Who's to Say?
In which we counter the question that is the bane of all moral philosophy classes
The face of near-certain skepticism as imagined by Bing AI image creator.
It is the bane of all moral philosophy classes. One subscriber to this substack articulates it perfectly. When faced with a moral dilemma, “Students will just state their opinion, and then say everyone's opinion counts.” Some students affect the demeanor of a 4th century BCE Sophist and just challenge the entire enterprise of moral reasoning by uttering, “Who’s to say what’s right?”
This usually comes up within the first couple of class sessions. Some student starts bouncing between skepticism and relativism from one sentence to another. I take that occasion to model some conceptual analysis. It takes patience to slow down and examine and cross-examine these claims but it’s important to deal with them. In another post, I’ll deal with an equally sloppy claim “We shouldn’t play God!”
The student may or may not be serious about figuring out the difference between relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism. I always try to be respectful because behind all these terms is lurking at least one legitimate concern.
“Who’s to Say?” is a legitimate question and it should be taken seriously (whether the student intends to be serious or not).
Sometimes the student is making a claim that there is no final court of appeal for moral questions. They are pointing out the problem of moral authority.
Some students will want to solve the problem of moral authority by an appeal to religious interpretation. However I remind students, even religious authority isn’t a silver bullet. “Thou shalt not murder” by itself doesn’t explain why passive euthanasia (letting die) is acceptable in some cases but not in others. It doesn’t give us direction when we have to decide to separate conjoined twins or wait until one dies. (See “Opening Gambit” Chapter 2 of Practical Bioethics for the case) Even Catholic Healthcare ethics which has one of the most complex models of moral reasoning still has grey areas.
However, we are not completely bereft of moral authority. In the absence of unmediated divine revelation, we are left with moral intuitions that when tested become agreed upon moral principles that coalesce into policies.
The student is right however, when those intuitions, principles and theories clash there is still a question of who’s to decide. Usually that means we appeal to agencies like the American Medical Association code of ethics or the American Nursing Association code of ethics. This isn’t a silver bullet either because the AMA and ANA are periodically revised by, you guessed it, humans. It’s not perfect but its far from no authority at all.
Perhaps sometime this year I will revisit this objection with an extended look at the late bioethicist H. Tristam Englehardt’s pragmatic/skeptical argument in his Foundations of Bioethics
Some times the “Who’s to say” isn’t merely claim about moral authority but also claim about our lack of moral certainty. We can never be certain who’s right, and what do we do when we disagree about what is right?
This is a slightly different claim. The difference between the skeptic and the subjectivist, I explain to my students, is about whether there is a fact of the matter. Skeptics allow there could be a correct moral option but we could never know definitively. The subjectivist says the only fact of the matter about right and wrong is result of our own considered moral judgments.
Okay, Marshal Raylan Givens, put it this way: Skeptics allow that there might be a morally right option but we could never know with certainty if it were so. Subjectivists, on the other hand, deny any moral authority outside the individual. To me, its important to figure out which of these claims the student who speaks up is making
Lots of students are skeptics. They are rarely sophisticated subjectivists. Just ask them about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Scratch a skeptic and you’ll find something for which they don’t believe all opinions count.
My experience is that they are often just allergic to the word “wrong.” They want to substitute affective terms like “hateful” or “unfortunate.” Getting them to use the term “wrong” or “false” takes time.
The genuine relativist/subjectivist is a harder case. It helps that students rarely are willing to accept the implications of cultural relativism or subjectivism. Chapter 1 of Practical Bioethics brings up 4th century Sophist, Protagoras:
Protagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher, is said to have argued that “whatever things seem to each city to be fine and just are so for that city, so long as it maintains them.” In other words, what is ethically just is relative to a particular city. I guess you could call that municipal relativism.
The Dude, one of the lesser known disciples of Protagoras
Plato paints a portrait of Protagoras as even more radical than cultural relativism. Some statements seem to say there is no fact of the matter about morality apart from the individual. This is commonly referred to as subjectivism.
Most of the time, it is enough to point out that emulating Protagoras practically would be very, very, hard—something Plato drives home.
Here’s a frightening implication hinted at in Plato’s Republic that I make sure to remind students. If all moral reasoning is merely subjective and there is no fact of the matter, then we are left with two alternatives: 1) a social contract that says I won’t force you as long as you don’t force me so that both of us get some but not all of what we want. Tolerance becomes the leading moral value. 2) naked force. I will make you do what I think is right without any appeal to moral reasoning that doesn’t exist anyway. I usually don’t have to remind them what this means. The light begins to dawn that wars have been started using this sort of will to power. It doesn’t have to just evoke geo-politics, the same thing can happen in miniature at hospitals, research facilities, and public health programs.
As explained in the first two chapters of Practical Bioethics, skepticism, pluralism, and principlism are practical alternatives to a relativism whose implications lead in this direction.
Thanks for the clear distinction between skepticism and subjectivism. I think I grasped it! Students have openly told me they thought, prior to taking my class, that the study of ethics was pointless because it is all subjective. Kant actually deals with this problem in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.