Contextualism and Relativism in Ethics

Abstract

According to a prominent approach in contemporary formal semantics, the truth of moral assertions depends on a normative perspective imposed on the facts of the world. The implementation of this approach known as indexical contextualism treats the dependence of moral truth on the corresponding moral perspective in analogy with the contextual dependence characteristic of sentences containing indexical terms. Alternatively, the moral perspective is seen as configuring the circumstances of evaluation in which the content expressed by the occurrence of a moral sentence is evaluated as true or false. The moderate version of this alternative view (non-indexical contextualism) considers that the truth of the occurrence of a moral sentence in a context of use is determined by the evaluation of its content in “the circumstance of the context”: the circumstance of evaluation represented by the same indexed set that represents the context of use. The radical version (assessment relativism), in turn, makes the truth of the occurrence of a moral sentence in a context depend essentially on the value of the normative standard in another context, from which the original utterance is assessed. Taking the judgment on the moral status of polygamous marriage as an illustration, the present work examines the competing merits of contextualist and relativist accounts of the use of moral language, especially in situations of disagreement and debate. The paper argues that, while indexical contextualism coupled with adequate pragmatic considerations can explain some relevant disagreement data, the alternative explanation of these data given by non-indexical contextualism is preferable, because it is simpler and more economical. It is also argued that relativism of assessment is better situated than non-indexical contextualism to explain the relevant phenomena of obligatory retraction and therefore to accommodate some discursive possibilities that play a central role in moral debates.