Wong

The argument for metaethical relativism, the view that there is

no single true or most justified morality, is that it is part of the
best explanation of the most difficult moral disagreements. The
argument for this view features a comparison between traditions
that highly value relationship and community and traditions that
highly value personal autonomy of the individual and rights. It is held
that moralities are best understood as emerging from human culture
Ethics
in response to the need to promote and regulate interpersonal
cooperation and internal motivational coherence in the individual.
The argument ends in the conclusion that there is a bounded
plurality of true and most justified moralities that accomplish these
functions. The normative implications of this form of metaethical
relativism are explored, with specific focus on female genital cutting
Moral Relativism

Moral Relativism and Pluralism

and abortion.

and Pluralism
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David B. Wong
concepts in the field of ethics. Each entry Kansas
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 Elements in Ethics
edited by
Ben Eggleston
University of Kansas
Dale E. Miller
Old Dominion University, Virginia

MORAL RELATIVISM
AND PLURALISM

David B. Wong
Duke University
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 Moral Relativism and Pluralism

Elements in Ethics

DOI: 10.1017/9781009043496
First published online: January 2023

David B. Wong
Duke University
Author for correspondence: David B. Wong, [email protected]

Abstract: The argument for metaethical relativism, the view that there is no
single true or most justified morality, is that it is part of the best
explanation of the most difficult moral disagreements. The argument
for this view features a comparison between traditions that highly value
relationship and community and traditions that highly value personal
autonomy of the individual and rights. It is held that moralities are best
understood as emerging from human culture in response to the need
to promote and regulate interpersonal cooperation and internal
motivational coherence in the individual. The argument ends in the
conclusion that there is a bounded plurality of true and most justified
moralities that accomplish these functions. The normative implications
of this form of metaethical relativism are explored, with specific focus
on female genital cutting and abortion.

Keywords: moral relativism, ethical theory, comparative philosophy,

normative ethics, naturalistic ethics

© David B. Wong 2023

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009043496 Published online by Cambridge University Press

ISBNs: 9781009044301 (PB), 9781009043496 (OC)

ISSNs: 2516-4031 (online), 2516-4023 (print)
 Contents

1 Why Are People So Exercised about Moral Relativism? 1

2 How Should Theses about Moral Relativism Be Framed? 2

3 Relationship and Community, Autonomy and Rights 3

4 Epistemic Reasons to Delve Further into the Conflict

between Relationship-Centered and Rights-Centered
Moralities 6

5 An Ethical Argument for Extended Inquiry into Rivals to

One’s Own Ethical Views 9

6 Overcoming Stereotypes of Relationship-Centered

Moralities 13

7 Complicating the Contrast between Relationship- and

Autonomy-Centered Moralities 18
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8 The Underdiscussed Question of What Morality Is 22

9 A Naturalistic Approach to Understanding Why Human

Beings Have Moralities 24

10 Putting Together Moral Ambivalence and a Naturalistic

Conception of Morality 27

11 Constraints on the Range of Viable Moralities 28

12 The Social Construction of Morality: By the Individual or

Group? 32

13 When People Differ in Their Moral Beliefs about an Issue,

When Do They Actually Disagree? 37
 Contents v

14 Why We Have Different Beliefs in Metaethics 40

15 How Moral Reasons Enter into the Truth Conditions of

Moral Judgments and Help Shape Our Moral Motivations 42

16 Summary of the Argument for a Pluralistic Form of

Metaethical Moral Relativism 45

17 Confused Reasoning That Is Sometimes Attributed to

Those Who Believe in Normative Moral Relativism 46

18 An Argument for Normative Moral Relativism That Is

Contingent upon the Acceptance of Certain Values and
the Adoption of Metaethical Moral Relativism 47

19 Why Normative Moral Relativism Cannot Be a Simple

Matter of Letting Others Be 48

20 What Is Female Genital Cutting? 49

21 Accommodation and the Fraught Issue of Abortion 53

22 Undermining Stereotypes of the Other Side 57

23 Fostering Pluralistic Encounters 59

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24 Summary of Normative Moral Relativism 61

References 62
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 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 1

1 Why Are People So Exercised about Moral Relativism?

Growing up Chinese American in the American Midwest, the ways of my family,
including what was expected of me as a son, seemed painfully different from the
ways of the families of my European American friends. Family seemed so much
more important in my home. This did not mean that my European American
friends had no responsibilities to their families, but in general, their duties rested
upon their shoulders more lightly. My mother once said to me that she simply
didn’t understand (maybe she meant didn’t approve of) the American obsession
with happiness. She thought the most important thing was to fulfill one’s respon-
sibilities to others, and of course the weightiest ones were owed to family. I don’t
think she meant to deny the importance of a subjective sense of contentment
(what I think she meant by “happiness”), but her point was that the subjective
sense had to be earned through the performance of responsibilities, as best as one
could. I respected her sentiments, and half of me agreed with her, but the other
half wanted to be free to pursue happiness.
The question was about how I should live my life, and so it took on the
greatest personal importance for me. When I began to take moral relativism
seriously, some of those closest to me wondered whether I should find some
other philosophical subject to write about. Many people think that moral
relativism licenses any answer a person would be inclined to give, or any answer
their society’s culture gives. That is why “moral relativism” is often used as an
epithet, a term of derision by people who assume that morality is a matter for
reasoned judgment. I agree with this assumption, but depart from the oft-
associated, but very different one that for any moral question there is a single
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correct answer to be found and that conflicting answers are incorrect. Others,
and I am among them, have come to question the latter assumption by reflecting
on the nature of moral disagreement. The kinds of disagreement that can be
most effectively adduced in support of moral relativism typically involve values
that come into conflict, each of which are compelling in their own right
(consider liberty versus equality). The experience of moral conflict can be
interpersonal, in which different sides have different views as to which value
is most compelling given the circumstances. Conflict also can be intrapersonal.
That is, one can be internally divided between two moral viewpoints, as was the
case for me after my discussion with my mother.
The mere fact that people disagree, intrapersonally or interpersonally, is not
in itself a reason to think that there isn’t a single correct answer to be found.
Insufficient evidence to resolve a disagreement is compatible with there being
a single correct answer. The interpretive frameworks that people bring to
assessing the evidence can differ markedly, producing conflicting views, but
 2 Ethics

this too is compatible with there being a single correct answer. The motivation
that people have for adopting beliefs, moral and otherwise, and whether they are
aware of their motivation or not, is often that these beliefs are held by others
with whom they identify or align themselves. Beliefs can help people protect
their self-esteem, and this can lead to motivations to overlook evidence that
undermines these beliefs and focus on evidence that supports them. Take the
belief that people are solely responsible for what they have achieved in life,
which plays a key role in certain conservative views about distributive justice. If
one has enjoyed reasonable success, one may strongly believe that one did so on
one’s own, focusing on the genuinely difficult situations one had to work one’s
way through, but not so much keeping in mind the help others provided along
the way. This is a very familiar way of coming to an ill-founded belief, and
philosophers point to such epistemic pitfalls to argue that moral disagreement
provides little or no evidence against metaethical universalism (e.g., see Brink
1989). But one can agree that such pitfalls exist, and still reject the idea that they
“explain away” all important moral disagreement.
In what follows, I make a case for this rejection and for accepting some
versions of moral relativism. The path begins with a discussion of how to frame
the issue of moral relativism. What exactly are the views being debated for
which certain kinds of moral disagreements are adduced as evidence?

2 How Should Theses about Moral Relativism Be Framed?

In philosophy, so much depends on how you frame the question. The best way of
framing the question enables interlocutors to fully consider the main consider-
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ations that have motivated the contending sides, and to evaluate the full array of
possible conclusions that could be justified by those considerations. A less-
desirable framing would narrow the range of motivating considerations or the
possible conclusions that could be reached. With this in mind, “metaethical moral
relativism” is defined here as the thesis that there is no single true or most justified
morality (with some adaptation, this formulation is from Harman 2000, 77).
Morality here is taken as a guide to what sort of actions and attitudes are required,
prohibited, and permissible, and much of its subject matter concerns how one is to
relate to and affect others, though it can also specify for the individual what it is to
live a worthwhile life. The disjunction, “true or most justified,” is meant to allow
for the possible position that morality is not the sort of thing that is true or false (as
an order or admonition might not be true or false), but nevertheless can be
justified, perhaps in greater or lesser degree (as an order or admonition might
be more or less well taken). Relativism, thus defined, is opposed to what I shall
call “universalism”: the view that there is a single true or most justified morality.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 3

This view is sometimes called “absolutism,” which seems the natural opposing
term for “relativism,” but I will use “universalism” since the other term is often
used to refer to another type of normative view that there are moral prescriptive
truths that hold without exceptions, such as “Never lie.”
The type of moral relativism thus defined is “metaethical” as opposed to
“normative” moral relativism. The metaethical thesis does not purport to tell us
what is morally right or wrong or what a morally good life is. Normative moral
relativism is the subject of Sections 17–24, but we will have occasion to address
some normative questions about what we ought to do throughout this Element.
Metaethics addresses metaphysical and epistemological issues that often arise
when we confront puzzles and difficulties in trying to answer the first-order
normative questions about what to do or how to live. In particular, puzzling
about the – sometimes seemingly intractable – moral differences between
people and even within the belief system of a single person can lead to belief
in metaethical relativism.
Metaethical moral relativism, as defined here, embraces a capacious set of
possibilities. It contrasts with more specific definitions that are usually more
extreme: for example, the view that the truth or justifiability of a morality is
determined by whatever standards or practices are established within a group or
even by a single person. This is metaethical relativism as “anything goes.”
While the definition proffered here includes the extreme version as a possibility,
it also includes what one might call a moderate form of relativism or a strong
form of pluralism: the view that more than one morality is true or most justified
but that not all moralities are true or most justified. It will be argued in
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Sections 3–16 that this latter view is most consistent with the best explanation
of both similarities and differences in moral belief and practice, with empiric-
ally grounded theories of the major roles they play in human life, and with
recent empirical evidence as to laypeople’s attitudes toward moral objectivity.

3 Relationship and Community, Autonomy and Rights

Many people have experienced the kind of conflict I experienced. Some of them
are immigrants or the children of immigrants (as I am), to a developed country.
One way of describing the conflict in a general way is to say that it obtains
between duties arising from relationship and membership in community, on the
one hand, and on the other hand, rights to personal autonomy that provide
a protected space to live as one pleases. The film A Great Wall (1986) depicts an
interpersonal conflict of values occasioned by a Chinese American family’s trip
to China to visit the father’s sister and her family. The daughter from the
Chinese family learns the concept of privacy from the son of the Chinese
 4 Ethics

American family, and deploys the concept in objecting to her mother’s opening
and reading her mail before handing it to her. The mother reacts to her daugh-
ter’s indignation with bafflement: Why should she need permission to learn
what is going on for her daughter?
These value conflicts come under the more general heading of relationship
and community, on the one hand, and on the other hand, autonomy and
individual rights. For example, the right to freedom of speech can come into
conflict with the value of promoting and protecting relationships of mutual
concern and trust. A case can be made for restricting speech when it seriously
threatens basic forms of shared understanding that form part of the framework
of mutual trust. Not only can this framework be undermined through speech that
intimidates and foments hatred, but it can turn the value of speech against itself
through causing those it victimizes to be silenced for fear of identifying
themselves as members of the targeted group (consider the brutal psychological
terrorism often waged over social media these days). Sometimes historical
events tilt the weight of judgment in favor of restriction – see, for example,
the illegality of Holocaust denial in many European countries – and sometimes
acts of intimidation are so egregious that they clearly merit the punishment of
law, as in the case of the students at the University of Mississippi who both hung
a noose and draped the Confederate battle flag around the statue of James
Meredith, the university’s first black student (Srvluga 2015). Even if in such
cases it is fairly clear what should be done, there are many cases in which it is
not. It is important to recognize that the values on each side of the conflicts
mentioned can be in relationships of mutual support as well as discord. The
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absence of relations of mutual caring and respect has historically in the United
States led to the willingness to prevent disfavored groups – for example women,
African Americans, Native or First Americans, and those coming or descended
from people from Asian countries (depending on the historical period and the
country of origin) – from being accorded equal status or citizenship, or from
being able to exercise their rights to vote and assemble for political participa-
tion. Supporting the value of relationship can support the rights of those with
whom one is in relationship.
There is comparatively little attention paid to conflict between relationship
and autonomy in academic moral philosophy, at least when compared with
conflict between the value of acting for the greatest good of the greatest number
and the rights of individuals to have their most compelling interests protected,
even if sacrificing those interests is for the greater good. The dominance of the
argumentative dialectic around the latter conflict in modern Western moral
philosophy explains this disparity of attention. The fact that so much of the
oxygen is consumed by the dialectic is itself revealing of an assumption shared
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 5

by the opposing sides: that the individual is taken as morally basic, whether it be
the welfare or happiness or utility of the individual, which under one of the most
dominant forms of consequentialism is to be aggregated and maximized, or
some trait individuals possess, such as rationality or the possession of basic
interests, in virtue of which they have rights. By contrast, moral conflicts of the
first kind involve at least one side taking relationship as a foremost value.
Moralities that emphasize the value of relationship in prominent ways are
found all over the world, and are at least as pervasive as moralities emphasizing
rights or promotion of utility. Conflicts involving the value of relationship with
the other two kinds of value need not involve one side denying that the other
side’s values are values at all. Indeed, it need not involve denying that the other
side’s values are important. It can involve a difference in the value priorities of
the different sides.
As implied by my first example derived from personal experience, there are
cultural differences in these value priorities. Cultures in which relationship is
given high priority include not just the ones expressed by Chinese Confucian
ethics, but Ubuntu ethics associated with South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.
There are Indigenous ethics, such as those of many Native American peoples,
for example the Ojibwe, Chippewa, and Anishanaabe. Not only do these ethics
generally have in common the high priority they place on having relationships
of the right sort (e.g., both Confucian and Ubuntu ethics stress that being
a realized person is to be in relationship with other persons; see Metz 2011),
but the relational ethic can in some of its forms acknowledge the organic
interdependence of all life and is extended toward parts of the environment
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that go beyond the human: plants, animals, and the land and water. These parts
are sometimes conceived and treated in ways similar to one’s human kin
(Coulthard 2014; Whyte 2018; Murdock 2020; Hourdequin 2021). To return
to the Chinese tradition, Daoism emphasizes the human relationship to the rest
of nature and points to what can be learned from the operation of natural
processes that contrast with the rigidity and fixedness of conventional human
conceptualizations of the way things work (Hourdequin and Wong 2005).
Within contemporary Western moral philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre (1988,
2007), Michael Sandel (1998), and Charles Taylor (1985, 1989) have presented
distinctive and sophisticated critiques of consequentialist and deontological nor-
mative theories. It is not within the project of this Element to discuss their
theories, but it is sufficient to point out here that their preferred normative theories
each give prominent place to an ethic of relationship and community. There are
significant differences between these three thinkers in the extent and manner in
which they believe the values of relationship can be made compatible with ethics
that emphasize rights and autonomy. Those working in care ethics present
 6 Ethics

a similar alternative, at least on a very general level, to consequentialist and

deontological normative theories. Uniting the diverse work of thinkers such as
Annette Baier (1986), Carol Gilligan (1982), Virginia Held (2006), Eva Kittay
(1999), Nel Noddings (1984), Sara Ruddick (1989), Joan Tronto (1993), and
Margaret Urban Walker (2007) is accordance of greater priority to the value of
relationships and the recognition that this emphasis on relationship poses
a significant alternative to the two dominant traditions of modern Western
moral philosophy. Though the care ethic is strongly associated with feminist
ethics, Chenyang Li (1994) has drawn attention to the parallels between the care
ethic and the Confucian ethic, which is the philosophical crystallization of the
cultural tradition my mother was rooted in. There are a great many differences
between Confucian and care ethics, as Li would acknowledge, but he is also right
to point out that they share an important point of difference from the dominant
mainstream of modern Western moral philosophy.
When taken together, these conflicts involving relationship and community
on the one hand, and (personal) autonomy and individual rights on the other
hand indicate that there is a central issue that occurs repeatedly in normative
moral thought and practice. That it does so says something about the complexity
of what human beings value and what they need. The reader may still be
unconvinced that there is need to delve further into this conflict. To take an
example that is likely not to be purely hypothetical, some people among the
likely audience for this Element may take the position that it is sufficient to
dismiss relationship-centered moralities simply because they can come into
conflict with rights-centered moralities. These people might take that position
because they are so firm on the absolute correctness of there being certain rights
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that should not be violated. The next section argues that there are both epistemic
and ethical reasons to delve further by addressing barriers to proper understand-
ing of relationship-centered moralities on the part of those who subscribe to
rights-centered moralities.

