Steven Lukes wrote [in #7 of ‘Essays’]:
The argument … may be stated abstractly as follows: (1) there are no good reasons for supposing that all criteria of truth and validity are (as many have been tempted to suppose) context-dependent and variable; (2) there are good reasons for maintaining that some are not, that these are universal and fundamental, and that those criteria which are context-dependent are parasitic upon them; (3) it is only by assuming such universal and fundamental criteria that a number of crucial sociological questions about beliefs can be asked, among them questions about differences between 'traditional' and 'modern' or ‘prescientific' and 'scientific' modes of thought; and therefore (4) despite many possible difficulties and pitfalls, the sociologist or anthropologist need not prohibit, indeed he should be ready to make cognitive and logical judgements (however provisional) with respect to the beliefs he studies …
… A wide range of thinkers in various traditions of thought have been tempted by the view that criteria of truth, or logic, or both, arise out of different contexts and are themselves variable. The temptation consists in an urge to see the rules specifying what counts as true and/or what counts as valid reasoning as themselves relative to particular groups, cultures or communities. (I shall leave aside purely philosophical attempts to establish relativism.) Among those who have succumbed to the temptation in varying degrees have been a number of sociologists of knowledge (especially Mannheim), as well as philosophically minded social anthropologists and philosophers interested in the social sciences (from Levy-Bruhl to Winch), linguists (most notably Whorf) and, most recently, historians and philosophers of science (notably Kuhn). Among those who have successfully resisted it are other sociologists of knowledge (including Durkheim), Marxist theorists (from Marx onwards), other social anthropologists (from Frazer and Tylor to Evans-Pritchard) and other philosophers of science (such as Popper). What forms has the temptation taken?
The various forms it has taken really amount to different ways of taking seriously Pascal's observation that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other.
Thus Mannheim writes of revising 'the thesis that the genesis of a proposition is under all circumstances irrelevant to its truth'. For him the sociology of knowledge is an attempt to analyse the ‘perspectives' associated with different social positions, to study the ‘orientation towards certain meanings and values which inheres in a given social position (the outlook and attitude conditioned by the collective purposes of a group), and the concrete reasons for the different perspectives which the same situation presents to the different positions in it'. He holds that social or 'existential' factors are relevant, 'not only to the genesis of ideas, but penetrate into their forms and content and ... decisively determine [sic] the scope and intensity of our experience and observation'. This, he [Mannheim] claims, has decisive implications for epistemology:
The next task of epistemology, in our opinion, is to overcome its partial nature by incorporating into itself the mUltiplicity of relationships between existence and validity as discovered by the sociology of knowledge; and to give attention to the types of knowledge operating in a region of being which is full of meaning and which affects the truth value of the assertions.
Yet Mannheim also writes, as though trying to resist temptation, that it 'is, of course, true that in the social sciences, as elsewhere, the ultimate criterion of truth or falsity is to be found in the investigation of the object, and the sociology of knowledge is no substitute for this’. Likewise, Levy-Bruhl, who followed Durkheim in many respects, diverged from him in this, arguing that primitive thought violates ‘our most deeply rooted mental habits, without which, it seems to us, we could no longer think': it is 'mystical, that is oriented at every moment towards occult forces ... pre-logical, that is indifferent for most of the time to contradiction' and committed to a view of causality 'of a type other than that familiar to us'. For Levy-Bruhl (above all in his earlier writings), primitives literally 'live, think, feel, move and act in a world which at a number of points does not coincide with ours' and ‘the reality in which primitives move is itself mystical'. Furthermore, he began from the hypothesis that societies with different structures had different logics; what he came to call 'pre-logical' thinking might violate 'our' rules but it had its own 'structure', albeit 'strange and even hostile' to 'our conceptual and logical thought'. But, in his latest writings, Levy-Bruhl too struggled to resist the temptations of this position, acknowledging that the 'mystical mentality' only defined part of the primitives' world and that 'the logical structure of the mind is the same in all known human societies’ …
Steven Lukes wrote [in #8 of ‘Essays’]:
Within social anthropology Lucien Levy-Bruhl argued that primitives 'live, think, feel, move and act in a world which at a number of points does not coincide with ours': their reality is itself 'mystical', their logic is 'strange and even hostile' to 'our conceptual and logical thought' and they have a view of causality 'of a type other than that familiar to us? while Ruth Benedict saw in different cultures 'equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence'. And within the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim saw the identification of socially located perspectives as having a bearing on validity and the truth of what men believe.
The temptation of relativism is a powerful and all-embracing one. If forms of life or systems of thought are inescapably constitutive of men’s perceptions and their understanding, then surely their moralities, their religious and their aesthetic principles will be as relative as their knowledge? Indeed, the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, a Durkheimian much influenced by Quine, links the social construction of reality with boundary-maintaining moral rules and the division between sacred and profane; conversely, she writes that 'the moral order and the knowledge which sustains it are created by social conventions. If their man-made origins were not hidden, they would be stripped of some of their authority.' Thus knowledge, morality and religion are closely interlinked and mutually sustaining, and relative to particular social contexts. But equally, there are those who resist the temptation of such ideas by proclaiming objectivism in morality, religion and knowledge alike. Roger Trigg concluded his book Reason and Commitment by asserting that without the notion of objectivity,
there could be no criteria to distinguish knowledge from ignorance, and human reason becomes impotent. With it, the claims of religion, the discoveries of science, the assumptions of moral argument, and much else, take on the importance they deserve.
