(Accepted for publication in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice) Relativism of distance - a step in the naturalization of meta-ethics Antonio Gaitán & Hugo Viciana1 Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution. Introduction Moral relativism would seem to be one of those rare domains in which philosophical research directly intersects with the public arena. It is not infrequent to hear religious leaders and political figures decry the dangers of relativism. And conversely general appeals to tolerance in the face of conflict are common in our current political panorama. But instead of denouncing moral relativism or blindly endorsing a general relativistic creed, a well-informed approach to judging its qualities and effects requires that we advance a rigorous notion of what relativism might actually be, as well as some form of knowledge about the basics of relativistic judgment in moral issues. More than 30 years ago, the philosopher Bernard Williams attempted to provide such a contribution to our understanding of moral relativism. By advancing a few empirical hypotheses together with normative intuitions, Williams offered a specific view that he called “relativism of distance”. He claimed that we are disposed to relativize our moral opinions (by dropping them) when we perceive a great cultural and social distance with respect to those holding an opposite moral stance on a disputed issue. Regarding this peculiar variety of relativism, we here pursue a twofold goal. On the one hand, we’ll evaluate the empirical adequacy of Williams’ relativistic proposal and, on the other, we’ll look into his account of relativism in order to articulate the shape and focus of a more empirical approach to 1 Both authors contributed equally. 1 meta-ethics. To attain these two goals, we structure this paper as follows. First, we introduce Williams’ relativism of distance (Section 1), presenting it as a description of a particular domain of folk moral relativism (Section 2). Once relativism of distance has been introduced, we look at some empirical findings on folk relativism through the lens of Williams’ relativistic proposal (Section 3). The goal of this section is to show the reader how Williams’ account is consistent with the most relevant experimental studies on folk relativism. Finally, we argue that Williams’ relativistic theory can be interpreted as offering important methodological advice for those who believe that meta-ethics should be empirically informed (Section 4). 1. Williams’ relativism of distance In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams 1985 - ELP in what follows) Williams’ focus of interest on relativism lies in those situations in which moral beliefs or moral “outlooks” (to use his expression) are “genuinely exclusive”, yet each of the conflicting views may be considered “acceptable in its place” (ELP, 174), at least by one of the parties. Situations of genuinely exclusive moral outlooks can be understood by reference to the idea of deep or radical disagreements, i.e. disagreements that cannot be resolved by assuming factual ignorance or intellectual shortcomings on behalf of the parties involved2. There is a problem with deep disagreements, one of particular interest for understanding Williams’ approach to relativism in ELP. The problem is usually formulated in the following terms: if A cannot say of B that he is wrong in claiming that not-p (in cases of deep disagreements, then both parties recognize that the opposite side is neither short of relevant evidence nor subject to some misunderstanding or irrationality) and B cannot say of A that he is wrong in claiming that p, then both A and B must accept that p and that not-p can be true. It looks, in short, as if those involved in a deep dispute are required to endorse, by their own rational lights, a set of mutually inconsistent claims (Beebe, 2010). Williams was well aware of this problem. Indeed, he starts his treatment of relativism in ELP by attending to a standard solution to the above dilemma. Such a solution, labeled by Williams as “strict relational relativism”, holds that we must understand the logical form of moral opinions as strictly relative, i.e. as necessarily referring to a social or cultural framework (Harman, 1975). Once we relativize the content of moral judgments in this way, the danger of ascribing irrationality to the parties involved in cases of deep moral disagreement will disappear. A’s moral opinion (p) is true relative to A’s framework and B’s moral opinion (not-p) is true relative to B’s framework. There is no straightforward contradiction here in claiming that both p and not-p can be true in this relative sense. 2 See McNaughton, D. 1988 for a more comprehensive treatment of deep disagreements, with special attention to the notion of incommensurability, which is crucial in the genesis of the idea of the relativism of distance. 2 The problem with this conceptual or logical argument, Williams noted, is that it misrepresents the internal perspective of those located in cases of sharp discord. According to the external description delivered by strict relational relativism, any agent immersed in a deep disagreement should be disposed to relativize her moral opinion, i.e. to see her moral verdict as applying only within her own society. Williams claimed, however, that this kind of “instant relativism” (ELP, 176) is absent when we attend to people’s reactions. In cases of profound disagreement, agents will tend to see their moral judgments as universal, as applying also to the members of the opposing group. This is a tendency built into our moral psychology and, for Williams, it cannot be easily eradicated (ELP, 158). Williams concluded that although strict relational relativism can make external sense of deep moral disagreements, thereby preserving agents’ rationality from the outside, strict relational relativism cannot make sense of their reactions in such situations. If strict relational relativism cannot accommodate people’s actual reactions, shall we then simply assume that our putative universalistic tendencies remain unvaried regardless of circumstance? Shall we be content with defending absolutism – the view that our moral opinions always extend beyond our own group or culture? Williams argued that both absolutism and relativism are simplistic views. That is, when trying to properly fix the scope of our moral opinions they do not sufficiently accommodate the complex variety of reactions of the agent doing the judging. But what happens when we attend to the agent doing the judging? When testing the effective scope of our moral opinions, Williams expressed the intuition that any reflective person can be in two different kinds of situations of moral divergence with respect to others (ELP 159-160). In a real confrontation, the reflective agent confronts a member of a different group that holds an opposite moral opinion. In this kind of confrontation, she can imagine herself living in a group with those norms and types of behavior. The divergent moral outlook constitutes for her what Williams terms “a real option”. And accordingly she perceives social conflict in relation to the given moral view as a true possibility (ELP, p. 178). In a notional confrontation, by contrast, the reflective person, confronted again with a member of a different group who is holding an opposite moral opinion, cannot realistically imagine herself as currently living in the other moral group and being affected by the other group. In this latter case, when she perceives an extreme social distance between herself and the opposite agent, the diverging moral view is not seen as a real option. As an example, Williams suggests the life of a Bronze Age chief or a medieval samurai as giving rise to entirely different value systems as compared to ours. Even though reflection on some of those values may still be relevant to the present —which the British philosopher accepted— there is no way that we could live their lives. After locating the reflective agent in these different scenarios, Williams makes a striking prediction: in notional confrontations the reflective agent will not be disposed to judge the opposite agent on moral terms. In real confrontations, by contrast, the reflective agent will not limit the scope of her moral opinions to her own reference group; she will strongly disagree with the moral opinion of the opposite agent. Thus, according to Williams, if 3 relativism is true, i.e. if we are disposed to limit the scope of our moral opinions, it can be so only in cases of notional confrontations. This is the essence of Williams’ relativism of distance. Three points of clarification would be helpful in order to understand this view clearly. Firstly, and as must be clear from the above, much of the weight of Williams’ relativist proposal is placed on determining the precise sense of “real confrontations”, specifying what constitutes “a real option” that “makes a difference”. It is easy to understand it in negative terms, in relation to cases in which one of the moral claims lies clearly outside the sphere of a potentially livable experience and, thus, does not constitute a real option. If one ancestral civilization required —as an expression at once of the maximum form of respect toward the group and a matter of the highest moral importance— that younger people wear a special form of clothing until they are sixteen years old, today there would be little social meaning to our approval or disapproval of this rule in moral terms. It is important to realize, however, that even if the content of a norm is clearly alien to us, falling outside the reach of everyday experience, this unfamiliarity is not sufficient, according to Williams, to describe a dispute around such a norm as a notional conflict. If you can imagine yourself living in the opposing society, by conceiving of it concretely and realistically, and by being sensitive to the different ways in which some shared values could be respected in the target community, then you could be inside a real confrontation after all. And this is true even if the content of the norm is clearly alien to you. Thus the relevant sense of “option” here, the one separating real from notional confrontations, is based on agent’s imaginative capacities, and these can be mediated by social, institutional, and historical information. Secondly, it becomes clear that Williams’ relativism differs in important ways from what many philosophers consider an authentic relativist perspective. To begin with, Williams’ relativistic proposal differs from such forms of relativism in scope. Williams describes the thinking of a reflective agent when located in certain specific confrontations (notional), but not his thinking in every possible confrontation. As we saw above, Williams predicts that, in real confrontations (which are majority according to him), the reflective person will tend to think as an absolutist or universalist. Therefore, if we think as a relativist in Williams’ sense, we do so only in very specific situations. Williams’ relativism of distance also differs from other forms of philosophical relativism in a second sense, this time related to its content. Williams defends the hypothesis that we think as relativists only when we are disposed to not judge other agents who are holding opposite moral views in a distant society. However, refraining from judging is not equivalent to at least three different approaches to relativism. Not being predisposed to judge other agents who are in a notional confrontation with us is surely not strictly equivalent to concluding that they are right by their own lights (Dreier, 2006). Neither is it the same as recognizing that when disagreeing with them we must abide by the moral standards only of the agent being evaluated (Benningson, 1999). And surely dropping our evaluation in cases of notional confrontation is different from the kind of ‘moral ambivalence’ at the heart of David Wong’s account of relativism. We experience moral ambivalence in Wong’s specific sense when we recognize as familiar some values 4 endorsed by a person with whom we disagree deeply. Wong notes that in these peculiar cases, our confidence in our own moral perspective ‘get shaken or destabilized’ (Wong, 2006. p. 5)3. And finally it would be helpful to note an additional and more specific prediction made by Williams when introducing his relativism of distance. Williams noticed that judgments of social justice are not affected by distance. “[I]t may be, he writes, that considerations of justice are a central element of ethical thought that transcends the relativism of distance” (ELP, p. 185). It means that we can evaluate in terms of fairness or equality those societies temporally and spatially distant, and that we can do so even when we cannot imagine ourselves living in such societies. Thus when the disagreement is about the degree of fairness of the basic social institutions in a past society, the fact that you cannot imagine yourself currently living in that society will not necessarily lead you to drop your moral evaluation. These are minor remarks, all aimed to qualify Williams’ peculiar version of relativism. A more general point about relativism of distance’s logical status is in order, however. In the next section we’ll focus on this issue. 