4 Epistemic Reasons to Delve Further into the Conflict between

Relationship-Centered and Rights-Centered Moralities
Recent literature on the proper epistemic response to disagreement with another
person is focused on situations in which the other is one’s epistemic “peer.”
Factors that go into assessing peerhood include whether the parties are roughly
equal in the relevant cognitive abilities they bring to the issue in dispute;
whether there is unequal bias on the issue; and whether they have the same
evidence. The question is then raised as to whether peer disagreement with
another gives one reason to think one is mistaken in holding one’s own position.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 7

A typical example features friends, after dinner at a restaurant, calculating how

much of a tip each should leave the server. They agree to divide equally a tip of
twenty percent of the total bill, and do the math in their heads, but they end up
with different amounts. One well-known position on this kind of example is that
the disagreement of one’s peer gives one as much reason to doubt the correct-
ness of one’s answer as one has to stick with one’s answer (Christensen 2007).
There are a variety of other positions on the correct epistemic stance to take,
but the point to be made here is that the moral disagreements just discussed raise
a rather different question: whether one has sufficient information to make
a reasonable judgment as to whether the parties to the disagreement are peers.
Do the opposing sides have the same evidence? While ordinary facts, such as
how much the total bill is, can certainly count as part of the evidence in moral
disagreements over what is right and wrong, such facts get taken into account
from the standpoint of perspectives composed of configurations of values. The
opposing sides have perspectives that significantly differ from each other, even
when there is considerable overlap in the values. Given that people arrive at
their positions in a disagreement on the basis of their value perspectives, we
should know with some specificity what those perspectives are and what
evidence they have for adopting them. In the peer disagreement literature, one
option for appropriate epistemic response to the restaurant tip case is suspend-
ing belief as to what is the correct amount. In the sort of cases of moral
disagreement under discussion here, the appropriate response is further sus-
tained and concerted inquiry. This is in fact the uptake of Christensen’s influen-
tial article on the import of disagreement for the activity of knowledge seeking:
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that in many cases we should take moral disagreement as the opportunity to

improve on our knowledge (Christensen 2007).
Given the practical urgency of acting on moral belief in particular, suspen-
sion of belief may not be a morally viable option. As will be discussed in
Sections 18–20, declining epistemic confidence in the justifiability of one’s
moral beliefs may appropriately affect how one acts on them. The immediate
point at this stage in the argument, however, is that further inquiry is required as
a matter of epistemic rationality. While it is possible to simply stand unmoved
on the basis of one’s strong moral intuitions (such as intuitions about what rights
people have and the scope of those rights as they collide with other moral
considerations), one should know that others have had similarly unshakable
intuitions very different from one’s own. Within the nonmoral realm, there seem
to be few intuitions people tended to have about the geometrical properties of
physical space that seemed as unshakable as the axioms that set up Euclidean
geometry (e.g., that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line
and that there is only one line going through a point not on another line and that
 8 Ethics

is parallel to that other line). Yet current mathematics regards these axioms not
as necessary truths about physical space but as hypotheses to which there are
alternatives. Alternative geometries have physical application and are part of
a revolution in how space is scientifically conceived. We would do well to test
our current intuitions against the intuitions that have driven other value per-
spectives. As a practical matter, we may have to act on our values at any given
time, but that does not prevent us from conducting inquiry into the moral
traditions of others.
We do not know how our epistemic situations compare to those of others who
hold these other value perspectives. To the extent that one has not seriously
investigated other traditions, and also veins of thought and practice within what
could broadly be deemed one’s own tradition (think of care ethics and defenses
of more relationally oriented ethics within the modern Western tradition), one
should have one’s confidence dented in the singular truth or justifiability of
one’s own value perspective. The various ways that one can misjudge, accept
stereotypes, and simply not make enough of an effort to understand heighten the
epistemic challenge. Studies reveal tendencies to exaggerate the similarities
among members of a group and to be biased in favor of our own groups and
denigrate other groups (see Tajfel 1970; Tajfel et al. 1971; Tajfel and Turner
1979). We should take such results as a caution about our tendency to make
quick judgments about the immorality of others.
The epistemic argument I have just made is intended to be a universal
argument addressed to the question of what is the epistemically rational
response to the types of moral disagreement mentioned. Given the normative
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importance of knowing how others decide on and morally justify their ways of
acting, we should conduct inquiry into the traditions that ground their decisions
as a matter of thoroughness and conscientiousness. Further, knowing that our
evaluations of others tend to be biased and provincial, we should try to correct
course through exercising our curiosity. To be clear, pressing one’s inquiry into
the reasons that others might have for their moral positions is not in itself an
argument for metaethical moral relativism. It could just as well result in the
conclusion of metaethical universalism. The point is that both those disposed
toward relativism and toward universalism should be looking into the most
difficult and challenging moral disagreements to see if a single correct answer
looks like it might eventually emerge. The metaethical moral relativist is
prepared to argue that a single correct answer does not emerge and that we
have little reason to think that one will.
Philosophers who are unsympathetic to metaethical moral relativism some-
times look down on the motivations of its proponents. The motivations purport-
edly show a kind of intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to try “to get to the
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 9

bottom of things.”1 I don’t deny that this is sometimes the kind of motivation to
be found behind the view. At its best, however, moral relativism is motivated
precisely by the desire to get to the bottom of things. From this point of view, it
is the universalist who stops inquiry too soon, who is too ready to fall back on
what seems self-evident and clear to them, at a point when they could inquire
further into how other people have thought differently in ways that challenge
that stopping point. In this guise, relativism is motivated by a sense of humility
before the wide and variegated expanse of human experience and aspiration (in
fact, the claim here is that it is rational to feel this sense of humility), and by
a desire to learn from others, including those in different historical eras and
different societies, those strange neighbors down the street, and difficult Aunt
Julia across the table at the big family gathering. Far from being motivated by
intellectual laziness, it is spurred by a willingness to challenge one’s own
deepest assumptions by discovering the different assumptions that others
make. It is fed by the desire to discover not only what one’s own best arguments
for one’s moral commitments are, but to discover what the best arguments of
others are for their moral commitments. It rests on the resolve to balance as best
as one can such motivations against the importance of standing for one’s sense
of what is right and just and good.

5 An Ethical Argument for Extended Inquiry into Rivals to One’s

Own Ethical Views
There is another, separate, and additional argument to be made for extended
inquiry into the best arguments of others, and it in fact appeals to one’s own sense
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of what is right and just and good. Because inquiry is an activity and therefore
practical in itself and also in many of its ramifications for further action, it is
subject to moral evaluation and prescription. In her work on epistemic injustice,
Miranda Fricker has observed that “epistemology as it has traditionally been
pursued has been impoverished by the lack of any theoretical framework condu-
cive to revealing the ethical and political aspects of our epistemic conduct,” and
similarly, she observes, it is “equally a pity that ethics has not traditionally taken
our epistemic conduct into its remit” (Fricker 2007, 2).
Here, we take up Fricker’s appeal by pointing out that in mischaracterizing,
simplifying, and stereotyping other people’s moral traditions, we not only dem-
onstrate a lack of respect for them but may also replicate beliefs that have served
as rationalizations of our society’s exploitation and oppression of these others.

1
This phrase and the idea behind it as applied to relativism is taken from an interview of this author
by Richard Marshall, online: www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/the-pluralist, accessed November 27,
2022.
 10 Ethics

Even if we do not ourselves personally or intentionally engage in such

rationalization, we may be the unwitting inheritors of casual dismissals of
the traditions of others, and risk burying what was done in the past and its
ramifications into the present. Furthermore, as argued later in this section, we
may have personally benefited from past misdeeds. I want to make clear that in
presenting a normative argument for consistent and concerted inquiry into the
moral traditions of others, I do not presume that the ethical premises upon
which it rests are universally true for everyone. I ask only that the reader
reflect on whether the argument holds force for them. I suspect that for a great
many readers, it does, or should have, given my sense of what their values are.
Consider that many in the societies containing potential readers of this Element
and others like it have benefited (intentionally or not, knowingly or not) from the
exploitation and oppression of many of these others, in the past and present. This
claim is addressed to those likely to be subscribed to moral traditions in which it is
now recognized that it was quite wrong to have exploited and oppressed members
of other societies, many of which contained moral traditions that prioritize
relationships. Exploitation and oppression were justified by characterizing the
civilizations of these people, including their moral traditions, as savage, barbaric,
and inferior. Some of these characterizations could be determined in short order as
plainly false and blatant rationalizations to which relatively few currently sub-
scribe, but others are stereotypes that continue to be accepted by people who are
widely thought to be far better informed and fair-minded, and this may frequently
be the case, which doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong.
Into the first category of the plainly false and blatantly rationalizing falls an
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1859 speech by a proslavery lawyer by the name of O’Connor who claims that

to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature. . . . He has the

strength, and he has the power to labour; but the Nature which created that
power has denied him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to
work. . . . And that Nature which denied him the will to labour gave him
a master to coerce that will, and to make him a useful servant in the clime in
which he was capable of living useful for himself and for the master who
governs him. (Millett 2007, 178)

Paul Millett remarks that this is a thoroughly Aristotelian defense of slavery,

which in the modern context is applied to the races (Millett 2007, 178).
Aristotle asserts that there are natural slaves suited by nature to be the
possession of others and to be their instruments of action (Aristotle 2016,
Politics 1.1, 1254a7–18). The soul is by nature the ruler of the body, and the
intellect rules the appetites. Analogously, the male naturally rules over the
female (1254a34–1254b15). And the use of slaves and tame animals is not
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 11

very different, he says, because both minister to the needs of life with their
bodies (1254b24–5). It is quite possible that this claim for the naturalness of
enslaving some people answers, perhaps unconsciously, to Aristotle’s percep-
tion that a well-lived life for some, including himself, depended on the slavery
of others. As Heath observes, “Without natural slaves, the masters’ natural
capacity for eudaimonia would be frustrated; and nature does nothing in vain”
(Pol. 1.9, 1256b20–1; Heath 2008, 264). That is, “enslaving people who were
not natural slaves would be unjust, creating an internal contradiction even
more fundamentally subversive of the good life” (Heath 2008, 264).
Much of the United States was built from the ancestral lands of Indigenous
peoples, who were removed by force, and often in violations of treaties made
with them, removed again from where they were sent when the land was
desired in the westward expansion of the nation. President Andrew Jackson
expressed the moral rationalization for these acts in his 1833 speech to
Congress: “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits,
nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in
their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and
without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them,
they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long dis-
appear” (Richardson 2004). This stance toward Indigenous peoples took
another form in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century practice, appearing in
the United States and Canada, of taking Indigenous children away from their
families and placing them in boarding schools with the express intent of
wiping away their language and culture (Adams 1995; Morel 1997; Hanson
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et al. 2020).
As for Chinese Americans, I remember the family elders sitting in our living
room and discussing bitterly the lynching and murders of Chinese in California.
One editorial in a San Francisco newspaper called the Chinese “morally a far
worse class” than black people and described them as “cunning and deceitful”
and “libidinous and offensive” (Chang 2003). To this day, such characteriza-
tions have a familiar ring to many Chinese Americans. The Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882 was the first act to prohibit an ethnic working group from entry into
the United States on the grounds that it endangered good order. Mexican
Americans were also subject to lynching in California and parts of the
Southwest. Though some were granted citizenship and land because they had
lived and worked in territory taken by the United States in the Mexican-
American War, their holdings were often taken illegally and sometimes by
force, and their citizenship did not enable their rightful reclamation of the
land. Like the Chinese, they often had no other viable option but to work in
the lowest-paying jobs under terrible working conditions.
 12 Ethics

From these egregious acts, some in American society reaped benefits, which
continue to be inherited by their descendants. One example is the university
from which I received my PhD, Princeton, where scholars and student
researchers have found that the man who deeded the land on which the univer-
sity sits was a slave owner. The first nine presidents of the university were all at
some point in their lives slave owners (Hollander and Sandelweiss 2022). Duke
University, at which I am a professor, “rented” the labor of slaves when it was
Trinity College (Gillespie 2020). The fact that I have been the indirect benefi-
ciary of exploitation and oppression and am also a member of a group that has
been exploited and oppressed is not unusual. Wrongdoing is infectious. I do not
suggest that these contrasting statuses cancel each other out and result in a clean
slate, so to speak. The fact that some Chinese Americans have been the subject
of racist injustice does not mean that they cannot themselves be the perpetrators
of such injustice toward members of other groups. Rather, it is incumbent on
each one of us to identify how we might have benefited from injustice or to its
compounding through perpetuating the mischaracterization of those who have
suffered from it. And we have to appropriately respond to it even as we continue
to insist on the rectification of injustice toward our own groups.
In the second category, which includes those with a much stronger claim to be
better informed and fair-minded, are those who reject self-serving mythologies
of race and gender. However, not all mistakes are as obvious as they seem with
the benefit of time and cultural change. While one might dismiss the racist and
sexist beliefs of earlier generations of Americans, one might still mischaracter-
ize and stereotype others who seem to be different or live differently, and to do
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so in a way that compounds, however inadvertently, the egregious sort of

exploitation and oppression practiced on these others. The ethical upshot of
the recognition of one’s own possible continuing contribution to compounded
injustice is to examine one’s own understanding of who these others are and
how they seek to live. If one has drawn from one’s own moral tradition to
condemn the egregious injustice done to others, one should also interrogate the
ideas one has of them, their values, and ways of life. Getting the wrong idea on
these matters may lead to further injustice against them. We may have ideas of
how to rectify past injustices done to them that they would reject or to which
they would propose better alternatives. Our mistaken ideas about them, includ-
ing what they value, may encourage wrongly paternalistic or condescending
attitudes toward them. To reiterate, this is not a direct argument for metaethical
relativism. Delving into the reasons of those on the opposing side of a moral
disagreement may or may not result in greater appreciation for the force of those
reasons, much less the conclusion that one has no persuasive case to overrule
those reasons. All I have argued for so far is a particular way of trying to arrive
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 13

at a decision between relativism and universalism, which is to pursue the

arguments and reasons on both sides of the relevant disagreement and to see
how we assess the force of reasons after such inquiry (the inquiry may be
ongoing, so we may have to make provisional assessments).
In the next section, I proceed to give a sample of what such an investigation
could look like. I will focus much of my attention on Confucian relational
ethics, but will relate it to other types of relational ethics when the comparison
seems apt. Keep in mind, however, that ethics that fall under the broad rubric of
“relational” can be quite different from each other on greater levels of specifi-
city and that there can be conflict among them on important matters.

6 Overcoming Stereotypes of Relationship-Centered Moralities

Those who subscribe to rights-centered moralities often dismiss relationship-
centered moralities on the basis of stereotypes, for example, that such moralities
subordinate or absorb the individual to or into the group. Social scientists often
contribute to this stereotype, perhaps inadvertently, by labeling them as “col-
lectivist” in orientation (e.g., Triandis 1995). The stereotype also includes the
presence of strong and rigid social hierarchies: the father or the head of the
family, the patriarch of the clan, tribal chief, and king. The stereotype may hold
that “collectivist” moralities may have once served a good social function,
perhaps under conditions that necessitated close cooperation between members
of a group, but that development and new forms of technology have made such
intensive forms of interdependence and hierarchy unnecessary.
It might further be said that those who remain wedded to relationship-
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centered ways of life may not have had experience of other more liberating
and self-directed ways. Or they may benefit from being at or near the top of
hierarchies that are endorsed under these moralities, and self-interest has biased
their moral beliefs toward these moralities. Now, however, it might be said, the
enlightened are in a position to clearly recognize the inherent dignity and worth
of the individual and that such worth grounds rights that require for the
individual opportunities and liberties to be protected against the demands of
others and groups.
Recently, the stereotype has undergone some undermining. Some empirical
studies of cultures in which relationship-centered values are prevalent have
stressed not that the individual is subordinated to the group but that the person is
conceived as an “interdependent” in contrast to an “independent” self (Markus
and Kitayama 1991). Under the interdependent conception, one’s identity as
a person, and one’s characteristic behavior and attitudes, are understood as
responses to particular people in particular contexts. The kind of person one is
 14 Ethics

depends on who one is with. The “independent” self is conceived as a free-

standing individual with an identity that is detachable from the particular people
one is interacting with. The interdependent conception has normative implica-
tions for what constitutes the good of the individual and how that good relates to
the good of others. In accordance with the way one’s identity can depend on
whom one stands in relationship with, one’s good as an individual depends on
the goods of others. One has a compelling personal interest in their welfare and
in one’s relationship with them. Sustainable and morally viable relationships
depend on the individuals’ gaining satisfaction and fulfillment from being in
those relationships. Rather than the individual’s good being subordinated to
others, the individual’s good overlaps with the good of others. For example, the
good of each member of a family may include or overlap with the good of other
members of the family. When one family member flourishes, so do the others.
This is not to deny that some interpretations of relational ethics within their
home traditions have sometimes fallen more on the collectivist, subordinating
side. Moral traditions usually give rise to an array of alternative interpretations
of their central values and how these values are to be prioritized in relation to
one another. This of course is no less true of rights- or utility-centered traditions,
but those working within those traditions take this variety of interpretations for
granted, and especially if they are advocates of these traditions, are used to the
task of discerning what they judge to be the best interpretation(s), one(s) that
they judge to provide the most authentic and most plausible version(s).
However, in interpreting other traditions (and much of the time “interpretation”
is too generous a description), there is too often a very casual, unreflective
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assumption that the tradition is monolithic with respect to its content and
practices. And little care is taken to examine the interpretations adopted.
In philosophical interpretations of the Confucian ethic, Hall and Ames (1987)
have made important contributions in undermining collectivist interpretations
of the ethic. I concur with them in holding that the best interpretations of
Confucian ethics place relationships of mutual care and respect at the core of
human fulfillment. To realize oneself is to be a self in relationship. It is not to
lose the self in relationship or the larger group. Within the Confucian tradition, it
is recognized that the interests of individuals, even in the best of relationships,
can conflict. The ideal is to balance and reconcile the conflicting interests, and to
do so in the light of the interdependence of individuals and of the goods they
strive to realize. Sometimes one person’s interests will have to yield to those of
others. A partial compensation to that person is that a central part of their good
lies in being, for instance, a member of the family. On the other hand, the good
of the family cannot be achieved without consideration of an individual’s
important interests. If those interests are urgent and weighty, they must become
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 15

