Addendum

Actually, I should clarify the claim in my last post. I believe that what we call "morally good" and "morally bad" is meaningful only relative to culture, which gives our actions meaning. Sometimes this is taken to mean that those concepts aren't really important. Here's the logic: If "good" and "bad" are meaningful only relative to culture, then they are highly malleable, since culture itself is highly malleable. If they are highly malleable, then they are arbitrary. If they are arbitrary, then they can't be important. That's a possible view, but it's not mine. I certainly do not think that they are unimportant. To be clear, while I do believe that "morally good" and "morally bad" are highly arbitrary, I do not believe that all virtues and vices are likewise arbitrary, and I do not believe that, even if they were, they would be unimportant. I might write more on this in the future.

Just Words? Part 2

Last time I argued that words at least sometimes constitute actions, and that there are no good or bad actions without a society to provide us with an opportunity to act in a morally good or morally bad manner (or courageously, or maliciously, or any other virtue or vice). I don't think these points are all that controversial. This time I'll argue that society does something else, too. It gives our words and our actions meaning. And because of this, in Part 3, I will argue that we have strong reasons to believe that language does change people--make them better or worse--as was suggested to me.

Society acts as the judge of our actions. Society imbues us with a sense of what a good person is. We judge people against that standard. Of course, we have some freedom to accept or reject those standards and create our own (though, as far as I can see, we don't have as much freedom as some would like to believe). For the most part, though, in order to judge people and actions, we measure them against real world examples. Want to know what you should do? Ask yourself what the virtuous person would do. What would the virtuous person do? Theorizing alone can't tell us; only our own thoughts and feelings can.

Critics object to this characterization of moral decision-making, charging it with relativism. If society is the judge of our actions, then an action could be good in one society and bad in another. And, indeed, I admit this; my view is relativistic. Actions are good or bad measured against actually-existing pracitices, not non-existent ideal types. I think it's ridiculous to suggest that there could be a society in which no individuals are virtuous people, yet non-relativists must argue that there could be such a society, at least in principle. So relativism is a strength of my view, not an objection. The charge of relativism is a red herring.

There Is An Article. The Article Is At Edge. You Should Read It. But Only If You Want To.

Edge has a very long and very interesting discussion of the Pirahã language and culture over at its site. If you're not familiar with the big debates in linguistics, consider searching for "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" and "Chomsky + universal grammar" before you read the article. If you are familiar with those folks and their ideas, go read it already!