A REASONABLE RELATIVISM1 J.

David Velleman New York University

As usually stated, moral relativism is the view that moral judgments must be relativized to a community. Saying that an action is wrong, according to the relativist, is like saying that someone is tall, a claim that is elliptical unless relativized to a reference class, since someone who is tall for an Mbuti may not be tall for a Kikuyu and it makes no sense to ask whether he is tall simpliciter. Similarly, says the relativist, it makes no sense to ask whether an action or practice is wrong simpliciter. Claims of wrongness must be about wrongness-for-members-of-x, where x ranges over different cultures or societies or, as I will call them, communities.2 The reason why it makes no sense to speak of tallness simpliciter, the relativist explains, is that there is no universal standard for who qualifies as tall. The standard applicable to the Kikuyu cant be applied to the Mbuti, nor to the Inuit or Uighur, either. Similarly, there is no universal standard of what qualifies as right or wrong; the only standards there are, are restricted in application to particular communities, whose members can be judged only in relation to their local standards. I think that there is a defensible view that these statements are meant to express, but it is not defensible as so stated. In order to develop a workable formulation of relativism, I will first identify the fundamental problem that any version of relativism must solve, and I will then offer a version that can solve it. I will develop my version of relativism in the form of a specific relativistic theory of practical reasons. Finally, I will explain why my version of relativism is more reasonable than relativism is generally thought to be.

This paper was presented as the first of three Carl G. Hempel Lectures at Princeton University, and as the second of three Hourani Lectures at the University at Buffalo. It was also presented to the philosophy departments at Colgate University; Rutgers University; Michigan State University; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; the University of Vermont; and Yale University; to the undergraduate Philosophy Forum at Columbia University; and to the Phil/Sci workshop organized at the University of Vienna by Martin Kusch and Velislava Mitova. For help with this material, I am grateful in particular to K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Boghossian, David Braun, Stephen Darwall, Randall Dipert, Ken Ehrenberg, Shelley Kagan, Alexander Nehamas, David Owens, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Gideon Rosen, Matthew Noah Smith, and Sharon Street. Special thanks to Don Herzog, Matty Silverstein, and Sharon Street for extensive written comments.
1

I will use the word community to emphasize that I am speaking of people who live together; I will use the word social as the corresponding adjective. I will speak as if communities are well defined, and as if individuals belong to one and only one community. Both of these assumptions are false.
2

2 T he P r ob lem of L o c a l N o r m a t i vi t y Relativism is often criticized for ruling out moral disagreement between communities. According to relativism, the Mbuti and the Kikuyu cannot disagree about the morality of so-called female circumcision,3 because the practice is merely wrong-for-the-Mbuti and right-for-the-Kikuyu, just as a person can be tall-for-an-Mbuti but short-for-a-Kikuyu. In the absence of a universal standard, there is nothing to disagree about. If the relativist tries to solve this problem directly, he will have to compromise his relativism. Relativism implies that different communities can disagree about the permissibility of a practice only by first agreeing on the question Permissibility for whom? whereupon one of the communities will end up talking about what is permissible for the other, a question on which the two should not disagree. The Kikuyu and the Mbuti should not disagree, that is, about what is permissible for the Kikuyu. Disagreement is to be expected only when each party speaks for itself.4 When each party speaks for itself, however, relativism implies that they are talking past one another. Since relativism has this implication, the relativist had better defend it. His defense should be that the problem of moral disagreement is real, not philosophical: different communities really do have difficulty engaging one another over questions of right and wrong, and a plausible explanation is that they are not in direct disagreement. Of course, one community can say Yes and the other No when asked whether a practice is permissible, but elaboration on these monosyllables will reveal that they are answers to different questions. The philosophical problem for the relativist is not how to allow for moral disagreement but how to explain local normativity. Let me frame this problem in terms of the logical form of reasons for acting.5

This may not be the best term for the practice in question, but it has the advantage, for my purposes, of being valueneutral, unlike female genital mutilation, for example. 4 The phrase speaks for itself glosses over the distinction between speaker- and agent-relativism. I find this distinction unhelpful. My version of relativism is formulated in terms of reasons. When the reasons at issue are reasons for acting, my version sounds like agent relativism. But the reasons at issue are sometimes reasons for reacting to an action, either proposed or already performed. If the re-actor is the speaker, my version sounds like speaker relativism.
3

I adopt the language of reasons on this occasion merely for convenience. In fact, I think that reasons-talk is generally misleading. See How We Get Along (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 118 n. 3, p. 121 n. 8; and There Are No Reasons for Acting (MS).
5