important interests of the family and can sometimes have priority in case of
conflict. At other times, differences have to be split in compromise. Sometimes
yielding to others must be balanced against having priority at other times. In
sum, one mutually adjusts conflicts in light of the interdependence of one’s own
good with that of others.
A story from 5A2 of the Mencius (Mengzi 2006–2021) illustrates these
points. It is about Shun, a legendary sage-king exemplary for his ability to get
people to work together and for his filial piety. When Shun wanted to get
married, he knew that if he were to ask for his parents’ permission to marry,
he would be denied. He decided to marry anyway without telling them. Mencius
defends what Shun did, saying that if Shun had let his parents deny him the most
important of human relationships, it would have embittered him toward his
parents. Shun’s good as an individual depends on both his desired marriage
relationship and his relationship to his parents. For him to conform to his
parents’ wishes is not only to deny him the first relationship but also to
adversely affect the second. For the sake of both relationships he must assert
his own good, which in the end is not separate from the good of his parents. Of
course, one might well imagine that if one of his primary moral concerns was
the health of his relationship with his parents, Shun would have had to have
gone to considerable lengths to repair that relationship given what he had done,
and he would be required to do this even if his parents had been unreasonably
disposed against his marrying. The moral task in an ethic of relationships is
often the task of finding a way to fulfill oneself in ways that also fulfill the
community. In fact, it is the kind of project that Nelson Mandela very well
described in talking about the ethics of Ubuntu: “[It] does not mean that people
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should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is, are you going to do so
in order to enable the community around you, and enable it to improve?”
(Mandela 2006).
A morality placing supreme value on the rights of individuals might well
approach the problem of conflicts of interest in relationships differently, saying
that Shun had every right to marry whomever he wanted to marry, and that he
was under no obligation to repair his relationship with his parents. Thus, while it
might endorse Shun’s action of marrying anyway, it would have been for
different reasons, and different subsequent actions might have been required.
Note, however, that a relationship-oriented morality such as Confucianism does
not differ from one that emphasizes the rights of the individual because it fails to
recognize that important interests of the individual can conflict. It differs in its
approach to dealing with such conflicts and in the weight it accords to the
relationship as a constituent of each party’s well-being. This does not mean that
the interests of each individual are reduced to the interest in the relationship or
 16 Ethics

that it can be acceptable to continually deny for the sake of the relationship the
satisfaction of interests concerning matters other than that relationship.
As to the criticism that relationship-oriented moralities embody unacceptable
hierarchies within the family, a number of contemporary defenders of the
Confucian tradition have argued that the core ethical values of the tradition do
not require objectionable kinds of subordination between men and women,
husband and wife, or between parents and children. The earliest thinkers in
the tradition, as represented by the Mencius and the Analects featuring the
teachings of Confucius, did clearly accept the subordination of women to
men, but did not attempt to justify it, and did not attribute to women capacities
to realize virtue that are lesser than those possessed by men (see Chan 2000).
Attempts came later to ground gender hierarchies in terms of a cosmology of the
two main forces shaping the processes of change: yin (associated with the
female) and yang (associated with the male). Though this cosmology has
always portrayed the two forces as complementary and interdependent, the
yang was also later conceived as superior and dominant over the yin. The
Daoist tradition within Chinese thought, as it often does, serves as
a corrective to the hierarchical tendencies of Confucian thought, and interro-
gates the conventional association of leadership with dominant attitudes and
conduct. The Daodejing celebrates the efficacy of those who are receptive,
responsive, self-effacing, and nurturing. Confucians can take on board much of
that correction as wisdom about the true nature of leadership and who can
become a leader.
Stereotypes of a moral tradition distant from one’s own culture can often arise
from “snapshots” taken from one perspective at a single stage of the tradition,
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which in turn are taken to represent the whole of that tradition. Many contem-
porary Confucians acknowledge the oppression embodied in the traditional
gender roles that were endorsed by earlier Confucians and envision the core
values of the tradition in ways that involve nonhierarchical reconceptualization
of, for example, family roles. Marriage, for example, might be reconceived as
based on friendship between partners, with each contributing according to their
particular strengths and not because they are of a particular sex (see Rosenlee
2014 on what a contemporary dialogue between feminism, the care ethic, and
Confucianism might look like).
The tendency to reify another moral tradition in terms of its earlier stages
conflicts with the tendency to interpret one’s own tradition in the light of
meanings one judges it ought to have. Within the rights-centered tradition as
embodied in the United States, for example, it is well known that the “self-
evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence (US, 1776) do and do not
greatly conflict with the practice and probably the intended meaning of the
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 17

authors: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator
with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” These words do not conflict in the sense that they really meant
“men,” not “women.” They do conflict because “all men are created equal” did
not mean the enslaved (including those enslaved by many of those who signed
the Declaration), and they did not mean Native or First Americans. Further, the
poor, even when of European origin, were widely thought to be a permanent
underclass (see Richardson 2020). In fact, the authors probably meant to assert
not the inalienable rights of individual human beings but the collective rights of
the colonists to statehood and self-government (Rakove 2009).
Yet the words of the Declaration are now attributed the universal meanings
pertaining to individuals that most contemporary Americans think they ought to
have. And when the exclusions under “men” intended by the signers are
acknowledged, the incongruence is elided through talk of inconsistency in
thought and practice. The fact is that there has been real change, but continuing
division of belief about the meaning of these “self-evident truths” that continues
to this day, when considerable numbers of Americans do not honor the univer-
salist interpretation in word or deed. If humility seems called for when pro-
nouncing on what one’s own moral tradition means, then it should be all the
more called for when pronouncing what another’s moral tradition means. If the
meaning of one’s own tradition is still in contention, one should also consider
that others see their tradition as undergoing continuing contestation. Esme
Murdock writes of the temporal perspective of settlers who have displaced
Indigenous peoples that it “configures indigenous governance and sovereignty
as firmly fixed in the chronological past and stagnating over time such that these
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governance structures and the political and legal philosophies that support them
have stalled and not evolved or grown with the changing conditions of settler
colonization and oppression” (Murdock 2022, 422).
As to the association of Confucianism with requiring unquestioning obedience
of children to parents, such an interpretation is based more on common cultural
practices than on the Confucian texts. It is true that the Analects, traditionally
taken to be the most reliable reflection of the historical Confucius’ teachings,
sometimes (e.g., 1.11, 2.5 in Analects 2006–21) suggests unconditional obedience
(though the passages are ambiguous, and there is plenty of controversy around
the traditional assumption about the text’s faithfulness to his teachings given
the aggregative nature of the text, the product of many minds and hands). On
the other hand, there is copious indication (4.18, 11.4, 13.15, 13.23, 14.22)
that children have the responsibility to remonstrate with their parents if they
believe them to be in error. The Xiao Jing or Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao
Jing 2006–21, “Filial Piety in Relation to Reproof and Remonstrance”),
 18 Ethics

characterizes remonstrating with a parent to dissuade them from unrighteous

acts as required by loyalty to the parent, and the same holds, it is said, for the
duties of a minister to a ruler, and a friend to a friend. Indeed, Xunzi, who
articulated the most theoretically systematic version of Confucian ethics,
and who was active near the end of the classical era, held that it was the
moral responsibility of a child to not follow parental orders when following
them, in contrast with disobeying them, would (1) endanger parents; (2)
disgrace them; or (3) would be doing something beastly. The greatest filial
piety, he declared, was understanding the proper purpose of following and
not following orders (Xunzi 2006–21, “The Way of the Son”).

7 Complicating the Contrast between Relationship-

and Autonomy-Centered Moralities
Earlier, I characterized relationship- and autonomy-centered moralities as dif-
ferent from one another by comparing the degree of priority they put on the
value of relationships as valued for their own sake with the degree of priority
they put on the value of autonomy, especially personal autonomy to choose how
to live, for its own sake. In characterizing my mother’s implicit comparison of
the Chinese attitude toward the worthwhile and meaningful life as one of
fulfilling responsibilities to others versus broad latitude to do what one wanted
in order to feel happiness (where happiness in her mind seemed to be a form of
subjective contentment), I was contrasting an emphasis on relationship with an
emphasis on personal autonomy. Growth of the network of responsibilities can
be inversely related to broad latitude to do what one wants. It could be said that
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the responsibility dimension of relational valuing stands in an inverse relation to

the personal-choice dimension of autonomy.
Recognizing this inverse relation between the two dimensions is compatible
with recognizing other kinds of relation between them, depending on context.
When discussing how increasing the scope and extent of one’s responsibilities
to others can have the effect of decreasing the scope of personal choice, we are
assuming it is the same person whose responsibilities and personal choices are
in question. However, there is also a sense in which the scope of personal choice
can be expanded when others recognize and perform their responsibilities to the
agent having personal choice. Most crucial are the responsibilities that need to
be performed to enable a person to develop the capacities of agency. Human
beings are born helpless, and only with the help of others do they become
enabled to make choices and to act to fulfill them. Moreover, certain choices,
such as the choice to pursue an advanced degree in physics, come into existence
only when made possible and meaningful against the backdrop of practices and
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 19

institutions. And such practices and institutions are possible only with the
appropriate responsibilities established and fulfilled to a sufficient degree.
Thus certain kinds of responsibilities and their performance by the appropriate
people may support personal autonomy for various others.
Furthermore, there are other dimensions of responsibility and autonomy that
also give rise to different kinds of relationship to each other. Consider that
besides personal autonomy, there is the moral autonomy of acting on one’s
moral judgment even if doing so displeases and contradicts the views of those in
authority over oneself. Xunzi’s view of what a son or minister should do when
the father or ruler has done or is about to do something quite wrong is an
example of such moral autonomy. Here again, being in certain kinds of rela-
tionship, such as having a model and teacher who encourages disagreement and
argument with him in the way Confucius did in the Analects (see 2.9, 9.30,
13.23, 15.36), can help nurture such moral autonomy. There are few formula-
tions of the ethical life in any tradition, I would maintain, that rival Confucius’
answer to his students’ question about his aspirations in life: “To comfort the
aged, to engender trust in my friends, and to nurture the young” (Analects 5.26).
The comparison of rich and complex moral traditions is itself a rich and
complex task. Interpreting a moral tradition deeply is to identify its central
values, and, unavoidably, it is to judge which articulations of that tradition have
been the most plausible in terms of those central values. Inquiry into whether
there is a single true morality involves such interpretation and comparison, and
in this regard, the argument departs from the way most metaethicists ply their
trade. They mostly aspire to stay above the fray and avoid answering the
question, “Well, does this particular tradition make plausible claims about
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what a good human life is, and about what it is to act rightly? If so, can we
say that these claims are more plausible than ones to be found in other moral
traditions?” The attempt to stay above the fray of engaging in these questions
has led to unproductive discussions that do not engage with the importance of
morality in human life.
If the job of interpreting and comparing moral traditions is done correctly,
I maintain, one will find familiar ideas, often in unfamiliar contexts, and
differences intertwined with similarities. Confucian ethics generally does not
highly value personal autonomy, and that is because its vision of a flourishing
human life is that of relationship and responsibility to others. Its de-emphasis on
personal autonomy places it in contrast with familiar versions of what I call
autonomy- and rights-centered traditions, but I have pointed out the strong
presence of another kind of autonomy that should be familiar to thoughtful
advocates of rights-centered traditions, which I have called moral autonomy.
Confucian ethics, or important strands of its tradition, do recognize that the
 20 Ethics

interests of individuals, though such interests include as central elements

relationship to others and contribution to the good of community, do come
into conflict with those relationships, with the interests of others with whom one
is in relationship, and with the good of community. This conflict may or may not
be fully resolved. But the resources it brings to these problems are formidable.
Once one begins to probe into the issues and arguments of a tradition, it is
possible to see lines of thought that are not only intelligible but cogent. One may
not arrive at the same set of priorities the other tradition may be tending toward,
but one may be impressed, as I was when I began to study the Chinese tradition,
by the range of familiar and important considerations to which that tradition
responds, and by the dimensions of value to which it can attach importance, and
do so for good reasons. It is partly because other traditions can overlap with
one’s own concerns, and bring forward lines of reasoning and apt response to
them, that one can begin to form appreciation for alternative forms of thought
and practice that both converge and diverge from the tradition(s) with which one
is more familiar. One begins to see alternative pathways and feels less assurance
that there is or needs to be a single correct pathway for human beings.
More specifically, once one investigates how a tradition that tilts in favor of
relationship deals with major challenges, and to the extent one can do the same
for a tradition that tilts in favor of (personal) autonomy, one not only sees that
the issue between them is more subtle than initially construed, but also that one
might also see how ways of life realizing each type of tradition might offer
fulfilling human lives. In Section 21, I will address the issue of what a better
version of the rights-centered tradition in its American version might look like
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when it deals with problems in its conception of rights. To the extent that one
conducts such a comparison, and finds plausible and formidable versions of
each tradition, one might begin to doubt that one tradition should be declared the
winner.
One might also doubt, to address another possibility, that there is some single
ideal balancing point that combines the strengths of the traditions and avoids the
moral downsides that each is prone to have. The responsibilities toward families
in Mencius’ discussion of Shun’s marriage prod individuals to engage in the
give-and-take of staying in relationship while working on the inevitable prob-
lems encountered. As seen from Mencius’ reasoning about the course of action
Shun took, staying in relationship need not involve suppressing one’s own
urgent desires and needs, and if one successfully reconciles these desires and
needs with maintaining viable relationships with important others, then greater
fulfillment may be achieved. But the challenges can be steep, and the chances of
failure not insignificant. Looking at this second possibility, lowering moral
expectations of what is required in relationship, or of what is required to sustain
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 21

it, looks appealing, and recognizing a strong right to exit a relationship without
having to work through reconciling its demands with one’s pressing desires and
needs is a way to do that. Yet reducing or lowering expectations of what is
required in relationship can encourage people to part ways too soon rather than
putting the work into making the relationship work.
The best hope for there being a single true or most justified morality is the
idea of an optimal configuration of values that somehow combines the norma-
tive appeal of all of them. To the extent to which there is need to prioritize values
when they come into conflict, the optimal morality would set the correct
priorities. To some extent, this possible route to universalism is the most
appealing to me, and this might not be surprising, given my bicultural back-
ground. It also appeals to my sense of what is going wrong with the American
experiment in democracy and individual rights. During various points in US
history, the country has made significant progress in extending the promise of
equality of rights and of acknowledging the equal dignity of all, but equally
often, it has shown that its upholding of rights tends to favor some and not
others, and that its rhetorical affirmation of equal dignity is underlain by
relegation of some to an underclass from which it is extremely difficult to
escape because of race, economic background, and gender. It has most recently
seemed to generate many divisive battles over what rights people have and what
they are entitled to do under those rights. These problems can be addressed,
I argue in Sections 21–22, and part of the path to successfully doing so is
through taking the value of relationship more seriously, and in particular the
need to accommodate others even when there is serious disagreement in order to
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continue making a life with them. It is part of my view that different moral
traditions can learn from each other and yet still retain their distinctive
identities.
Arriving at such conclusions might produce an experience that could be
called “moral ambivalence” (Wong 2006), by which one becomes significantly
uncertain as to whether there is a singular truth as to how to balance or prioritize
values that are shared across different moral traditions. To clarify the way that
ambivalence is deployed in the argument: There is no claim that everyone or
even most people have had this experience. The experience deserves epistemic
weight in proportion to the understanding achieved by the subject of the
experience. Ambivalence can be gotten on the cheap or it can be earned.
Further, there can be no assurance that those of comparable understanding
will have similar reactions of ambivalence when addressing the same conflict.
When experienced by those who have seriously and in a sustained fashion
sought understanding of what is to be said for all reasonable sides, ambivalence
puts pressure on inquirers for an explanation.
 22 Ethics

The experience of moral ambivalence does not, by any means, prove the truth
of relativism, but presents an explanatory challenge that relativist or universalist
theories might satisfy in varying degrees and different ways.2 If there is a single
right way to deal with difficult conflicts of value, relativists ask universalists
what they think that single right way is and why they think it is so. If their
answers rest on the intuition of some set of “self-evident” truths, the relativist
may further ask why that intuition should be favored over others that have lain at
the core of other traditions, or even the intuitions of others in their own tradition.
Some universalists and realists assert that disagreeing parties might never be
able to resolve their differences even in epistemically ideal circumstances
(McGrath 2010). If one is a robust realist, it is argued, then one must be prepared
to admit an epistemic gap that is unbridgeable, at least in our current circum-
stances. Such a possibility cannot be refuted, but perhaps it gives up too soon on
the project of explanation, for it is unclear on such a view where the line falls
between the humanly knowable and unknowable, the uresolvable and the
unresolvable: Does it fall between those disagreements that seem to hinge
only on disagreement over nonmoral factual questions (the knowable) and
those disagreements that seem to involve differences over moral values (the
unknowable)? If so, that leaves a huge domain of unknowability. If the domain
of unknowability is smaller (somewhere within the class of disagreements
involving differences over moral values), how is the boundary drawn?
Relativists often press the case against universalism by advancing a view of
morality that can be called naturalistic. Here, naturalism about morality is
deployed as part of the theoretical framework used to present what is claimed
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to be the best explanation of the moral ambivalence just described. In the next
Sections, this naturalism is explained and combined with the phenomenon of
moral ambivalence to argue for a moderate form of moral relativism or strong
form of moral pluralism.