2. An apt description of folk moral relativism? What kind of claim is at the core of the relativism of distance? It has become usual in recent debates on moral relativism to distinguish between different senses of relativism (Gowans, 2017; Quintelier & Fessler, 2012). At an initial level, relativism can be formulated either as a normative claim or as a descriptive claim. When formulated in normative terms, moral relativism sometimes stands for a general loose appeal to tolerance (Levy, 2002) in the face of moral conflict: 3 There are important commonalities between Wong’s pluralistic relativism and Williams’ relativism of distance. Both recognize the importance of cultural and social information when arguing for a realistic version of relativism (Wong 2006. p. 41-43 Williams 1985. p. 165). They also agree on the benefits derived from endorsing some variety of methodological naturalism when approaching relativism (Williams 1985. p. 160 Wong 2006. p. 35-41). On a more specific level, both Williams and Wong develop their views on relativism by stressing some problematic assumptions shared by standard versions of relativism trying to make sense of the agent’s internal perspective in deep disagreements. For Wong the key is to reject standard relativism’s commitment to ‘the radical difference view’, i.e. the belief in the existence of radically different moral codes (Wong 2006. p. 10-12). By contrast, for Williams, the problem is standard relativism’s lack of touch with agents’ effective reactions (Williams 1985 p. 157). However, there are also remarkable differences between Williams’ and Wong’s approach to relativism. A crucial one is the effective scope of both theories. While Williams’ relativism of distance is rarely implemented in effective disagreements–because according to Williams the perceived social distance required for being in a notional confrontation is not accessible to us in most of our current historical conditions–Wong claims that his pluralistic relativism accommodates a familiar feeling of estrangement from one’s own values we all can experience if confronted with strange but not fully alien moral traditions (Wong, 2006. Chapter IX). 5 Normative relativism: we ought to tolerate the moral opinions of those who disagree with us on certain contested moral issues. Relativism can also be presented as a descriptive claim. There are at least two possible descriptive versions of relativism. According to the standard formulation, one extremely influential within Anthropology and related social sciences (Cook, 2003; Shweder, 2012; Velleman, 2013), moral relativism would simply state that there is great variability in moral opinions across cultures: First-order descriptive relativism: moral opinions vary across cultures First-order descriptive relativism has been quite influential, and for some time it was thought that there is an intuitive case for normative relativism once we assume the fact of moral variability (more about this below). Williams, in any case, remains skeptical about the force of this descriptive version of relativism (Moody-Adams, 2002 - for a full examination of the evidence on this score). He repeatedly claims that all current confrontations are real, a commitment on his side that suggests that descriptive variability is of less significance in our highly globalized cultural context – at least regarding some core moral values. The other descriptive formulation of relativism is sometimes labeled “meta-ethical relativism”. On this view, moral relativism would stand for a set of second-order descriptive claims about our moral practice. Among these second-order descriptive claims appear statements about the meaning, the truth-conditions, or the logical form of our moral discourse, but also more substantive claims about the content and shape of our moral thinking, i.e. how we perceive the scope of our moral views or if we believe that they can be applied to other times and places. More precisely: Second-order descriptive relativism – non-psychological: the meaning, the truth conditions, and the logical form of our moral claims in cases of deep disagreement can be explained by reference to the following equivalence: ‘X is right = X is right in C’. Second-order descriptive relativism - psychological: a disposition to limit the scope of our moral opinions is reliably elicited in cases of deep disagreements – along with a cluster of psychological tendencies related to tolerance. 6 Second-order descriptive relativism – non-psychological and Second-order descriptive relativism – psychological are quite general, maybe too general to be informative, especially when we take into account the sophistication of current debates on relativism. Very different relativistic theories can endorse Second-order descriptive relativism – non-psychological. And the same applies for Second-order descriptive – psychological. For our current purposes, however, the thing to notice is that these formulations are logically independent (Snare 1995). You can argue in support of a semantic variety of relativism without claiming that those thinking morally are disposed to perceive the scope of their moral opinions as limited to their cultural or social context4. Conversely, it could be logically possible to pair a relativistic psychological tendency to perceive the scope of your moral opinions as limited to your own group with a non-relative semantic account – claiming, for instance, that the truth-conditions of your moral opinions are based on desires, and further noticing that those desires grounding the truth-conditions of your moral opinions are universally converging (Smith 1996). Relativism can be a normative or a descriptive claim and, within the descriptive variety, we find first-order and second-order versions. Now we have a set of coordinates. These coordinates can help us to ask about the logical status of Williams’ relativism of distance. So what kind of relativism is Williams’? In some instances, Williams could be interpreted as supporting a normative version of relativism. According to such a reading: Relativism of distance - normative: we ought to be tolerant with others’ moral beliefs if the confrontation encompassing our disagreement is merely notional. Although we can in principle interpret Williams’ relativism of distance through a normative lens, we are going to argue that doing so will prove to be an unstable choice. The first reason to reject the normative reading is that Williams himself forcefully opposes the internal coherence of any normative version of relativism. In his first foray into moral relativism, he noticed that many relativists move from a naïvely group-functionalistic view, according to which what is right for any society is seen as necessarily linked to its “survival” as a group, to a normative claim, according to which we ought not interfere with the values of other societies. Williams stressed an obvious contradiction in this general movement: it assumes a relative sense of ‘ought’ in its depiction of social processes, while nevertheless endorsing a non-relative sense of ‘ought’ by recommending how to treat other societies that hold different moral views (Williams, 1971. p. 20-21). 