Chomsky's Philosophy - Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63_kAw3WmE

The title and the first question refer to Foucault and the public debate Chomsky had with him in 1971. After that these are mostly not mentioned and are barely relevant to the rest of the video content, until Chomsky briefly mentions Foucault again halfway through.

Chomsky starts out comparing moral relativism with scepticism, and invokes a straw man of sceptics. In fact his position is a No True Sceptic fallacy. "Moral relativism... doesn't exist in ordinary life" - if somebody professes it, it exists, and plenty do actually. So his first attack is a baseless dismissal, which is a sign of evasion.

He is right in admitting that the questioner's sense of morals varying widely over space and time is quite correct. Rather than accept that as a sense of 'moral relativism' which accords with reality, I would rather say that it is not any form of moral relativism. It is simply moral variety. 'Relativism' is always some claim that some one thing only exists relative to some other thing - that it is not absolute and independent of any such condition. That's saying a lot more than that the one thing varies considerably in the forms it takes.

Chomsky then digresses into detail about 'visual systems' as if they are relevant as a comparison - I guess my objection is that these are not analogous to ethics, or that he has not shown they are. I have a more specific objection to "And I assume we're biological organisms, so our moral values and ethical systems are also biological systems" - I do not assume such a thing and don't see any reason to go along with it. Ethics is clearly a factor of the mind, and the mind is not biological. Just out of interest, what organ is involved in 'ethical systems' - where we clearly identify the eye with visual  systems?

Chomsky's next unargued assumption is that moral variety can only be within certain limits. This follows his analogy with visual systems and of course language (it's exactly what he believes about language variety/universals) but he makes no argument whatsoever, rational or empirical, for this idea.

Straight on top of this dogma he makes another one:  that the idea that moral variety is unlimited is incoherent. Why on Earth? It supposedly has something to do, again, with the situation he believes obtains with regard to language: that when people adopt the same culture (by growing up in it and being influenced by it) it cannot be merely on account of the limited external stimulus, but must be due to a whole load of innate mental structure that humans already have in common.

Actually there's no reason why we should go along with this, and it seems to me Chomsky is overgeneralising his innatism to fields outside language acquisition. He hasn't studied ethics acquisition and is just making assumptions. Secondly all we have to universalise is the human capacity to create moral systems, not what content they have - the fact that people in the same culture generally adopt the same ethics would seem to be evidence that there are considerable specifics getting through besides the innate universals. Thirdly he only considers culture-based moral relativism not individual-based moral relativism. And so on.

But even all of this is utterly by the bye when it comes to critiquing the position he says Foucault adopts. I'm not sure what position Foucault had but it seemed to me to be one in which no moral system was an absolute truth. Chomsky doesn't touch this by arguing that the range of possible human ethical systems is limited. Does it even matter to Foucault whether the range of possible human ethical systems is limited? It seemed to me he was just trying to argue that each moral system is only correct to itself, that there is no universally correct system. Chomsky seems to be strawmanning again here.

And Chomsky incidentally hasn't argued for a universally correct moral system either, only for a universal range or framework underlying moral systems. Nothing in his argument requires (or proves) that there is any objectively correct ethics anyway. Everything he's said about the way we acquire ethical systems within cultures, about the paucity of stimulus and great gap being jumped by the individual in forming their ethics, could all be true without there being any real or objective morals at all. He may think he's talking about objective morals but he isn't necessarily, whereas I think Foucault was.

Chomsky then goes on to consider changes to the general ethical stances taken in 'our own' i.e. Western culture. Having pointed out how attitudes towards homosexuality have changed in his lifetime he then claims "moral values have advanced". How is the change an advancement, rather than a degeneration or merely a neutral change? I myself am glad of these changes, and I definitely don't think they are a degeneration, but they are only an advancement to people like me because we see them that way. To other people they are a degeneration because they see them a different way. I hope people like me prevail over those other people, but I don't think there's anything objective about the value the change in moral attitudes has. Why does Chomsky? He just assumes it.

He goes on to assert that this 'advancement' is a case of "penetrating more deeply into our actual moral values". This implies there are some sort of 'real' moral values deep inside ourselves, and the moral systems we have had so far have failed to live up to them - as we 'progress' we approach ever closer to the legendary, Platonic 'real' values. This expresses a great deal more than Chomsky has said earlier, and seems to commit him to far too much. (Needless to say there's no reason to suppose it's true.) It also has an interesting implication about the position of his own current values relative to those mythical inner values: he says "penetrate more deeply into", which implies there is further to go. This therefore means that the values that Chomsky himself now holds are not the truest values humans have. If he sees things like this, why would he hold the values he does? Does he believe they are correct? Shouldn't he abandon them because he realises there is further to penetrate into actual human values?

Furthermore, if what we are tending towards are our true, underlying moral values, why on Earth have we had a different set of moral values operating in all the cultures we've had so far in history? No explanation.

Regarding slavery - "there still are slaves" - there are more now than there have ever been, it's just that as a proportion of general population there are fewer. "It's regarded as reprehensible" - well, except by those involved in doing it, and those who look on and allow it, and that's a large part of the world's population. He claims it was substantially moral arguments that helped to get rid of slavery in the West - this may be true but does not mean that morals are not relative, just that moral argument can be useful in making change. He is right that moral issues can be debated, but is it moral relativists (I thought they didn't exist anyway?) who insist there is nothing to debate, or those who are fixed in their beliefs but subconsciously untrusting to have them tested?

Now let's consider the slaveowners' argument he expresses: slaveowners are more moral than employers because since they own their workers they look after them, while industrialists merely rent. But we know very well that this is bogus because we know how much slaveowners mistreated their slaves! So it doesn't matter how much Chomsky may think the argument has some validity, it's based on transparently specious premises.

I'm going to skip over the "regimes of truth" comments because they don't bear on the question of moral relativism". In response to the woman's question, Chomsky completely fails to answer it and just dogmatically repeats the same assertions of 'progress', assuming the same ethical values preferring the later phase over the earlier phase. He seems to be unable to understand the idea that the 'progress'-ness is just his judgement, and that of those who agree with him - that per se it's just change.

The first questioner tries to restate the point with some specifics; Chomsky just dodges the issue AGAIN and just dogmatises his own values AGAIN and re-asserts the claim that there must be universal limits to moral values AGAIN. He then tops it off by saying it's a scientific question! Is it a scientific question how 'moral reality' could fit within the universe we know, when we have no idea what a 'real moral entity' could be? It's a philosophical one, and the most scientific research can look at ethics is anthropology and sociology of patterns of ethics in cultures and populations.

There is a huge irrational-rationalist bias at the heart of this innatism, and how far it has travelled from its origins in trying to explain Child Language Acquisition. As a fellow linguist and anarchist I am sometimes disappointed in Chomsky.