Moral Relativism
Are moral values absolute, or relative to culture? What are the consequences of either view, especially when cultures interact?
This is a topic that gets some people very heated. Some people claim that moral relativism is responsible for a good deal of what is wrong with the world, asserting that if one does not believe in the existence of some absolute, objective set of moral rules that transcends culture, one cannot have any moral principles at all and will probably act in a very selfish and anti-social manner. Others disagree.
Overview Podcasts
Simon Blackburn - Philosophy Bites. Blackburn has an interesting and subtle perspective on the issue.
http://philosophybites.com/2007/08/simon-blackburn.html
Boghossian - Philosophy Bites. Boghossian seems to think relativism is pretty terrible.
http://philosophybites.com/2011/10/paul-boghossian-on-moral-relativism.html
Websites
Wikipedia Moral Relativism (as usual, quite good):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
SEP (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) Moral Relativism:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/
IEP (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) Moral Relativism (probably just a simpler version of the SEP aricle):
http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/
A very short internet summary of arguments for and against:
http://www.moralrelativism.info/
An essay from a relativist point of view:
http://sageandonions.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/is-it-intolerant-to-not-tolerate-intolerance/
Hume Is-Ought Problem. In stark contrast to Sam Harris, Hume argues that it is impossible to logically work out what you ought to do from observations about the way the world is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem
Hume Treatise of Human Nature (ebook version can also be downloaded for Kindle or other portable readers), containing more of Hume's thoughts on the source of morals:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/h92t/introduction.html#B3.1.1
Moral Relativism
The wikipedia article above identifies three forms of moral relativism: Descriptive, Meta-Ethical and Normative.
Descriptive moral relativism is of no interest as it just means you recognise that some people have different moral views. Hardly anybody would deny that.
Normative moral relativism is the extreme form that says that there are no objective moral truths and hence we should not criticise or seek to control people from other cultures that have different morals from ours. Not many people hold such a view but it tends to be what religious people in particular assume is the view of anybody that denies the existence of objective moral truths. Simon Blackburn argues (persuasively, in my view) that Normative Moral Relativism is self-contradictory, because saying that we should not interfere with other cultures is itself am absolute moral claim, which the Normative Relativist denies can be true.
Meta-ethical moral relativism is the most interesting (to me). It denies the existence of objective moral facts, but makes no claims about whether one 'should' have their own moral framework, or what it should be. Hence a Meta-ethical Moral Relativist is free to adopt whatever moral rules they like, or none if they prefer, and to lobby for the imposition of those rules on others as much or as little as they wish. Meta-ethical Moral Relativism does not entail a person following no moral rules. The name for that position is Moral Nihilism, and is (fortunately for the rest of us) relatively uncommon.
There are many confusing categories and associated labels for variants of Meta-Ethical Moral Relativism, including things like Non-Cognitivism, Error Theory and Expressivism. One I find intriguing is Emotivism, originally championed by the English Logical Positivist AJ Ayer, and more recently by RM Hare (with a new label of course - Universal Prescriptivism). It also goes by the quaint name of the 'hurrah/boo theory'. Here's a short article on Emotivism:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/emotivism_1.shtml
Sam Harris thinks science can tell us what is moral
Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape. Harris, a well-known US anti-religion campaigner, has gone out on a limb with a very strongly held, and controversial, view that not only do absolute morals exist, but we we can work out what they are by science. I haven't read the book but I've heard and read summaries of it, as well as his spruiking the topic, often enough.
Podcast of Sam Harris discussing his ideas with Richard Dawkins (right click link and then save, if you want to put it on an ipod):
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PodDelusionExtra/~5/sKNwf1rmyI4/72635_20110413141016.mp3
Physicist Laurence Krauss seems to agree with Harris. In the following podcast the two of them gang up on Simon Blackburn who rejects their view.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131099083
Moral argument for the existence of God
This is one of the traditional arguments for God's existence, generally attributed first to Immanuel Kant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality
CS Lewis's version:
http://www.philosophy.ucsb.edu/faculty/anderson/moral_arguments_for_the_existence_of_God.html
Another Christian viewpoint, with a lovely Godwin's touch
http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/moral-argument.htm
And another:
http://powertochange.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/right-wrong.pdf
Debate Audio: Peter Singer vs Dinesh D'Souza "Can there be morality without God"
http://www.apologetics315.com/2009/04/dinesh-dsouza-vs-peter-singer-debate.html
Debate Audio: Shelley Kagan vs William Craig "Is God necessary for Morality"
http://www.apologetics315.com/2009/04/is-god-necessary-for-morality-william.html
One of the biggest problems with the moral argument for God is that It runs headlong into the Euthyphro dilemma, which was described by Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro. Wikipedia has a decent explanation. The short description up front is easier to understand if you translate 'pious' as 'good'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma#The_dilemma
Plato's Ethics
This is particularly relevant because Plato taught that abstract 'truths' like numbers had an actual existence in a place called the world of 'Forms', to which this physical world we experience is a mere shadowy approximation. He taught that, along with mathematical truths such as 2+2=4, moral truths have a real existence in the world of Forms, independent of how many people know (or obey) them. So Plato was a strong non-relativist on matters of morals. Although Plato also believed in gods, we can see from Euthyphro that he didn't regard them as the arbiters of what is good. To the extent that they were good (and I think he thought they mostly were) it was because they conformed closely to an independent standard of goodness.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics/
The first paragraph is a good enough summary without needing to go further.
Other than Plato, Sam Harris and religions, the most widely known types of argument for some sort of objective morality are based either in social contract theory or evolutionary psychology.
Social contract theory says that morals are rules that we mostly agree to society imposing (via approval and disapproval, not just via law), because we'll all be better off on average as a result. John Rawls is a social contract theorist. Other famous ones are Rousseau ("The Social Contract") , John Locke (the "Second Treatise on Government") and Thomas Hobbes ("Leviathan"). I'm not proposing we read these now as we'll probably do social contracts in another meeting some time soon. For the keen, these books are all freely available on the internet, as are summaries of the ideas.
The evolutionary psychology approach says that humans have evolved strong feelings about certain acts, that we call morals, because they are an aid to the survival of the species as a whole. Note that what's beneficial to survival of the species is not necessarily what's beneficial to survival of the individual, or even of their direct progeny. Otherwise male mantises would never want to mate.
Patricia Churchland is a philosopher with an interest in brains. Her book "BrainTrust: What Neuroscience tells us about morality" is about morality as an evolutionary adaptation. She discusses the issues in the following podcast:
A shorter podcast in which she covers some of the same material is:
Elliot Sober is another well-known proponent of this view. Here is a short essay he wrote on it:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/What%20is%20Evolutionary%20Altruism.pdf