I’m not sure I consider myself a moral relativist. I believe that morals really do exist. I also believe our views on morality do evolve over time. My position is that morality is not an individual matter. The definition of morals is that they are beliefs about what behaviors and actions are considered desirable by a culture. They are not matters of individual taste or opinion. In a democracy, the best indication we have as to what our morals are may be the laws we enact and the legal punishments we devise for undesirable behaviors. Those legal guidelines are often at odds with popular opinion as well, because very often large minorities and possibly even majorities of people dislike or disagree with a law. But if someone breaks it and gets caught, the proscribed penalties are still applied.

The best argument against following a law such as the one allowing slavery, or those that used to systematically deny groups of people civil rights for instance, is the appeal to a higher level morality. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. And others are all excellent examples of people who argued that the laws were unjust and needed to be changed. I respect very much people who can help impkrove the morality of a society. What I do not respect are those who believe that since they do not agree with a given law or they think it is silly or worse just inconvenient, they decide simply to ignjore the law or disregard it. Those persons are not trying to improve the morality of the culture, they are just choosing to believe it doesn’t apply to them. That type of subjectivism and relativism is not logically sound, since it violates the most basic tenets of what it means for any society to have a moral code. Any code of morality that has any degree of coherence must apply to everyone in that society.

I suppose for me these discussions about the morality/immorality of recreational drug use always end up rather unsatisfactorily, because at the end of the day people will still believe what they believe and do what they wish to do. As a parent and as a citizen, my decision has been for 35 years to consistenly oppose recreational drug use, and to include pot in that list of substances that I consider unacceptable and therefore immoral. Since the laws are consistent with my position, it seems my position is logical and coherent in this society.

People who want to smoke it are going to do that, regardless of our laws or the fact that the vast majority of people in the US do not want to see it legalized. But morals are at the end of the day not individual, they are beliefs of groups of people. They are standards of conduct, not personal opinions. If someone wants to move the morality of a culture to a new place, they have to work to change the laws, not simply break them. And if they are unable to change the laws, they should logically consider that their personal views may not be moral after all.

Ok, so you’re assuming moral relativism (that ethics is a mere social convention, and determined by a particular culture’s beliefs — that is, whatever a culture believes is right/wrong, actually IS right/wrong… for that culture), and concluding (I think) that the law accurately reflects cultural beliefs, and consequently the culture’s ethics. I think there are at least two reasons why that’s a bad idea.

First, while laws may generally reflect a culture’s values, that’s not always the case.

Second, why defer to popular opinion? Aren’t majorities often wrong? Most everyone in every culture believed the earth was flat for a very long time — didn’t make it true. Similarly, for a time, the culture of the US — or at least the culture in the South — sincerely believed it was morally permissible to own human beings. — didn’t make that true either. And surely that’s false!

It’s clearly logically inconsistent to simultaneously say that one set of persons ought to be free, and another set of persons ought to be bought and sold, simply due to arbitrary differences in skin color. Slavery is unethical because it’s indefensible — it doesn’t treat like cases alike, and doing enough is simply logically inconsistent.

But even if one were to agree to the enslavement of all persons (regardless of color), simply to avoid the logical inconsistency problem above, surely there’s something wrong with preventing autonomous, feeling beings — with all our shared capacities for reasoning and relationships and reflection and the like — from cooperating in voluntary harmony with others like us, according to rules we can all reasonably endorse.

Notice what I’ve done — made a very convincing argument as to why slavery is immoral — without appealing once to popular opinion. Slavery isn’t wrong because people think it’s wrong — people think it’s wrong because it IS wrong (for the reasons cited). Popular cultural belief has nothing to do with it, just like popular cultural belief had nothing to do with the shape of the earth.

Of course, a person could dismiss the above as flowery nonsense, and maintain a hardline anti-moral realist stance, perhaps because I can’t “prove” slavery is wrong like one might “prove” that ice is cold. But I think that person would be hard pressed to accept an extreme case (assuming slavery isn’t extreme enough). Imagine, for instance, a culture who sincerely believed it morally permissible to torture innocent babies for sexual pleasure. Surely no sane person would conclude, “Well, if they sincerely believe it’s alright to torture innocent babies for sexual pleasure, it must actually BE alright to torture innocent babies for sexual pleasure… for them… I suppose.” Clearly, if anything is immoral, THAT is immoral. We can clearly see and know it’s immoral with only a moment’s reflection. Our moral intuition just won’t let us conclude otherwise.