4 Gilbert Harman, for instance, claims that relativism is first and foremost a theory about the truth-conditions of moral terms and not about their meaning as perceived by the speaker (Harman & Thomson 1995). 7 It could be claimed that Relativism of distance - normative is not straightforwardly contradictory in the sense pointed out by Williams. After all, there is no explicit mention in Relativism of distance - normative to a groupfunctionalist account of society. You could endorse this normative version without committing yourself to any strong specific view on social ontology. Against this rebuttal, however, should be stressed the pragmatic or conceptual core of Williams’ criticism on normative relativism sketched above. The basic intuition in the above argument, one independent of issues of social ontology, is that the intended scope of Relativism of distance – normative, when uttered by a normal speaker, seems to be non-relative, applying to any society in which any of its members would perceive a given conflict as notional. It means that Relativism of distance – normative is committed at the very end to offering universal advice, albeit suited for a highly qualified situation. Thus besides being straightforwardly contradictory (when paired with a certain variety of social functionalism), Relativism of distance – normative is also self-defeating in this pragmatic sense5. For these reasons, we believe that a descriptive reading of relativism of distance is more plausible. More precisely: Relativism of distance – descriptive: The perception by an agent of the scope of her moral opinions is a function of the “distance” in which the opposite moral opinions are placed. When the agent perceives a moral confrontation as “notional” she will refrain from evaluating the opposite party. The above formulation is sufficiently intertwined with Williams’ original proposal for us to assign authorship to him. For instance, after stating that his aim when approaching the issue of moral relativism amounts to “turn[ing] the question of relativism around” (ELP, p. 161), Williams notes. “The question has traditionally been whether we have to think in a relativistic way, for conceptual or logical reasons, or whether that is impossible. We should rather ask how much room we can coherently find for thinking like this, and how far it provides a more adequate response to reflection” (ELP, p. 160) In our view, the foregoing quote suggests a commitment to understanding the task of a relativistic theory of 5 The pragmatic component is present in Williams from the very start. In 1971, for instance, he writes: “The most the theory can allow is the claim that it was right for (i.e. functionally valuable for) our society not to interfere with Ashanti society, and first, this is certainly not all that was meant, and, second, is very dubiously true”. (Williams, 1971. p. 21) 8 morality as the description of our current reactions when placed in certain confrontations. Williams’ proposal would stand for a variety of what we referred to before as second-order descriptive relativism6. Indeed a peculiar variety. Williams’ descriptive version cannot be straightforwardly located under the reach of Second-order descriptive relativism – non-psychological. For this version, the description to be offered by a relativistic theory must be cashed out in semantic terms, with the goal of accommodating our conceptual commitments in contexts of deep disagreement. As we saw in the previous section, and as the above quote makes clear, Williams did not pay much attention to idealized disagreements, and for him the goal of a relativistic theory must not be aimed at supporting a mere logical maneuver, i.e. to relativize this or that context so we can handle our conceptual intuitions in idealized contexts of disagreement. When constructing a relativistic theory we should focus instead on moral disputes mediated by cultural distance. Regarding these disputes, we should inquire into the effective psychological reactions of the parties involved. The above suggests that Williams would not object to Second-order descriptive relativism – psychological. However, in our opinion, Williams’ relativism cannot be seen as strictly equivalent to this formulation, either. According to Second-order descriptive relativism – psychological every time we are involved in a deep disagreement we are disposed to limit the scope of our moral opinions. But as we saw above, according to Williams only those deep disagreements that are also perceived as notional will have this effect on us. Another important qualification is that even if for Williams the required description must be explicitly psychological (referring to our beliefs about the scope of our moral opinions), there is something misguided about the implicit commitment of Second-order descriptive relativism – psychological with applying a single psychological scheme to explain our relativistic thinking in every possible context. On the contrary, according to Williams, we tend to think as universalists in almost any possible context, shifting to a peculiar relativistic way of thinking (dropping our moral evaluation) only in very specific cases (notional confrontations). So choosing to describe relativism simply in psychological terms (as in Second-order descriptive relativism – psychological) falls short of the real explanatory task —which is to disentangle the specific contexts where we think as relativists and to explain the relationship between this thinking and our default universalistic thinking. In short, when introducing his relativism of distance, Williams was in fact developing a particular second-order 6 Our appeal to ‘description’ in order to qualify Williams’ meta-ethical view can be seen as problematic. Why cannot be seen our project an instance of ‘descriptive ethics’ after all? Meta-ethics has been traditionally constructed as a vindication of our moral thinking and moral phenomenology. The label ‘descriptive ethics’, by contrary, has been usually reserved to some disciplines in the social sciences (Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, etc.) delivering empirical evidence about our moral experience – evidence about the distribution, social causes or psychological underpinnings of our moral thinking. So by describing Williams’ relativism (a meta-ethical view) as ‘descriptive’, are we locating it under the umbrella of descriptive ethics? We don’t think so. We are asking for more evidence coming from the social sciences about the internal side of our moral experience or moral phenomenology. When descriptive ethics focus on meta-ethical thinking we open the path of descriptive meta-ethics. 