"Let's not yield to relativism"

Relativism is a useful tool for understanding ethics, it has a limit, and at that limit are more steadfast and general truths.


My friend (let's call him Q) and I had a conversation about "Engineering Ethics and the Public", a class taught by Marc Edwards that we are currently involved/enrolled in. The conversation was specifically about how the ethics class is taught.


Q has more experience with ethics and he is skeptical of and surprised by the specific attention paid to one's "personal morality" in the discussions of ethics that occur in the class. "Ethics is conceptual", he claims, and without attention to ethical frameworks, the class may quickly devolve into ethnocentrism. A simple example: In a country where vaccinations are culturally/religiously prohibited, we may have the personally derived ethical impetus to vaccinate and protect people from illness, but we are not necessarily in the right. Following our personal ethics and choosing to vaccinate, we would be ethnocentrically imposing our worldview on another group.


My assessment is that this imposition may or may not be a worthwhile ethical cost to accept, but we should regardless be aware of it. Still, I argue that the attention this class pays to the lines that people personally draw, and to people's personal moral histories, instead of ethical frameworks, is an indication that it is being taught in a situated way, and is a strength. While most ethics classes will place students in a difficult to resolve ethical situation, the difficulty of the situations that we are trying to solve does not lie in their intractability. These engineering situations do not go awry because of faulty logic (read: shit logic), they go awry because of a culture that does not value an ethical decision in the first place. The dilemmas we are presented with have multiple stakeholders, and multiple complex reasons for coming about, but the easy to predict end result is exposing children to high amounts of lead. Did the engineers responsible need a better understanding of ethical frameworks? I would argue no. Instead, engineers need to understand the culture of engineering which allows these more obviously unethical decisions to happen, and they need to develop moral courage (a personal, not to mention affective, learning objective).


To Q's credit, I think this approach has some weaknesses. I noted in our previous class session that there was some conflation between what was lawful and what was ethical. This distinction would be made very obvious if we were approaching ethics with multiple frameworks, but the conflation is allowed to persist when we focus on our personal ethics.


And which of us is being the relativist?

Both, I think. A quick definition, relativism is the belief that there is no objective truth, and that in place of any knowledge or action based on objective truth, one simply knows and acts on a subjective truth. Q is using relativism to provide depth to the scenarios that engineers might face. I am defending an educational approach that uses relativism to provide depth to one's own understanding of ethics.


This is against the backdrop of a struggle I have been having with relativism as my ontology. As Dr. Allen Wood sharply deduces in his paper about relativism, I have arrived in the gray areas of relativism through skepticism. I have in my graduate education been exposed to a lot of advice that contradicts other advice. Methods that contradict other methods. I feel as though I have not heard faculty agree with each other, possibly not even agree with themselves, in the past year. For a skeptic that looks for the alternative view on most things, it has been hard to arrive at reasonable (though fundamentally uncertain) conclusions. It was fairly easy for me to begin to believe that objective truth was a myth, the great lie of positivist physical science that I was trying to leave behind. And there was an odd pride in relativism. It was a helpful guide in our discussions of race. Chomsky paints it as an academic fad that comes with material rewards. But I began to doubt my convictions when I saw post-modernism as part of a larger critique of liberalism. One of my professors inspired me to write this post when he urged the class not to "yield to relativism".

Another of Chomsky's talks got me thinking about the tenability of relativism. In this talk, I think Chomsky demonstrates his power in that he argues not just from a point of philosophy, but also from a point of biology. The essential upshot is that ethics and culture may be relative, and arbitrary, but they are not infinitely arbitrary. There is some underlying structure to it because not all culture can be reproduced through the biological processes of learning. This perspective, of an ethical framework that is relative but floats around some underlying structure, is reflected through principlism. Principlism is a system of ethics that tries to secure autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. The assertion of principlism is that these four principles are held in common with most ethical frameworks, historically - though they have been interpreted differently within different cultures.


I am beginning to think a few things. I think relativism in its purest form allows for the ignorance of many reasonable truths. Children being exposed to lead is probably going to be bad, though not absolutely - I'm thinking of a Chinese emperor treating mercury as an immortality elixir. I think there is a balance to strike between relativism and general truths if we want to act ethically. Relativism may be a useful tool for understanding students' perspectives, or for understanding foreign cultures, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should keep letting the emperor drink mercury. I think the balance is struck by teaching and learning conversation (conversation implying an element of listening). Upon learning that mercury is generally harmful (and not relatively harmful), we should strive to learn about the emperor's ethics, while we teach the emperor about mercury's effects (preserving his autonomy).