Morality Is a Cultural Byproduct of Relativivism

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If you have a view according to which morality is created by us and for us then those reasons may be either strongly diminished or in fact non-existent. I want the vision of morality that I would I am hoping is correct is one according to which if something is morally required of you then that carries with it genuine non-self-interested kind of practical authority. All human beings are at a fundamental level moral equals to one another and their skin color, sex your gender they're irrelevant in the determination of how much respect and dignity a person deserves.

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That’s not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it’s wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.

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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.

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