9 descriptive account of our moral experience. Below, we examine how this descriptive and empirically dense version of relativism can be integrated into the naturalistic study of folk moral relativism. Many of Williams’ ideas on relativism of distance can be operationalized and explored in several dimensions, and a number of recent findings in experimental philosophy and moral psychology can be connected to it. 3. The empirical relevance of Williams’ relativism of distance Other ideas of Bernard Williams (the notion of “moral luck”, the idea of “thick concepts”, the phenomenology of sacrificial dilemmas, etc.) have enriched the research in moral psychology (Doris & Stich, 2006; Kahane, 2012; Young et al. 2010). Recent years have also seen a surge of interest in the confluence between philosophical theories of relativism and their moral psychological dimensions (Goodwin & Darley, 2010; Quintelier et al., 2013, 2014). In this section, we expand upon these two tendencies by stressing the relevance that the relativism of distance has for experimental philosophers and researchers working in the field of moral psychology. 3.1. Spatial and temporal distance Although, as we noticed above (Section 1), Williams warns against taking mere spatial distance to be the dimension that explains the possibility of relativism, this nevertheless presents itself as an intuitive starting point. As part of the findings of a series of questionnaires regarding morals, administered by Kelly et al. (2007), it was shown, for instance, that those surveyed tended to judge certain infractions of norms related to harm (e.g. whipping a sailor) or disgust (e.g. mortuary cannibalism) as being more morally acceptable whenever those infractions were presented relative to a certain historically ancient society or a geographically distant foreign culture. Consequently, temporal and spatial distance acted as dimensions that prompted broader acceptance of what would normally be perceived as morally deviant behavior in the participant’s own society. More recently, Fessler et al. (2015) have reported a clearer result of this same phenomenon in a cross-cultural study across seven different field sites. In this study, they presented participants in each of the different locations with moral scenarios based on prototypical forms of harm and infractions of rights (stealing, unmotivated aggression, cheating, etc.). Participants were asked to rate the badness of the described actions (“How good or bad is X?”). They were also asked to imagine that the action took place in a distant time or foreign country. In all different groups, temporal and spatial distance appeared to be predictive of decreased moral condemnation. 10 In a series of studies in experimental philosophy, Sarkissian et al. (2011) showed that the perception of how comparable and close the conditions of the individual or group being judged are to those of the participants also proves decisive in our views on morality7. When participants in these studies were presented with the moral judgments of individuals who were similar to themselves, they tended to express more “objectivist” attitudes in relation to the moral wrongness of those described actions, perceiving them either as “wrong” or as “not wrong”, but not both at the same time). By contrast, when participants were asked to judge individuals that were described as being less comparable to themselves (such as people from different cultural traditions, or the hypothetical case of an extraterrestrial individual) then most participants tended to manifest a more relativistic stance in which they accepted that certain actions could be described as being both “wrong” and “not wrong” by different kinds of people, including those individuals described as considerably different from the participant (see also Quintelier et al. 2014). Sarkissian et al. thus concluded that “people’s intuitions do not always have this objectivist character. On the contrary, people’s intuitions undergo a systematic shift as they begin considering different sorts of individuals.” Williams’ distinction between real and notional confrontations may not be entirely out of place here. This is particularly so when we realize that in most of their vignettes, Sarkissian et al. did not present descriptions of members of groups sometimes perceived as being in conflict with the cultural group of the participants. Instead, the examples used were the moral judgments of an “isolated Amazonian tribe” or the previously mentioned hypothetical extraterrestrials. Following Williams, we can formulate the hypothesis that the results would have been different had the moral judgments been presented as being made by members of other exotic cultural groups who, nevertheless, maintained a relatively conflictual relationship with the cultural group to which the individual participants belong (e.g. Afghan mujahedeen). Thus, once we understand that distance per se is not at issue, but rather the relation of distance to the possible perception of conflict among different agents holding different moral claims, we can make better sense of Sarkissian’s findings. 3.2. Injustice and normative expectations As we noticed above (Section 1), Bernard Williams highlighted the possibility that judgments of justice are not affected by distance, having a genuinely universal scope. In the last few decades, the importance of considerations of justice in the developmental emergence of moral judgment has typically been studied following a famous experimental protocol 7 This sort of distancing effect the authors find in the empirical literature arises at about age 9 (but not much earlier). See Schmidt, M. F. H., Gonzalez-Cabrera, I., & Tomasello, M. (2017). 