3 Whether a practice is right or wrong must have something to do with reasons for or against permitting it and engaging in it. So if relativism is correct, the Kikuyu must have reasons that the Mbuti do not, and vice versa. Yet a relativist cannot be content to treat an agents social location as a circumstance that appears, explicitly or implicitly, in the content of reasons, as when we say that a reason to build a lean-to is that one needs shelter in the forest, whereas a reason to build a hut is that one needs shelter in the hills. The resulting view would not be relativistic: needing shelter in the forest would be a reason to build a lean-to even for the Kikuyu, though they usually live in the hills. Nor can the relativist be content to include social location in localized action-types, such as building a lean-to in the forest or building a hut in the hills. Whatever counts as a reason for building a hut in the hills would count as a reason for anyone to do so, even the Mbuti, although such a reason is unlikely to arise for them, since they usually live in the forest. The relativist must rather treat social location as a condition on the application of reasons, as if to say that members of hill-dwelling and forestdwelling groups get different rational guidance from one and the same totality of circumstances. The relativist must explain how the normative force of reasons can vary with the community to which an agent belongs. Such reasons would have a particular normative force only within a social location. How can practical reasoning itself be a local matter? For mu la tin g Rela tivism In the usual formulation of relativism, unrelativized judgments are said to be elliptical, and the informal notion of ellipsis is sharpened with the formal apparatus of indexicality. Tall is treated as an abbreviation for tallx, where the index x ranges over classes of people, whose height determines what proposition we are expressing when we call someone tall.6 To call someone tall simpliciter is to leave the value of x undetermined, or at least unspecified, thereby failing to express a determinate proposition. As Jamie Dreier has noted,7 however, indexicality is relevant to moral relativism primarily because it is relevant to guiding action, as John Perry showed in his paper The Problem of the

Alternatively, the class of people is taken to determine the conditions that would make the proposition true. See John McFarlane___.
7

Internalism and Speaker Relativism, Ethics 101 (1990) 626. My application of Perrys analysis differs from Dreiers in that his yields an account of normative discourse whereas mine yields an account of normativity. Dreier explains how the term good can pick out a relation between the thing and the speakers motives, thereby satisfying (speaker) relativism, while also expressing those motives, thereby satisfying internalism. In these respects, Dreiers semantics for __ is good is not materially different from the commonsense semantics for I want __. Not only, then, is it about

4 Essential Indexical.8 There Perry explores indexicals as modes of presentation whose role in communication and belief is to indicate to point a role that does not depend on the proposition presented.9 If I tell someone that Columbus Circle is straight ahead, the proposition I express is indexed to a location and direction of motion: I am expressing the proposition that Columbus Circle is straight ahead of so-and-so relative to his trajectory at such-and-such a time. But the intended role of my utterance is to tell my addressee that Columbus Circle is straight ahead of him, whoever he is, given his trajectory now, whenever that is. He would learn nothing useful from being told that Columbus Circle is straight ahead of so-and-so at such-and-such a time, unless he knew that he is so-and-so and that such-and-such is now, precisely so that he could derive the unrelativized statement that Columbus Circle is straight ahead. The pointing mode of presentation is whats useful to him, irrespective of what proposition it expresses. Thus, a pointer is relative to the perspective from which it must be followed, but it need not indeed should not be relativized to that perspective for the sake of its intended role. It does have to be relativized in order to be explicit about the proposition that it expresses, but its intended role is to guide action, and for this role, explicitly expressing a proposition is irrelevant and possibly counter-productive. I propose that pointers can serve as a model of local normativity, because reasons are indexical in the same sense: they are not indexed to a perspective but they indicate from within it, so that they are describable but not operative elsewhere. This proposal will raise absolutist eyebrows: how can something that merely points from within a perspective constitute normativity? If this question is how pointers can be a model of absolutist normativity, then of course I have no answer. Yet I can allay absolutist worries at least to this extent: in my account, reasons will turn out to be intrinsically

normative discourse rather than normativity; it is not even specific to normative discourse. My question is not about discourse of any kind; its about the normative force of reasons. I ask, How can one and the same consideration have different normative force for different agents? In keeping with a common figure of speech, I will compare the normative force of reasons to physical weight. I will argue that just as one and the same material object can be heavy in one gravitational frame of reference but not another, so one and the same reason can be weighty in one perspective but not another. This view is not about the semantics of calling something a reason. Neither is my view particularistic, in the manner of Jonathan Dancys; it is rather holistic. For I identify a single relation that any reason must bear to the whole of an agents practical perspective. John Perry, The Problem of the Essential Indexical, Nos 13 (1979): 32; reprinted in The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays; Expanded Edition (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2000). See also Perrys Self-Notions, Logos (1990): 1731, and Myself and I, Philosophie in Synthetischer Absicht, ed. Marcelo Stamm (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 83103, also reprinted in The Problem of the Essential Indexical.
8

From now on I will use the term pointer instead of indexical for expressions that play this role.

