When Does Understanding Another Person's Moral System Become Stockholm Syndrome?
[This article, by Dr Ray Prebble, follows directly on from “On Being a
Garbled Relativist”, republished at Urtica
Ferox on 18 March 2020. It is adapted from a chapter in Ray’s forthcoming
book, A Guide for the Modern Thinker:
Meditations on the Universe and the Plight of Humanity. To a large extent
it is self-contained, but readers will get more from it by reading “On Being a
Garbled Relativist” first.]
I know from experience that if you
are unfamiliar with the discussion in this area, the concept of cultural relativism
and the arguments against it can take a while to sink in. So let’s step back
and take stock. Cultural relativism is based on the idea that, as a matter of
fact, cultures differ in their moral views. That is its strength. Having said
this, no moral conclusions can be drawn about how different cultures with
different moral systems ought to
treat each other. That is its weakness. It is a serious weakness. By arguing
that moral views are merely the product of a culture, the relativist has
removed any possibility of making any sort of moral judgements that apply across cultures.
This means the relativist is
obliged, like a non-interventionist God, to sit back and let the party roll. It
is akin to watching goats butt their heads together, or a lion stalk a gazelle
at the waterhole. There are no moral judgements we can apply to these
situations: they simply are. The fact
that people, unlike lions, are able to reflect on their actions and therefore
come up with what they themselves take to be moral “reasons” for acting one way
or another, is irrelevant. They are simply doing what they do and that’s all
there is to it. Of course no cultural relativist will agree with this: they
will shout and fret and call me names. But they are committed to it by their
own theory. Moral relativism effectively extinguishes morality as many people
understand it. This is why the United Nations, especially when involved in
violent clashes of cultures such as in Rwanda or Bosnia during the 1990s,
appears impotent. It is paralysed by relativism.
I have been criticising relativism
both for its incoherence and for its consequences, and instead I have been
developing the argument that moral decisions, even when in conflict across the
cultural divide, can be discussed and reason applied to them. But all of the
arguments have involved examining the implications of holding a relativist theory
as a response to moral diversity. Now I want to look at a problem with
relativism that has to do with its central assumption of moral diversity.
Diversity, difference, is where relativism gets its toehold, and we have been
simply accepting diversity as a fact. Indeed, in looking at how people end up
with moral systems I tended to assume that moral diversity is inevitable. But
let’s look more closely at the claim that people and cultures differ widely in
their moral views.
To
do this I want you to picture a hypothetical scenario. You wake with a start in
the middle of the night, alone in bed (either because you sleep alone or your
partner is absent). You are convinced you heard a noise from inside your house.
Heart pounding, you creep out of your bedroom into the lounge to investigate the
thud that still echoes in your brain. Suddenly, silhouetted against the window,
you see the figure of a large man with a bag of stolen goods in his hand. You
turn, dash down the hall and into your bedroom, slam the door, which doesn’t
lock. You think about the fact that your visiting sister is in the bedroom,
down the other end of the house – past the lounge – but, recalling the gruesome
home invasions on the news, you turn and squeeze out your bedroom window, fall
into a rose bush, crash through a hedge, then trip over a fence railing and
sprain your ankle as you tumble onto the street. There, guilty about saving
yourself but glad to be alive, gasping for breath, bleeding from a dozen
lacerations and grimacing at your rapidly swelling joint, you recall the
full-sized Santa Claus you kept overnight in the lounge for the children’s
Christmas party the next day.
Your actions were based on your
beliefs, in particular your belief that there was a large, potentially violent
burglar in your lounge. On the basis of that belief your actions were
reasonable: there had been violent attacks by burglars in the neighbourhood,
and, in the light of this knowledge, your hectic and violent escape, which
caused you substantial injury, was the right thing to do. On the other hand, if
you had not had this belief, it would
have been utter madness to dive out your bedroom window into a rose bush: it
would have been entirely the wrong
thing to do.
