Mini Ethic-sode #4: Ethical Relativism, Central Capabilities, and L'Wxana Troi

What is up with ethical relativism? How do you know what the right thing to do is when you have multiple conflicting ethical systems across different cultures? What is the Prime Directive?

13:40: Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, pg. 18.

19:55: Gross Edward and Altman, Mark A. (1993) Captain’s Logs: The Complete Star Trek Voyages. London: Boxtree, pg 220.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi, I'm Peter. I'm a professor of ethics and host of Things You Can Do, a podcast of hopeful regularity, where I take your ethics questions and transmography them into meaningful advice so that you can know some things you can do. Today is our fourth mini ethicsode where I take you on a 15-minute journey through a nugget of philosophy to sate your bite-sized hunger for tasty ethics. Today I want to talk about ethical relativism and do a brief introduction to an idea that we'll expound on in more detail next week in our full episode: the ethical case study. We're gonna talk about what ethical relativism is, and then investigate why it's an important concept in ethics, especially when it comes to thinking about your relationship to your community and to society at large. You might have heard the term relativism thrown around before, but I think it's best to break down the meaning pretty clearly to begin with. Sometimes when a word becomes a buzzword, at least it's a buzzword in the kinds of conversations an ethicist tends to pay attention to, its meaning can get fuzzy or warped, or we can end up applying that meaning to the wrong kinds of situations. So let's have a quick moment of Latin contemporary. Let's look at this word relative. It comes from the Latin latus, which means to carry, and the prefix re, which in this context can mean back or back toward. So relatus is to bring something back. Or in a metaphorical way, we would say that we are referring to something, something that's not currently present, but that we know what and where it is. So something that's relative has a relation to another thing, something else that we're referring back to. This makes sense, since we tend to call people that we have a genetic connection to, but that don't live in our family unit, relatives. But the jump from related to this to the meaning of relative in ethical relativism requires a little bit of a mental stretch. Okay, think about how someone in the military who flies a plane or pilots a ship might talk about direction with respect to their own position and heading. Perry the pilot is flying his plane and heading north. The control tower tells him that the airport he wants to go to is at his 3 o'clock. That means that it is to the pilot's right or starboard side. But imagine another craft, a boat piloted by Kelly the captain, traveling south, directly underneath where Perry the pilot is in the sky. The same location, the airport, is at her 9 o'clock, or on the port or left side of Kelly's craft. We understand that even though Perry and Kelly are basically in the same spot, and the airport hasn't moved at all, the direction or relationship that they have to the airport is different. That is, it's relative based on the direction they're going. So let's translate this concept over to ethics. In ethical relativism, the same ethical situations or concepts may appear or function differently according to someone's heading, as it were. Headings like your upbringing, your culture, your age, or the era in which you're living, your status in society, your personal abilities. All these kinds of things might go into the ethical equation that will come out with different morally praiseworthy or blameworthy actions based on the individual or that individual's relationship to the other agents in the situation. Gavin de Gras has this song I really like on his self-titled album from 2008. Yes, I realize I'm carbon dating myself a bit with this reference. It's called Relative. He says, a flashlight isn't quite sunlight, but any light at all seems bright when you're looking in the dark. And this is another good word picture for how we think of relativism. How bright is that light? Well, sometimes it depends on how bright the room is around it. Okay, so before we move into our case study, I want to provide a couple ideas that will help us sort of measure how things will appear relative in relationship to different deeply held values and beliefs. First, similar to how we have descriptive versus prescriptive or normative ethics in general, we can talk about descriptive or normative relativism. We talked about this all the way back in episode one, so let's review real briefly. When we say descriptive, we just mean, hey, this is what's happening. I'm not making any comment on what's going on here. I'm just describing the situation. But prescriptive means I'm making a judgment. You should do this, you shouldn't do this, etc. So in descriptive relativism, we're just saying, hey, it seems like when we look at the world, people tend to have different ethical systems that they use to figure out what their actions should be in any situation. This seems honestly pretty self-evident. You mean, wait, not everyone has the same ethical system or deeply held values? Stop the presses, alert the Navy, call the new dog times. No, this makes sense. Descriptive relativism just allows us to say, all right, whether it's right or not, it looks like we've got people who make decisions based on different moral codes and concepts. Normative relativism takes this situation and says, people have different moral codes, and you know what? It's good and right that they do. How could we possibly have eight billion people on one planet and not have some diversity or disagreement about what the most important things are? We can also call this meta-ethical relativism. Meta-ethical is just a fancy philosophy word that means from the broadest point of view. When we zoom out as far as we can go, we realize that there just isn't any hard and fast rule for any kind of conduct. Everyone in every different culture and community is creating their own codes of conduct to try to do the best they can. And there's no moral math out there that proves one more right than the other. We can talk about strong and weak relativisms. That is, how far that relativism asks us to stretch our idea of moral action. So the 19th-century Prussian philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, would advocate for a very strong relativism that makes it very difficult to find common moral ground across cultures, or even from person to person. Hence, we might also call a strong form of relativism an individual relativism. This person has made up their own mind for what their moral precepts are, and they aren't letting any other social or cultural influences have the last word. And if you know anything about Nietzsche, well, yeah, that just kind of sounds like him. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more from him in a future episode. Alright, you say, but don't different cultures across time kind of show that there's some stuff that just seems important to everybody, or at least to most people? Well, maybe respecting the elderly, or not making children fight in wars, or not torturing people. There might be some examples of communities or cultures not quite agreeing with these, but in general, we can find folks from all eras of human history that would agree pretty strongly with something like don't steal something that is someone else's, like their food or their life. This cultural relativism is what we might call a weak relativism. So-called not because it's weak or bad, but because the relativism isn't all the way. That is, there are still some points that aren't completely fixed, but they seem relatively clear to a lot of people, regardless of their position. It does still cause us a problem because simply describing the different ways that cultures value these things doesn't solve what happens when they interact with each other. Some cultures regulate dignity for the life of others by applying laws severely restricting your ability to take someone else's life without heavy consequences. But other cultures might do this through extra-legal mores and traditions that may appear confusing, contradictory, or maybe even worse than the original problem. For example, in the ancient Near East, or what I often like to refer to as Bible times, there were often cultural traditions that influenced what would happen to someone who had been wronged or experienced injustice or tragedy. So let's have a brief. In ancient Hebrew cultures, there was what was known as a Goel, or sometimes Goel Hadam. Careful listeners might hear L in here and think that this word is related to the word L, which in ancient Near Eastern languages like Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Aramaic often refers to God or some other similar powerful entity. But this is a trick. Instead, this is a word that comes from the verb gaal, which means to buy back. And the L is what happens when that verb, an action, gets turned into a word for the occurrence of the action or the one doing the action, a participle. So a goel is the one who buys back or redeems. And a goel hadam is one who redeems their kin or their family member. We see this in the ancient biblical story of Ruth. Because Ruth's husband, Elimelech, died without having any children with Ruth, it was Boaz's responsibility, not just to his society and to Ruth, but to God as well, to take care of Ruth, to buy back the land of her families that was sold, and to provide her deceased husband with an heir that would functionally be of Elimelech's line, not Boaz's. To us, this may seem really weird. You mean the way to take care of a widow was to be forced to have a child with her that wouldn't be yours? What if you already had a family? What if she doesn't like you? What if she doesn't really want kids in the first place? This does feel like it kind of squishes up against some other deeply held values that we have in our culture. But for ancient Near Eastern cultures, these considerations were subordinate to caring for the widow and for the deceased husband's bloodline. In fact, the ancient Hebrews took it so seriously that earlier in the Bible in Genesis, a guy named Onan is supposed to act as a goel for his deceased kin. But knowing the child wouldn't be quote unquote his, he intentionally failed to impregnate his brother's wife, and because of this, the biblical account says that God put him to death. Okay, back to our conversation on relativism. We're stuck a little bit on this problem of descriptive relativism. It seems that there are different moral systems across cultures, but what do we do about that? Do we just stay out of everyone's way? Do we never interact with another culture? Do people from another country get a pass on laws and customs of the place that they're in? Well, one important example of trying to approach this problem of translating values across cultures is American philosopher Martha Nussbaum's ideas of central capabilities. I think it's really cool to talk about central capabilities because Nussbaum is the somewhat rare example of a notable philosopher who is still alive. Dr. Nussbaum is the author of the 2011 book Creating Capabilities, The Human Development Approach, in which she tries to nail down what are some of the things that all humans, no matter where or when they live, have in common. Nussbaum uses these central capabilities to try to form rational approaches to how we should act and what responsibilities humans have across cultures. Interestingly, by doing this, Nussbaum is actually trying to find a way out of a descriptive relativism that makes us just shrug and say, oh well, looks like everyone has a different moral compass. Instead, she offers her capabilities approach as a kind of foil to a relativism that is ambivalent about what we actually are able to do about apparent inequities that appear as a result of our ethical differences. Instead, we can use the capabilities approach as a way of trying to translate situations that might look fundamentally different on their face in order to get an idea of what might be a morally upright action or intervention in an ethical dilemma involving multiple, possibly conflicting perspectives.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