5 action-guiding facts, whose normative force does not depend on the agents motivational set. Mine is an externalist relativism, in a sense that I will explain. I will defend my formulation of relativism by developing a particular instance of it, that is, a particular normative theory that is relativistic. In following this strategy, I will leave my defense of relativism vulnerable to objections that are specific to my particular theory. Unfortunately, I know of no other strategy, because relativism in itself is too abstract to be effectively defended or, I would add, to be meaningfully criticized. Rel ativ ism a b o u t V a lu e I begin with a relativistic account of value. I will present it brusquely, so as to leave space to discuss the respects in which it is relativistic. The account says that to be valuable is to provide reasons for particular responses, which correspond to each particular mode of value admiration for whats admirable, boredom with whats boring, contempt for whats contemptible, desire for whats desirable, envy for whats enviable, fand so on down the alphabet of values.10 This account of value rules out the realist view that value itself is the source of reasons for responding: value cannot be the source of reasons for responding if it is constituted by them. Where, then, do reasons for responding come from? According to the relativist, reasons for responding come from the subjects evaluative perspective. The relativist must then explain what an evaluative perspective is and how it gives rise to reasons for responding. Consistency Borrowing from Sharon Street, I suggest that a person develops an evaluative perspective, which gives him reasons for responding, as soon he regiments his responses for consistency.11 In my view, the relevant mode of consistency requires the agent to respond similarly to things that are similar in

I draw this conception of value from Elizabeth Andersons Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
10

11

I differ from Street with respect to the mode of consistency involved and the motive for introducing it. See her Constructivism about Reasons, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 3, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 207-245; What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?, Philosophy Compass 5 (2010): 363384; and Coming to Terms with Contingency: Humean Constructivism about Practical Reason, forthcoming in Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, eds. James Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

6 descriptive (that is, non-evaluative) respects.12 It does not require perfect consistency, nor consistency in any one respect rather than another; it requires only that there be some features with respect to which the response is consistent more or less. As soon as a person tries to admire like things alike, he begins to take what they are like as grounds on which to admire them, and he thereby develops a point-of-view about what to admire. His admiring responses take on the structure of an evalutive perspective, organized along lines of similarity with which he tries to align his dispositions to admire. These similarities determine what, from his perspective, are reasons for admiration. The requirement of consistency seems to spell trouble for relativism about value. Relativism says that there are no universal norms, and yet the requirement of consistency constrains reasons for valuing in every perspective. Reasons for valuing thus seem to be constrained by a universal, perspective-independent norm. As Street has pointed out, however, relativism can accommodate norms that have authority within every perspective, provided that they acquire that authority independently within each one.13 I will express Streets point by saying that relativism can accommodate norms that are ubiquitous but not universal. Ubiquitous norms are authoritative only locally, but they are locally authoritative everywhere, within every evaluative perspective. An example is the taboo against incest. This norm is sometimes taken to refute relativism by proving the existence of human universals, but the incesttaboo is not universal in the philosophical sense, since a community that allowed incest wouldnt be violating any moral imperative, no matter how problematic it might be in other respects. So in the philosophical sense, the taboo is ubiquitous but not universal. A moral relativist had better deny the existence of universal norms; for if he concedes the existence of universal norms, he will be hard pressed to explain why moral norms arent among them. But a moral relativist must go further. Although there being no universal norms would entail that moral norms are at most ubiquitous, they might still be ubiquitous in a way that the moral

12

This rule is a very loose version of the principle of supervenience, which says that value must supervene on the nonevaluative properties of its bearers. The principle of supervenience is often said to be a conceptual truth about value, as well it may be. What is not a conceptual truth, however, is that value so conceived is normative for us. Why should we be guided by properties that supervene on the non-evaluative? I believe that my theory of value answers this question.
13

See Streets Objectivity and Truth: Youd Better Rethink It (forthcoming), and How to Be a Relativist About Normativity (MS).