On the face of it, the person who
chuckles and flicks on the light switch to reveal the Santa Claus and the
person who runs in total panic would not seem to share the same beliefs about
appropriate ways of acting. Yet the only thing that distinguishes them is a
very specific belief about the world: one believes there is a threatening
intruder, the other believes there is a harmless manikin, and on the basis of
those differing beliefs they act totally differently: one acts extremely
violently, leading to injury; the other acts calmly and peacefully.
Now we know that these “two”
individuals have the same beliefs about appropriate ways of acting because they
are the same person in our scenario: they have the same moral system. We don’t
know much about this moral system, of course, but we can be safe in assuming
that these individuals don’t differ morally: they are merely reacting
differently on the basis of different beliefs about their immediate environment.
Ethicists are immensely fond of
stretching people’s moral imaginations by first getting them to accept a moral
rule, such as that killing an innocent person is wrong, and then getting them
to imagine a scenario (such as an out-of-control train) that involves a choice
between sacrificing the life of an innocent person or letting 10, or 100,
innocent people die. “What would you
do?” the ethicist smugly asks Sarah, a baffled first-year student.
If the participant in this ethical
thought experiment finally admits that she would kill the single innocent
person, do we assume that her moral system has changed? Or would we conclude that the moral decision forced upon
her was based on very specific beliefs about what is likely to happen as a
result of her actions in this situation? She still believes that killing
innocent people is wrong, but she is suddenly faced with what she now perceives
to be degrees of wrongness: killing
100 innocent people is wronger than killing one innocent person. And let’s face
it: choosing between degrees of wrongness aptly sums up a huge proportion of
the moral decisions we have to make.
This is why it is unrealistic to
define a moral system purely in terms of the content of a simple list of
unqualified moral statements to which an individual does or does not agree,
such as the Ten Commandments. One could insist that before the Ethics 101
lecture Sarah believed killing innocent people is wrong, and that after the
lecture Sarah believes killing innocent people is right. But in fact all that
we have shown is the complexity of moral decision-making. Sarah hasn’t changed
from a nice girl into a psychopath. She was tricked into agreeing to an overly
simplistic moral rule and made to see that life is sometimes not that simple.
(To the criticism that there are few situations in which we have to decide
whether to kill one or a hundred people, one could reply that military
commanders regularly face just such decisions.)
Parents encounter the complexity of
moral rules the hard way: after teaching their child not to lie, they blanch in
horror as their three-year-old girl tells her grandmother, when asked, that her
new hairstyle looks horrible. To be workable, all moral rules must be seen as
general guidelines that need to be interpreted when applied to specific
situations, which is why traditionally every society has had some form of moral
authority to appeal to when circumstances create a situation where the right
thing to do is unclear. This isn’t due to an absence of moral rules: it is due
to the fact that in the real world there is both right and wrong in many
actions, and judgements need to be made.
In a directly analogous way the law
recognises exceptions to legal rules: killing another human being is illegal in
most societies, but there are usually circumstances where it is not illegal,
whether this be in time of war, in self-defence, because the person didn’t mean
to, because your wife was unfaithful, and so on. In these circumstances a
simple “Thou shalt not kill” has not been seen as adequate to cover the
staggering variety of human experience and mitigating circumstances that are
revealed in court cases.
But, we might ask, why is it that
gaining more factual information
about what happened in a particular situation helps us to make moral decisions? Is it possible that the
real decision, in many cases, relates to non-moral rather than moral factors?
This doesn’t seem to be
unreasonable. In court cases we want to know precisely what happened in order
to pass a legal judgement. What were the circumstances, was there a motive, was
the act premeditated, what was the sequence of events leading up to the action
in question, what happened afterwards, was there remorse? This kind of factual
information is crucial in a court case, and in sentencing, so it doesn’t seem
unreasonable to assume it might also be crucial in reaching a decision about
whether an action was morally wrong. You can’t just look at the category of
action itself − for example, hurting another person − and pass moral judgement.