8 The Underdiscussed Question of What Morality Is

Someone outside academic moral philosophy might justifiably assume that the
question of what morality is would be one of the most thoroughly discussed
topics in that discipline. This turns out not to be the case. Much argumentation
and theorizing about morality is premised on a conception of morality that is
treated as a definition or that is virtually equivalent to one. Michael Smith
argues from the “platitudes”– that morality is about objective facts and that

2
These clarifications of how I think moral ambivalence should come about so as to have weight in
the argument for relativism were inspired by critical points made by Christopher Gowans (2007)
in a review of Wong (2006).
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 23

when people make moral judgments they are motivated to act on them – to the
conclusion that moral judgments are judgments about what one would desire if
one were rational (Smith 1994). On the other hand, J. L. Mackie (1977) starts
from a conception of morality as concerning objective moral facts and in which
these facts are objectively prescriptive (they unconditionally give any one
reasons to behave morally) to the conclusion that there can be no true moral
judgments because there are no such facts and no such objective prescriptivity.
He asserts that these features are part of the ordinary conception of morality and
embedded in the meanings of moral terms, as well as being acknowledged by
many moral philosophers. The problem with such arguments is that the concep-
tions of morality they presuppose are mainly based on the philosopher’s intu-
itions about the judgments and inferences that laypeople make (see Gil 2009;
Sarkissian 2017).
Empirical work on laypeople’s concepts of morality throws such philosoph-
ical arguments under the suspicion of being parochial. Geoffrey Goodwin and
John Darley (2008) devised measures to gauge people’s beliefs in moral
objectivity. The extent to which one tends to treat a moral judgment as true or
false and to believe there is one correct answer as to whether that judgment is
true or false is an indication of the degree of objectivity one assigns to the
judgment. When queried on the truth of various judgments on an array of ethical
issues, participants varied considerably in assigning truth value according to the
kind of act being judged. Most strikingly, although they generally agreed with
the permissibility of abortion, assisted death, and stem-cell research, only very
small percentages assigned truth values to the judgments expressing their views
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(2008, 1346). In a second experiment, Goodwin and Darley asked participants

whether there was one correct answer as to whether a moral judgment was true
or not. The participants were far more willing to say there was a correct answer
as to the wrongness of robbing a bank than they were to say the same about the
goodness of anonymous giving and were highly unlikely to claim a correct
answer as to the permissibility of assisted death (2008, 1352). The participants’
reluctance to attribute truth to the latter moral judgment may stem from two
thoughts they might have had: recognition that opposing answers on matters
such as the permissibility of abortion, assisted death, and stem-cell research
might be equally reasonable; and the assumption that conflicting positions
cannot both be true. When given the opportunity to say that there is more than
one correct answer as to whether a moral judgment about these issues is true or
not, significant numbers of participants took that opportunity.
The Goodwin and Darley study suggests that there is a diversity of attitudes
toward the objectivity of moral judgments, not just across people, but also
across the range of ethical issues and possible subjects of disagreement.
 24 Ethics

Wright et al. (2013) asked participants to classify topics as factual, moral,

conventional, or a matter of taste. They found no difference between average
levels of imputed objectivism for the items participants classified as moral.
Wright and her colleagues confirmed the diversity of attitudes on moral object-
ivity, which they call “meta-ethical pluralism.” Strikingly, Goodwin and Darley
found that the strongest beliefs in the objective correctness of morality tend to
be held by those who believe them to be the commands of God, not the source of
objectivity to be expected from reading Smith or Mackie. The results of these
studies have adverse implications for a customary way that universalists often
argue for their metaethical position: that it is inherent to the very concept of
morality that it is about objective facts that admit of a single true answer. In fact,
characteristics attributed to morality are not only as disputable to laypeople as
they are to philosophers, but laypeople are also liable to respond in diverse ways
to the fact of moral disagreements and to perceived difficulties in resolving
certain kinds of such disagreements.
One of the ways that philosophers typically do metaethics is as an exercise in
conceptual analysis. As the arguments of Smith and Mackie demonstrate, this
conceptual analysis of moral concepts rests on the assumption that the concepts
are uniform and stable across the populations of their users, which may be why
philosophers feel free to rely on their own intuitions about conceptual contents.
This assumption looks simply to be wrong. It gives less credit to laypeople than
they deserve. Thoughtful people can be expected to continue thinking about
what sort of thing morality is, and their observations about moral disagreements
and how and whether they have been resolved may indeed affect their views
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about some of the most basic characteristics they attribute to morality. In

addition, people’s larger views about the nature of the world and its origins
may affect their views about the nature of morality. Those who adhere to
a strongly theistic view may adhere to a divine-command theory of morality,
regardless of most philosophers since Plato’s Euthyphro having accepted that
the gods approve of something because it is right, rather than something’s being
right because the gods approve of it.

9 A Naturalistic Approach to Understanding Why Human Beings

Have Moralities
Rather than simply relying on conceptual analysis, this Element proposes to ask
why morality seems so important and central to human life, drawing from the
most relevant human sciences in looking for answers. This is what is meant by
taking a naturalistic approach. Sometimes a naturalistic approach is associated
with the attempt to reduce all phenomena to the physical. The approach adopted
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 25

here does not attempt to do that. Instead, it seeks only to make best use of the
relevant sciences to explain the phenomena in question. This “methodological”
naturalism, as opposed to a reductive or “substantive” naturalism (see Railton
1989; Wong 2006), furthermore, does not seek to reduce all normative concepts
to descriptive ones. For one thing, the standards or norms that govern scientific
inquiry may not be reducible to nonnormative properties. Normative concepts
may receive definition only in terms of other normative concepts. Scanlon
(1998), for example, argues that the concept of a reason (to believe or to do
something) may only be explicated in terms of phrases such as “a consideration
counting in favor of.”
The aim here is not to reduce but to clarify what kinds of reasons morality
provides as it guides thought and action. The proposal here is that a very large
class of moral reasons direct us to cooperate with each other. Here, I draw from
the scientific understanding of how the human biological inheritance prepares
us for cooperation. We share with the great apes a capacity for empathy with
others and for reciprocating the good they do for us (Flack and de Waal 2000; de
Waal 2008), suggesting a shared evolutionary history resulting in genetically
based dispositions for these behaviors. However, humans are distinctively
equipped with dispositions to develop complex cognitive and emotional traits
that enable them to cooperate at levels of far greater scale, coordination, and
complexity (Tomasello 2019).
Within human evolutionary theory, there has been a great deal of activity in
generating hypotheses as to how human beings could have evolved other-
concerned and reciprocating motivations. There are hypotheses as to why
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human beings might be disposed to act for the sake of their kin at cost to
themselves (Hamilton 1964), why they tend to reciprocate cooperation with
cooperation (Trivers 1971), why they might be disposed to engage in personally
costly acts of punishing others who free ride on the cooperation of others (Gintis
2000), and why they might engage in personally costly acts for the sake of
nonrelated others (Sober and Wilson 1998; for an update on later work that
builds on these hypotheses, see Okasha 2020). Besides forms of reciprocity that
are highly conditional and transactional in nature, reciprocity can take place in
kin and other kinds of relationships encompassing bonds of care and affection,
and these bonds can also have an evolutionary basis (see Hrdy 2011). These
hypotheses help explain how human beings became adapted for a life of
cooperation with each other, in part through evolved capacities to have concern
for others and to be disposed to help them (Hrdy 2011; Tomasello 2019).
Physically, we are unprepossessing animals, easily preyed upon by larger,
quicker, stronger animals with sharp teeth. Cooperating with each other, how-
ever, we multiply our powers manifold. While our closest relations, the great
 26 Ethics

apes, show some social motivations, such as empathy, they largely treat each
other instrumentally as means to their individual ends, especially outside their
families. Human beings not only have the capacities to care about others for
their own sake, but also have genetically based dispositions to create and to
follow cultural norms with prosocial content, and these norms support and
greatly enhance motivations to cooperate (Richerson et al. 2003; Richerson
and Boyd 2005; Tomasello 2019). Such motivations, together with self-interest
and the tendency to favor members of one’s own group(s), constitute a diverse
array of propensities that make cooperation possible but often pose problems of
motivational conflict for human beings. Morality could be that part of human
culture, a set of norms, practices, and judgments of various degrees of generality
that is used to socialize and guide human beings toward productive forms of
cooperation (Curry et al. 2019).3
Moralities can have other functions that overlap with the function of fostering
cooperation. These other functions prescribe ideals of character and striving
after values that are sometimes independent of or go beyond what is needed for
social cooperation (in my comment on Curry et al. 2019, appended to that essay,
I make this point). They spell out what a good or fulfilling or flourishing way of
life is, and what kind of character is needed to live that way. Such ideals serve
the need for a kind of intrapersonal coordination among the individual’s diverse
motivations such as concern for others, concern for self, and the self’s projects
and commitments. Anyone with young children is familiar with their alternation
of clashing motivations in quick and seemingly arbitrary succession. Internal
motivational conflict is a common phenomenon of human life, and so is the
feeling of frustration at having defeated oneself by pursuing first one end and
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then another, incompatible end, through indecision and wavering between one’s
desires. Human culture attempts to bring motivational conflict under control
through ideals of the good and worthwhile life that identify the ends most
worthy of pursuit. For example, knowledge, affectionate relationships, and
fulfillment of responsibilities to others are quite often marked as constituents
of a good human life, and guiding oneself by these values can foster reasonable
coherence (I say “reasonable coherence” because it is not an exact or purely
logical matter to make a consistent whole of diverse ends that may come into

3
Sharon Street (2006) invokes the influence of evolutionary forces on the content of evaluative
judgments in arguing against robust realism, which is the view that there are evaluative truths
existing independent of any evaluative attitudes. The form of pluralism defended here also denies
such a robust realism, but the argument for it depends on a conception of the functions of morality
that is not much in evidence in Street’s work (perhaps because she is focused on the status of
“evaluative judgments” in general). In my argument, I connect the function of facilitating and
regulating cooperation with hypotheses about the adaptiveness of evolved dispositions that prime
human beings to cooperate.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 27

conflict with one another in the unpredictable circumstances of an ongoing life).

Moralities also sometimes contain ideals of how people should relate to those
parts of their environment that are not human, animal, plant, or even water, as
seen above in the references to some of the ethics of African and Indigenous
peoples, and to Daoism in the Chinese tradition, though again, these ideals may
contribute to the viability of cooperation between humans, for example in
fostering an appreciation for the nonhuman environment that makes for sus-
tainability in resources and that supports cooperation. However, human beings
have attained deep and lasting satisfaction in being able to live in relationships
to nonhuman environments that they can regard as their homes.

10 Putting Together Moral Ambivalence and a Naturalistic

Conception of Morality
This section puts together the two parts of the argument for a kind of metaethical
moral relativism: moral ambivalence and a naturalistic conception of morality
as constructed. Recall from Section 7 that the relevant kind of moral ambiva-
lence is the result of serious and sustained inquiry into moralities that give
conflicting answers to some of the most pressing moral problems. Another
component of the argument is the conception of morality as emerging from
human biology and culture to foster and regulate social cooperation and internal
motivational coherence between the differing and potentially conflicting kinds
of motivation within individuals. The argument in this section is that this
naturalistic constructivist conception of morality, when combined with con-
straints on what can be an adequate morality that fulfills its functions, will
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provide the most plausible explanation of moral ambivalence.

Ambivalence is coming to see other moralities as alternatives to one’s own. If
these others are alternatives to one’s own, then these others and one’s own must
have something fundamentally in common. On the conception of morality
advanced here, they all are ways of promoting and sustaining interpersonal
cooperation and internal motivational coherence. If in fact there is not just one
correct way for moralities to perform these functions, moral ambivalence would
be the result. The claim here is that some version of metaethical relativism – that
there is no single true morality – emerges as part of the best explanation of moral
ambivalence. This kind of argument from the best explanation does not purport
to be definitive in the way that the conclusion deductively follows from self-
evident premises. Because it makes a claim for a certain theory about morality
as part of the best explanation, it is subject to comparison with other candidates
for the best explanation, including universalist ones claiming there is a single
true morality. In the next section, I add other components to this theory of
 28 Ethics

morality that I think strengthen the claim that it is the best explanation, and these
are components that yield constraints on what could be a true morality. There is
a plurality of true moralities, but it is a bounded plurality.

11 Constraints on the Range of Viable Moralities

As noted in Section 1, a debate is shaped by the way that its participants frame
the question to be debated, which in turn shapes the conceptions of the alterna-
tives in play. The debate over metaethical relativism has tended to oscillate
between extremes. On one extreme is an “anything goes” sort of relativism. It
might be a moral subjectivism that hinges moral truth or justifiability solely on
the individual’s adopted standards. It might be a social conventionalism that
directs us to the group’s standards. On the other extreme sits a robust universal-
ism, according to which moral properties are conceived on the model of
physical properties that exist independently of all human thought and decision.
Alternatively, morality consists of laws of pure practical reason applying to any
rational being, human or nonhuman. Sometimes those on the universalist side of
the spectrum make a move toward the middle without explicitly acknowledging
that they are doing so. For example, some grant that certain moral problems may
lack a truth-apt resolution due to vagueness in moral concepts (Shafer-Landau
1994, 1995, 2003), or because of ties in the ranking of moral values that come
into conflict (Brink 1989), or because of the noncomparability of such values
(Shafer-Landau 1994, 1995, 2003). But they tend to put these admissions into
parentheses. For relativists, including this author, who make a move toward the
middle and acknowledge doing so (Wong 2006; Velleman 2013), the conception
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of morality as functioning to promote human cooperation is the key. The

function of fostering cooperation, when combined with widespread and typical
human propensities that may have been selected as adaptive, may produce
objective constraints on morality (Wong 2006).
The function of coordinating intrapersonal motivations may, in combination
with the character of widespread and typical human propensities, also be
a source of objective constraint, but the range of what human beings have
regarded as a good and worthwhile life is wide and encompasses such diverse
ends that it is difficult to identify the function of intrapersonal coordination of
motivation as a purely independent source of constraint on true moralities, apart
from the way that prioritizing such ends as the fulfillment of responsibilities to
others as a central constituent of the good life can also help fulfill the interper-
sonal function of facilitating cooperation. For example, those ideals of the good
life that place limits on the legitimacy of pursuing one’s self-interest, especially
of doing so at the cost of others’ interests, will clearly also advance the
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 29

interpersonal function of facilitating and regulating cooperation. Hence the

focus will be on the argument from the interpersonal function.
Let us return to the idea that morality is a normative guide that arose partly to
foster social cooperation. Consider that not any form of social cooperation
could plausibly be deemed moral. Forms of cooperation such as slavery that
are sustainable only through threats of harm or through deception are not
morally acceptable because of the type of normative guide morality is supposed
to be, which is a guide that can be accepted on a voluntary basis by appeal to
interests (not necessarily or not only self-interests) that human beings typically
or characteristically have. This is plausibly one of the meanings of “morality”
(Wong 2019b).
Given the earlier criticism of claims about morality made on the basis of pure
conceptual analysis, it is appropriate to be modest about the claim that morality
is a normative guide that should not depend on deception or coercion for
acceptance. While it is likely quite a common belief about morality, not all
such beliefs can be put together into a coherent and explanatorily useful theory
of morality. Consider Goodwin and Darley’s finding, mentioned in Section 8,
that quite a few people think of morality as composed of God’s commands, and
the apparent link between this thought and a very strong form of objectivity that
these people attribute to morality. A divine-command theory of morality would
rule out many of the explanatorily useful points about morality, biological and
cultural evolution, and cooperation that have been made in this Element.
A coherent theory will probably have to be somewhat revisionist in its intent
(Gibbard 1992), and will not give full credit to the beliefs that some number of
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people have about morality.