7 relativist must also deny. For even if moral norms were merely ubiquitous, they might be necessarily so. An example of a necessarily ubiquitous norm is the requirement of consistency as I have characterized it. This requirement is necessarily ubiquitous because it is constitutive of evaluative perspectives.14 It doesnt just happen to show up in every evaluative perspective; there can be no evaluative perspective in which it doesnt show up. Still, the requirement is authoritative within a perspective because of showing up within it, not because of being authoritative in some perspectiveindependent way. Because I believe that the requirement of consistency is necessarily ubiquitous, I am not a consistency-relativist. I am a moral relativist, however, because I deny that any moral norms have the same status as the requirement of consistency. In sum, I deny that there are universal norms of any kind, and that there are necessarily ubiquitous norms of morality. The denial that moral norms are necessarily ubiquituous, much less universal, is moral relativism as I understand it. Normativity I have said that when a person strives for consistency in his responses, he begins to take the descriptive features of things as reasons for responding to them. I do not mean that he takes those features as reasons for responding in order to attain consistency. That is, he doesnt treat consistency as an end to be attained by means of responding to things with particular features. Treating consistency as an end would raise the question of its value whether it is worth pursuing and that question could be answered only within an evaluative perspective; whereas on my view, striving for constency is what generates an evaluative perspective, in the first place. So in what sense does striving for consistency in ones responses lead one to take the descriptive features of things as reasons for responding to them? To begin with, the drive toward consistency among ones responses can empower the features of something to encourage or discourage a response to something, insofar as that response would be consistent or inconsistent with ones responses to other things. Striving for consistency in admiring things, one is led to cultivate admiration for things similar to other things that one admires, and to stifle admiration for things dissimilar from them.

14

Norms can be necessarily ubiquitous for other reasons. See, again, Streets How to Be a Relativist About Normativity.

8 Now, one might think that if ones drive toward consistency leads one to admire something with particular features, then those features serve, not as reasons for which one admires the thing, but as mere psychological causes of ones admiration. How can ones admiration be not just caused by those features but based on them as reasons? My answer is that the normative force of reasons for admiration just is the motivational force of the drive toward consistency, which empowers the descriptive features of things to encourage or discourage admiration for them. When a person is thus moved to fit his responses to observable similarities among their objects, that person is ipso facto being guided by the normative force of those features as reasons for responding. This answer may seem like no answer at all. How can a motive constitute the normative force of reasons? My answer continues, as follows. Normative force plays a particular role in the behavior of rational agents, by influencing them in a particular way. If a motive influences agents in the appropriate way when encouraging them to admire things with particular features, then it constitutes the normative force of those features as reasons. Whatever plays the role of normativity earns the title. In other words, normativity is as normativity does. If normativity is as normativity does well, then, how does it do? What particular way of influencing an agent is characteristic of reasons? To begin with, a reason is a fact, actual or apparent: acting or reacting for a reason consists in being guided by a fact. Furthermore, it consists in being guided by a fact alone, independently of ones motives independently, as some would put it, of ones motivational set.15 Finally, reasons can be compared by the agent: some are stronger than others. Reasons are facts that intrinsically and inter-comparably guide an agents responses and actions. Havent I now contradicted myself? The role that I have just described as characteristic of reasons is that of influencing an agent independently of his antecedent motives. Yet I previously said that normative force is the force of a standing motive that empowers considerations to play the role

15

The phrase motivational set was introduced by Bernard Williams in his paper Internal and External Reasons, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 10113. That one happens to have a particular motive is also a fact, of course, and this fact may be among those on the grounds of which one acts or reacts; but if one is to do anything on the grounds of that fact, as on a reason, it must guide one intrinsically, without the help of any motives, including the one that it involves.