You have to get inside the particular circumstances of the situation first.
This seems undeniable.
Relativist anthropologists advanced
a long way down this road. In the course of explaining the development of the
term “cultural relativism”, Robert Redfield notes that it came to be believed
by anthropologists that it is wrong to stop at the point of saying, “These
people think it is right to …”, with the blank filled in by some practice deemed
morally reprehensible in the speaker’s own culture. One has to get inside the situation, inside the heads
of the individuals involved, and understand “why these things were done and
thought right and good”. When this exercise was carried out, Redfield remarks:
the shock of
the different began to disappear as it came to be understood that each
traditional way of life was a somewhat coherent statement, in thought and
action, of a good life. Seen in context, most customs then showed a
reasonableness, a fitness with much of the life, that allowed the outsider more
easily to understand and more reluctantly to condemn.[1]
If to understand is not to condemn,
and to forgive, this may be because one is saying that in that particular situation, I would think and act in the same way
because I understand and agree with the moral reasoning involved. Having taken
on the non-moral knowledge and beliefs of this initially apparently very
different individual from another culture, including the consequences of acting
in certain ways, I find myself agreeing with them in their moral choices. It
now seems a very short step, like a good cultural relativist, to respecting the
moral systems of other cultures.
In effect, though, this does away
with the original perceived moral difference rather than bolstering any reason
for respecting moral difference. It appeared
as if you had a radically different moral system, but in fact the moral
differences could be accounted for by differences in non-moral beliefs and
knowledge. This is what the sensitive anthropologist is experiencing when
immersed in a different culture. The question then becomes: Is what happens to
the anthropologist in a foreign culture equivalent to what happens in Ethics
101? Has there been a change in moral system, or a refinement of the original
moral system based on new information about the world and the way things
(including societies) work?
The implications of how this
question is answered are huge. Because the steps in reasoning the cultural
relativist takes are as follows:
1.
I thought the actions of this individual from another culture were
morally wrong.
2.
However, once I came to understand the reasons for their actions I came to
think they were morally right.
3.
Therefore we ought not to morally condemn the actions of individuals from another
culture.
But of course 3 does not follow from
1 and 2. The logical implications need to be worked through more strictly:
1.
I thought the actions of this individual from another culture were morally
wrong.
2.
However, once I came to understand the reasons for their actions I came to
think they were morally right.
3.
Therefore, in order to pass moral judgements about the actions of an individual
from another culture, we need to understand their reasons for acting the way
they do.
It may not seem like it at first,
but this is a big difference. If one
lives with a tribe and comes to see why they abandon old and sick people to
die, and even morally condone it, that does not give any support whatsoever to
a blanket prohibition on morally judging other cultures. It does give support
to the idea that before you judge you should try to understand. If the proponents of moral diversity go about erecting
knowledge walls around cultures, which imply that no-one from outside the
culture can ever truly understand their reasons for acting, then they have
effectively cut off the possibility of any kind of moral discourse. A resort to
a wholesale prohibition on moral intervention then becomes inevitable. This is
why it is crucial to challenge others’ beliefs. To unthinkingly respect them is
simply to put them in the too-hard basket. It is to shy away from engaging with
people different from you concerning the most important aspects of life.
The requirement to gather
information about a moral situation falls under what has been called an
“epistemic duty”, which is nicely summed up by the philosopher Mark Rowlands: “[An epistemic duty] is the duty to subject
one’s beliefs to the appropriate amount of critical scrutiny: to examine
whether they are warranted by the available evidence and to at least attempt to
ascertain whether or not there exists any countervailing evidence.” He continues, rather pessimistically, “Today
we have scant regard for epistemic duty: so sparingly is it honoured that most
people would not even regard it as a duty (and this, itself, is a failure of
epistemic duty).”[2]
I’m
not sure this is a problem of modern life: people have always been reluctant to
subject their own beliefs to suitable scrutiny. Rowlands is not just saying
that if you want to be taken seriously then you need to produce the evidence
from Wikipedia: he is implying that you are morally culpable if you don’t find out
relevant information. Ignorance is not an excuse. If you buy a dog and don’t
realise it needs water, and it dies, then you are morally to blame (Rowlands
would say you are evil). Finding out information is an essential part of making
a moral decision, and a failure to find out information can mean you make a
very bad moral decision.