The purpose of this chapter is to express a perplexing sense of intellectual discomfort at my inability to accept either of these all embracing positions. To put the matter sharply, I can see good reasons for rejecting cognitive relativism but no overwhelmingly good reasons for rejecting moral relativism. This stance is, of course, not unfamiliar among both social scientists and philosophers. Durkheim was firmly committed to the cognitive supremacy of science, while adhering to a certain kind of moral relativism, according to which a morality is a set of 'moral facts', that is socially given ideals and imperatives, characteristic of a given society of a given type at a given stage of development, which individuals can (cognitively) grasp more or less adequately. On the other hand, both Max Weber and most contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophers tend towards upholding the cognitive supremacy of the scientific method and the non-cognitive status of moral judgement based on choice between principles or ideals that are irreducibly at war. I am inclined to this latter position, though it strikes me as certainly over-simple and perhaps ultimately untenable, for the sorts of reasons that are suggested later [MGH: see next paragraph]. What follows, then, is a kind of dialogue between the case for combining cognitive anti-relativism with moral relativism …
… Let us take as an example the identification of an exercise of power within a society. A concept of power very widely used in contemporary political science is the following: that A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B's interests. Now the notion of 'interests' (like that of 'needs') is an irreducibly evaluative notion: if I say something is in your interests, I imply that you have a prima facie claim to it, and if I say that 'policy x is in A's interest', this constitutes a prima facie justification for that policy. In general, talk of interests provides a licence for making judgements of a moral and political character. So it is not surprising that different conceptions of what human interests are are associated with different moral and political positions. One can distinguish (somewhat crudely) between the following three conceptions of what interests are: (i) the liberal conception, which relates men's interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation; (2) the reformist conception, which, deploring that not all men's wants are given equal weight within the political system, also relates their interests to what they actually want and prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in the form of deflected, submerged or concealed wants and preferences; and (3) the radical conception, which maintains that men's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests and, in such cases, relates the latter to what men would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice. In other words, each of these conceptions of interests picks out a certain range of the entire class of actual and possible wants as the relevant object of moral appraisal; and that selection is itself a matter of moral and political dispute.
In the light of this, and of the concept of power as defined above, it will be clear that different conceptions of what are to count as interests will yield different ways of identifying power. And this is indeed what one observes in practice. A political scientist operating with a purely liberal conception of interests, will only see power where there is a conflict of overt preferences between A and B, and A prevails. Another, who allows that B's preferences may be submerged, will cast his net wider. A third, who is ready to allow that power can be exercised against B's real interests (which may not be manifest in and many even conflict with his actual wants), will see power where neither of the other two see it. Moreover, these differences of empirical scope are essentially linked to different value assumptions; in each case these latter predetermine the concept's range of empirical application. From which I conclude that the concept of power too is essentially contested, and that what, on the face of it, looked like an empirically decidable matter (answering the question, 'Is this an exercise of power?') turns out on inspection to be ineradicably evaluative — and necessarily so, since it appears that any way of identifying power rests upon some normatively specific conception of interests, and conflicts, with others.
Thus the first cause for discomfort in being a cognitive anti-relativist but a moral relativist is that there may be, at least within certain ranges, no morally (and politically) neutral form of cognition of social facts: the concepts available for identifying them may be as essentially contested as I have claimed moral concepts to be.
The second reason for discomfort may be seen as arising from the fact that contests over the latter are, after all, contests over something: essentially contested concepts must have some common core; otherwise, how could we justifiably claim that the contests were about the same concept? Implicit in the position I have taken above is the idea that the concept of morality is itself essentially contestable: that the criteria determining what counts as 'moral', the objects of moral judgement, the forms of moral justification, and so on, are to be seen in a pluralistic manner as irreducibly and indefinitely diverse. But, how, in that case, can one identify a particular principle or judgement or belief as moral rather than something else? I cited with approval Ladd’s suggestion that one can look for those prescriptions for conduct which have a special superiority and legitimacy in a culture and I also suggested looking for those regulative concepts which the members of a community apply to activities and relations of central concern to them. But how can we rule out the possibility of a given culture so applying non-moral concepts, according superiority and legitimacy to non-moral prescriptions, or at most to an attenuated and degraded morality? … Does not the very act of identifying a set of principles, judgements, actions, and so on, as moral commit us to making assumptions about the content of morality, its role in organising and regulating social life and its relation to human needs, wants, interests, purposes, virtues, excellences, defined somehow — but how? — independently of any particular moral perspective? And if that is so, are we not thereby committed to a non-contestable definition of morality, and thereby to setting limits — but how narrow? — to moral relativism by, at the very least, ruling out certain judgements and actions … as candidates for morality?
I began this chapter by referring to the temptations of relativism. These can be overcome either by resisting them in toto or by giving in to them with abandon. The situations of the consistent Puritan and of the uninhibited voluptuary are at least unambiguous. It is the partial resistance to temptation that causes anxiety and a lingering sense of dissatisfaction.
Steven Lukes, Essays in Social Theory, Macmillan Press 1977 [pp. 138-140, 155-156, 172-174]
Lukes quotes the following in order of appearance:
K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1960) [pp. 262-3, 255-6, 240, 264]; Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La Mentalite primitive (Paris: Alcan, 1922) [pp. 47-48, 85,47, 520]; Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures (Paris: Alcan, 1910) [p. 30]; Les Carnets de Lucien Levy-Bruhl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949) [pp. 61, 62]; Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (London: Routledge, 1935) [p. 201]; Mary Douglas, Rules and Meanings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) [p. I5]; Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment (Cambridge University Press, 1973) p. 168.