9 of reasons. How can an antecedent motive be what empowers considerations to exert an influence on an agent independently of his antecedent motives? To reiterate the problem. First I said that responding to things consistently, along lines of descriptive similarity, can amount to responding to them for reasons, because the drive toward consistency is what endows the descriptive features of things with normative force. Then I said that such a motive can endow those features with normative force because it plays the appropriate role: normativity is as normativity does. Now Ive said what normativity does is to endow facts with intrinsic influence, independently of the subjects motives. The remaining question is how normativity can endow facts with a motive-independent influence if it consists in the force of a motive. My answer is that the motive that establishes a perspective does not exert motivational force within it. In this respect, a perspective is like a gravitational frame of reference. The gravitational field of the Moon establishes a frame of reference within which material objects have an intrinsic tendency to fall, but when viewed from a different frame of reference, it exerts an extrinsic force of attraction on objects in the Moons vicinity. From the perspective of the Earth, Moon rocks are attracted by the Moon, but from the perspective of the Moon, they simply fall. The gravitational force that establishes a frame of reference drops out of account within that frame. Similarly, the motivational force that establishes a perspective drops out of account within it. The drive toward consistency in admiration establishes a perspective within which considerations guide a persons admiration intrinsically, though when viewed from outside that perspective, they guide only with the help of an extrinsic motive.16 For example, if someone tends to admire successful people, then his drive toward consistency may favor admiring a person who is successful. From the subjects perspective, the persons success in itself makes him admirable; from a different perspective, the persons success draws admiration from the subject under the force of his drive toward consistency. Just as, from the lunar perspective, Moon rocks are heavy, but from the terrestrial perspective, they are pulled by the gravitational force

The analogy can be carried further. The tendency to fall is a tendency to go down, and there are no directions of up and down outside a gravitational field: in outer space, there is no such thing as falling. So wherever there is such a thing as falling, there is a gravitational force that gives material objects an intrinsic tendency to do it. Similarly, there is no value outside a perspective; and so wherever there is such a thing as value, considerations of local interpretability provide reasons for valuing.
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10 of the Moon; so from the subjects perspective, successful people are admirable, but from other perspectives, admiration for them is encouraged by his drive toward consistency. Its a fact that, from a perspective where the drive toward consistency favors admiring people along lines of success, peoples success makes them admirable, but that fact provides no guidance to anyone, unless he is aware of occupying such a perspective, so that he can see people as falling in line with what he admires, hence simply as admirable. Its a fact that, for people walking north on Broadway from Times Square, Columbus Circle is straight ahead, but that fact provides no guidance to anyone, unless he aware of walking north on Broadway from Times Square, so he can think of Columbus Circle simply as straight ahead. Rocks on the Moon are drawn toward the Moon, but that fact provides no guidance to anyone, unless he is aware of standing on the Moon, so that he can infer that rocks will tend to go down that is, simply to fall. The fact that rocks tend to fall is not really a fact; its a pointer for people standing on a massive object such as the Moon. The fact that Columbus Circle is straight ahead is not really a fact; its a pointer for people walking north on Broadway from Times Square. The fact that someones success makes him admirable is not really fact; its a pointer for people whose drive toward consistency favors admiring success. In each case, the force that establishes a perspective gravitation, momentum, motive falls out of account in the pointing mode of presentation. And the pointing mode of presentation is the one that provides guidance, as reasons for acting do. Note that within an evaluative perspective, reasons are external in the sense defined by Bernard Williams.17 Within a perspective, that is, saying that success makes someone admirable says nothing about ones motivational set, because within that perspective, success is intrinsically admirationguiding: the motive that empowers someones success to encourage admiration for him has dropped out of account. Here the reason for admiration appears in the guise of an external reason. Objectively speaking, success is admirable only from a perspective where the drive toward consistency encourages admiration along lines of success. Here the reason for admiration appears in the guise of an internal reason. Absolutists tend to be externalists, because they think that norms apply to everyone irrespective of his personal circumstances, including his motives. Philosophers therefore tend to

17

Internal and External Reasons, op. cit. Here I summarize an argument that is laid out more carefully in The Possibility of Practical Reason, in The Possibility of Practical Reason ().

11 infer that a relativist must be an internalist. But this inference is as case of affirming the consequent. What follows from the fact that absolutists are externalists is that internalists must be relativists, not the reverse. Relativists can be externalists, too.18 Creating an evaluative perspective My account of value doesnt say that when a person regiments his responses for consistency, he begins to recognize reasons for responding to things. If, as I claim, reasons exist only within a perspective, and a person has no evaluative perspective until he begins to regiment his responses for consistency, then there can be no evaluative reasons for him in advance of that regimentation. I must therefore say that when a person regiments his responses for consistency, he begins to have reasons for responding, which didnt exist until he formed an evaluative perspective. Yet if a persons having reasons for responding to things depends on his forming an evaluative perspective by regimenting his responses for consistency, we have to wonder why he would do so. Why not respond to things at random, given that there are as yet no reasons for responding one way rather than another? Why bother to have an evaluative perspective at all? I must reject this question if it is asked in a normative sense. I must refuse to say why everyone ought to seek consistency in his responses, or ought to have an evaluative perspective, since any such ought would have to originate in some universal, perspective-independent norm of the sort whose existence I deny. I must rather interpret the question descriptively; that is, I must explain why people do seek consistency, do generate evaluative perspectives, not why they ought to. Moreover, I must go beyond explaining why individuals generate evaluative perspectives of their own; I have to explain why members of a community generate an evaluative perspective that they share. The phenomenon that elicits relativist intuitions, after all, is moral divergence between communities between the Kikuyu and the Mbuti, between the Uighur and the Inuit, and of course between each of these groups and middle-class Americans. Whats especially problematic