The aim is to account for the broadest set of the beliefs about morality that
appear to be the most plausible, given what else is known about the human
world and beyond. The constraint that morality be acceptable on a voluntary
basis, not dependent on coercion or deception, enables a theory that incorpor-
ates the way a great deal of moral criticism has been made and that has enabled
genuine change in human history, for example, criticism of theories of race and
gender that attribute inferior capacities of rationality or self-control to whole
groups of human beings, theories which were then utilized to subordinate those
groups.
To be clear, the proposed constraint on what a true morality could be is not
based on a contractualist view of the origin of morality. There is no claim that
morality emerges from agreements that people make with each other to cooper-
ate in certain ways. Rather, the claim is that morality is a normative guide that
purports to be acceptable to those who come under its governance on grounds
free of coercion or deception. We might then say that a morality that can be
 30 Ethics

accepted only under conditions of coercion or deception cannot be a true

morality. We might then call this universal constraint on all moralities “justifi-
ability to the governed.” This constraint leaves open the matter of what grounds
people could have to accept a morality without coercion or deception, but some
of the earlier discussion of the content of relationship- or autonomy-centered
moralities suggests possible grounds: Relationships of the right sort plausibly
form much of the substance of a meaningful human life; the personal autonomy
to have control over how one lives one’s life also has deep and wide appeal.
Other constraints on what could be a true or justifiable morality do not derive
from the meaning of the concept of morality but from its function of sustaining
voluntary social cooperation together with the widespread and typical psycho-
logical propensities of human beings (what could be called “human nature,” but
without the essentialist implication that every member of the species must
possess all such psychological propensities). If one of these widespread and
typical propensities, self-interest, promises to render social cooperation prob-
lematic, then true or justifiable moralities will have to address this challenge,
and this will be done partly through the content of their norms. A norm of
reciprocity, in particular a norm requiring people to return good for good
received, might be a necessary component of all true moralities that helps to
relieve the psychological burden of contributing to social cooperation when it
comes into conflict with self-interest. It takes some pressure off other-regarding
concern as a motivation for cooperation.
A reciprocity norm can take many specific forms that can vary with the
particular morality and with the type of relationship they apply to. It can
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apply to a more purely transactional relationship that is based on particular

benefits given and that can require tit-for-tat, in-kind return. It can also apply to
relationships based on kinship or friendship, in which purely transactional
exchange might be regarded as contrary to or destructive of the relationship.
Rather, appropriate return for benefit received might be conceived as adjusted to
what the recipient, in their particular circumstances, is capable of giving back.
A child is not expected, for example, to return in-kind benefits to a parent who
cares for and nurtures them. In some cultures, the return might take the form of
receptivity to the parent’s direction, affection, and acknowledgment of what
was given by the parent (see Earp et al. 2021 for an empirically informed
discussion of “transactional” versus “care-based” forms of reciprocity).
A third constraint concerns “accommodation,” a value that might have to be
acknowledged within all adequate moralities fulfilling the function of fostering
interpersonal cooperation, because of the ubiquity of disagreement over how to
interpret even those values that might be shared among people or how to
prioritize values in case of conflict. This value is a willingness to maintain
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 31

a constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even
intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible
pressure if it always depended on strict agreement (see chapters 2 and 9 in
Wong 2006 for further discussion). As a moral value, accommodation expresses
a primal form of respect for others that transcends any requirement that they
agree with one. Antonio Cua (1989) identifies the presence of this value in
Confucian ethics, and it is given prominent expression by the Analects passage
in which Confucius says of the exemplary person, the primary moral ideal in
that text, that such a person pursues harmony rather than sameness; the petty
person does the opposite (13.23). In this respect, all adequate moralities must
have this value of relationship.
The three constraints identified are substantial but do not narrow the possi-
bilities to one single true morality. Justifiability to the governed leaves a range
of moralities that might be accepted without coercion or deception.
Reciprocating good for good and accommodation, while not subject to arbitrary
or whimsical interpretation, can be interpreted in significantly different ways in
different moralities, and their relative priorities compared to other values would
also be subject to variation. How a morality addresses these issues determines
its more specific content, and the range of moralities that satisfy the general
constraints in different ways and in different forms constitute the plurality of
true or most justified moralities.
Aside from universal constraints arising from the combination of the
cooperative function and human propensities, the truth conditions of moral
judgments are shaped by local and contingent factors. A deeper explanation
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will refer to the complexity and variety of human needs and desires and how
they can evolve to take different forms in particular circumstances. Further,
because of the variety of human motivations, the ability to strike different
balances between, for example, needs for relationship and for personal auton-
omy makes for a range of different ways to live deeply satisfying human lives.
The case for pluralism and against universalism may ultimately be supported by
reflection on the tension between values such as relationship and autonomy,
individual rights and the greater good, and the duties of special relationship and
duties to human beings (or perhaps all sentient beings) as such. The tension
between such values can certainly be ameliorated, and in some circumstances,
these values can be compatible and even mutually reinforcing, but as Isaiah
Berlin observed, we can envision no utopia in which the maximal realizations of
these values are made compatible with one another (Berlin 2002, 212–217).
The universalist might insist that there must be a single correct balance
between all the important values, but then the problem, as discussed earlier in
relation to moral ambivalence, is to specify in what the balance consists and
 32 Ethics

how to justify that there is such a singular ideal balance. The task of balancing is
liable to be much more complex and the options more numerous when we
recognize that it is not trying to bring into alignment simply and broadly
specified values such as relationship, autonomy, and rights. There are different
kinds of relationships (e.g., those of the family, friendship, those defined by
institutional roles such as professor and student), different kinds of rights that
can have varying scopes (with variation in the scopes being a major way of
balancing rights against each other or against other nonrights considerations
such as public welfare). The sheer number and variety of ways to finely parse
values strongly suggests that there is a significant plurality of viable options for
combining and balancing them.
Development of this idea that morality is socially constructed, but con-
strained around the functions of promoting and sustaining social cooperation
and fostering internal motivational coherence within the individual, must
address some major questions, addressed in the following Sections: Who does
the constructing? And within the range of plural moralities defined by the
universal constraints of adequacy, when there is conflict in what they require
and encourage people to be and to do, can we call that conflict disagreement?

12 The Social Construction of Morality: By the Individual

or Group?
This section gives an answer more specifically to the question of who socially
constructs morality. The individual? The group? The theory defended here is not
that the morality of a group is a single set of norms to which all members of
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a group subscribe. The set of norms, practices, and judgments that come to be
called a morality has imprecise and varying borders, and its various constituents
will be subject to varying interpretations and disagreements. At times, depend-
ing on the context and aim of inquiry, one might talk about American or Chinese
morality, but it must always be kept in mind that such descriptors comprehend
considerable internal diversity. As seen from the discussion of Confucian ethics,
which is itself part of a complex and diverse Chinese moral tradition, there is
considerable variety of views expressed among Confucians on crucial issues
such as the requirements of filial piety.
Some critics of relativism have called attention to the difficulty of drawing
clear and unqualified boundaries for the morality of any given group or society
(Moody-Adams 1997). Some relativists are vulnerable to that charge given the
way they conceive of how true moralities can vary across groups. Gilbert Harman
(1975), for example, influentially suggested that moralities consist of implicit
agreement among members of a group to intend to act in certain ways on the
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 33

conditions that others similarly intend. His theory seems to presuppose

a uniformity of basic moral commitments among members of the relevant group.
David Velleman (2013) has argued for a form of moral relativism that
construes moralities as specifying the action-types that are “doable” within
a given community. To learn the morality of a community is to learn what
sorts of action make sense or are intelligible for agents in that community. For
Velleman, then, adherents to different moralities will not even be able to
understand what passes as “doable” in each other’s moralities. Rovane
(2013), like Velleman, holds a version of relativism based on the mutual
unintelligibility of various moral worlds. She gives an example in the contrast
between the hypothetical Anjali, who lives a life of traditional duties to family
and obedience to parents’ wishes in a rural village of Punjab in India, and
a hypothetical middle-class American woman who grows up in a small town in
middle America, goes to a distinguished university, earns an advanced degree,
and goes into a business career. She does not marry, contrary to her parents’
wishes, and does not think she is morally obliged to comply with those wishes.
Anjali, on the other hand, submits to the marriage her parents arranged for her.
While Rovane grants that these two different moral worlds may share “moral
platitudes” in common, such as the general wrongness of killing, harming, and
hindering agency, she argues that such points of agreement are too general to be
action-guiding.
It is true that culture gives specific substance as to when one should specific-
ally refrain from killing, harming, and hindering, and what specifically counts
as such actions. However, this does not mean that different moral “worlds” are
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hermetically sealed from one another (see Appiah 2006; Wong 2006). The
businesswoman in Rovane’s example grew up in a small town and was raised
by parents who wished her to marry. She knows something of the specifics of the
traditional world of her parents. Or in Velleman’s terms, she knows what is
“doable” in that world. Many Americans live in the interface between these two
worlds. In India, many young people are now imbued with an ethic that prizes
personal autonomy, yet many of them opt for marriages arranged by their
families and professional matchmakers. Cultures of the urban and the rural sit
cheek by jowl, and considerable numbers of people are conversant with both.
Matchmakers help young people to navigate and cross bridges between them.
British-born Indians generate a variety of marriage-making practices, from
one extreme at which the children do not even have a veto over their parents’
choices of mates, to the other extreme in which parents are only involved in
staging the wedding. The most popular choices within this group are in
between: the semiarranged marriage in which parents select potential mates
and introduce them to their children, after which a courtship ensues in which the
 34 Ethics

children are encouraged to fall in love; and the “love-cum-arranged marriage”

in which the children first select their potential mates on their own, then
introduce them to their parents to get a parental-approved introduction and
courtship. These choices in the middle of the spectrum reflect a desire to accept
in some ways the traditional constraint of parental approval of spouses for
children, together with the freedom to fall in love on one’s own (Pande 2021).
To sum up, a challenge for the kind of group-based relativism that is based on
the idea that different groups do not disagree but rather cannot understand each
other in some fundamental way is that when examined more deeply, the kinds of
examples given actually undermine the conclusion they are supposed to sup-
port. People within each group disagree with each other, and their moral ideas
can substantially overlap with the ideas of people in other groups.
To take another example of what is usually regarded as a deep moral
disagreement, those who are pro-life and pro-choice on abortion don’t neces-
sarily have the problem of understanding the other side’s position, but the
intractability of this sort of disagreement has been one of the main grounds to
take relativism seriously. Sometimes the disagreement over abortion is
explained in terms of disagreement over nonmoral facts pertaining to the
morality of abortion, for example, whether there is a God who has endowed
humanity with the divine purpose of procreation and who confers souls at
conception or shortly thereafter. While some may ground their anti-abortion
stance on such a belief, not everyone with this stance does so, and may instead
point to obligations to protect developing, or at least potential, human life. As
shall be seen in Sections 21–22, there is again a spectrum of positions on
the morality of abortion that involves a mix of normative considerations – the
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necessity of respecting actual or potential life versus the autonomy of the

pregnant person – that are comprehensible and often given moral force on
both sides.
The challenges for conceiving morality as constructed by groups might lead
one to adopt a more individualistic version of relativism. James Dreier (1990)
and Jesse Prinz (2007) have defended a version of what Drier labels “speaker
relativism,” according to which the content of moral terms is determined by the
individual speaker’s moral commitments (or in Dreier’s language “motivating
attitudes”). Given such an analysis, however, it becomes problematic to explain
why people treat a speaker’s moral pronouncements as typically having impli-
cations for what they have moral reason to approve and to do. Such implications
may be rejected, especially if the speaker’s pronouncements seem way out of
line with the audience’s conception of appropriate judgment in the circum-
stances the speaker is addressing, but it often takes this kind of stark incongru-
ence to upset the expected implications. Most of the actual cases of moral
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 35

disagreement are not of this extreme variety, but blend the familiar with the
different. The upshot is that morality often bears an interpersonal dimension that
belies the conception of morality as speaker-relative (for more on this topic, see
Wong 2011, 2019a).
These implications from the speaker to the audience are especially liable to
be drawn in contexts where people are engaged in cooperation to accomplish
a common project. Michael Tomasello (2019) writes of “joint commitments”
in which people perceive in each other a commitment to act together and to
also agree on the appropriateness of sanction from the participants on whom-
ever does not fulfill the role ideal assigned to each participant. This is clearest
in small-scale, face-to-face collaborations, and as the scale of human cooper-
ation broadens to encompass cooperation with people one does not see and
does not even know, culture provides moral norms to specify the responsibil-
ities and prerogatives of one’s role ideal. Even on the large and impersonal
scale, it is not unusual for people to think that sanction is appropriate for
someone unknown to them but who is simply described as not doing their
part. Such reactions are consistent with the hypothesis that morality is
intimately involved in the furtherance of cooperation, and since the scale
and complexity of cooperation makes it arguably the activity that most
distinctively and consistently distinguishes human beings from all other life
on earth, it is plausible to see it as enmeshed with the nature of morality. But
now there is a puzzle. If morality is not the sole expression of a speaker’s
prescriptions or of a group that is monolithically united around a set of norms
and distinguished from other groups who occupy different moral worlds, then
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what is it?
There is an alternative to regarding morality as the possession of a group or
of the individual. We need not treat them as dichotomous alternatives. This
alternative involves recognizing that in human cooperative life, there is need
to regulate and convey to all participants what is expected of them, but also
considerable play in how these expectations are interpreted by individuals
and subgroups. The norms, often implicit, that spell out expectations can be
fluid, often vague, and in need of further specification and interpretation.
Sometimes cooperation is on the large scale of encompassing a whole society
or even societies or nations, and sometimes it is on a very small scale, within
a family or neighborhood. People may draw from the conceptual resources
utilized to regulate and foster cooperation on one of these levels and argue
that these resources are applicable to another level of cooperation. Confucian
ethics often gives rise to arguments in which moral resources regularly
applied to the family level are said to be applicable to larger levels.
Arguments from analogy can play a crucial role, starting with a context of
 36 Ethics

cooperation in which, say, certain kinds of duties or responsibilities are

widely accepted as having force, and then moving to another context in
which this is not so obvious, but where the argument is meant to point to
relevant similarities with the first context. This provides opportunity for the
individual to exercise their own creative and interpretive thought. Such
thought can go into justifications to others of the moral acceptability of
what the individual has done or proposes to do, with implications for the
acceptability of others’ actions.
These characteristics of morality arise because of the complexity and
variety of the people and groups it serves to guide. Morality plausibly arises
from customs and practices that emerge and evolve implicitly (most of the
time) among people who belong to more than one group. This is especially
true of modern, large societies with populations diverse in ethnicity and
social class. Even much smaller and simpler societies are subject to signifi-
cant diversity of group membership that introduces diversity of moral belief.
The Greek tragedy Antigone (Sophocles 1984) is about values of family
loyalty and obedience to the gods (which requires that Antigone bury the
body of her brother) and the value of political loyalty to the state (King
Creon has declared the brother a traitor and that he not be buried). We, like
Antigone, have choices to make between the conflicting demands of the
groups to which we belong. Both the group and the individual are factors in
the moralities we end up having. Neither “morality is determined by the
group” nor “morality is determined by the individual” seem right as mutually
exclusive options.
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In this respect, moral language is like natural language in general. Just as

natural languages have no clear and unqualified boundaries (they have dialects
and even idiolects of individual speakers who inherit a shared language but
develop some idiosyncratic meanings for parts of that shared language), the
meanings of terms change over time and new terms get incorporated from other
natural languages. Similarly, moral languages have a social origin that is diverse
and dynamic. We learn what terms such as ‘good person’ and ‘right action’
mean from those who raise us, but also from those who school us, our peers, and
other social influences. Though there might very well be some measure of
agreement between these different sources, such agreement inevitably coexists
with diversity, even of the fundamental kind that does not depend on difference
in nonmoral factual belief, so that different people in our fields of social
influence do not mean precisely the same things when they use moral terms.
From common experience, we know that cooperation with others does not
require uniformity of normative belief (in Section 22, there are striking
examples of such cooperation).
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 37

13 When People Differ in Their Moral Beliefs about an Issue,

When Do They Actually Disagree?
A challenge for relativists is to explain how two people can “disagree” in
some sense if both of their apparently conflicting beliefs, say, about the
permissibility of abortion, turn out to be correct or true. If it turns out, for
example, that one person’s moral dialect includes meaning and truth condi-
tions for applying ‘right action’ that give high priority to reproductive rights
and the other person’s dialect gives high priority to preserving fetal life, then
both parties might be saying true things when they express apparently
incompatible positions. There is a pragmatic conflict here in the sense that
their positions prescribe incompatible actions and social policies, but people
may not see that conflict as solely pragmatic, but as a conflict over what is
morally true.
The “may” is important. While critics of relativism (e.g., Bloomfield 2009)
may presuppose that all laypeople (i.e., everyone who has not staked out
a philosophical position on relativism) will treat the conflict as one over truth,
this turns out to be false. The Goodwin and Darley study described earlier
suggests that people can set aside the presumption that moral conflict is
a disagreement over what is true or what is the single correct answer in the
case of particularly intractable conflict. At the same time, the study suggests the
need to explain the presumption. Analyses of the meaning and truth conditions
of moral judgments can be more or less conducive to explaining this sort of
mixed verdict from laypeople. For example, an “indexical” analysis of the
meaning of moral judgments can make relativism too obvious as the metaethical
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view to have. The idea underlying an indexical analysis is that just as we know
as part of the meaning of indexical terms that the reference of indexical terms is
determined by certain contextual features of utterance – particularly the identity
of the speaker or the near spatial environment of the speaker – so the truth
conditions of moral judgments direct us to assess the judgment using the
standards of the speaker. It is part of the meaning that the reference switches
systematically according to the speaker. A competent user of an indexical, for
example, knows that the reference and hence the truth conditions of “I” as in “I
am a professor of philosophy” vary with the identity of the speaker. Very few
competent users of moral language take it for granted that the truth conditions of
moral judgments vary in this way.
“Truth relativists” offer a different approach to the semantic form of moral
language based on the idea that some kinds of disagreements are “faultless”:
Two parties can genuinely disagree over a proposition and yet neither need be
mistaken and both can be making true judgments. They stress that the
 38 Ethics

disagreement is genuine because it is over the same proposition (thus departing

from the indexical relativists) but that each party to the disagreement can be
correctly assigning a different truth value to that proposition (see MacFarlane
2007; Kölbel 2013). This is possible because assignment of truth values can depend
on a context of assessment usually set in connection with the person doing the
assessing (perhaps the assessor’s standards or sensibility). Truth relativists point to
differences over taste to argue for the intuitive plausibility of faultless disagree-
ments. Olivia believes that Matisse is better than Picasso, while Felicity believes
that Picasso is better (Kölbel 2003). One might perceive genuine disagreement
here, but also the possibility that Olivia and Felicity are applying different critical
standards or have different aesthetic sensibilities for which neither can be faulted.
When each makes a judgment, the truth of the proposition is set by her standards or
sensibility, thus making for the possibility of different truth values. Truth relativism
applied to a moral disagreement such as abortion might similarly hold that there is
disagreement between those who affirm and those who deny the moral permissi-
bility of abortion, but that the disagreement can be faultless because the truth values
of the judgments will be set by the different standards of the assessors.
Significant numbers of the participants in the Goodwin and Darley study may
indeed imply that the disagreement over abortion or stem-cell research is
faultless, but it is not clear how truth relativism as applied to moral judgment
explains the presumption, as earlier noted, that moral disagreements are con-
flicts over truth value. That is why participants are reluctant to assign a truth
value to positions in such disagreements. The fact that the presumption can be
overcome is not the same as there being a normal expectation that the truth value
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of moral judgments is set by a parameter determined by the assessor’s standards.

