Truth relativism in metaethics
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Date
20/04/2022Author
Denning, Patrick
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Abstract
Metaethical relativism is the view that whether a moral claim is true depends on the standards
endorsed by an individual or society. This view is attractive because it allows one to hold that
moral claims can be true or false in an ordinary correspondence sense, without being
committed to the view that moral claims state objective facts. But what could it mean to say
that a whether a moral claim is true depends on an individual or society’s standards? How
could a single claim be true or false in an ordinary sense, and yet be true for some people
while false for others?
This thesis defends a certain answer to this question: metaethical truth relativism. Metaethical
relativists have historically endorsed a different view: content relativism, which is the view
that the semantic contents of moral claims vary across contexts of use. However, semanticists
working outside metaethics have recently shown that an alternative exists, namely truth
relativism: the view that the truth values of moral contents vary across contexts. Metaethicists
have been slow to investigate the significance of this discovery. This is surprising, because
truth relativism appears to avoid some of the most influential objections to content relativist
views. Thus, this development in semantics appears to offer an exciting new direction for
research on relativism in metaethics.
The scope of this thesis is not narrowly semantic, however. Questions in moral semantics often
interconnect with questions in substantive metaethics, and the question of whether ethical
thought and talk is semantically relativistic is no exception. Therefore, while the core of the
this thesis focuses on moral semantics, it also contains a fair amount of substantive metaethical
material, located primarily in the first and final chapters.
The plan of the thesis is as follows. Chapters 1 & 2 begin with a discussion of the most
historically influential argument for metaethical relativism: the argument from disagreement.
Chapter 1 discusses an epistemic version of this argument, but concludes that this version
provides only limited evidence for relativism. However, chapter 2 introduces a different
version of the argument, with a more semantic focus, (which appeals to the notion of faultless
disagreement) and begins to make the case that this argument provides evidence not only for
metaethical relativism broadly construed, but for truth relativism in particular.
The broad strokes of this argument are that there can be moral disagreements which are
faultless (in a sense which rules out objectivist views) and furthermore that only truth
relativism (as opposed to content relativism) can vindicate the sense that these are genuine
disagreements, rather than mere differences of opinion. Chapter 2 presents empirical evidence
for the claim that putative moral disagreements can be faultless. Chapters 3 and 4 then take a
deep dive into the topic of disagreement. Chapter 3 develops a positive account of disagreement
which is available only to truth relativists. And chapter 4 advances detailed arguments against
contextualist accounts of disagreement. Chapters 3 and 4 together thus defend in detail the
claim that truth relativism can, while content relativism cannot, account for the sense that
there is genuine disagreement in the relevant cases. Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, form a
single long argument for truth relativism. They show that there is a compelling argument for
relativism broadly construed, and that deep analysis of the issues surrounding this argument
favour truth relativism over content relativism.
Chapter 5 zooms back out to the broader metaethical landscape, discussing two remaining
objections to relativism. The first objection is that relativism has objectionably subjectivistic
implications, and the second is that moral standards cannot helpfully be understood as
determined by societies (rather than individuals). In the course of responding to these
objections, natural opportunities to flesh out the substantive metaethical commitments of the
theory will arise. And this will set us up to conclude with a brief comparison of truth
relativism with some of the other main options in the space of substantive metaethical theory.