A small argument in the unending debate between moral relativism and moral absolutism.

 

Some are tempted to say that there is no meta-ethics – that is, that one can judge whether something is right or wrong according to a specific, culturally-determined set of moral values, but one cannot say whether one culture's set of moral values is morally better than another culture's set of moral values. But this is false.

What this implies is that within a given culture, those who determine the moral values of that culture cannot be wrong – that they are infallible. But of course they can be wrong. They can make mistakes, like everyone else. It makes no more sense to say that moral authorities are incapable of making mistakes than to say that scientists or judges or parents or anyone else who makes decisions cannot make mistakes. Consider the case of victim-blaming. It is wrong for a culture to blame a victim for the harm done to that victim by an aggressor. Blaming the victim is a mistake. It is wrong. Yet, of course, many cultures blame victims for all kinds of things.

One might ask: if victim-blaming is wrong – objectively wrong, the way the theory of phlogiston turned out to be wrong – then how come the prohibition against victim-blaming is not universal? How is it that so many moral authorities, throughout the ages, have made this mistake, again and again? One might see a comparison here with the belief that the Earth is flat, or that the sun moves around the Earth. Certainly, from our perspective in the tiny region of the biosphere on Earth, the Earth looks flat, and it looks like the sun moves around us. We evolved to live in this tiny niche, relative to the size of the universe, and it was not necessary, for us to survive, and produce fertile offspring, for us to evolve the capability of doing

Similarly, in the ancestral environment, it was important for hominins to maintain order and social cohesion within a group. For this reason, honoring one's parents, the elders of the tribe, the authorities, and the powerful in general became a forceful, highly ranked preference. Besides which, countering the powerful could get you killed, or at least cause you to lose status within the group, and could be a very costly decision. Therefore, when confronted with a conflict between a relatively more powerful person and a relatively less powerful person, it became almost instinctual to take the side of the powerful. Strengthening one's alliance with the powerful is almost always a good strategy, from an evolutionary standpoint. If that meant shunning the victims of violations of aggression and social norms, so be it – as less-powerful people, there's little they could offer you, in the way of alliance, from an evolutionary point of view, that the powerful aggressors could not supersede. That makes victim-blaming very common among cultures. But it doesn't make it right. To the degree that a culture makes it the norm to oppose this very strong interior impulse to blame the victim, and instead to overcome one's own cowardice and to rise up in accusation against the powerful when they aggressively violate the powerless, that culture has a better moral system. It is better to blame the aggressor than to blame the victim, because it is more accurate, more true.

But just because aggressor-blaming is more accurate than victim-blaming does not mean in any way that we can reliably hope that cultures will tend to evolve toward aggressor-blaming.  On the contrary, we have a fairly plausible explanation that predicts that they will change in the opposite direction, and become less accurate.  Cultural entropy: cognitive bias is high, and in many circumstances tends to increase.