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COMPLETIONRELATIVISM All of these problems for a Fictionalist relativism about morality trace back to the assumption that our target utterance: ‘‘It would be wrongofPaul to steal Mark’s car’’ expresses a complete truth-evaluable proposition. Once that assumption is in place, there is no alternative but to embrace an Error Theory of that utterance, and, given a propositional construal of moral codes, no alternative but to take a relativistic conception of it as involving its entailment by a set of similar, though moregeneral, false propositions. Thequestion, therefore, quickly suggests itself: is that assumption optional? To get away from absolute facts about morality, all we really need is for judgmentsof theform: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car to be untrue; we don’t have to think of them as false. An obvious alternative, then, is to think of the relativist as having discovered that the target judgments suffer not from Error but from Incompleteness, and so as calling for their completion by reference to moral codes. Call this Completion Relativism. Couldn’t we use Completion Relativism to generate a more plausible model for moral relativism? In contrast with the view I earlier attributed to him, Judith Jarvis Thomson reads Harman as endorsing precisely such a Completion view. She describes him as claiming that: Moral sentences (such as ‘‘It would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car’’) are in a certain way incomplete; indeed, it is because [such] sentences are incomplete in that way that they lack truth values. …Non-moral sentences such as [‘‘In relation to moral code M, it would be wrong to steal Mark’s car’’] are completions of moral sentences.⁸ So perhaps we simply got off on the wrong track, using the case of motion to motivate a Fictionalist Relativism about morality rather than a Completion Relativism about it. Well, suppose we say that a proposition of the form: It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car is an incomplete proposition, in much the way that: Tomistaller than … ⁸ Harman and Thomson, p. 190.Whatis Relativism? is clearly incomplete. And suppose we try to complete it with: In relation to moral code M, it would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car. Onceagain, though,it is hard to see how tomake sense ofthis. 29 First, we are still operating under the assumption that moral codes are sets of propositions which encode a particular conception of moral prohibition and requirement. That means that a moral code must be seen as consistingin propositions of the form: x is morally wrong. But since wehave just finished saying that particular propositions of the form: x is morally wrong are semantically incomplete, we would have to say the same thing about the more general propositions which are supposed to constitute the moral code, for they are basically propositions of the same general type. But just as it was hard to see how anyone could believe a set of propositions that they knew to be false, so it is hard to see how anyone could believe a set of propositions they knew to be incomplete. Second, if the propositions that constitute the code are incomplete, it is very hard to see how they could constitute a conception of anything, let alone a conception of right and wrong. Before they could be said to amount to a conception of anything, they would have to be completed. But our only idea about how to complete them is by reference to moral codes! And now we would seem to have embarked on a vicious regress in which we never succeed in specifying the conception of permission and prohibition which is supposed to constitute a particular community’s moral code. Third, how are we to understand the phrase ‘‘relative to moral code M’’? Since we have said both that the propositions which constitute a moral code as well as the target propositions are incomplete, that relation cannot be the relation of logical entailment. ‘‘Relative to moral code M,’’ then, must be understood as expressing some non-logical relation that obtains between x’s being morally prohibited and some moral code. But what could such a non-logical relation possibly be? For all of these reasons, then, it looks as though Completion Relativism is not a cogent option either. WHATHASGONEWRONG? The preceding argument establishes, I believe, that if moral relativism consists in the claim that ordinary moral judgments are to be relativized to moral codes, where moral codes consist in general propositions of much the same ilk as the judgments that are to be relativized to them, then there is nothing very coherent30 Paul Boghossian for moral relativism to be. Yet this is, of course, a very familiar conception of moral relativism. What has gone wrong? Why would moral relativism turn out to be not even coherently assertible when the relativisms on which it is based—those concerning mass, motion and simultaneity—are notonly coherentbut true? The first thing to say in response to this question is that the sense in which a Fictionalist Relativism about morality is similar to the successful relativisms drawn from physics is very superficial. The two cases look alike but in fact have very different logical properties. Thus, in the motion case, we say that we have discovered that: ‘‘x moves’’ is untrue, and needs to be replaced by: ‘‘x moves relative to F.’’ Andinthemoralcase wesay thatwehavediscovered that: ‘‘x is wrong’’ is untrue and needsto be replaced by: ‘‘x is wrong relative to moral code M.’’ However,this similarity in surface grammar masks a deep differencein the underlying logical forms. In the moralcase, we are movingfromajudgmentoftheform: xisP to a judgmentoftheform: (x is P) bears R to S. In other words, in the moral case, the replacing proposition is built up out of the old proposition in a quite literal sense: the replacing proposition consists in the claim that the old proposition stands in some sort of contentual relation to a set of propositions that constitute a code. This feature is crucial to the thought that lies at the core of standard conceptions of moral relativism that although we can no longer assert moral judgments in some unqualified way, we can truthfully talk about which of those judgmentsare permitted by different moral codes. In the physics cases, by contrast, while the proposition expressed by ‘‘The Earth moves’’ is of the form: xisP the proposition expressed by the replacing sentence ‘‘The Earth moves relative to F’’ is of the form: xRy;Whatis Relativism? 31 the concept of a monadic property moves has been replaced by the concept of a relational property moves-relative-to, a concept which no more contains moves as a proper part than the concept alternative contains the concept native as a proper part. There is no way to understand the replacing proposition in this case as built up out of the old proposition in the manner that is presupposed by a Fictionalist view of morality. This difference at the level of logical form leads to the problems that attend Fictionalist Relativism. Because, in such a view, the old proposition is retained intact in the new proposition, it carries with it the charge of untruth that launches a relativistic conception. Because the new proposition places the old absolute proposition into a contentual relation to a set of propositions of a very similar nature, that charge carries over to the parameter to which the truth of moral propositions is being relativized. The result becomes something barely intelligible. The moral relativist’s best shot is to say that the original absolute propositions are complete but false. On this option, however, he faces the difficulty of explaining how we are able to accept a set of propositions that we know to be false; and the difficulty of explaining how he avoids commitment to there being some absolute moral facts somewhere after all, because the falsity of moral prohibitions seems to entail the existence of moral permissions. If he nowattemptstoretreat to the view that the target propositions are incomplete, his problems get even worse: for now he faces the difficulty of saying how alternative moral codes could be alternative conceptions of the moral facts and how proposition fragments could complete, in the required way, the incomplete character of the target propositions. None of these problems arise in the physics cases because in those cases the old proposition is discarded and is simply replaced with a new relational proposition, which, it turns out, is the only truth that there is in the vicinity of the old judgments. CODES AS IMPERATIVES Well, why isn’t the lesson of these considerations that we should hew to the physics model far more closely? Why couldn’t we formulate a satisfactory moral relativism by saying that in the moral case, It would be wrong of Paul tosteal Mark’s car is discovered to be untrue and is to be replaced not by: [It would be wrong of Paul to steal Mark’s car] is entailed by moral code M but rather by: Paul stealing Mark’s car is wrong-relative-to M,32 Paul Boghossian where the hyphenation makes clear that we are now talking about a replacement proposition of the form ‘‘xRy’’? Wewill turn to looking at what this might mean in a moment, but before we do so, we should pause to remark on a small puzzle that attends the cases that are drawnfromphysics. The puzzle can be put as follows. If my account of the physics cases is correct, classical motion judgments are untrue. If anything in their vicinity is true, it is not those original motion judgments but some other judgments, with a different logical form and involving distinct concepts. But how could the truth of these other judgments, which donotthemselvesinvolvetheconceptofmotion,amount to the discovery that a relativism about motion is true? If I replace talk of phlogiston with talk of oxygen, that is not a way of discovering the atomic nature of phlogiston. Why do we take ourselves to have discovered that motion is relative? In the usual account of things, there is supposed to be a distinction between eliminativism and relativism. In the case of the former, we respond to the discovery that a domain of discourse is systematically untrue by rejecting that discourse and, possibly, substituting some other discourse in its place. In the case of the latter, we respond by declaring that we have discovered the truths in that domain to be relative in nature. But how are we to make out this distinction between eliminativism and relativism if, even in the classic cases of alleged relativism, what we get is the wholesale replacement of one set of judgments by another? Why aren’t all cases, including the famous ones from physics, just cases of eliminativism? This puzzle would be solved if, say in the case of motion, there were a more general concept, , itself neither absolutist nor relativist, such that both the absolutist and the relativistic notions could be seen to be subspecies of it. I think it is likely that there is such a concept, but I won’t attempt to define one now. It will suffice for present purposes to point out that, given that a relativist view of a given domain always involves the replacement of the original absolute judgments by certain relational judgments, we need to be shown that these two sets of judgments are sufficiently intimately related to each other, in the sense just gestured at, to justify our saying that what we have on our hands is relativism and not eliminativism. Let us call this the requirement