In a nutshell, then: a true test of
moral diversity is to fully understand another person’s reasons for acting as
they do, including the beliefs they have about the world and in particular the
situation in which they are acting, and then ask yourself, “If I were in that
situation, with that information and those non-moral
beliefs, would I act differently?” If the answer is no, then it is worth asking
in what sense you are operating with a different moral system. In some ways
this is similar to the “reasonable person” notion applied in legal cases. Given
this situation, what could we expect a reasonable person to do? The answer to
this question can determine whether someone is acquitted of murder. If a juror,
after hearing all the weeks of evidence in a complex case, believes that in a
similar situation they would have acted in the same way, then they are likely
to morally absolve the defendant and consequently seek to legally absolve them
as well.
“Surely this is absurd,” you
splutter, and here I will flesh out what I take will be many people’s reaction:
This
is madness. You seem to be confusing gaining knowledge of another culture with Stockholm
syndrome, whereby close association with someone who has kidnapped you, say, will
bring you around to their way of thinking. But, first off, everybody knows that
this involves a change in moral
thinking; and second, it is generally viewed as irrational, a psychological
aberration.
More generally, are you really
saying that there is, after all, no moral
diversity? That if, through circumstances, a person from one culture ends up in
another culture with a different set of non-moral beliefs and knowledge, which
result in different moral actions, then if that person adopts the moral actions
of their new culture they leave their own moral system intact? It just looks as if a moral change has taken
place? If so, doesn’t this make the whole concept of a moral system completely
empty and absurd?
My reply would be, first, to stress
that my aim is to suggest that moral diversity has been over-exaggerated rather
than to argue that it is non-existent. It has been over-exaggerated because all
of the emphasis is placed on the end results of the moral reasoning process in
terms of words and actions. But just as we did when attempting to explain the
extreme actions of the person fleeing the Santa Claus, we need to work back to
the basis of these words and actions.
And this introduces my second point.
Cultural relativism hinges on the
idea that moral values simply arise as preferred ways of acting in a society,
and as such there is nothing to choose between them. You think sex before
marriage is right, I think it is wrong, and we can go no further. But if we
admit, as in the case of the shadowy Santa, that moral choices are also based
on other beliefs about the world, this raises the real possibility that these
other beliefs are of a kind that can
be debated fruitfully, such that one belief can be shown to be right and one
wrong. If this is so, it follows that the moral beliefs that stem directly from
non-moral beliefs can be shown to be either right or wrong.
In discussions about moral and
cultural relativism the focus is almost always on the moral beliefs themselves,
not on what underpins them, but this is precisely where the argument should be
happening. If a startled neighbour, hauling on his dressing gown, asks you what
you are doing standing bleeding and naked in the street, if you managed to
collect your dignity and thoughts sufficiently in such a situation you might
say, “Based on my belief that there was an intruder in my lounge who meant to
do me harm, I decided that the best course of action involved rapid and extreme
retreat, despite causing personal injury. I now realise that I was mistaken in
my initial belief, and so I have to admit that my decision to act in that way
was wrong. I ought not to have acted as I did.”
By emphasising moral diversity,
cultural relativism erects a no-go area around one of the most crucial aspects
of life by declaring there is no room for debate: moral beliefs and actions
simply cannot be compared, judged or justified because they are based on
culture, and culture is simply what it is, a given. This is what Sam Harris
means when he argues that religious
tolerance is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. It is
because tolerance (let alone respect) entails an end to all argument. If one
ought to tolerate (or respect) the actions and beliefs of another, no matter
what they are based on, then there is no longer any room for negotiation. End
of story. Cultural relativism eliminates the possibility of any sort of dialogue
between cultures.
