If you're not an absolutist, you're not necessarily a relativist

Born in Scotland in 1711, Hume was perhaps the greatest of all philosophical skeptics, an atheist who questioned every kind of absolute, even scientific absolutes. He wished to find a basis for morality not in God or "reason" but in social existence itself.

Hume didn't want to talk about morality and religion in the same context. You can't ground morals in transcendental ideals, he thought. That's not how we become moral. Instead, we want to naturalize morality.

We act morally without transcendent standards, Hume thought, because we need to live in society. What is good merely for individuals, what satisfies egoistic impulses—is, by definition particular, and therefore nothing general in morality can be based on it. But when one speaks of general virtues and vices, whose use or harm is obvious, then one speaks of values held in common. The positive and negative virtues could be generalized. Certain kinds of behavior (honesty, courage, benevolence, friendliness) are useful or amiable. We approve them. Other kinds of behavior (dishonesty, viciousness, adultery) are not useful or agreeable. We disapprove them. This leads to an ethics based on utility, a morality of social consensus derived not by reason but by sentiment. For nothing can be proved with reason. “Tis not contrary to reason," Hume said, in his most famous sentence, "to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."

At the moment a paper edge was about to cut into your finger, the rest of the world, for all you cared, might perish. Anything was better than that cut. Ethics, Hume insisted, was a matter not of reason or logic but of experience. We are motivated by expectation of pleasure or pain; our experience of such things induces us to form moral principles.

Ultimate justification was not possible, but in any society, there are certain regularities, certain repetitions (certain things that are useful or that make us happy), and by observing carefully we can derive a series of general maxims about behavior.

Once you get into this sort of skeptical standpoint, once you assume a historical explanation of moral standards, then, yes, you might end in relativism, even in nihilism. There's no absolute standard in God, in science, or even rationality. But Hume resurrects the problem of finding standards you can recognize as community-wide. We have to look at what we applaud and don't applaud. Individuals over time undergo experience. You learn; there's an accumulation of instances that allows you to act within certain contexts over time. We're not judging acts in individual terms only.

So he made a case for experience, for memory, for the accumulated moral wisdom of the race, and for judgment. And he said it again: "If you're not an absolutist, you're not necessarily a relativist. If you reject that whole dichotomy, you're in a different ballgame. Hume's project is about laying contingent foundations for morals. We haven't got an essence, but we react to different appetites and desires. Human life has a kind of form.


Movies and Case Against Total Relativism:
The existence of movies, and the movie audience, are a disproof of relativism. Film as a mass medium would not be possible without the expectation that the audience would be moved to pleasure by scenes of well-deserved success and repelled by viciousness; moved to relief by the safety of the virtuous and to satisfaction by the death of the malevolent. Movies would not be possible without the morality of the spectator, which makes the drama possible. Sylvester Stallone is as much a hero in Bangkok as in Pittsburgh (that he's a hero in either place is a pity, but that's not the point). If audiences suffer when likable characters fall into danger, the suffering is produced not just by empathy but also a shared notion of how life should go. Even a criminal would weep at the death of a little child. Hume would be the first to admit that the criminal weeps because his own selfish interests are not involved; and we might add that his tears do not stop him from killing children. Yet they tell us that killing children is wrong. A movie critic must be a Humean. If I believe in the audience and in a group response to common emotions, then I must believe that, however many times violated, there is a moral compact in society—not just the Lockean contract or self-interest, but an agreement of sentiment. Again, the highest political calling in our time would be to derive an agreement of sentiment common to whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

- David Denby