18

One might point out, correctly, that every motive establishes a perspective within which it drops out of account. In general, a person is guided by facts about what would be gratifying, not by facts about what would be gratifying to particular desires, even if such are desires are his. Why, then, doesnt every desire constitute a brand of normative force? Why only the drive toward consistency? The answer is that the drive toward consistency structures a single perspective within which reasons can be compared. To conceive of each motive as generating its own perspective would be to give the agent no unified perspective of his own. And generating a unified perspective is an essential function normativity, hence of any motive that plays its role. There may be other motives that would generate a single, comprehensive perspective for an agent. As far as I know, however, none would figure in a plausible explanation of the phenomena that actually motivate relativism. Let me now describe how the drive toward consistency figures. in such an explanation.

12 about local normativity is that, while not necessarily ubiquitous, it is nevertheless general: its authority extends beyond the individual to a whole community, and yet no further. Local normativity has an intermediate scope, which must somehow be explained by the nature of social groups of the sort to which it is sized. My explanation therefore begins with our social nature. Human beings have a practical need and a psychological drive to live together with other people not just in proximity to them but in personal interaction with them. And personal interactions require mutual interpretation. You cannot deal with others as persons without trying to understand them and to make yourself similarly understood. Mutual mind-reading the interpretation of one anothers mental states is absolutely prerequisite to social life of any kind. Your drive toward sociability therefore entails a drive toward mutual interpretability.19 On occasion you may seek to conceal or obscure your mental states, but you generally need for others to have grounds for discriminating shyness from furtiveness in your behavior, belligerence from ebullience; you need to give them grounds for anticipating what is likely to elicit your admiration, boredom, contempt, desire, envy, and so on down the alphabet of responses. Now, the assumption that your responses are consistent is a natural starting point for interpreting your responses whether or not you aim for consistency. This interpretive hypothesis follows from the assumption that responses are sensitive to descriptive features of their objects, an assumption that is the obvious default unless and until it is disconfirmed. When you regiment your responses for consistency, you simply make yourself more readily interpretable under what is in any case the default hypothesis for interpreting you. I suggest that you regiment your responses for consistency in order to make yourself interpretable. Out of a drive to be interpretable, you strive for consistency, and you thereby establish an evaluative perspective. The drive to be interpretable motivates you not just to generate an evaluative perspective of your own but also to coordinate it with the evaluative perspectives of your interpreters, who are of course the co-members of your community. You can hope that co-members will suss out your attitudes even if they are responsive to very different features of objects from theirs. But the simplest hypothesis from their perspective, the hypothesis they will assay until it is disconfirmed, is that you value things in response to the same features as they do. Your best chance of making

19

I develop this claim at length in Regarding Doing Being Ordinary (MS).

13 yourself interpretable is therefore to share their evaluative reasons. Just as seeking consistency in your responses is a way of better accommodating the antecedently plausible hypothesis that you respond to like things alike; so sharing evaluative reasons with others is a way of accommodating an antecedently plausible interpretive hypothesis, namely, that your responses are like theirs. And since you will rely on the corresponding hypothesis, sharing your evaluative reasons will be a way for others to make themselves interpretable to you.20 The result is a pure kind of convergence, in the following sense. Reasons for you to admire something, for example, are features of it such that, by admiring things with those features, you can make yourself more readily interpretable. One of the ways in which you can make yourself more readily interpretable is by admiring things for the same features as other people do, as they do partly in order to make themselves more readily interpretable by admiring things for the same features as you. To some extent, then, you and others have to converge on whatever reasons for admiration are the salient reasons on which to converge. Fortunately, there are constraints on the salient point of convergence about reasons to admire. These constraints include the nature of admiration, its functional role among human responses, and the points of convergence for other responses to which it is anchored. I leave discussion of these constraints to another occasion.21 Within these and other constraints, different communities can converge on different reasons for admiration, which (again) consist in features of things such that, by admiring things with those features, members of a community can become more readily interpretable to one another, partly in virtue of having converged on those reasons. Reasons for valuing things can then be localized to a community by being localized to the perspective shared by its members. Although social perspectives differ with respect to reasons for valuing, they are alike in depending on mutual interpretability; in other words, the need for mutual interpretability is necessarily ubiquitous among them. Whatever other functions are served by a shared way life, they depend on its making the participants mutually interpretable, so as to be capable of social interaction. And the need for mutual interpretability can explain the participants drive toward

