Here, I believe, the moral relativist fails to distinguish contingency from arbitrariness. Contingency is a causal concept; if, given causal laws and circumstances, multiple effects are possible, then what actually happens is contingent, that is, its occurrence is random or depends on further, unspecified facts.18 Contingency is simply the notion that things could have been otherwise. My nose (for all anyone knows) might have resembled my father’s rather than my mother’s; that it resembles Mom’s is a contingent fact. Perhaps omniscience would reveal that everything (or nothing) is actually contingent. Perhaps God knows there was no chance I could have had Dad’s nose; but given our lesser knowledge, some things appear to be contingent and some don’t. We know enough to know that any offspring of my parents would necessarily be human. No contingency there.
Among the things that could have been otherwise are our moral principles. Humans may never have evolved, and so had no principles, or the cultures and history that produced contemporary moral principles may have been different. Perhaps any agents that exist would necessarily have practical principles, and perhaps agents of certain kinds necessarily have principles of certain forms, but as the relativist notes, diversity of moral principles seems to demonstrate the contingency of any particular standard.
Arbitrariness, however, is a justificatory notion, and speaks of the presence or absence of a specific type of cause: a belief or an action uncaused by a reason is arbitrary. I am indifferent to whether I write in blue or black ink. I reach for the blue ink pen rather than the black ink pen. But I neither have, nor even believe I have, a reason for using blue ink. My use of it is arbitrary. A man asks his son rather than his daughter if the child is interested in learning how to fix the flat tire. He thinks he has a reason, so his choice of child to teach does not appear arbitrary to him, or indeed to all those who share his beliefs about innate gender interests and abilities. But for those of us who believe those beliefs are false, he has a motive but he has no reason (although we grant he thinks he has a reason), and, in our judgment, his choice is arbitrary at best.19
There surely are causes for our arbitrariness, but the causes, even if known, do not make belief or action less arbitrary so long as those causes are not reasons. Should a future master neurologist scan our brains and find the configuration of gray matter in our skulls that causally accounts for all of our beliefs and actions that are unmotivated by reason, the beliefs and actions will be explained, but still arbitrary.20 The arbitrary may not be contingent, for an event may be causally necessary without any of the causes being reasons,21 and, more to the point, the contingent need not be arbitrary, for although an event is caused by reasons, given the laws of nature and given circumstances, other causes may have obtained. Reason may have prevented the United States and the Soviet Union from going to war at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but nothing we know made that escape causally inevitable. Avoiding nuclear war in 1962 was not an arbitrary act, but it was a contingent event.
Contingency, therefore, is not relevant to the charge that all moral standards are arbitrary. Although moral standards may never have come into being, it yet may be the case that Reason brought some of them into being. However, if reasons played no role in causing a moral principle, the charge of arbitrariness would be warranted. So, are there reasons to hold moral principles?
There are no moral reasons for holding moral principles. As the generator of moral reasons, fundamental moral principles themselves are uncaused by moral reasoning.22 Still, like a constitution which is immune to being judged constitutional or unconstitutional, and yet may be judged by other standards, we can evaluate how basic moral principles fare judged by a nonmoral standard, a standard which may generate nonmoral reasons to hold the moral principles.23 The nonmoral standard that gives moral principle the possibility of escaping arbitrariness can be nothing but Reason itself. Morality is not arbitrary if it is a subset of Reason. Reason itself, although contingent, is neither arbitrary nor nonarbitrary—rather it is the arbiter of the arbitrary.
The standard that all forms of rational principles and procedures claim to meet, including moral ones, is the tendency to reveal truth. Deductive rules of inference promise to preserve truth flawlessly as beliefs combine and transform into other beliefs. Inductive principles promise insight into the probable truth regarding the unobserved based on the observed. There may be no noncircular way for them to justify their claim that they do serve truth, but deduction’s and induction’s roles in rationality presume there is a truth to be served.24
Moral principles too must offer a domain of truth they reveal, otherwise, they would be arbitrary, and there would be no reason to adopt one morality rather than another. If there were no moral truths, rationally speaking, any moral principle would be as useless as any other, for none could be a truth revealer if there were no moral truths to reveal. If “Thou shalt not steal” is no more true or false than “Never give a sucker an even break,” then, if we take rationality to be about tracking the truth, neither principle could be rational, and adherence to either principle would be arbitrary.
Of course, if these were not fundamental moral principles, but rather derived from others, they might not appear arbitrary in in the absence of a realm of moral truth. Suppose one accepted “never give a sucker an even break,” because, along with some beliefs about the best way to acquire wealth, it followed from “Do that which will ensure wealth,” which itself followed from “Do that which your heart most desired.” Does that not justify “never give a sucker an even break?” Does that not make it a reasoned choice of principles, a nonarbitrary choice? It would, but only if “Do that which your heart most desires,” along with the other premises in the derivation of “never give a sucker an even break,” were true. At the bottom, only the possibility of truth can save a belief (and therefore an action in accordance with a judgment) from arbitrariness, for reasons, the antithesis of the arbitrary, are by nature seekers of truth.
It must be granted that no moral argument can demonstrate that a particular fundamental moral principle reveals moral truth more reliably than an alternative fundamental moral principle, for that demonstration would employ a moral principle and thereby beg the question. However, the relativist is not disputing particular moral truths, but the idea that there are objective moral truths. To answer the relativist, we must show that it is possible for a morality to get at the moral truth better than an alternative, even if we cannot yet, and perhaps never will, definitively demonstrate that it has actually done so.25 And to show that it is possible for a morality to get at the moral truth better than an alternative, there must be moral truth.
In sum, if morality exists at all, then relativism is surely correct that one or another particular moral perspective is inescapable, that moral standards are not external to human beings but are rather human creations which might have been other than they are, and that there is a strong appearance of a variety of deeply held yet incompatible moral principles. However, neither the perspectival specificity, nor the contingency, nor the multiplicity, nor the human genesis of moral standards self-evidently implies that they are all equally correct, equally true. Nonetheless, in light of the relativist insights, the anti-relativist is burdened with showing how a moral standard can be correct, leaving others incorrect. Although basic moral principles are not deficient because unjustifiable in moral terms, to respond to the relativist challenge they must be able to justify the truth of their implications. The problem is not that moral principles are morally unjustifiable, it is whether there is anything they apply to that is eligible for justification, that is, that might be true. Can moral judgments, any moral judgment, be true?
Before shouldering the anti-relativist burden of describing a nonrelativist moral truth, we should note the heavy load the relativist must carry, which makes being an authentic relativist a rarity. While this does not lighten the anti-relativist burden, feeling the weight of relativist baggage, may encourage taking on the nonrelativist responsibility to provide an account of moral truth.
If we ask the relativist to adjudicate between my condemnation and your tolerance of torture, she would say “you are both right according to the standards you each employ.” We could readily agree, but that is not what we are asking; we want to know which of us she thinks has come