Moral Judgment and Relativism -- A Rejection of "Wokeism"

A friend of mine recently took me to task for rejecting what is popularly known today as "wokeness," the notion that we should hold those who came before us to the same moral standards we hold our contemporaries to and not simply give them a pass because they lived in a time when what they did was acceptable "like back in the days when slavery was justified by the prevailing standards," he wrote. And how is that not to espouse a form of moral relativism, a position he and I have long argued over and which he knows I reject?

I offered a rather lengthy answer in an effort to explain how one could oppose the application of today's standards to yesterday's transgressors (of those standards) and still hold to the notion that moral valuation has an absoluteness to it that allows us to assert compelling arguments for certain forms of behavior and to expect others to abide by the standards they establish despite differences in our cultural backgrounds. If there is cultural relativism after all, as a rejection of so-called wokeism implies, then why isn't moral judgement, which always occurs in a culture, and never in isolation (because moral judgment applies to our behaviors relative to others), not also relative?

Today's advocates of "woke" thinking want to condemn people like Abraham Lincoln, a man who opposed slavery in his time, ran for president on a platform that would halt its spread west beyond those states in which it was already firmly established, and who advocated for slavery's gradual end. Was Lincoln also a racist? In terms of modern American standards it would probably be fair to say he qualified. Yet he seems to have been not just an intelligent man but a fundamentally decent one whose sympathies were with the oppressed Africans who were enslaved in the American south. But he was not, by his own admission, arguing for political equality for freed slaves. He shared the prejudices of his time (though I think it's reasonable to say he would have been as woke as the next person in our own era if he had had the knowledge of human nature and of America's history since his death which we have).

So should Lincoln or Washington, or Jefferson or others who actually held slaves in their lifetimes, for that matter, whatever their writings and speeches promoted, be condemned as racists in our modern sense because they followed the practices of their own era? Who among us isn't influenced by the practices and beliefs contemporary with ourselves? Who doesn't formulate his or her judgments in terms of these? Should those men of our past, who were human beings with all the flaws humans possess, with all the imperfections, be judged by today's standards when they did not live in an environment that expressed or was governed by our standards? We all live in the times we live in but sometimes some of us see beyond our times, even if only imperfectly.

Lincoln surely did and so, too, did those who made the American Revolution, whatever their foibles, flaws and sins.

As to the matter of historical relativism, surely we can say with confidence that cultures and mores are relative and change over time -- and from human group to human group, as well. But does this imply moral relativism? While every moral judgment must be made in light of what the agent being judged knows or knew or could have known, as well as in light of the understandings he or she may possess, and all of this is culturally relative, is the same thing applicable to our moral judgments?

Questions of moral value, if understood as having concern for others' interests as well as our own, may not be absolute in the sense that they reflect some sort of extraordinary reality beyond our own, some metaphysical absoluteness as if embedded in the universe beyond the merely human world. But surely we may speak of such questions as having a more than merely contingent status, which they must have if we're to avoid the charge of moral relativism. But what sort of special status can impart to moral claims an objective quality if there is nothing to be found beyond the merely human realm?

Can the moral claims we make not be compelling for all in another sense, i.e., in a trans-cultural way which locates in moral judgment an insight available to humans as humans which is not merely limited to any particular culture? Our capacity for making moral judgments seems to be embedded in two aspects of ourselves as members of the human species. The aspect first we share with many other animals. It consists of the ability to recognize and care about others of our type, in our groups, as family or otherwise recognizable as members of the same group. It is our ability to be social creatures, to the degree we are. We have, that is, a capacity to feel for others (a function of evolution-produced traits in our species members).

But as humans we have something else as well, an add-on commensurate with our brain capacity and the abilities which it gives us to use language to frame our world. It is within this second aspect of our species, the kind reflecting the capaciousness of our species specific type of brain, that moral valuing takes form in our ability to recognize not just immediate sensory inputs but a world which they form for us because of our language-enabled rational capacity. That is, we have the ability to see a world around us and beyond us. And this includes seeing ourselves as a part of it, as standing and operating within it.

This second feature of the human creature, when combined with the first inherited capacity to see and recognize, and so care about, others like ourselves, enables what we call moral valuation. It functions as a specific sort of reasoning, namely reasoning about what we are, about our natures, about our own selfhood. It is this capacity, which gives us a world and ourselves within it -- as part of it -- that also enables us to recognize others having this same capacity and so to apply the instinct we have for caring about others beyond the immediate zone of the familiar.

While animals without language cannot recognize the idea of selfhood and so cannot value it or make use of it, we, as speakers capable of conjuring up a world for ourselves out of the raw sensory inputs of our experience, can do precisely that. We can think about others as like ourselves, as having a subjectness that characterizes them just as ours characterizes us, and this means as possessing feelings and pains, desires and aversions, fulfillment the sense of loss, as having wants and needs and being geared to achieving their fulfillment or avoiding that which has an adverse effect on them. To recognize a self is to recognize another being like ourselves and this brings a logic of its own to the fore.