The capabilities approach can be provisionally defined as an approach to comparative quality of life assessment and to theorizing about basic social justice. It holds that the key question to ask when comparing societies and assessing them for their basic decency or justice is what is each person able to do and to be? In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking not just about the total or average well-being, but about the opportunities available to each person.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Nussbaum's capabilities include life, bodily health and integrity, emotions, relationships with other species, and even play. The point of identifying these isn't to make a set of ideas that every human agrees on, but rather to think about the kinds of things that all humans are capable of doing in community. When we realize that different human communities all tend to have different ideas of what life means to them, we can understand that while some particular cultures might honor life generally by preserving it, others might honor it by having very prescriptive rituals or norms about how it ends. Let's dive into our case study. Laboxana Troy is the mother of an officer on the USS Enterprise and an important diplomat from her world of BetaZ. While visiting the Enterprise, she takes a fancy to another visitor, a being named Timison, who hails from the reclusive world of K-Lon 2. Timison has been helping the crew of the Enterprise workshop solutions for the sun that K-Lon 2 orbits. It's dying, and if drastic action isn't taken, it will die and explode, taking along with it the entire Kalon civilization. Fascinatingly, the ethical dilemma in this episode of Star Trek The Next Generation is not about the survival of the Kalon species, but about the survival of one particular Kalon, Timison. He's still trying to solve the problem of the Kalon star, but he must abandon his research and return to his homeworld to participate in a ceremony called the Resolution. Now that he's reached the age of 60, Timison will complete ritual suicide, something all Kalon adults of his age consent to do. This ritual keeps older folks from becoming a burden to the rest of Kalon society and gives them a dignified and predictable end of life. Lawaksana is absolutely scandalized by this. It's important to know that not only does Lawaxana have strong romantic feelings for Timison, but as a beta zoid, not a human, she is endowed with certain empathic and telepathic abilities that allow her to read thoughts and feelings from other beings. She feels a powerful sense of injustice that Timison would be pulled away from such important work in order to be put to death. And further, as a woman of advanced age herself, she objects to the idea that an elderly person would be a burden and wouldn't have anything else to offer their community.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

He is supposed to go down there to his loving friends, be wined dined, honored for his achievements, and then kill himself. It's a barbaric ritual. The um the resolution, it's called. Obviously, you can't let him go, Jean-Luc.

SPEAKER_03 16:29

I'm afraid I have no choice.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

I don't think you've been listening to me. The man is supposed to kill himself. Now you don't just let that happen. You don't just turn your back. What's the matter with you?