Rejecting cultural relativism is not
a popular move, and it usually inspires knee-jerk “You’re a Nazi” responses. But
the enormous benefit of starting to look at things in this way is that it at
least allows for the possibility of discussion and resolution of differences. If you decide that the difference
between you and someone you are arguing with is entirely moral, then it would
seem there is no possibility of any further discussion. However, pursuing a
moral argument to its core, thrashing out differences in knowledge, beliefs and
non-moral perspectives, has the potential to achieve much, much more. It is
only by being sceptical about the degree of
moral diversity promoted by relativists that the clash of cultures can ever be
ameliorated.
Another way of putting this − and I apologise
for hammering the point home but it is crucial and bears reiteration − is that
apparently very different people may share common values. This should not come
as a great surprise because of the universality of the human condition. Barring
disease and other physiological and psychological abnormalities, we all feel pain
and joy, want to be loved, and feel more protective of those close to us than
we do of strangers. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying one can base an entire
non-relativist moral system on a few common human needs. What I am saying is
that having common needs will tend people towards common values, even if beliefs
about the best practical way to realise these values differs, and manifests
itself in apparently divergent moral systems. This is why even though different
groups tend to come up with different ways of doing things, which is the
assumption we started with, if the problems people face and the needs they have
are similar, then chances are moral diversity will often be more apparent than
real.
“What about a Jew arguing with a
Christian and a Muslim?, you say. “Are you going to drill down into their
non-moral beliefs and convince them all they aren’t really different?” My
reply: yes, many moral beliefs are based on religious beliefs, but religious
beliefs can be argued about just like other non-moral beliefs, especially when
they hinge on the interpretation of a text. The histories of these three
religions are drenched in arguments about interpretation, textual and
otherwise, but I will get to that in my next article.
One real-world example of the
recognition of moral similarity in the face of apparent cultural diversity can
be seen in the wording of the European Union’s Constitution. Part II of The
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union begins (my emphasis):
The peoples of Europe, in creating an
ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values.
Conscious of its spiritual and moral
heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and
solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. It
places the individual at the heart of its activities, by establishing the
citizenship of the Union and by creating an area of freedom, security and
justice.
The Union contributes to the
preservation and to the development of these common values while respecting the diversity of the cultures
and traditions of the peoples of
Europe as well as the national identities of the Member States and the
organisation of their public authorities at national, regional and local
levels; it seeks to promote balanced and sustainable development and ensures
free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and the freedom of
establishment.[3]
In other words, cultures may differ
greatly − and the EU explicitly recognises this − but there may still be a
shared system not only of “common values” but of “universal values”, which are intended to act as the glue to hold
this hotch-potch of cultures together. The less-important differences in
“cultures and traditions” that don’t impinge on these shared values are to be
respected − but this is very different from respecting cultural behaviours purely
on the basis that they arise in a different culture.
Of
course, as is becoming increasingly clear, this noble-minded balancing act
between universal values and diversity of cultures is difficult to sustain, and
may well not survive Brexit followed closely by the Covid-19 pandemic. But one
of the strongest criticisms of the EU is that it has ended up being run by an
unelected bureaucracy, despite democracy being one of its two founding
principles. It may well turn out that the idea of trying to form a
supranational entity with a single culture was doomed from the start, and that
it is crucially important for groups to have their own ways of doing things in
order to feel a sense of belonging and identity. This doesn’t mean discussion
about right and wrong goes out the window. It becomes even more important, and,
I want to argue, is still possible. We can
keep talking about what is right and wrong.
[1]
R Redfield, Human Nature and the Study of Society: The Papers of Robert
Redfield, ed. M.P. Redfield, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1962, pp.
458−459.
[3]
http://www.unizar.es/euroconstitucion/library/constitution_29.10.04/part_II_EN.pdf.
Accessed 25 October 2010.
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