I agree that this constitutes relativism, and deny that I am a relativist.
It looks to me like the opposing position is not based on disagreement with this point but rather outright failure to understand what is being said.
I have the same feeling, from the other direction.
I feel like I completely understand the error you’re warning against in No License To Be Human; if I’m making a mistake, it’s not that one. I totally get that “right”, as you use it, is a rigid designator; if you changed humans, that wouldn’t change what’s right. Fine. The fact remains, however, that “right” is a highly specific, information-theoretically complex computation. You have to look in a specific, narrow region of computation-space to find it. This is what makes you vulnerable to the chauvinism charge; there are lots of other computations that you didn’t decide to single out and call “right”, and the question is: why not? What makes this one so special? The answer is that you looked at human brains, as they happen to be constituted, and said, “This is a nice thing we’ve got going here; let’s preserve it.”
Yes, of course that doesn’t constitute a general license to look at the brains of whatever species you happen to be a member of to decide what’s “right”; if the Babyeaters or Pebblesorters did this, they’d get the wrong answer. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way to convince Babyeaters or Pebblesorters to be interested in “rightness” rather than babyeating or primaility. It is this lack of a totally-neutral, agent-independent persuasion route that is responsible for the fundamentally relative nature of morality.
And yes, of course, it’s a mistake to expect to find any argument that would convince every mind, or an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness—that’s why moral realism is a mistake!
I have the same feeling, from the other direction.
I feel like I completely understand the error you’re warning against in No License To Be Human; if I’m making a mistake, it’s not that one. I totally get that “right”, as you use it, is a rigid designator; if you changed humans, that wouldn’t change what’s right. Fine. The fact remains, however, that “right” is a highly specific, information-theoretically complex computation. You have to look in a specific, narrow region of computation-space to find it. This is what makes you vulnerable to the chauvinism charge; there are lots of other computations that you didn’t decide to single out and call “right”, and the question is: why not? What makes this one so special? The answer is that you looked at human brains, as they happen to be constituted, and said, “This is a nice thing we’ve got going here; let’s preserve it.”
Yes, of course that doesn’t constitute a general license to look at the brains of whatever species you happen to be a member of to decide what’s “right”; if the Babyeaters or Pebblesorters did this, they’d get the wrong answer. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way to convince Babyeaters or Pebblesorters to be interested in “rightness” rather than babyeating or primaility. It is this lack of a totally-neutral, agent-independent persuasion route that is responsible for the fundamentally relative nature of morality.
And yes, of course, it’s a mistake to expect to find any argument that would convince every mind, or an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness—that’s why moral realism is a mistake!