of intimacy. Let us turn, now, to the question of what moral relativism would look like if it assumed anon-Fictionalist form of Replacement Relativism. The two central questions we face are: what relation could ‘‘is-wrong-relativeto’’ be? And what parameter could ‘‘M’’ designate such that specific acts of stealing mightormightnotbear that relation to it? It is already clear from the foregoing considerations, that whatever a moral code is going to be, it cannot consist of a set of propositions. Anatural alternative conception, as I’ve already noted, is to think of it as a set of imperatives, rather than propositions. So let us see how far we can take that idea, which, in any event, might be thought to have independentappeal.Whatis Relativism? If moral codeMconsistsof aset of imperatives of the form: Don’tdox! 33 how should we think of the relation ‘‘is-wrong-relative-to’’? A natural suggestion wouldbethat it means ‘‘is one of the acts prohibited by.’’ If we put all this together, and we remind ourselves of the importance of including a reference to the speaker’s endorsement of a particular code, we get the following account: ‘‘Paul’s stealing Mark’s car is wrong-relative-to M’’ means: Paul’s stealing Mark’s car is one of the acts prohibited by the set of imperatives, M, which I, the speaker, accept. Howwelldoesthisproposal fare? PROBLEMS FOR IMPERATIVALMORAL RELATIVISM One immediate question concerns the requirement of intimacy.Howarewe going to show that the replacing and replaced propositions are sufficiently intimately related to justify our saying that we have shown moral truths to be relative? How are we to ward off the suggestion that what we have here instead is just moral nihilism, with moral discourse discarded in favor of some replacement where we talk not of what is good and bad but only of what is and is not permitted according to imperatives that we accept and choose to live our lives by? This story would be easier to fill in, if we could explain what makes a given set of imperatives moral imperatives. The relativist’s idea is that moral judgments need to be relativized to moral codes. On the propositional construal, it was quite clear what made the relevant codes moral: they were constituted by propositions which encoded particular conceptions of moral right and wrong. That conception of moral codes, however, proved unworkable for the purposes of relativism. On the imperatival construal, however, we simply have a set of imperatives without any distinctive moral content. What makes these imperatives moral imperatives as opposed to some other sort of injunction? Clearly, we would have to look not to the imperatives themselves, but to their acceptance by agents to see what might distinguish them from imperatives of another variety—prudential imperatives, for example, or aesthetic ones. There had better be something distinctive about the acceptance of moral imperatives for otherwise we would nothave pinneddownthatwearerelativizingtoaspecifically moral code. But it is far from clear that there is such a distinctive state of mind.⁹ ⁹ For a particularly sophisticated account see Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).34 Paul Boghossian Afurther problem that attends the imperatival construal concerns its ability to capture norms of permission. Let me explain. As we have already had occasion to note, moral norms might be either norms of permission or norms of requirement. We may be required to do something, A, under particular conditions, C, or simply permitted to do it. Imperatives, however, are, by definition, of the form: If C, do A. It is this logical form that marks them out as non-propositional—incapable of assessment as true or false. However, it is not clear how something of imperatival form is going to capture a norm of permission, a norm that merely allows doing A if C but does not require it. If I issue the imperative: ‘‘If that car doesn’t belong to you, don’t scratch it’’ I amrequiringyou nottoscratch it, not merely permitting it. For that reason, it is very hard to see how imperatives alone could constitute a fully satisfactory construal of what moral codes are. A further problem for the imperatival construal will be familiar from our discussion of the propositional construal. In that discussion, we saw that the relativist had difficulty accommodating the normative character of moral judgments, even after the thinker’s endorsement of a particular moral code is brought into the picture. (17) In relation to (propositional) moral code M, which I, the speaker, accept, it would be wrong ofPaul tosteal Mark’s car. As I pointed out, this still seems to be a descriptive remark about which beliefs one has, rather than a genuinely normative remark about what ought and ought not to be done. This problem, it seems to me, only intensifies on the imperatival construal whose counterpart of (17) is: In relation to the set of imperatives, M, which, I, the speaker, accept, it is prohibited for Paul to steal Mark’s car. The final and probably most important objection to the imperatival construal derives froman observation wehadoccasiontomakeearlier—namely,thatmoral codes are normally expressed through the use of indicative sentences that are themselves just more general versions of the sentences by which particular moral judgments are expressed. Thus, it would be natural to say that our moral code, whichcontainsaprohibition against stealing, would be expressed by the sentence: (17) ‘‘Stealing is wrong.’’ Andthis sentence is itself just a general version of the various particular sentences bywhichweexpress ordinarymoral judgmentssuch as:Whatis Relativism? (18) ‘‘Paul’s stealing Mark’s car is wrong.’’ 