20

The interpretive hypothesis that others react for the same reasons as oneself corresponds to Davidsons Principle of Charity; the strategy of accommodating this hypothesis by reacting for the same reasons as ones interpreters might be called the Principle of Gratitude. One gratefully meets their charity half-way, making it easier for them to extend.
21

I discuss them in How We Get Along and

14 contistency within and between their individual responses can explain it in purely causal, psychological terms, without reference to any norms of consistency. When considerations are reasons-for-the-Kikuyu, they exert on the Kikuyu a genuinely normative force. Americans can describe that force but not be guided by it, just as someone can describe but not be guided by directions to somewhere from a location other than his own. Americans cannot be guided by reasons-for-the-Kikuyu because they lack the motive for being interpretable among the Kikuyu. Whats more, Americans cannot even view reasons-for-the-Kikuyu as normative, though they can view them as normative-for-the-Kikuyu. Americans cannot view Kikuyu reasons as normative because, from their perspective, such reasons owe their force to an extrinsic motive though not, of course, from the Kikuyu perspective, as Americans too can see. You might ask, Perspectives aside, which considerations are the real reasons? Thats a nonsensical question, like asking Perspectives aside, which are the correct directions to Columbus Circle? or Frames-if-reference aside, how much does this rock really weigh? You might conclude, Well, then, there are no real reasons, only reason-from-a-perspective. Thats the wrong conclusion. From within a perspective, some things are really and truly reasons. But the fact that they are reasons is not really a fact: its a pointer, which provides guidance from within the perspective. The real fact of the matter is that they are reasons-from-a-perspective a fact that provides no guidance at all. The idea that a consideration can be a reason objectively speaking, rather than reasons-from-aperspective that absolutist idea is incoherent. Its incoherent because reasons are guides, and guidance, viewed objectively, is always relative to a perspective, though within that perspective it is absolute. Contextualizing normativity How have I solved the problem of local normativity? Ive solved it by having social location modify normative force rather the content of reasons or actions. Kikuyu reasons for acting are not of the form Because we are Kikuyu and p. Such reasons would be applicable to everyone conditionally on their being Kikuyu. Nor do Kikuyu reasons favor actions of the form doing A if one is Kikuyu. Such reasons would apply to everyone unconditionally, though many would act on them by omission, because of not being Kikuyu. In either case, there would be no reasons that were peculiar to the Kikuyu.

15 Local normativity yields the following consequences. If I were Kikuyu, I just might have reasons for favoring female circumcision, but I dont have reasons conditional on being Kikuyu for favoring it, nor reasons for favoring it conditionally on being Kikuyu. I dont have reasons of any kind for favoring female circumcision under any circumstances. But it is just possible that the Kikuyu do. Mor a l Rela tivism Thus far, I have spoken mainly of reasons for responding, which I have treated as the basis of value. Of course, morality involves not only reasons for responding but reasons for acting as well. I can be brief in presenting relativism about reasons for acting, since much of the work has already been done. Reasons for responding acquire their normative force, I have said, from the drive toward consistency among ones own responses and between them and the responses of ones community. And I have said that the drive toward consistency follows from the basic human need for mutual interpretability, because consistency answers to an hypothesis that would be reasonable for an interpreter to adopt in any case the hypothesis that people respond similarly to similar things. If reasons for acting are to exert normative force, they should acquire it from the same motive in a similar way. The question, then, is what would make ones behavior more susceptible to interpretation under an antecedently reasonable hypothesis. The obvious candidate is an extended mode of consistency, requiring some degree of coherence between interpreted attitudes and observed behavior. An interpreter of your behavior can reasonably begin with the defeasible hypothesis that it manifests the attitudes that he has interpreted you as having. You can therefore make your behavior more readily interpretable by harmonizing it with your responses, especially those responses which you have made interpretable by conforming them to the rule of consistency. In other words, you can make your behavior more readily interpretable by making it consistent with your values and the values of your community. My account of perspectives has now been expanded to include practical perspectives understood more broadly perspectives that include not only values but reasons for acting as well. Under the expanded analysis, reasons to do something are facts in light of which your doing it would be interpretable. Such facts might be, for example, facts about the means to ends that you stably desire, since adopting those means is interpretable as manifesting your stable desires. Extended onsistency thus yields the familiar rule of instrumental reasoning.