11 first conceived by the developmental psychologist Eliot Turiel and his associates. The so-called “moral/conventional distinction” in moral development deserves a special place in the discussion of the relativism of distance. We’ll argue that even if evidence from the moral-domain theory cannot fully support Williams’ approach, the framework of the relativism of distance might encourage further research concerning the influence of distance on different components of the moral domain. In the study of moral development, it is well established (Nucci, 2001) that children as young as five, and sometimes younger, can distinguish certain infractions (moral) that are less time or place specific, do not depend on adult authority, and are generally deemed more serious, and other types of infractions (conventional) that are more context or adult dependent, and generally considered less serious. The universal character of this pattern of moral cognition has been taken to be relatively robust (Sousa, 2009; Turiel, 2002) and may even be innate (Baumard, 2010). Now, how does this domain of research relate to Williams’ suggestion that considerations of justice transcend the relativism of distance? The first thing to notice is that some well-established findings in the moral/conventional literature would support the converse implication of Williams’ prediction, i.e. that harm-norms can be affected by temporal and spatial distance. As we noticed in the previous section, a number of psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists have noticed that certain transgressions involving harm do not neatly correspond to the typical moral/conventional response pattern. Kelly et al. (2007) claimed that such transgressions can be conventionalized (regarded as acceptable) if presented in a specific historical or contextual framework. Proving that harm-norms can be affected by distance, however, is not the same as proving that basic norms of fairness cannot be affected by temporal and spatial considerations. To positively test this prediction, we must present people with cases of fairness violation, cases involving basic social arrangements in Williams’ sense, and then test how their evaluations might be affected by temporal and spatial considerations. If people’s judgments about the infraction of these arrangements are less affected by distance we will gain more convincing evidence supporting Williams’ prediction8. Besides delivering further hypotheses concerning the structure of the moral domain, the relativism of distance could also be of some help to re-evaluate the significance of certain controversies surrounding Turiel’s findings. Instead of considering the results of the moral/conventional task as proof of the existence of full-blown essentialist psychological categories —the “moral” and the “conventional”— we might find it more helpful to regard prototypical 8 To our knowledge that prediction has not been tested yet. That is perhaps because, in recent years, the interpretation of the results of the moral/conventional task has paid particular attention to the condemnation of harm (see e.g. Haidt, 2012; Kelly et al. 2007). However, Turiel was far more liberal when stressing the significance of the moral/conventional divide and thus we must be able to envisage a more systematic approach to components of the moral domain, one sensitive to the relative incidence of distance on the different dimensions. 12 moral infractions, in keeping with this experimental paradigm, as infractions whose assessment hardly requires any background considerations of the kind Williams pointed to when introducing the category of ‘notional confrontations’ (i.e. there is little need to know the details of the context in order to judge them). On the contrary, prototypical conventional rules under this paradigm are more dependent on the kind of contextual or social considerations when it comes to judging the rightness or wrongness of their infringement (Dubreuil, 2011). Under this gradualistic view of the moral domain, there are no perceived moral rules, on the one hand, or perceived conventional rules, on the other, but rather a continuum of manners of understanding certain infractions. Some of these are more prototypically universalized, whereas, at the other extreme, others can be more easily relativized, depending on context 9. In some cases, the perception of pure conventionality could be seen as the perception of a merely “notional” confrontation. Also this conventionality could eventually become highly moralized through different pathways. Findings by psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, or experimental philosophers such as Shaun Nichols, highlight that emotionally loaded rules that might otherwise be perceived as conventions (particularly relatively conventional rules related to disgust) tend to elicit a strongly moralistic response among certain populations (Haidt et al., 1993; Nichols, 2002). It appears that strongly felt emotions act here as a cue triggering a moral heuristic, thus hampering some rules from being easily relativized. But even in this instance, as suggested by the results in Kelly et al. (2007), temporal or spatial distance might attenuate the moralizing force associated with these emotions. 3.3. Perceptions of necessity In his criticism of the unreflective state of traditional societies, Williams further articulates his idea of the incompatibility of diverging moral claims. It is not enough, he argues, to conclude that two different modes of cultural life are incompatible. In his opinion, one should arrive at such a conclusion for the right reasons. Williams writes: “They may not have been wrong in thinking that their social order was necessary for them. It is rather the way in which they saw it as necessary —as religiously or 9 Here, we are advocating moderate syncretism. We are aware that this gradualistic view fits badly with Williams’ claim that “it is always too early or too late” for relativism to appear (ELP 158-159). Williams surely had in mind, when using this metaphor, the necessity of assuming a uniform social context if we wish to secure a robust pattern of moral reasoning within a group, along with the difficulty of overcoming such moral pattern in later years, and for that reason he added the ‘too late’ point. Moral-domain theory, however, would surely help to modulate Williams’ resistance to the gradual development of a relativistic thinking. A possible path on this gradualistic direction would lead us to notice that an early understanding of the relative conventionality of certain rules (the fact that even young children understand that it may be both “OK” and “Not OK” to break a given rule, depending on the situation) can support an early grasp of the relativity of certain moral judgments. 