Price and Moral Relativism

Last updated 03/18/07.

Published on: October 6, 1998

The other day I had a minor revelation. I say minor, because I didn't realize some new principle, but because it finally occurred to me that there is a good way to explain an important concept: moral relativism.

The people opposed to moral relativism are mostly moral absolutists or transcendentalists. These are folks who think there is a fixed morality, and that they know about it either from revelation, mystic insight, "natural law," "self-evidence" or some other hocus pocus.

Many skeptics take a positivist approach to rejecting such claims: they point out that there is no objective evidence of a "true" or absolute moral system. Indeed, most absolutists make no bones about the non-objective nature of their claims, and it's pretty easy to identify just where the others fake it.

Moral relativism is a conclusion made by many skeptics by the failure of arguments for objective morality.

Skeptics are regularly "hammered" with a basic question by these absolutists. "If morals are relative, and there is no true morality, then how can there be ANY morality, how can any act be judged?"

My revelation was that there's a simple analogy we can draw which answers this objection. Morality is in some ways like price.

"If prices are relative, and there is no true price, then how can there be ANY price, how can any price be arrived at?"

This may seem like a strange analogy to make: how is morality like price? Skeptics have an answer for that in their understanding of the nature of morality.

Morality is the set of heuristics we use to try to optimize the results of our actions towards satisfying our values in a social setting. I say heuristics because the effectiveness of one moral variant over another is pretty much a quantitative guess at the individual level rather than an analytic decision based on a theoretical understanding of the principles involved. The simple reason is that it is too much work to analytically evaluate the alternatives when we are faced with the pressing demands of life. If we see a moral heuristic work well for somebody else, we're likely to adopt it even though we may not understand why it works. Or we may trust parent's or religious leader's claims that these are "true" (read: good heuristics).

The key thing here is that morality is thus based on OUR VALUES AND THE VALUES OF OTHERS. Just like prices. We take it for granted that differing values integrated together through markets set prices, and that depending on how values change, prices can wander all over. So too it is with morality. Morality, like prices, are local, relative, and derived from a combination of individual values, institutions, and technology.

This explanation explains the anthropological facts about differences in morality throughout different cultures as something we would expect, as opposed to absolutist ideas which have the problem of explaining those differences away. For example, a change in technology changes moral behavior, as the development of birth control technologies has. A change in social institutions (another form of technology) changes moral opinions, as the rise of democracy has.

An interesting application of these ideas is the notion of trial by jury of peers. This is a totally relativist institution for determining justice, which may be based on morality. Which is why juries can acquit even when laws have been blatantly broken. Relativism like this is our escape from the Procrustean bed absolutists would force us into.

[Postscript: a few days later, I remmbered where I originally got some of my ideas. John Hodges' Why I am a former Objectivist and former Libertarian. One further step John didn't take (and indeed, most philosophers never take) is the realization that there isn't one true ethics, morality, or set of values any more than there is only one species. There is an ecology of many of these, just as there is an ecology of species, with specialists for niches created by others.] Counter image omitted.