We learn moral terms by learning criteria for their application from those who
teach us the rest of our natural language. We are not taught that these criteria
normally change with the speaker or assessor as a matter of the meaning or logic
of the term. We initially are shown examples of right or wrong action, often our
own actions or of those around us, and usually as part of our socialization. We
are later given partial characterizations of such actions in more general terms
describing, for instance, what kinds of actions are wrong. Most moral language
users draw from exemplars (pointing to a particular case of someone’s doing
what they promised to do, even at some personal cost, for example) and partial
characterizations (such as “Doing what you promised to do even at some
personal cost”) when they assign truth values to moral judgments (see Park
2022 for a clear analysis of how the meaning of moral concepts might be
analyzed using the major theories of concepts in the literature).
Variation in the meaning and truth conditions of such judgments does not
divide up according to tidy groups or societies or cultures. The processes by
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 39

which moral languages, and the natural languages that contain them, come into
being and evolve, exhibiting hybridity and incorporation of diverse influences,
results in continual change and diversification in the meaning of terms. English
originated as a German dialect that came to England through conquest by the
Germanic Angles and Saxon tribes. It underwent subsequent transformations
through invasions by Scandinavians and Normans. New languages emerge and
evolve when different groups interact and migrate. Different groups who mingle
through conquest or migration also mingle their norms and practices. Consider
that national and regional differences between dialects of a natural language
such as English can be substantial. Distinct regional dialects can evolve when
English is learned by a group of people whose native language is other than
English. The habits of their native language interact with and transform the
vocabulary and grammar of the English that is transmitted to them. The
interaction that takes place can give rise not only to different dialects, but also
to different idiolects, as different speakers make individual accommodations in
their vocabularies. There can be parallel processes in the evolution of moral
languages.
Differences between dialects and idiolects may not be so apparent. Having
a morality is usually a matter of holding plural values that are often in tension
with each other, such as promoting good consequences and protecting individ-
ual rights, relationship and (personal) autonomy, or duties arising from special
relationships and duties to one’s fellow citizens or simply to human beings as
such. Within a group of any size there can be differences in the way people
resolve those tensions; differences in the priorities they tend to confer on this
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value when in conflict with that value. These differences may be stable enough
to be embedded in criteria that individuals use to apply moral terms. Deep
differences between the moral views of people in a group, society, or culture are
very often interwoven with significant similarities, so that it is not obvious
(though on the theory defended here, it turns out to be true) that there is enough
variation in meaning and truth conditions to make for deep disagreements that
are not conflicts over truth but only pragmatic conflicts.
Furthermore, if one has stereotypical views of the values of others who on
some issues make significantly different moral judgments, of the nature that
I characterized in Section 6 concerning the views of relationship-centered
ethics, one is likely to dismiss their moral views as simply false, rather than
seeing their views as being rooted in a tradition that supplies with respect to
the relevant judgments significantly different content to the moral judg-
ments that might come out true. This situation, it must be stressed, is not
a matter of the adherents of relationship-centered ethics making certain
judgments that are “true for them” but false for adherents of rights-centered ethics.
 40 Ethics

The case envisioned here is that the judgments of adherents of each tradition may
turn out to be true, and in a way that could be recognized by adherents of the other
tradition, once they recognize that in fact they mean different things with different
truth conditions.
There is usually just enough in common between all the moral dialects and
idiolects so as to foster uncertainty as to what the situation is. Going back to the
Goodwin and Darley (2008), Wright et al. (2013) studies (see also Ayars and
Nichols (2020), the result is a variety of metaethical views. Those who assume
that moral disagreements are always disagreements in which the relevant moral
concepts have the same content will tend to take universalist metaethical
positions. Those who focus on the apparent intractability of some moral dis-
agreements may conclude that in some ways, people are talking about different
things and therefore may be inclined to reject universalism, at least for a certain
class of moral disagreements. One theoretical advantage claimed for the plural-
istic position defended here is that it makes possible a pretty good explanation
for this diversity of metaethical viewpoints.
Are we all talking about the same thing, and is it just that some or all of us get
off track and end up having false beliefs that create disagreement? Or is it that
sometimes we are talking about the same thing, and our disagreements are over
what is truly the case (because our moral concepts overlap in meaning and in the
truth conditions for their application), and at other times we are not talking
about the same thing, and our disagreements are not over what is true but are
only pragmatic in nature (because the overlap in meaning and truth conditions is
just that and not complete identity)? There may in fact be enough variation of all
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these kinds, and some people, reflecting on different bits of the evidence, can
come to diverse metaethical conclusions (this explanation was advanced first, as
far as I know, in Wong 2006 and elaborated in Wong 2011, 2014; but Olinder
2012 independently proposes another version of it).

14 Why We Have Different Beliefs in Metaethics

Philosophers, such as Michael Smith, often base a good part of their arguments
for universalism on what they perceive to be laypeople’s objectivist beliefs
about morality and features of moral discourse, which those philosophers
believe imply a belief in the objectivity of morals on the part of those laypeople.
But these perceptions may reflect these philosophers’ own presuppositions,
which may not be shared by significant numbers of moral language users.
Thus, if one holds that the semantic content of moral judgment refers to
objective moral facts, or to moral properties that exist in the world completely
independently of human thought and practice, this makes it difficult to explain
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 41

why there are informed and intelligent moral language users, not just contrarian
philosophers out to make a name for themselves, who are metaethical
relativists.
On the other side, philosophers who defend metaethical relativism are often
led to make claims about the content of moral judgment that makes it difficult
for them to explain how competent moral language users could be anything
other than metaethical relativists. If we accept Velleman’s and Rovane’s theor-
ies, then it becomes hard to explain why, unless they are very provincial, people
don’t recognize that they occupy moral worlds that are unintelligible to other
people. If moral judgments refer to the implicit agreements to conduct oneself in
certain ways on the condition that other parties to the agreement conduct
themselves similarly (Harman 1975), then it becomes hard to explain why
intelligent and informed moral language users don’t recognize the possibility
or reality of there being different moral communities based on different implicit
agreements. If, with Dreier, we assume that we learn moral language by learning
that the truth or falsity of a moral judgment depends on the speaker’s moral
commitments, again, it seems that we should all grow up to be metaethical
relativists. And again, this makes puzzling the situation of varied metaethical
belief as we find it.
A metaethical theory needs to explain why there are significant numbers of
informed and intelligent people who are both universalists and relativists, and
who aren’t making some rather obvious mistake about the semantics of moral
judgment and concepts. As argued in Section 7, some thoughtful and informed
people have arrived at moral ambivalence. This too is not something obvious
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that any competent moral language user comes to accept in becoming

a competent user. It comes from a commitment to serious inquiry into at least
one serious rival to one’s best interpretation of one’s moral tradition. That
commitment does not automatically result in moral ambivalence, but I have
sketched one possible pathway in Section 7, starting with a contrast between
relationship-centered ethics on the one hand, and rights-centered or utility-
centered ethics on the other hand. I have sketched ways in which trying to go
beyond the stereotypes that advocates of the latter two ethics might have of the
former could lead to more serious consideration of relationship-centered ethics
as a viable realization of a moral way of life.
More explicitly, the truth conditions of moral judgments can be set out in
terms of reasons to be a person with certain kinds of traits or to perform
certain actions. These could be reasons given a specified set of circumstances
or conditions, or reasons all things considered. The truth conditions of moral
judgments would specify the conditions under which we would have reason
to address a person’s suffering, to keep an agreement made, and so on.
 42 Ethics

The constraining effect of interpersonal and intrapersonal coordinating func-

tions of morality together with common human motivational proclivities
would make for significant overlap in reasons and thus the truth conditions
for moral judgments, enough overlap such that those people who do not press
inquiry into the areas of conflict over the specific conditions under which
people hold there is reason to perform such actions could assume that the
truth conditions are uniform. This way of viewing the semantics of moral
judgments makes it no surprise that people could have different and conflict-
ing metaethical views.

15 How Moral Reasons Enter into the Truth Conditions of Moral

Judgments and Help Shape Our Moral Motivations
The final step of explanation is clarification of what form the truth conditions of
moral judgments take. I have phrased the truth conditions in terms of the moral
reasons that people have, where “moral” refers to the sort of normative guide
that provides and sustains some structure to social cooperation and fosters
internal motivational coherence within the individual. The feature of justifiabil-
ity without coercion or deception is another feature of the conception of the
moral employed here. But what is a reason? Some hold that whatever one has
reason to do, moral or otherwise, must be based on the actual motivations, such
as desires, that one has. That is, some hold that the relevant kind of reason has to
be one capable of motivating a person to do what they have moral reason to do.
However, this makes impossible what is one of the primary socializing func-
tions of morality: to shape the motivations that people bring to social cooper-
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ation and thereby help them to lead their lives with a reasonable degree of
internal motivational coherence. As indicated earlier, human beings inherit
a diverse set of motivational inclinations: Some tend in the helpful, cooperative
direction; others in the self-regarding direction; some are antagonistic toward at
least some others. These unlearned dispositions are “raw” in the sense that they
compete with one another for expression, and the conditions under which they
become activated and express themselves can be pretty arbitrary in terms of
consistency with moral values.
A child can find a baby bird fallen from a nest and instinctively seek to
nurture it, but then turn around and ridicule a classmate for being overweight or
speaking with a stutter. Learning what we have moral reason to do under which
conditions is the way we train our premoral dispositions to become moral
dispositions, or at least grow closer to them. If things go right from the moral
point of view, the child learns to be compassionate more consistently and no
longer seeks or even finds enjoyment or satisfaction in being cruel to a classmate.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 43

To help us accomplish this, moral reasons must hold a prescriptive force that
is independent of whatever premoral inclinations we begin with. This pre-
scriptive force is similar to that of a command or advisory: The illocutionary
force is that of a directive, but it is left open where the motivation to comply
with it might come from. Part of it in most cases comes from unlearned
dispositions of the individual as part of human adaptations for the coopera-
tive life (I say in most cases, because of likely significant variability in
unlearned dispositions among members of the human species, as there is in
other biological species).
However, another part of the motivation may come from adaptations to
follow what others do. This is part of how we are biologically fitted to receive
the guidance of cultural norms. Tomasello (2019) has found in some of his
studies that children, beginning around the age of three, have a readiness to
follow whatever they have been taught as the rules for performing a certain kind
of activity. For example, they insist on the proper way to perform a certain
action in a game simply on the basis of having been shown that way to perform
the action, even if that way has not been presented as the proper way to perform
the action; the child will nevertheless protest if they see another player perform-
ing the activity in another way.
Moral socialization of unlearned dispositions occurs when these dispositions
get engaged with teaching and modeling of norms that spell out the reasons to
act in certain ways under certain conditions. The reasons guide and channel the
dispositions and become part of the cognitive dimension of the corresponding
emotion.4 Compassion involves the perception of another being as suffering,
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and per the views of philosophers such as Mencius (Mengzi, 2006–2021, 3A5)
and Martha Nussbaum (2001, 306) the perception of that being as not deserving
that suffering. Mencius holds the plausible view that moral emotions involve
affective, conative (motivating to action), and cognitive dimensions (see Wong
2015a, Wong 2015b for this interpretation). Natural compassion tends to be

4
This means that a normative relativist cannot subscribe to the sort of metaethical relativism based
on the idea that all moral reasons that people have are motivating reasons – based on desire or
motivational propensity present in their motivational systems. Gilbert Harman (1975) is the
foremost proponent of this kind of metaethical relativism. For a criticism of this view, see
Wong (2006, 74–75). One of the most debatable assumptions Harman makes is that morality is
founded upon implicit agreements that people make with one another in structuring their social
cooperation. As argued earlier, this runs into the heterogeneity of people’s moral commitments
even though they cooperate with one another in various ways and make moral judgments about
each other. It also runs against the conception of morality as a part of culture that shapes human
motivation and is not simply responsive to it. On the viewpoint defended here, moral reasons are
not internal to the motivations human beings already have. On the other hand, neither do they
have motivational force on their own. When they do succeed in motivating, they engage with one
or more of the motivations mentioned in this section.
 44 Ethics

erratically expressed: not always present when it should be, and sometimes
prompting conduct that is inappropriate to the circumstances or no conduct at all
when doing something is in order. When it becomes a moral virtue, compassion
is guided by a reliable sense of when one has reason to respond to the suffering
of others. The moral development of this emotion involves an interaction
between its different dimensions: The apprehension of moral reasons channels
the affective and conative tendencies toward appropriate expression. On the
other side of this interaction, the affective and conative tendencies provide
motivational efficacy to the reasons that channel and guide them.
This conception of moral cultivation, in which the cognitive, affective, and
conative interact and reinforce one another, finds analogy in the contemporary
psychologist Martin Hoffman’s work (2000) on the role of empathy in moral
development. Hoffman has suggested that a child begins to internalize morality
when they experience empathic distress upon witnessing another person’s
distress. The earliest modes of empathic arousal are primitive, automatic, and
involuntary processes. Hoffman thinks that the most effective child-rearing
takes advantage of occasions when primitive empathy is aroused and used in
moral teaching. A child hurts another, for example, and an adult might arouse
empathy in the perpetrator by pointing out the effect on the victim, expressing
disapproval, and suggesting apology or reparation.
When such a sequence is repeated many times, “scripts” are created and
encoded in memory so that they influence later decisions and behavior. It is
important that the kind of induction that presents moral reasons to the child be
given in an emotionally evocative situation so that the cognition of what the
child is being taught can be made “hot” by the activation of affective and
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motivational proclivities and through the linking of the proclivities to the

reasons. Hoffman goes on to suggest that moral norms or principles can acquire
their motivational efficacy through association with activated affective and
motivational proclivities. At the same time, the norms or principles, through
getting linked to the proclivities, can correct certain biases that accompany the
untutored proclivities, such as the greater tendency to ignore the distress of
those persons who are unfamiliar to us or to forget the distress of those who are
not present to us here and now (I discuss the relationship between Mencius and
Hoffman in Wong 2015a and 2015b).
The anthropologist Naomi Quinn (2005) identifies one cross-cultural univer-
sal of child-rearing as the linking of moral lessons with emotional arousal, so as
to make the lessons unmistakable, memorable, and motivating. In her discus-
sion of Chinese child-rearing, for example, Quinn identifies the practice of
shaming as an instrument for bringing home a moral lesson to a child while
emotionally arousing them. Quinn points out that moral lessons are a pervasive
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 45

and consistent feature of social life for a child, often not explicitly stated, but
communicated by adults in a glance, a gesture, a posture, and even in what is not
said. She further suggests some neurological correlates of these universal
features. The regularity of lesson-giving strengthens certain synaptic connec-
tions in the brain; and drawing from Joseph LeDoux’s work (2002, 200–234),
Quinn points out that hormones released during emotional arousal actually
strengthen synaptic connections and organize and coordinate brain activity,
crowding out all but the emotionally relevant experience from consciousness.
One might surmise that constancy of lesson-giving, woven into the fabric of
everyday life, strengthens these synaptic connections even more. This kind of
moral socialization is what gives moral reasons their motivational efficacy, and
to do this they cannot simply be based on what a person is already motivated to
do, but must be capable of engaging and guiding motivations that may only be
incipient.

16 Summary of the Argument for a Pluralistic Form

of Metaethical Moral Relativism
This completes the sketch of a naturalistic conception of morality that begins
with recognition of cultural norms that have functions of promoting and sus-
taining interpersonal cooperation and intrapersonal coherence of motivation.
There are universal constraints on how these functions could be adequately
fulfilled, given characteristic human motivations and ends. However, these
constraints cannot narrow down the range of moralities that fulfill the functions
of morality to just one. More specific normative guidance is given through the
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way that the plurality of values in a morality are handled when they come into
conflict. In Section 6, we got an example of differences between more specific
action-guiding moralities in the way that certain kinds of conflicts between
values of relationship and autonomy might be handled in moralities that are
more relationship-centered versus moralities that are more personal-autonomy-
centered. Understanding how these conflicts might be best handled within these
morality types produces in some of us the sense of moral ambivalence: the sense
of significant uncertainty as to whether there is a singular truth as to how to
balance or prioritize values that are shared across different moral traditions.
A naturalistic conception of morality that draws from the human sciences is
then put forward to explain why we might arrive at moral ambivalence.
Morality, it is proposed, is a normative guide that emerges from human culture
to foster and regulate social cooperation and coherence between diverse and
potentially conflicting motivations within the individual. Moral enculturation
shapes us in accordance with certain ideals of the kinds of persons we ought to be.
 46 Ethics

These ideals are specified in terms of reasons to be and to act in certain ways.
Because cooperation requires some substantial degree of agreement on these
ideals and norms, we tend to think of morality as something shared with others,
and that enables us to form expectations that we can ask them to justify their
actions and ways of being toward us. However, there is no pregiven Platonic
heaven of moral values that constitutes the singularly true justifications that we
should be giving to each other. In presenting to others our conceptions of what we
have moral reasons to be and to do, we are not getting at a pre-existing moral
fabric of the universe. We are weaving a human fabric through contending,
accommodating, and working with one another.
What is universal takes shape in the intersection between the functions of
morality and the types of animals we tend to be, with unlearned motivations
given through natural selection. Though these motivations can undergo consid-
erable shaping through moral and other kinds of socialization, they do place
certain limits on what an adequate morality that fulfills its functions could
broadly look like. Within these limits, there is no one true morality, and this
makes it possible to experience moral ambivalence. Unlike other ways of
arriving at metaethical moral relativism, this picture of how we arrive at
a plurality of true and most justified moralities does not give us any reason to
expect that either philosophers or laypeople would ordinarily arrive at simple
versions of either relativism or universalism. If the semantics of moral judgment
leaves open the question of whether there is a single true morality, and if we both
substantially converge on some kinds of moral issues because of the universal
constraints and substantially diverge on other kinds, we get what the picture
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advocated in this Element predicts. This metaethical pluralism seems to be what

empirical study has found among laypeople, and the pluralism certainly exists
among philosophers.
Sections 1–7 discussed the way that normative concerns can and should guide
our inquiry into the question of metaethical moral relativism. The final Sections
of this Element return to normative issues and discusses how one should act
toward others if one has accepted pluralistic metaethical moral relativism. The
view in question is often called normative moral relativism.