13 metaphysically necessary— that we cannot now accept” (ELP, p.183). The above quote may offer insight into why some divergence of values may be seen as particularly conflictual. The phenomenon, sometimes called “normative moralization” (Fessler & Navarrete, 2003), by which arbitrary patterns of social behavior are perceived as intrinsically “correct”, has long puzzled anthropologists. What could be driving these processes of normative moralization? Many different hypotheses have been suggested. Particularly interesting for the idea of relativism of distance is a result reported by psychologists Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley. They have found support for the idea that it may be a lack of attention to possible alternative social configurations which sometimes drives the moralization of certain domains. Specifically, Goodwin and Darley (2010) have shown that a measure of abilities in disjunctive thinking —the ability to think of alternative possibilities for the solution of a specific problem— correlates better than do other classical psychological measures that tend to treat moral dilemmas as not having an objective answer. Although this finding need further empirical corroboration, we view it as consistent with Williams’ hypothesis on traditionalistic moral objectivism about which he states that “it is tempting to say that they did not know of alternatives to their social arrangements and thought that their social order was necessary” (ELP, p. 180). Goodwin and Darley also found that participants who tended to opt for objectivist responses in moral dilemmas —i.e. participants who often affirmed that two different moral claims regarding the same issue could not be true at the same time— were less imaginative and had less to say when giving an explanation about the source of a certain moral disagreement. They also showed other factors to be correlated with individual differences in attitudes towards moral relativism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, belief in God as a source of moral truth was a good predictor for judging that a series of moral dilemmas have an objective solution (and thus judging that diverging moral claims cannot simultaneously be true). Perceptions of social necessity thus appear to help account for both folk moral realism (Pölzler, 2017) and the effect of distance on relativism. However, besides these perceptions of social necessity, perceptions of normative necessities (basic epistemic and practical rules) governing groups different from our own would also shape our moral judgment. For instance, the acceptance of other groups’ moral norms can be facilitated when the acts that would otherwise be condemned are presented in terms of different beliefs about the best means to achieve certain ends. Within philosophy a distinction is often made between ought-judgments, or judgments about what is supported by conclusive reasons, and judgments about rationality, i.e. appraisals based on relationships of internal coherence between the agent’s attitudes (Broome 2013)10. 10 Maybe in the cases at hand, perceiving the internal coherence of others (again, even when we know that there are 14 In the psychological literature the interpretation of these cases is slightly different. These divergent beliefs about the best means to attain certain ends are referred to as different “informational assumptions” held by different reference groups (Wainryb 1993), as opposed to different moral beliefs or different moral values. We know from this research on moral reasoning that what other people believe about the efficacy of certain types of behavior (whether, for instance, parents in a given culture believe that spanking helps children learn) is relevant information that tends to decrease moral condemnation. More surprisingly, however, these studies also suggest that highlighting the presence of different moral beliefs, as opposed to different informational beliefs, may turn what is perceived to be a notional confrontation (with an aspect of conventionality) into a more conflictual confrontation. This agrees with Williams’ ideas on the effect of beliefs concerning metaphysical necessity and moral conflict. Notably, it suggests that metarepresentational capacities (how salient it is to us the way other people conceive of the scope of a norm as universal) may be key in shaping our moral stance towards them. Here, we have shown that empirical findings highlight how a number of dimensions influence the folk psychological relativization of moral condemnation: perceptions of temporal and spatial distance in relation to how conflict is perceived; the importance of how the action is construed in terms of the informational beliefs and expectations that surround it; and possibly, the perception of alternative social arrangements. As shown by an increasing number of studies in this domain, “the folk” can accept the relativity of certain moral judgments in different areas, while rejecting such relativism in other areas. Were we to disregard how human beings behave in this sense, we would be at loss to offer a proposal on moral relativism and its effects. 4. The meta-ethical import of the relativism of distance In the previous section, we discussed the empirical consistency of the relativism of distance. However, Williams’ proposal was not simply to add a new and empirically informed meta-ethical position to the debate on relativism. He sought to “turn the question of relativism around” (ELP, p. 161). In this section we consider that aspiration as a different approach to meta-ethics. In developing his implicit program of meta-ethical reform, Williams largely assumes concepts, theories, and conclusive reasons against their attitudes or choices) could have some effect on the intensity of our moral condemnation. This, by the way, is another classic topic in Williams (Williams 1979). Relevant here is Quintelier et al, 2014, where they find this basic effect: when a person in a vignette does something he or she considers wrong (by their own lights), subjects find what they've done to be more objectively wrong than when the person does not consider what he or she has done to be wrong. 15 distinctions coming from classic discussions on relativism (Stevenson, 1963; Brandt, 1967). Particularly relevant in this regard is the prevalence, in the background framework, of two stages in constructing a meta-ethical theory, both widely assumed by recent philosophical approaches to relativism (Dreier, 2006; Sarkissian 2016): First stage: gathering conceptual stock. Collect moral ideas, linguistic intuitions, and conceptual platitudes and pay special attention to those related to deep moral disagreement, contradiction, rational resolvability, etc.. Second stage: accommodating the evidence. Propose a unified and systematic theory that can make sense of or vindicate our moral experience in light of the evidence gathered in the first stage. The above stages summarize much of the work being done in recent meta-ethics. In the particular case of relativism, great effort has been aimed at accommodating some core conceptual intuitions, (sometimes apparently contradictory, e.g. contending that in deep disagreements both parties are faultless, or contending that when disagreeing both parties cannot be right) by proposing a unified theory on the meaning, truth-conditions or logical form of basic moral terms. For Williams, on the other hand, theorizing about relativism constitutes a commitment to modifying the above requirements, both in terms of their content and relative priority. Accordingly, it is no longer so much a matter of paying attention to our conceptual intuitions about idealized cases of moral disagreement, as it is, firstly, a matter of focusing on the actual reactions of agents involved in situations