The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
The Practical Irrelevance of Relativism
University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN 55455–0310 tiberius@umn.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
I learned a lot from reading Jesse Prinz's ambitious and entertaining book, The Emotional Construction of Morals. I think he’d be pleased to know that I learned many interesting things that I would not ordinarily find in a book of academic philosophy. Also, even when I disagreed with him, almost all of my questions were anticipated and addressed as the book proceeded, which is a very satisfying experience as a reader and (in my opinion anyway) high praise in philosophy. I say ‘almost all’ of my questions because there are a few that remain. These centre around a puzzle about Prinz's relativism, which is the focus of my comments.
The puzzle is about why the kind of relativism we get from Prinz's meta-ethics matters to normative ethics or moral practice. I think it does not (or at least not directly and not in the ways he thinks it does).