From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [27:04]: One thing I hear is when we talk about race, and this gets to sort of the metaphysics and epistemology of reality, it’s common refrain is, you have your facts, I have my facts, you have your reality, I have my reality isn’t, you know, possible to have a consensus on a shared reality? And are you seeing sort of a disintegration not just of sort of racial harmony, but this idea that we do have a reality exists as a and we can use our minds to discover,
Stephen Hicks : There’s a simplistic way in which that’s true—but there is also a more corrupt way in which I think you’re experiencing. If it’s adults who are saying things like that, then I suspect that it’s more likely the corrupt version of that.
I mean, there’s one thing saying: You have your experience, and I have my experience, and you grew up on the farm, I grew up in the city, or you grew up in the mountains, and I grew up next to the sea, and so on. So we each have different lived experiences. But what all that means is that it takes more of an effort for us to understand where the other person is coming from.
When we start talking about more significant experiences, say, people who have experienced a trauma of some sort—they were mugged and beaten, or they were raped. And it’s obviously true to say that if you have not suffered that traumatic experience then your awareness of the badness and the trauma is going to be more distant and more abstracted. All of that is perfectly, it’s perfectly fine.
But the corrupted version is—and this is where we get into philosophical territory fairly quickly—If we want to say: Because people have these different experiences, there is no such thing as a common framework that that we can understand, an abstract set of principles that we can all come to agree on and validate, or that if I have had certain experiences when I was younger, you’ve had certain experiences when you were younger, that certain things are just closed off to the entire realm of being, an entire realm of value, and so forth. That kind of cognitive relativism is a corruption, it’s a philosophical mistake. And that leads to problems.
Now, one version is a racial versions of that. If we start from saying people of different races, that they are biologically born with different cognitive faculties, and that necessarily means they’re going to think about the world in different ways. Well, that is an old-fashioned racism. And, perhaps 30 years ago, I would have said that that’s been thoroughly discredited, but it is unfortunately making a comeback, for some philosophical reasons. That also feeds into a kind of moral relativism that says not only do people think differently, they have different values. And then: People who think differently and have different values, there’s no way for them to communicate with each other on anything that’s important. And then: If there’s no way for them to communicate with each other, then why bother trying to communicate with each other if it’s just going to be an exercise in futility? And then, of course: If you have a different value framework from mine and those are in conflict with each other, then conflict resolution necessarily has to be not through discussion, not by the courts—it necessarily just becomes a matter of physical imposition and power. And so then you’re get a breakdown of civil society.
Now, that’s a quick-and-dirty version of going from a strong cognitive relativism to a moral relativism to fighting it out in the streets, but that is partly where we are. When we are looking at the news and despairing at the large number of people who don’t seem open to saying that we should be able to talk about issues civilly online, around the water cooler at temple, or wherever. Or that, on more serious issues, we should be able to take it to the courts and expect that there’s going to be objective adjudication procedures in place. Or, to take politics, that politics will be a place where we peacefully argue about everything and put it to a vote and then have the argument again, four years later, that we’re going to be committed to the peaceful process. That seems to be broken down—and that points up the importance of the philosophical framework. And we have been living through a major philosophical shift over the course of the last generation.
The full interview is here:
Related: Ruth Benedict on cultural relativism, in the Philosophers Explained series.