16 A communitys morality may or may not be viewed as an additional component of its practical perspective. How exactly morality emerges from or supervenes on these other components of a practical perspective is far more than I have space to discuss. I hope that my account of values and reason for acting has been sufficient to suggest how such a discussion would yield a relativistic account of morality. Ho w R el ativ ism C an Be Reason able Relativism is always confronted with supposedly decisive counter-examples; the current favorite is torturing babies for fun. Would torturing babies for fun be permissible in a perspective that afforded sufficient reason for it? Yes it would, if there really were such a perspective. But it would have to be a real perspective, through which real people viewed and acted upon their social world. Until someone has actually tried to inhabit such a perspective, speculation is idle.22 We know of no community that has permitted torturing babies for fun. Nor do we know whether there could be such a community whether, that is, torturing babies for fun could be permitted by a shared sensibility on which any community could converge. We do know of communities that have permitted awful things slavery, human sacrifice, the burning of heretics. None of these practices is as bizarre as torturing babies for fun, but all of them are bizarre enough. Relativism doesnt forbid us from describing these practices as horrific, appalling, repellent, so long as we mean that they are horrifying, appalling, or repellent to us. What relativism may not allow is the claim that the people who allow these practices have reason not to do so. Whether people have reason for permitting themselves to enslave or slaughter other people depends on the details of their own practical perspectives. Yet the fact that reasons are always relative to a perspective does not entail that perspectives themselves are on a par. Even if people do have reason for enslaving or slaughtering other people, the possibility remains that those reasons depend on perspectives that are less advanced as perspectives less advanced, not just from a particular perspective, but in relation to a necessarily ubiquitous standard of progress.

22

See Sharon Street, In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference (MS).

17 My fellow relativists will be shocked by the suggestion that one community can be less advanced than another, and not just from someones perspective. Nothing could be further from the spirit of relativism. But I suspect that a more radical, less reasonable relativism will not be able to solve the problem of local normativity. In order to explain how normativity can vary across social locations, we have to identify it with a motive that constitutes practical perspectives, that plays the role of normativity within them, and that takes its direction from local conditions. Such a motive will unavoidably provide a necessarily ubiquitous aim in relation to which ways of life can be more or less advanced. In my particular account of local normativity, the necessarily ubiquitous aim is mutual interpretability, which is a prerequisite for social life. The standard of comparison for practical perspectives is thus the degree to which they facilitate mutual interpretability. How well have members of a community managed to converge on reasons for acting and reacting? How well do those reasons help them to understand themselves as the kind of creatures they are, endowed with a somewhat fixed nature as human beings? How well, in other words, have the members of a community managed to develop a shared way of human life? Now, you cant eyeball various communities and see how well they facilitate mutual intelligibility among their members. You have to inhabit a particular way of life and do the daily work of interpreting, being interpretable, and helping to develop a common ground that facilitates mutual interpretation. Progress comes from a collective experiment in living, and there is no substitute for participating in the experiment. So there is no point in appealing to an explicit standard of progress in face-to-face disagreement with members of other communities. The rational way to disagree with those who live differently is to articulate your own self-understanding, listen as they articulate theirs, and then go back to your respective experiments to see whether you have learned something by which to understand yourselves better by living differently. You can thereby make progress of a sort that you cannot direct or detect from without. To be sure, the philosophical problem of disagreement remains. When occupants of different communities assert determinate propositions about what is a reason-for-whom, they should find no grounds for disagreeing. Everyone should agree on the facts about what is a reason-for-the-Kikuyu, though not even the Kikuyu can take guidance from those facts. The Kikuyu and Mbuti can still disagree about what is a reason for what, but then they are simply pointing in different directions

18 from different locations, like pedestrians in different neighborhoods disagreeing about the way to Columbus Circle. They are simply talking past one another. The point is that there is still a reason for talking. The reason for talking with those who live differently is that we and they share common ground, a common goal, since all of us are trying to figure out how to make better sense of and to ourselves as human beings. We even have reason to think that conversation will lead to progress. For as occupants of practical perspectives, all of us are trying to achieve the same sort of progress, simply because progress consists in that which we are all trying to achieve, necessarily as occupants of practical perspectives.