35 Now, though, if (17) is taken to express an imperatival content roughly given by: Don’t Steal! it’s very hard to see how (18) could have any other sort of content because they are both sentences of exactly the same type, the only difference being that (17) is a generalization of (18). In other words, if the imperatival construal of moral codes is correct, we would appear to have no choice but to take (18) to express the content: (19) Don’t steal Mark’s car, Paul! (18), though, is just the sort of ordinary, unqualified, absolutist sentence that the relativist is going to seek to replace by relational sentences of the form: (20) ‘‘Paul stealing Mark’s car is wrong-relative-to M.’’ on the grounds that there are no absolute facts about morality with which to confirmtheabsolutist sentences. However, if it is really true that (18) expresses an imperatival content of the kind specified by (19), then it is very hard to see what motive there could be to replace it, or how the discovery that there are no absolute moral facts could be relevant to it in any way. Since it just expresses the imperatival content: Don’t Steal Mark’s car, Paul! it has not made any claim; and since it has not made any claim it can hardly be true that it is condemned to having made a false claim; and since it is not condemned to having made a false claim, it can hardly be true that it needs to be replaced on the grounds that it is so condemned. The imperatival construal of moral codes, then, far from showing us how coherently to implement a relativistic view of morality seems rather to make relativism irrelevant and inapplicable. CONCLUSION In this paper, I have attempted to explain how a relativistic conception of a given domain should be understood. And I have then tried to outline the obstacles that stand in the way of extending such a conception to the domains that have most interested philosophers—those of morality and epistemic justification.¹⁰ ¹⁰ In this paper, I have confined myself to talking about the moral case; the epistemic case is treated explicitly in my book Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chs 5–7.36 Paul Boghossian It is natural to wonder whether there is an alternative conception of relativism that would serve some of these traditional philosophical preoccupations better. The mainalternative to the account I have been exploring is provided by the idea that a relativistic conception of a given domain consists in the claim that there can befaultless disagreement in that domain. Here is Crispin Wright: Imagine that Tim Williamson thinks that stewed rhubarb is delicious and that I beg to differ, finding its dry acidity highly disagreeable. There is, on the face of it, no reason to deny that this is a genuine disagreement—each holding to a view that the other rejects. Butitisadisagreementaboutwhich,atleastatfirstpass,theLatinproverb—de gustibus non est disputandum—seems apt. It is, we feel—or is likely to be—a disagreement which there is no point in trying to settle, because it concerns no real matter of fact but is merely an expression of different, permissibly idiosyncratic tastes. Nobody’s wrong. Tim and I should just agree to disagree. Call such a disagreement a dispute of inclination. The view of such disputes just gestured at …combines three elements: That they involve genuinely incompatible attitudes (Contradiction); That nobody need be mistaken or otherwise at fault (Faultlessness), and That the antagonists may, perfectly rationally, stick to their respective views even after the disagreement comes to light and impresses as intractable (Sustainability). According to this characterization, then, relativism about a given domain is the view that there may be faultless disagreement in that domain. One person may assert p and the other not-p, yet it needn’t be the case that either of them is at fault, not merely in the sense that both might be equally rational, but in the far moredemandingsensethat bothmighthave said somethingtrue. But how could any domain pull off such a trick? How could it turn out that a proposition and its negation might both come out true? Remarkably enough, a numberofwriters have recently proposed answers to this question. Wright proposes to make sense of the combination of Contradiction and Faultlessness by invoking his view of truth as super-assertibility. Kit Fine has suggested that we could make sense of it by regarding the opposed judgments as targeting ‘‘different realities’’ (though Fine proposes his solution only in connection with issues about the passage of time and not necessarily in connection with other subject matters). And John MacFarlane has explored the idea that we can make sense of it by regarding the truth of a proposition as settled not just by a world andatimebutalso bya‘‘context of assessment.’’¹¹ I am doubtful that we can ultimately make sense of the notion of a proposition that can sustain faultless disagreement. I don’t see how any such proposition ¹¹ Crispin Wright, ‘Intuitionism, Realism, Relativism and Rhubarb,’ this volume (Ch. 2); Kit Fine, ‘Tense and Reality,’ in his Papers on Tense and Reality (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006); John MacFarlane, ‘Making Sense of Relative Truth,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2003.Whatis Relativism? 37 could serve as the plausible object of belief, the very thing for which the notion of a proposition is needed. I also believe that many of the arguments developed in this paper, about the difficulty of coming up with a satisfactory characterization of the ‘‘standards’’ to which moral or epistemic judgments are to be relativized, will carry over to the conceptions of relativism characterized by faultless disagreement. However, many important questions remain unexplored and there is much interesting work that remains to be done.