Hello all, I would like to begin by saying that a lot of the
objections that I will raise have been offered in class previously. I wish to
write this blog post in order to air some of my thoughts, and a new situation
to analyze that may end up in my first paper.
Harman does an excellent job of succinctly laying out his
thesis regarding moral relativism in the first sentence of his paper. He
believes that “morality arises when people reach an implicit agreement… about
their relations to one another (p.41)”. The crux of my argument revolves around
the nature of an implicit agreement, and the idea of community agreement. The objection
that I present here is epistemological in nature, in that I question how we
come to understand implicit agreements especially in a community setting. Every
individual has a unique perspective on the world that surrounds them, and it is
more than likely that a situation which arises, will be viewed drastically
different by two individuals.
This situation may be best described by using a (rather
disheartening) scenario. Imagine a situation in which a woman has just killed
her former rapist, and this scenario was viewed by two individuals. Both of
these individuals believe that murder is wrong. However, one of these
individuals (Person A) does not believe that rape is morally wrong, while the
other is vehemently anti-rape (Person B). B will then say that the murder was
justified due the heinous act of rape, while A will cling to the idea that all
murder is wrong.
My issue with Harman’s moral relativism is that in this
scenario the implicit agreement is entirely too vague. Both A and B seem to
have come to the same conclusion--i.e., that murder is wrong; but when a
complicated scenario arises that also involves moral disagreements regarding
rape, then their implicit arrangement fails. In layman’s terms, my argument
revolves around the ambiguity of Harman’s thesis regarding moral relativism.
How do I know that when I say “murder is wrong” and the person across from me
agrees, that we are actually agreeing to the same principle, and not our
interpretation of it.