I think sometimes people turn to subjectivism/relativism out of frustration (from an inability to articulate and logically defend a pet view) or in light of so much disagreement over moral matters, with no definitive way to settle such disagreement. But just because something is difficult, and just because people disagree over it, doesn’t mean it must be a matter of mere opinion. For example, proving whether life exists (or doesn’t) beyond the Milky Way may be impossible to settle with certainty (given our current state of technology), and experts in fact disagree which is the case. But notice that this doesn’t make the issue a matter of opinion — doesn’t mean the correct answer is the one the majority happens to hold. For life either exists or doesn’t beyond the Milky Way independent of what the majority of scientists believe (just like the flat/round earth). The same could be true of ethical claims, and given the repugnance of the baby torture example, it appears it is true.

A person who says as much isn’t saying that they hold all the answers. Just that the answers are out there, that they don’t depend on personal or cultural opinion, and that they’re probably worth trying to figure out.

And last, imagine if your favorite food were illegal, but a very similar food were legal. Both foods had the same effects, same harms, same benefits — or at least all were very close in type and degree. If you knew in your heart that there was no principled difference between the banned food that you loved and the allowed food that just wasn’t quite as good, would you throw your hands in the air and say, “Oh well — the majority seems to believe there’s something wrong with the food I love, so I guess I’d better not eat any…” Would you really conclude that eating that food was genuinely “wrong”? Would you choose (and reject) friends based on who ate that food? Would you teach your kids to stay away from persons who ate a little on the side? And would you have a completely different standard for those who ate the (similar in every way but for unexplained reasons) allowed food? Or mighten you discuss the inconsistency with others, petition your legislators to right this indefensible (and silly) wrong, and maybe eventually conclude that there wasn’t much of anything intrinsically special about the law after all?

Just some thoughts. Sometimes tone is hard to convey on the written page, but I type all of the above in a friendly way — just inviting you to reflect — not trying to destroy your view or make what you’ve written look bad. Just talking

Thanks so much for posting! I hope you take a sec to reply, and come back anytime.

Matt

My own personal view has always been that recreational substance use of illegal drugs is immoral, and always wrong. I have consistently disassociated from anyone who did use drugs, and have taught my kids that they should not befriend or associate with anyone who uses them. Am I right? Wrong? There is no objective way to settle this. What I do know is that I will never worry about getting thrown in jail for possession, and that no one can argue that I am failing to uphold the moral code our society has enshrined in law.

I’ll concede that perhaps you’re right that many can smoke and retain the vast majority of their cognitive faculties. Smoking pot at least seems to make folks a little slower than they’d otherwise be though, and I’ve had people with experience confirm this — say they had to quit because a new career required them to be sharp. But whatever the case, as I conclude in the article, weed in moderation for many people doesn’t seem to be too harmful or unethical, similar to alcohol in moderation. Thanks again for posting!

Hi, Matt! So glad you jumped in here.

The monkey study you cite is interesting. Being a philosopher, I have an aversion to dirtying myself with empirical studies But if you say it’s the *only* study to ever link pot to brain damage, and the study suffered serious flaws — well then, we have reason to discredit that link. Maybe it’s the case that dunderheads just tend to gravitate toward weed, and THAT’s why burnouts are burnout — they’d be dense even without pot. I dunno though. As I was telling Scott above, I’ve had people tell me directly that they could tell a difference. I’ve never smoked, but I have drank, and I can tell a difference for days after drinking in my mental sharpness. If weed avoids that, maybe I should be smoking instead of drinking… Whatever the case, I say we just suspend judgment on this point until someone cares enough to research further or provide personal confirmation or denial. Cool?

Really nice gateway analogy with Wal-Mart! Indeed, visiting a drug dealer to buy marijuana might make purchasing harder drugs easier, just like visiting Wally World to purchase apples makes buying Cheetos easier. However, that’s not the only reason pot could lead to harder stuff. For one, once you do something illegal, the taboo is broken. A person could feel emboldened, their inhibitions lowered, no longer worried about being a strict law follower if they were before. Also, given that there seems to be so much misinformation about weed out there, a person might conclude after smoking it that since the scare campaign against pot is all hype, well then — maybe the scare campaign against meth is all hype too!

Of course, none of this settles the issue — I’m just answering your direct point. Thanks so much for the thoughtful post!!