SPEAKER_03 16:42

I'm sorry, but whatever my personal feelings, I have no jurisdiction here. I simply cannot interfere.

SPEAKER_02 16:48

But you have to. In a situation like this, you absolutely have to interfere. You you've got to go down there, talk to those people, Jean-Luc. Open their eyes, educate them.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

The prime directive forbids us to interfere with the social order of any planet.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Well, it's your prime directive, not mine.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

A brief note here, for those of you who don't watch Star Trek, the Prime Directive is the law of the United Federation of Planets that says that while Starfleet is interacting with other civilizations that aren't a part of theirs, they won't interfere in any kind of way that would violate the autonomy and dignity of a different civilization or species. Basically, it's Starfleet's way of saying we're not going to find a new civilization and come in like the morality police and teach everyone how to do things the right way. This is their response in part to the difficulty of descriptive relativism. Don't try to judge another civilization's actions by the standards of your own. So now that we have this situation, we need to understand that this is not a matter of the evil Kalon government is murdering Timison? There is a practice at the level of the entire Kalon civilization that everyone is aware of, and that we're led to believe pretty much everyone goes along with. Timison is sad to abandon his important research, but he also feels a sense of duty and responsibility to his culture. And he even struggles with his place in his community. Does the importance of his work give him leave to postpone the resolution ceremony? Is the knowledge that he holds more important than his society's commitment to the longevity of their species? And what impact does the emergent issue of a soon-to-be-dead son have on Timson's moral compass? What I really want to highlight here is that Timison and Loaxana, who is also meant to represent our perspective as the viewer, experience this dilemma differently. For Loaxana, it's unfair and authoritarian that the government should decide when someone dies. It implies that elderly folks are a burden, and that folks that don't offer enough to society are unwanted. This is an egregious breach of personal autonomy and the right to control one's personal environment. How can anyone do this? For Timerson, the issue is more about how to honor the part that he plays in the Kalon culture and the important work he feels called to do, and whether the needs and desires of the one outweigh the needs and desires of the many. If you want to know how the characters and the story deal with it, go check out episode 22 of season four of Star Trek The Next Generation called Half a Life. Les Landau, who directed this episode and many other episodes of various Star Trek franchises, said that this episode was intentionally meant to be a morality play about what the place of the elderly in our society should be. The creators intend us to think and draw conclusions about how we should treat folks who might be, quote unquote, a burden on society. So what do you think? What conclusions do you come to about the Kalon civilization and the way they treat elderly folks? Should Loxana intervene? Is it right for her to try and convince Timson to reject his civilization's values? And what does this tell us about the nature of difficult problems of descriptive ethical relativism? At the very least, I think it tells us that there's a lot of work that goes into trying to find the right answer in difficult ethical situations. And the more we interact with people who have different values, the more complicated that can become. But I don't think it's a cautionary tale about the dangers of intercultural communication. Rather, it seems more like an encouragement that these supposedly intractable ethical quandaries can have creative solutions that we participate in solving. To return again to our friend Gavin de Gras, we could say that the problem of ethical relativism, well, it's all about the way we receive it, how much we believe it. Depending on the life you lead, if you leave it, compare it to yourself. Compared to someone else, you can. You can. You have the ability to think and choose and create, to create actions and effects in the world that meet the challenge of these dilemmas and still align with your commitments and deeply held values. That is what it means to live in a world where our moral actions involve our choices. It's written by me, Peter Owens. For references and citations, you can see the show notes. The Things You Can Do intro theme is written by Brandcom. The outro theme, and Around the Sun Again We Go, was written by me. Also in this episode were my songs, Mr. Good Boy, and Interdictor Jedi Trance. As well as my instrumental cover. Of Gavin de Gras' Relative from his 2008 album, Gavin de Gras. Audio from Star Trek The Next Generation, created by Gene Roddenberry, is utilized under fair use conventions. Special thanks to producer of the show Meg for her voice talents on this episode.