Another Way Of Thinking About Values

Written by: Orion Webster

I’ve been thinking for sometime now about the problems in practice with moral relativism and the problems in principle with moral objectivism, and I’d like to share another way of thinking about values and how we treat each other, that I think wraps up the pros and cons of the aforementioned interpretations of morality.

The way that I personally think about values is something that I would call moral pragmatism. You can think of this as a position that is somewhere in between moral relativism and moral objectivism, because as stated previously it takes into account the merits and downsides of both positions. With moral relativism you have the problem that one cannot say that another moral position is inferior or superior, which makes it difficult if not impossible to have any notion of moral progress, or to be anchored in any real sense to outcomes generated by values in practice. The thing is moral relativism though not effective in practice is not technically wrong in principle. Moral statements in so far as we are talking about preferences, cannot really be true or false and thus cannot be objectively right or wrong. Moral objectivism on the other hand solves the problem in practice in that you can condemn positions that lead to dead ends, and prop up those that lead to outcomes we want, which allows for a notion of moral progress, but it doesn’t deal with the fact that a preference cannot be objectively right or wrong. Moral pragmatism, instead, merely anchors values to the reality that we share a common humanity that, at base, has a preference for flourishing, thus we can decide if moral positions get us to a more desirable state or not, and condemn those that lead to shit shows and prop up those that are actually functional. It allows for a notion of moral progress, and cares about the outcome of actually creating a better world, and gets rid of the sense that moral statements even have to be objective to be admonished or held sacred. In my view, it doesn’t matter if moral statements are objective, no one cares about that and it seems that they can’t, but we all share the human project of, at the very least, wanting ourselves and probably our families to flourish, and what we disagree about is the best mode of getting to our desired outcomes.

The reason that all of this is important and how it ties back to the overarching theme of lifestyle design and in other words designing our best lives, is that whether or not we think we are justified in criticizing values that differ from our own, plays a huge role in whether or not we act. If you are a moral relativist of the most devout variety, who sees their friend suffering because of some value system that they hold sacred, such as a religious belief say, you may find yourself doing nothing because you hold all value systems to be, in practice, equivalent though perhaps different and maybe even irreconcilable, and thus you find that you have no basis to offer what might otherwise be a superior way of viewing whatever the issue is.

I think that moral relativism as a position is held by many highly educated and intelligent people since it’s not technically wrong, so it becomes hard to flatly refute. The problem of course is that outcomes actually matter, which is why I think we should uproot moral relativism and replace it not with moral objectivism, which is faulty in it’s foundation, but with moral pragmatism with takes in the merits of both positions without having to lie to ourselves to get where we want to go.

I hope you find this idea helps you to take action by giving you some sense that morals can be adaptive or maladaptive without being technically right or wrong, true or false.