The trans-cultural aspect of moral judgment is found in what reasoning leads us to once we become aware of the role and place of selves in our world. And this awareness, like all awarenesses, is culturally expressed. But it is not merely culturally determined.

In fact it is, itself, a factor in determining cultural change. As awareness of selfhood, and of the selfhood of others, dawns in individuals it gets built into the cultures in which the individuals move. Thus men like Jefferson and Lincoln, and those others who helped write and endorse the cultural documents of our nation, America, added their insights to the cultural milieu in which they moved so that these became become part of that culture and, working their way in to its very fabric, wrought changes to it that led to what we have become today.

In this sense the moral insights of individuals change cultures and make them morally better (or worse if the insights are blinding rather than visionary) and in this sense, too, we can say that moral valuation is not dependent on cultures but affects them even as the cultures we all operate in affect our own choices and actions.

Here moral valuation is not merely culturally dependent but trans-cultural because it's embedded in the nature of what we are which any given culture is an expression of. The moral insights we achieve spread from culture to culture through human contact reflecting something deeper than any particular culture itself. It reflects the nature of human beings in terms of the two capacities alluded to above:

1) The ability to see and recognize others like ourselves; and

2) The ability to reason about that recognition and come to decisions that take account of it.

Of course we are not always aware of the selfhood of others, we do not always think about it and may not even consciously recognize it much of the time. Some of us, indeed, may only achieve a stunted awareness of the other as being like ourselves (those we call sociopaths perhaps?). But reasoning can enhance this awareness of the other by showing us how we are alike and allowing us to see why why we ought then to work to enhance this realization and take it into account in deciding how to act.

Reasoning can get us to the point where we recognize that it's actually self-denying to disregard or reject the selfhood of another when theirs is no different than our own. It is, that is, irrational to do so while not rejecting it demands something more of us, namely our decision to treat the other as a self, too. Slavery as a practice and institution prevalent in early nineteenth century American culture came to seem wrong to more and more white Americans as they began to recognize themselves in those who were enslaved among them. Once we see that the other as like ourselves, we see, as well, that it's irrational to treat the other as unlike ourselves.

Of course we can, and many may still choose to, do so. Many may choose to ignore the call of rationality when this recognition occurs. That's why moral valuing in the end is about choosing, i.e., having freedom to act. Otherwise, if we lacked that freedom, we could never be held accountable for acting or not acting in particular cases. Accountability is essential to moral judgment. If we are all automatons, then moral valuation would be irrelevant.

In the final analysis, then, it's self-contradictory to choose to reject the recognition of the other's selfhood arbitrarily, or out of devotion to one's own self-interest, since we are not only subjects (selves in the world) but also reason-using subjects (unlike other primates and various other animals) and reason dictates recognition of what is real. To reject the claims on us made by rational judgment is to reject what we are. Thus moral judgment is finally about embracing what we are by acting on the reason-based recognition that having selfhood is to be like we are.

Morally satisfactory behavior is that which affirms this recognition by demonstrating the agent's decision not to reject it. And this is trans-cultural because it is rooted in our natures as discursive creatures capable of mutual recognition. But we cannot apply judgment of another's behavior out of the context in which that behavior occurred for it is not intelligible in isolation or when lifted out of its milieu. But more, doing so, or attempting to, leads to a blind rejection of what we actually are by rejecting who we were.

The culture we have today is a function of those who came before us and who left us with their insights and understandings which combined to shape what we are now. Shall we condemn our predecessors because they were not yet as aware of the implications of their particular moral understandings as we believe we are today? Yet we are us because they were them and they wrestled with these problems and cut new paths for those who followed them . . . for us. Today's progenitors of Wokeness want to condemn men like Lincoln for their failure to be modern Americans with all the history and knowledge of the past we possess today. This is not only unfair to Lincoln and those others who blazed the trail to our modern world and mores, it's unfair to ourselves for in peeling them away from our history we also lose the insights and recognitions they modeled in their own lives which paved the way for ours. To understand those insights we must know them in their own time and place, see them for the blazers of the trails that they were.

The moral judgments we make are never made in isolation, outside a cultural context -- and even cultural contexts evolve over time, as individual awareness within each cultural group does. You cannot apply the judgment of another's behavior out of the context in which that behavior happened for doing so leads to a blind rejection of what we actually are by rejecting who we used to be. Moral claims are about making progress in how we understand ourselves and others and that means recalling how such progress was made. The culture we have today is a function of the moral insights of those who preceded us. Should we condemn them, then, because they were not yet as aware of the implications of their moral beliefs as we think (and hope) we are today? Yet we are us because they were them -- and because they wrestled with these problems and cut new paths for those of us who followed in their wake.