move from the ostensive/command world to propositions is way more complicated than this, we are hopelessly simplifying here.