of moral exclusion with other agents located in specific cultural settings. We might ask if we should use this empirical input to build, on a second stage, an explanation of what moral relativism can plausibly be. The explanation, as we explain below, is not necessarily unified. More precisely: First stage modified: gathering evidence concerning people’s reactions. Focus on the actual reactions and beliefs of agents in positions of moral exclusion relative to other agents located in specific cultural settings at varying distances. Second stage modified: explaining the evidence. Propose an explanation, not necessarily unified, that can make sense of the evidence gathered in the first stage. Three points should be noted regarding the above requirements. First, we would like to stress the importance of cultural and social information in First stage modified. In recent debates on relativism, there is a strong tendency to 16 focus on highly idealized situations to stir conceptual intuitions, imaginary cases in which the only relevant information is about the evidence shared by the opposing parties and the level of rationality of each of them. For Williams, on the contrary, empirical meta-ethics is concerned not only about being more systematic in gathering conceptual evidence about such idealized cases (e.g. by doing actual surveys, this being in line with current experimental philosophy); it is also concerned about focusing on people’s reactions when confronted with thickly described scenarios, culturally enriched conflicts against which they must project the scope of their moral opinions. The second important aspect of Williams’ implicit revisionary approach to meta-ethics is his early endorsement of the variability of our moral reactions as a guiding principle for meta-ethics (Gill, 2009). Williams’ basic insight, we recall, was that if relativism is true as a descriptive claim, i.e. if we are willing to limit the scope of our moral thinking, it can be so only in cases of notional confrontations. For the remaining contexts and potential disagreements, we think in a universalistic way, taking our moral opinions as universal in scope. Here we argue, taking into account much of the recent empirical literature on this subject, that this implies that if we wish to offer an accurate second-order description of our relativistic thinking, we should provide a dual account. This dual account would refer to a default, universalistic-style way of thinking, but also to a more localized relativistic way of thinking, one activated through an imaginative exercise mediated by cultural and social information. And it surely implies the recognition that even for those contexts where we think as relativists, different styles of relativistic thinking must be expected. What does this commitment to the importance of the actual reactions and beliefs imply? Again, given recent findings, it favors the view that we deliver different kinds of explanations when coping with the different contexts of our relativistic thinking. Maybe the functional and psychological factors underlying our default universalistic mode of thinking are different from the functions and psychological processes involved in the cases where we ‘relativize’. But they may be different even in kind: in one case we could appeal to functional and psychological explanations while in other cases historical and sociological factors may be more explanatory. The crucial point, in any case, is that no unifying explanatory model (much less a bold appeal to logical relativization) will give coherence to the variability of our style of thinking regarding the perceived scope of our moral opinions. This explanatory pluralism is another gain from Williams’ empirically based meta-ethics. Conclusion The influence of Bernard Williams for moral philosophy in the last 50 years has been undeniable. However, his relativism of distance has gone mostly unnoticed, at least in mainstream debates on relativism. With some exceptions (Jenkins, 2006), Williams’ proposal has been considered a peculiar view, opinions ranging from labeling it as deeply 17 revisionary (Rovane, 2008) to describing it as a suggestive approach, but one touching tangential issues not straightforwardly connected to the standard and well-established debates on relativism (Fricker, 2010). Here we offer what we consider an updated reenactment of the relativism of distance. According to our interpretation, Williams’ relativism is simply a description of our tendency to limit the scope of our moral opinions when we cannot imagine ourselves living in the same society as the opposite party. We have claimed that this basic intuition stands for a peculiar second-order descriptive claim, a psychologically framed one; we have also noted that Williams’ insight is consistent with a set of experimental studies on folk-relativism and that some predictions worth testing can be advanced by taking it into account. Thus, besides of being empirically well supported, the relativism of distance truly prompts thinking about the shape and content of empirically informed meta-ethics. “Moral relativism” has had a multiplicity of references and denoted different concepts in academic moral philosophy during the last century. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, we can say that while at one extreme there might be only one way of being a moral universalist (moral absolutism), there are in fact many different ways of manifesting relativism in moral judgment (Beebe, 2010). This multiplicity implies that questioning how a certain form of relativism (such as relativism of distance) relates to “moral relativism in general” might be ill-founded to the extent that there is no such a thing as “moral relativism in general” (except of course by terminological fiat). Such multiplicity might help to explain why some controversies on the nature and status of relativism have been so bitter and long-lasting11. 11 Special thanks should be given to Fernando Aguiar, Fernando Broncano, Pierrick Bourrat, Toni Gomila, Anton Leist, Gabi Lipede, Eduardo Pérez Navarro, Manuel de Pinedo, Alejandro Rosas, José Ramón Torices, Carissa Véliz, and Neftalí Villanueva for very helpful comments and criticism. Research for this paper was funded by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) through the Research Project ‘La constitución del sujeto en la interacción social’ - FFI2015-67569-C2-1-P. 18 References - Baumard, N. (2010). Comment nous sommes devenus moraux: une histoire naturelle du bien et du mal. Odile Jacob. - Beebe, J. R. (2010). Moral relativism in context, Noûs, 44(4): 691-724. - Benningson, T. (1999). The Truth in Vulgar Relativism, Philosophical Studies, 96: 269-301 - Brandt, R. (1967). 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