17 Confused Reasoning That Is Sometimes Attributed to Those

Who Believe in Normative Moral Relativism
“Normative moral relativism” is often associated with the view that one ought to
tolerate people who act on different moral beliefs than one’s own, or that one
ought not to impose one’s beliefs on those with different beliefs, letting them
live by their beliefs, or that one ought to treat them in accordance with the
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 47

standards they apply to themselves. Such normative views are in turn often
inferred from metaethical relativism. The thought here is that if there is no
single true morality, then one would be right to adopt a “hands-off” stance. Such
an inference has been criticized as invalid. Harrison (1976) argues that
metaethical relativism is a claim made from an “external” viewpoint outside
any moral system of values and rules, while a requirement to be tolerant is made
from within a moral system. The former cannot support the latter. Bernard
Williams (1981) points out that the normative views seem to be applied
universally to everyone, and based on a universal normative principle requiring
toleration. If indeed metaethical moral relativism were the view that there were
no moral values or norms that applied to everyone, to espouse on its basis
a universal policy of toleration would be self-contradictory.
However, there are alternative ways to construe metaethical moral relativism
and its relationship to normative moral relativism. Normative moral relativists
should grant that it is a nonstarter to try to derive a normative requirement to be
tolerant solely from a metaethical claim. The normative requirement need not be
derived from metaethical moral relativism alone. Recall that in Sections 4 and 5,
the argument for extended inquiry into the moral traditions of others was of two
types: the first was based on a conception of epistemic rationality and addressed
to all; the second was addressed toward those with certain moral values such as
respect for others, at least to the extent that one is ready to regard as wrong
distorting or simplifying their moral traditions for the sake of calling them
inferior people or viewing them as having inferior cultures and justifying
conduct toward them that otherwise would be unjust, oppressive, and exploit-
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ative. The second line of argument for extended inquiry can be extended to
apply to conduct toward those who may be living according to moralities
different from one’s own, but which are as true or as justified as one’s own.

18 An Argument for Normative Moral Relativism

That Is Contingent upon the Acceptance of Certain Values
and the Adoption of Metaethical Moral Relativism
Suppose you value respect for the autonomy of individuals and of peoples.
Arguably, to treat individuals as Kantian ends in themselves is to respect value
commitments they have made that cannot be criticized as rationally mistaken or
false. What does it mean to respect their autonomy? Arguably, one meaning is to
refrain from interfering with their actions in ways that cannot be rationally
justified to them. Let’s call this “justifiability autonomy.” Unlike Kant, normative
moral relativists do not assume that regarding respect for autonomy as a universal
value binding on everyone is necessary to regard it as binding on oneself.
 48 Ethics

They rather might be addressing all those who do have such a value, and perhaps
those who might be persuaded to adopt it based on other related values they hold,
and are applying that value in conjunction with a belief in the existence of
apparently rationally irresolvable moral disagreements (Wong 1984). The infer-
ence is made from both metaethical relativism and a certain value that they may
hold as moral agents.

19 Why Normative Moral Relativism Cannot Be a Simple Matter

of Letting Others Be
This argument for normative moral relativism is coherent, but being coherent
does not prevent complications, any more than it does for any other moral view.
As pointed out in Section 12, the others with whom we disagree probably do not
constitute a cohesive and uniform group. They are diverse and disagree with
each other, as well as with ourselves. Recognizing this more complex situation
requires moral relativists, normative or metaethical, to depart from an assump-
tion they sometimes make – that there are relatively uniform and cohesive moral
communities that disagree externally with other communities but not internally.
But as argued in Sections 13–15, this is not at all a necessary consequence or
ground for holding that there is no single true morality (see also Wong 2011).
The normative upshot is that it is rarely so neat a matter of our getting to decide
whether or not to let “others” alone. Some of those others may prefer that we
intervene on their side, and others will not. And yet, both sides may be so
interdependent on each other that there is little hope of being able to say, “Well,
let’s not interfere with those others, but support the ones who agree with us.”
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Further complications arise on our own side. We find reason not to interfere
with others on the basis of our value of justifiability autonomy. But this kind of
autonomy is not the only value that we hold. In case a disagreement involves
these other values, normative relativists have a reason to act on these values,
even if the opposing side cannot be criticized as rationally mistaken or as
holding false beliefs. In other words, the value of justifiability autonomy
provides a reason for toleration or lettings others be, but that reason need not
be regarded as overriding the reasons provided by every other moral value held
by normative relativists. If normative relativists hold plural moral values, then
values other than justifiability autonomy, such as the defense of innocent life,
might provide reasons to severely condemn and interfere with the practices of
others even if there is no rational refutation of these practices available. Why?
Subscribing to a value is a matter not only of holding oneself to it, but of seeking
to have it realized in the world, which means trying to get others to live by it. As
argued in Sections 14–15, subscribing to a value does not mean presupposing
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 49

that everyone has a motivating reason to act on it. The upshot is that normative
relativists might have to decide which of their own values they give priority to in
the case at hand, or they might try to devise a course of action that would allow
them to act on all the relevant values at stake. In this respect, normative
relativists would not be much different from other moral agents who hold
a plurality of values that sometimes come into conflict given a certain set of
circumstances. To illustrate this point, I shall discuss the practice of female
genital cutting. This case also illustrates the way that inadequate inquiry into the
moral traditions underlying this practice can be a failure of epistemic rationality,
and also an example of the way that sweeping condemnations of the varied
practices falling under “female genital cutting” can be a violation of justifiabil-
ity autonomy. A better approach may, it will be argued, involve application of
the value of accommodation.

20 What Is Female Genital Cutting?

Even the name “female genital cutting” raises normative controversy. Most
critics of this practice call it “female genital mutilation” and would complain
that mere “cutting” grossly underplays the brutality of the practice. Here, the
choice is to use the word “cutting,” which is usually adopted to convey the wide
variation in what is done: Forms of this practice vary significantly, from
a pricking of the genitalia to draw a drop of blood, to removal of the hood of
the clitoris, to removal of the entire external clitoris, to removal of all external
genitalia with stitching together of the resulting wound. The persons on whom it
is practiced range from infants to adult women who consent to it. The great
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majority of those who arrange and perform the practice are women. Where there
is female genital cutting, there is almost always a corresponding practice for
males. Surveys in Africa reveal that when compared with men, an equal or
higher proportion of women favor continuation of female genital cutting (Public
Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa 2012, 23). The
practice is sometimes endorsed and performed by women (over objections to its
acceptability from the majority of men), and sometimes initiated and performed
by teenage girls (over the objections to its acceptability by the entire adult
community; Thomas 1996; Leonard 2000; both cited by Earp 2016, 112).
Which forms of the practice are prevalent depends on the region and which
group engages in it. For example, “type III” or “infibulation” (removal of the
external genitalia and the suturing of the vulva) is much more prevalent in
Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan than in other countries (Yoder et al.
2013, 202). These constitute 10 percent of cases in Africa. The remaining cases
are type I (reduction of the clitoral hood or the external elements of clitoral tissue),
 50 Ethics

and type II (partial or complete labial reductions and partial or complete reduc-
tions of the external elements of clitoral tissue) (Public Policy Advisory Network
on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa 2012, 22).
The rationales for the practice also vary widely: Control of female sexuality is
often featured in criticism of the practice, but reasons given by its adherents
include their viewing it as a rite of passage and test of courage, establishment of
a gender identity, entrance into a secret society, resistance to colonialism and
postcolonial Western domination, and a generalized adherence to tradition
(Kratz 2002; Lyons 2007; Shweder 2003). Sometimes a religious rationale is
given. Muslims who engage in the practice often cite portions of the Hadith, the
sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet Mohammed. There are alternative
interpretations of the relevant sayings. Some dispute their authenticity and seek
to decouple female genital cutting from Islamic approval. Other interpretations
argue that according to one saying in particular the Prophet Mohammed posed
limitations on the practice of female genital cutting that predated Islam, enjoin-
ing practitioners not to cut severely and thereby destroy genital tissue
(Duivenbode and Padela 2019, 287, 290).
Since opponents of female genital cutting often assume that the practice
functions to control female sexuality, it is worthwhile to point out the evidence
against this assumption. Almost all societies that practice female genital cutting
also practice male genital cutting, and the reasons given for it are often similar.
In some cultures, the rite for girls elevates their social status, promotes within-
sex bonding, and provides increased personal and political agency. In cultures
where there is only a rite for boys, the lack of one for girls reflects their lower
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status (Earp and Johnsdotter 2021; Gruenbaum et al. 2022).

The World Health Organization (2008), an agency of the United Nations,
has taken the position that “female genital mutilation” is morally wrong in all
its forms. Earp points out that while some types of the practice result in
extreme pain and profound trauma (2016, 127), and that these types may be
impermissible regardless of cultural context and in particular if carried out on
children, the same cannot be said of some other types. Some of the rationales
for especially the most radical forms of the practice might not pass the
constraint of justifiability to the governed. On the other side, it is pointed
out that the meaning of pain varies with cultural context. Sometimes women
undergoing the practice reject the use of anesthesia and emphasize the
importance of preparing for the pain of childbirth and of demonstrating
maturity (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund 2000, 16; cited by Earp 2016, 127).
Lyons (2007) notes that most Westerners react much less negatively to
painful initiation rites undergone by males because of a gendered difference
in expectations. Nelson Mandela recounts his own ritual circumcision,
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 51

performed without anesthesia, the agonizing pain of which was expected to

be suffered in silence as a test of courage (Mandela 2006).
Fuambai Ahmadu, an anthropologist born in Sierra Leone but raised in the
United States, returned to her country of birth to undergo the cutting by the Bondo
women’s secret society in her Kono tribe. She disputes the claim that the practice
diminishes sexual pleasure for women, arguing that the criticism presupposes an
excessively mechanical picture of sexuality, omitting the role of the mind as the
most important sexual organ (research by gynecologists and others have con-
firmed women who have undergone the procedure have rich sexual lives, includ-
ing desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction; see Public Policy Advisory Network
on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa 2012, 22). Even if just the mechanical
picture is considered, the traditional form of the procedure does not remove most
of the clitoris, nor does it remove the tissue and structures necessary for orgasm
(Catania et al. 2007; Ahmadu and Shweder 2009; Abdulcadir et al. 2016).
Ahmadu found among the Kono no cultural obsession with feminine chastity,
virginity, or sexual fidelity. The role of the father is considered marginal to the
central “matricentric unity” (Ahmadu 2001, 285).
This is not to deny that there are forms of the practice that fit the vehement
criticisms usually launched against it in the West and in the countries in which
they originate. What is brought home, however, is the need for more serious and
tempered reconsideration of the broadsides leveled against female genital
cutting. Such generalizations can backfire by angering those who feel judged
but not respected enough to be heard. It leaves critics open to the counter-
criticism that there is more fair comparison than they are willing to acknow-
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ledge between some forms of female genital cutting on the one hand, and on the
other hand, male circumcision and female cosmetic genital surgery, which are
taken for granted and accepted in the West (Boddy 2016, 2020). It also raises the
question of whether the disposition of many in the Western philosophical,
ethical, and political traditions to regard themselves as having discovered the
true forms of universality fosters a careless disregard for practices it is inclined
to dismiss as barbaric, to the extent that it overlooks important differences
among these practices and among the rationales given by their adherents. It
raises the question of whether this disposition is unwittingly inherited from the
long history of powerful societies rationalizing acts of colonialism, oppression,
and exploitation through characterization of others or their cultures as inferior
(see Gruenbaum 2001; Njambi 2004, 2011; Boddy 2007; Oba 2008).
The form of cutting that consists only in pricking has increased in acceptance
as sufficient among immigrants to the West from countries in which more severe
forms of the practice have been customary. When Somali immigrant mothers
requested of a Seattle, Washington hospital to have both their boys and girls
 52 Ethics

circumcised, and when the medical staff learned that most of these mothers had
undergone infibulations, the staff could not contemplate performing the proced-
ure. However, the doctor chairing the committee charged to address the question
felt it a necessary expression of respect that they try to understand how Somali
parents viewed female genital cutting. Discussions led some Somali parents to
propose the compromise of a nick to the hood over the clitoris that would draw
blood. That proposal received support within the hospital, partly on the grounds
that some parents said that if denied the moderate procedure they might take
their daughters out of the country to get the more radical procedure done. The
compromise fell by the wayside when the matter exploded into heated moral
and political controversy, as some termed all forms of female genital cutting
“barbaric,” while in contrast one obstetrician-gynecologist at the hospital coun-
tered that the nicking of the prepuce was a good deal less drastic than what is
done to boys when they are circumcised (Ostrom 1996). In light of such ethical
considerations, the anthropologist Richard Shweder has proposed that liberal,
pluralistic societies should try to accommodate groups desiring to engage in the
practice on two conditions: first, that only moderate procedures should be
performed on those below the age of consent (no major irreversible alterations
of the body); and second, that those who have reached the age of consent should
have the right to alter their bodies in substantial ways (Shweder 2003, 206; see
also Shweder 2022; Earp 2022).
Thus, normative moral relativism need not endorse a simplistic and categor-
ical letting others be; it can legitimately matter to us when others violate our
values, and the justifiability autonomy of others is not necessarily the final word.
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Normative relativism can take the form of a type of moral consideration for
nonintervention or tolerance, but it need not take the form of the prescriptive
final word. However, if we contemplate condemning, intervening, or prohibit-
ing, we should undertake a serious inquiry as to the extent and manner to which
others actually do violate our values, and why. We may find that the practices in
question and the rationales for them depart from our stereotypes of them, and we
may have to face our own hypocrisies and inconsistencies, or we may find
ourselves unable to justify the rational superiority of our judgments over theirs.
That should matter to us, and we may find reason either to straightforwardly
accept the practices or to try to find compromise.
Recall that the sort of metaethical moral relativism defended in this Element is
distinguished by universal constraints on the range of true moralities. Not all
moralities are true, but a range of moralities can be true. One of the constraints is
that all true moralities must contain the value of accommodation. The most general
characterization of this value is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship
with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 53

The rationale is based on the function of morality of promoting and sustaining

social cooperation: Such cooperation would come under impossible pressure
if it always depended on strict agreement; hence human beings must at least
sometimes be willing to cooperate even though they disagree about important
matters.
One example of an act of accommodation is the Seattle hospital’s offer
(before it had to be retracted) to perform the moderate procedure. On the one
hand, the Seattle hospital had to avoid doing harm to any of its patients, even at
the behest of the patients’ families. On the other hand, it had adopted the value
of welcoming and serving people of all cultural, racial, and ethnic back-
grounds, and of adapting its treatment of patients in accordance with these
backgrounds, subject to constraints deriving from other considerations such as
the avoidance of doing harm. Trying to satisfy both constraints led to the
compromise proposal. The harm is arguably minimal, and the offer accom-
modated those Somali parents who were willing to accept the proposed
procedure more for its ritual-like aspects than for any permanent alteration
effected. While it may not have satisfied parents who desired such a permanent
alteration, it was responsive to those who said that if they were not given the
compromise option, they would have the procedure performed on their daugh-
ters elsewhere, and if so, the procedure would involve major and permanent
alteration.

