Martin Amis and the agonies of ‘wet’ liberalism

Of course if that was all there was to relativism then there’d be no real problem. Once you understand how any two grid systems work you can translate coordinates from one system to another. The thing that turns relativism into a problem is something called incommensurability. This is the idea that not only are there different systems for understanding and describing the world, but that it’s not possible to create translation manuals for every pair of systems.

If you’re not a relativist you’ll simply reject the possibility of incommensurability. Because readings from all truthful maps can be translated from one to another, there’s a sense in which they all share the same system. And if it’s not possible to translate, then one of the maps is wrong.

There are some people who don’t care about whether maps “tell the truth” or not. All they care about is whether a particular map gets them to where they want to go. For example, Harry Beck’s famous London Underground map grossly distorts spacial relationships. It tells lies about how far away one station is from another. It flattens out the curves in the train lines and misaligns their directions. But as any pragmatic tube user will tell you, the Central Line isn’t really red and the Piccadilly Line isn’t really blue either. Big deal.

Some philosophers have the same attitude to belief systems. As long as the system is easy to use and lets you predict and control your environment to get what you want then metaphysical truth doesn’t matter. So far so good you might say. But don’t belief systems also tell you what to want? Don’t they show you how to tell the difference between good and bad?

And this is where relativism gets really controversial. Imagine you’d convinced yourself that there were no good arguments for one moral belief system over another. Does this mean that the rational thing to do is follow self-interest? Not really. What arguments are their for that moral belief system? So how about believing in nothing - nihilism? Again, the same answer. The real question is not what you should believe in but what you do believe in. And the answer to that will probably come from your cultural background. Or at least that’s what moral relativists would say.

If you think about morality in this way you won’t find any reason at all to tolerate other people’s belief systems. The only reason you could possibly have for tolerating another person’s belief system was that your belief system happened to be liberalism.

So relativism isn’t stupefying after all. In fact it’s mostly irrelevant. For philosophers like Rorty, the cross-cultural agony of “wet” liberalism is a psychological rather than a philosophical problem. If someone wants to destroy your way of life why would you want to encourage them? You’d have to be crazy.