21 Accommodation and the Fraught Issue of Abortion

Another possible case where the value of accommodation might be especially
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relevant is the disagreement over abortion, which has been heightened with the
Supreme Court having struck down Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s
Health Organization (2022). In Roe, the Court ruled that there was
a constitutional right to choose abortion, the scope of which depended on the
stage of pregnancy (the fewest restrictions by the state are imposed on the right
during the first trimester; during the second trimester, the state may regulate
abortion in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health; and during the
third trimester the state can regulate or prohibit abortion in the interests of
protecting prenatal life, with exceptions to the prohibition for the sake of
protecting maternal life or health; Roe v. Wade 1973, 410 U.S. 113). Planned
Parenthood v. Casey (1992) affirmed a constitutional right to abortion during
the first trimester but gave states more scope to restrict abortions. Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overruled both previous deci-
sions of the Court, holding that there was no constitutional right to abortion and
returning the authority to regulate abortion to the states.
 54 Ethics

The legal scholar Jamal Greene (2021) has argued that the rancorous debate
over abortion in the public sphere shows how divisive is the conception of rights
that has come to dominate American legal culture and perhaps the culture at
large. The conception of rights as “presumptively absolute, yielding only in
special circumstances, if at all” (Greene 2021, 7), is divisive in its effects
because it ensures that there must be winners and losers in the adjudication of
what rights there are and who possesses them. Another formulation of this
conception of rights is that they protect interests that “trump” competing
interests and cannot be balanced against the public good (Dworkin 1977).
Greene tends to present Roe as applying the conception of rights as trumps
because it recognizes a right to abortion but none for the fetus.
Perhaps a fairer and more sympathetic reading of Roe and its fate may
conclude that its attempt to navigate between contending absolutes fell victim
to the mentality of rights as absolute trumps. Roe, and even more so, Casey, does
not affirm an unconditional right to have an abortion. In Roe, the scope of the
right is limited by the stage of pregnancy and the type of reason that might be
given for abortion. The test for permissible restriction during the first trimester
is “strict scrutiny”: restriction must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling
state interest, using the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. It is this
relatively strong right during the first trimester that prompts Greene to say that
Roe implied an “absolute right to a first-trimester abortion” (2021, 128).
However, this absoluteness disappears with the second and third trimesters.
The litigating sides in Roe actually have a better claim to have staked truly
absolute positions. The state of Texas argued that the fetus is a person protected
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by the 14th amendment and that protecting prenatal life is a compelling state
interest. Jane Roe and others involved argued that Texas invaded the individ-
ual’s right to liberty under the 14th amendment, and that the right to an abortion
is absolute; that a person is entitled to end pregnancy at any time, for any reason,
and in any way. The majority opinion, written by Harry Blackmun, actually
steered between these absolutes, holding that states have rights to protect
potential human life after the point of viability, identifying that point as occur-
ring during the third trimester of pregnancy. This, along with authority to
regulate abortion in ways reasonably related to the health of the pregnant person
(activated during the second trimester), substantially limits the right to have an
abortion. Casey changed the trimester framework of Roe in favor of making the
point of fetal viability the threshold for state interest in protecting prenatal life,
noting that that point of viability changed with advances in medical technology.
It furthermore raised the standard for deciding when a restriction on abortion is
invalid: It must impose an “undue burden” on the person having the right, or
a substantial obstacle in that person’s path.
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 55

It may be, as Greene suggests, that Roe’s omission of a right of the fetus to life
enraged and triggered the radicalization of the pro-life movement. In any case,
there emerged a concerted and ultimately successful attempt to change the
composition of the Supreme Court to a majority willing to strike down Roe
and Casey. Their demise puts the question of the legal regulation of abortion in
the hands of the states. At the time of this writing, the various states display
a wide regulatory range, from outright bans from conception onward; to recog-
nizing a right to abortion until the fetus is viable, or if necessary to protect the
life and health of the mother; to allowing abortions throughout pregnancy
(World Population Review 2022). The state legislative response to Dobbs
conveys a picture of a country splintering along political, cultural, and moral
seams, marked by violent, often abusive, and contemptuous discourse, punctu-
ated by awful physical violence and intimidating threats screamed out over
social media.
Greene suggests that the “trumping” conception of rights contributed to this
situation. He proposes a different conception that treats rights in general as
inherently limited but allows that in exceptional circumstances some rights
could be treated as nearly absolute. One set of exceptional circumstances is
exemplified by the US history of racial discrimination, segregation, and sys-
tematic, intentional subjugation of groups. When the state engages in these acts,
a proper response is the assertion of the relevant rights as trumps. However,
treating all rights in this way results in existential battles over who has which
rights. The conception Greene advocates, that of rights as inherently limited, is
consistent with an approach called “proportionality,” which is dominant across
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legal systems in the world except for the United States. Proportionality is
consistent with recognizing many, varied kinds of rights which need to be
balanced against each other and against governmental and social interests.
“Structured proportionality” is constituted by a multistage process whereby
distinct questions must be answered in the right ways to advance to the next
stage of adjudicating proposed restrictions of rights in favor of other rights or
interests: Does the proposed restriction pursue a legitimate goal? Is the restric-
tion a suitable means of pursuing the goal? Is there a less intrusive but equally
effective means? Is the restriction justified (proportionate) in light of the gain in
the protection for the competing right or interest (see Möeller 2012)?
Greene points to Germany’s treatment of abortion as an example of what the
alternative might encourage, both in terms of a less contentious way to deal with
disagreements over when abortions should be allowed and in terms of
a conception of rights as inherently limited and in need of balancing in cases of
conflict. Its treatment is more consonant with the fact that the best way to protect
fetal life is not to outlaw abortion (which only drives the practice underground)
 56 Ethics

but rather to provide pregnant persons with meaningful alternatives to termin-

ation. German courts have structured abortion jurisprudence around both the
rights of the pregnant person and the fetus. Abortion is technically illegal but
can be performed without prosecution during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy
with mandatory counseling and a three-day waiting period, or (beyond the first
twelve weeks) for reasons relating to significant threats to the pregnant person’s
health or life, serious genetic irregularities of the fetus, or severe emotional
distress or unusual hardships associated with pregnancy or childbirth, and in
cases of pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Further, the state must provide
prenatal care, childcare, and employment guarantees that encourage women to
choose to give birth. Greene asserts that although German courts started from
a premise of fetal rights, today it is easier (and often much cheaper) to obtain
abortions in Germany than in much of the United States. In the United States, “A
more accommodating judicial strategy might have brought the two sides closer
together, and perhaps even better protected women, in this most divisive of
political conflicts,” he writes (Greene 2021, 90).
However, cultural differences and political structures vary across Germany
and the United States, and it would be very difficult to securely establish
counterfactuals. A conception of rights, even one that has become dominant
in a country’s jurisprudence, does not by itself determine how specific issues
involving rights will be adjudicated. Canadian jurisprudence also tries to bal-
ance rights by deploying a test of structured proportionality. But Canada has no
criminal restrictions on abortion whatsoever. The Canadian Supreme Court
(R. v. Morgentaler 1988) struck down a law that had criminalized the perform-
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ance of abortions except in cases where hospital committed provided certifica-

tion that continuation of the pregnancy would or would likely endanger the
pregnant person’s life or health. However, it did not establish a constitutional
right to abortion. There were three separate opinions presented in support of the
majority’s decision. All three opinions agreed that the abortion law violated the
pregnant person’s right to security, but they did so on the grounds that access to
the hospital committee was not equally available across the country and that the
legally required procedure could result in extensive delays which could further
endanger the pregnant person’s life or health. Further, the Court was unanimous
in holding that the state had a legitimate interest in protection of the fetus. But
regulation was left up to the legislature, which has not passed a law on abortion
since. After Dobbs, there was a call in Canada from some quarters to pre-
emptively establish a legal right to abortion, but a number of abortion rights
advocates cautioned against the move, fearing that it would provoke anti-choice
legislators to retract it when they were in the majority. This complex story, when
put alongside Germany’s, does not offer assurance that having a conception of
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 57

rights more amenable to their being balanced against each other or other
interests is going to by itself bring about a less fraught and contentious dis-
agreement over abortion.
Such a conception of rights might facilitate the kind of negotiation between
different moral viewpoints in a pluralistic society that Greene is calling for, but
it is hardly sufficient. A broader sort of social and political change would need to
take place that gives people space to deal with the moral complexity of their
own positions and those of others. They would need to encounter others with
substantially different views, and in contexts that provide them a better sense of
the full humanity of these others. The effect of closer encounters with others
would be something like the effect I am striving to produce through this
Element: prompting deeper exploration of what lies behind and belies the
stereotypes we have of others. This will help in the kind of effort necessary
for those who seek sufficient consensus on a reasonable and humane solution to
the abortion disagreement. Though national legislation is a possible solution,
liberals will likely have to engage in retail politics on the state and local levels
with people who have somewhat different views than they have. They will have
to accommodate, but to do that, they will have to know how they can connect
with others who disagree, not so as to eliminate disagreement, but to work with
them on some things that both sides want.

22 Undermining Stereotypes of the Other Side

To portray the conflict as one between hardened sides that each champion their
one true answer is to mischaracterize the moral thinking and feeling of the vast
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majority of Americans. In a recent study (Bruce 2020), sociologists conducted

in-depth interviews with people who were given the time to qualify, explain, and
state “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” Most do not take categorical
positions either for or against abortion rights.5 They neither hold that a woman’s
right to abortion nor that the life of the fetus is the only relevant moral
consideration. This already is to depart from the characteristic public debate
on the issue, which features one consideration but not the other, as if it did not
exist.
Considerable numbers of those in the middle couched their positions as
generally permitting abortion but not under some conditions, most frequently
in the later stages of pregnancy or after viability, or sometimes if the behavior
leading to pregnancy had shown carelessness or irresponsibility toward birth
5
They conducted 217 in-depth interviews in California, Colorado, Indiana, North Dakota,
Pennsylvania, and Tennessee in 2019. The sample approximated diversity (in political ideology,
religious preference, religious attendance, race, age, marital status, children or no children,
political affiliation) across the US adult population overall.
 58 Ethics

control. Other considerable numbers of those in the middle couched their

positions as generally opposing abortion but permitting it under some condi-
tions, most often when the woman’s life was in danger, pregnancy had been
caused by rape, incest, or domestic abuse, when at the earlier stages of preg-
nancy or before viability, and in cases of financial and psychological unreadi-
ness to care for a child. There are also considerable numbers of people who can’t
be categorized as being generally for or against, with excepting conditions.
Some say the morality of abortion has to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
Others say that they would not judge the decisions of others on abortion,
sometimes because they accept a plurality of moral positions on abortion;
sometimes because they have not been in the situation of having to make the
decision for themselves and therefore feel unqualified to judge others in that
situation; sometimes because they have been in that situation and resist categor-
ical judgment about what they did; and sometimes because they consider that it
“depends on the person” and their situation in a way that makes it inappropriate
for others to judge.
In another study, an overwhelming majority of US-resident adults expressed
willingness to help a close friend or family member seeking abortion. Not
surprisingly, those who regard abortion to be immoral were willing to offer
the fewest forms of support and at the lowest level. Yet almost half in this group
would help a friend or family member with arrangements, and over a third
would help with associated costs. A majority who think the morality of abortion
depends on certain factors would offer logistical help and with the associated
costs of abortion (Cowan et al. 2022, 4). Reasons given in interviews for this
“discordant benevolence” indicate both differing values and shared values. One
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reason is “commiseration.” Some would help a friend or family member

because they view them as a human worthy of care, despite their moral disap-
proval of the choice that person is making. A conservative Republican who had
had her own abortion but thinks of the procedure as killing would still support
another woman in a similar situation because “we make bad choices, but we’re
still good people.” A liberal Democrat who got pregnant when single and was
scared because she “didn’t have anybody” morally opposes abortion.
Nevertheless, she would say to others considering abortion: “I’m here for
you . . . I’m here no matter what,” because “everybody needs somebody to
help them through it” (Cowan et al. 2022, 6).
Cowan and her colleagues call a second reason for discordant benevolence
“exemption” because it “carves out a condition of exceptionality to help
reserved exclusively for their friend(s) or family member(s).” That is, abortion
is regarded as morally unacceptable but an exception in terms of helping it take
place is made in affirming the value of helping close others in need. Ryan,
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 59

a liberal Democrat who opposes abortion on the grounds of taking responsibility

for life, would be willing to help his sister have an abortion if she was set on it,
though he would not help her pay for it (Cowan et al. 2022, 7). A third reason for
discordant benevolence is “discretion.” At the same time that one can think that
it is morally wrong to have an abortion, one can also hold that it is the
individual’s right to make their own decision (Cowan et al. 2022, 8). It would
have been interesting to know more about the scope of this kind of “moral
individualism,” as Cowan and her colleagues call it (2022, 7). It seems implaus-
ible that people would apply it to just any moral view that was at odds with their
own. A possible explanation is that people give more weight to letting others
make their own decisions when the moral issue is one that is particularly
difficult to view as having only one right solution. Abortion is a position on
which people do hold moral positions, even strongly held and felt positions, but
on which they also recognize that informed people of good faith hold different
positions.
The acts that the study of Cowans and her colleagues describe are acts of
accommodation. Going forward, it might be hoped that pro-life advocates
would recognize the most effective way to reduce abortion is to make it more
financially and emotionally feasible to carry a pregnancy to term, and that pro-
choice advocates would approve of making more feasible the choice to have
a child as well as the choice to abort. People can operate from a definite moral
point of view on abortion but recognize the complexity of the issue and their
own values and choose a way of acting on their point of view and their other
values that reflects a degree of moral ambivalence.
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23 Fostering Pluralistic Encounters

Put in its most general form, is it possible to foster, and even to institutionalize,
the idea of people coming together to explore how they might deal with their
moral differences and find ways to accommodate each other? The moral-
political climate in the United States at the time of this writing presents
a daunting challenge, but efforts to bring people of different backgrounds
together to deliberate upon what divides us show promise and some results.
A type of study made up of a series of experiments and known as “delibera-
tive polling” brings together people of diverse backgrounds to discuss and make
recommendations on issues many of which provoke vehement and entrenched
disagreement, such as energy policy, immigration, and what to do about crime.
The political scientist James Fishkin (2009) conceived of events in which
citizens convened, typically for a weekend, to deliberate over such issues.
They were chosen on the basis of random representative samplings and were
 60 Ethics

supplied with briefing materials on the issues, attended talks given by experts,
and part of the time met in small discussion groups led by trained moderators.
They were polled for their views at the beginning and at the end, and the results
typically showed significant change. A concrete example of when such events
had significant impact is the deliberative polling done in the American state of
Texas on the issue of energy policy. This produced significant shifts in citizens’
opinions on the viability of wind power, resulting in Texas utilities and govern-
mental regulars investing in that technology (Galbraith and Price 2013).
Another of the more intriguing ideas for getting more input from more parts
of the body politic is that of

an “open mini-public”: a large, all-purpose, randomly selected assembly of

between 150 and 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds, gathered for an
extended period of time (from at least a few days to a few years) for the
purpose of agenda-setting and law-making of some kind, and connected via
crowdsourcing platforms and deliberative forums (including other mini-
publics) to the larger population. (Landemore 2020, 13)

A striking realization of a deliberative mini-public is the Irish Citizens

Assembly, whose work resulted in the adoption of groundbreaking laws on
abortion and marriage equality (see Farrell et al. 2019). People asked to
participate agreed to meet on weekends to receive information from experts
chosen across the political spectrum, and the information was also made
available to the public.
Throughout the twentieth century, Ireland, an overwhelmingly Catholic
country, legally banned abortion. In 1983, a referendum affirming the ban
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through constitutional amendment passed by a two-thirds majority. However,

the steady travel abroad of Irish women to have abortions, and a series of tragic
cases involving the denial of abortion to women and in some cases, children,
gave rise to public sentiment against the amendment. In 2016, the issue was
turned over to the Citizen’s Assembly. Sixty-four percent of the Assembly voted
to legalize the termination of pregnancy within twelve weeks, and called for the
government to put the matter to a referendum. Sixty-six percent of Irish voters
agreed to the overturning of the ban (McKay 2019).
Besides the concrete legislative and policy results, perhaps the most hopeful
outcome of such experiments is the seriousness with which participants
approached their job and the respectfulness they showed to each other in delib-
erative polling and mini-publics. To get their jobs done, they strove in many cases
to put their aversions to the positions of disagreeing others in a larger perspective.
If nothing else, they put to shame the posturing and overheated rhetoric of
politicians who address the issue (on deliberative polling, see Gessen 2019; on
 Moral Relativism and Pluralism 61

the Irish Citizen’s Assembly, see McKay 2019; and podcast by Students at
Central European University’s School of Public Policy 2018).

24 Summary of Normative Moral Relativism

Normative moral relativism is not self-contradictory, but neither is it a complete
ethic. It is based on metaethical relativism and the value of justifiability auton-
omy, but other values we hold, such as various rights we and other people have,
may require actions incompatible with nonintervention and leaving others be.
We may decide it is more important to act on these other values, or we may try to
balance justifiability autonomy with these other values through modifying our
way of acting on values such as rights. Ways of responding to the practice of
female genital cutting may result from this sort of balancing. These ways also
exemplify acting on the value of accommodation, which is a universal con-
straint on moralities.
Accommodation may also help in dealing with the extremely divisive issue of
abortion. Part of the problem may be an absolutist conception of rights which
leaves us less able to balance them against each other and other important
considerations, and less able to accommodate others who think differently
about the issue. The more fundamental problem may be our alienation from
others who think differently. We have to be willing to engage with others in the
spirit of getting a fuller picture of the complexity of their views, as we would
want others to understand us. This spirit lies behind the best versions of moral
relativism.
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 Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Dale E. Miller, Ben Eggleston, and an anonymous reviewer for
their many helpful comments.

For Liana and Z

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 Ethics

Ben Eggleston
University of Kansas
Ben Eggleston is a professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas. He is the editor
of John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism: With Related Remarks from Mill’s Other Writings
(Hackett, 2017) and a co-editor of Moral Theory and Climate Change: Ethical Perspectives on
a Warming Planet (Routledge, 2020), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism
(Cambridge, 2014), and John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life (Oxford, 2011). He is also the
author of numerous articles and book chapters on various topics in ethics.

Dale E. Miller
Old Dominion University, Virginia
Dale E. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Old Dominion University. He is the author
of John Stuart Mill: Moral, Social and Political Thought (Polity, 2010) and a co-editor
of Moral Theory and Climate Change: Ethical Perspectives on a Warming Planet (Routledge,
2020), A Companion to Mill (Blackwell, 2017), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism
(Cambridge, 2014), John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life (Oxford, 2011), and Morality,
Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2000). He is also the editor-in-chief
of Utilitas, and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on various topics in
ethics broadly construed.

About the Series

This Elements series provides an extensive overview of major figures, theories, and
concepts in the field of ethics. Each entry in the series acquaints students with the main
aspects of its topic while articulating the author’s distinctive viewpoint in a manner
that will interest researchers.
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 Ethics

Elements in the Series

Moral Psychology
Christian B. Miller
Philippa Foot’s Metaethics
John Hacker-Wright
Natural Law Theory
Tom Angier
Happiness and Well-Being
Chris Heathwood
Ethical Constructivism
Carla Bagnoli
Hume on the Nature of Morality
Elizabeth S. Radcliffe
Kant’s Ethics
Kate A. Moran
Ethical Realism
William J. FitzPatrick
Prioritarianism
Richard J. Arneson
Aristotle’s Ethics: Nicomachean and Eudemian Themes
Paula Gottlieb
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Moral Responsibility Reconsidered

Gregg D. Caruso and Derk Pereboom
Moral Relativism and Pluralism
David B. Wong

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