So? If one's kid is downloading music illegally at home, in "complete violation" of the family's policy, does that protect the parents from the various industry groups that might press lawsuits?
It "achieves" something all the time, if nothing but the relentless downward social mobility of its practitioners punctuated by occasional spasms of quasi-sociopathic violence.
Money is stability and resources for a child, at least in modern societies.
If you want to get completely evolutionary-psychological about it, women want attractive, confident and strong men as fathers for their children. And wealthy, gentle and patient men to raise them. Sometimes, they are even the same man.
So, if I gun your family down, but then buy an airplane ticket to somewhere, you think the government would have no right to inquire where I went to from the airline, in order to protect the privacy of airline ticket buyers?
I'm sorry, but "n+2" isn't a secured future per se, it's a deferred one. Adding features incrementally is a lot more promising. It isn't as if Mozilla is seen as on the verge of extinction.
The way to communicate a secured future is to say "we are constantly improving our software" and having new features get added bit-by-bit. The n+2 release is almost a way of saying that the n+1 release is going to be completely reinvented anyway, so don't get too comfortable. It is a poor communication strategy.
I actually like to attack Microsoft-bashers, but the problem with IE wasn't the integration with the OS, it was the bundling and integration with the OS. Clearly, the OS will work fine if you don't install Mozilla, no matter how much they integrate the browser with it.
No kidding. In a commercial product, promoting the n+2 version when you are on the n version and about to release the n+1 version would be suicide. Can you imagine if, just before the iPhone release, Steve Jobs said, "the iPhone 2.0 will have built-in GPS, 3G, and shoot lasers!" Granted, free software is somewhat different than for-pay gadgetry, but it still takes the winds out of the sails of the pending next release.
There is a difference between status symbol and design aesthetics, you know.
I hate brands. But I like things that are designed well and are attractive. I don't want to live in a strictly utilitarian environment - ultimately, that leads to nihilism.
I'm not interested in Vista. Vista seems to be struggling to get a foothold in the market place.
But:
Security doesn't seem to be its problem. Compatibility and performance are. I don't know why people are surprised whenever Vista performs reasonably well in some security evaluation or another - other than a reflexive dislike of Microsoft, I haven't seen anything that would incline one to assume Vista would lose this sort of contest.
While I am also pretty much unconcerned by RF and think that there's a streak of instinctive ludditism at work here, I don't think hypocrisy is a fair accusation. I know Sebastapol pretty well. It's not just a liberal town: it's partially an outright hippie town, and a lot of the people involved in this story probably don't have mobile phones, televisions and microwave ovens.
I agree with you. The relative value of the space program is definitely worth talking about, over and over, particularly since it uses public funds. I defend the space program, but don't think that the argument put forward by the OP is a troll position.
I don't think the fallouts of space research are the best argument for it. They are nice, but they may have come at an opportunity cost, as well, and there are other avenues of research that might be going unfunded because of it.
The best argument for space research is the one I made elsewhere: the value of scientific curiosity itself, the intrinsic value of the research to our society. It's not worth our bottom-dollar, maybe, but it's worth something. Especially if it can't be justified in terms of markets for consumer goods.
Knowing more about our universe improves the quality of life, period. I know that you want to help everyone at the bottom, but a culture that maintains intellectual curiosity evinces and spreads values that benefits everyone. And your argument can spiral downward: why spend money teaching people art and music when some can't read? Why spend money on parks when some people have no homes, and don't have any way of visiting the parks? Etc. etc.
Besides, I like the Utah landscape, and I'm not even Mormon.
The differences I'm discussing are ontological - in the "thingness" of a thing, in its unity and behavior as a member of a category.
The argument about primitives of perception is the closest thing to a domain of possible concession for a realist position, which is only true if a mechanistic argument about perception holds true. Your claim that it is a logical fallacy is essentially a way of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, "la-la-la, I can't hear you."
There is nothing irrational about treating anything as an extra-moral entity. If he does, in fact, argue with her about morality, then one can only claim that his behavior contradicts his claims. If I know, empirically, that you subscribe to a cosmological position (such as fundementalist Islam) that puts me outside your circle of reciprocal moral behavior, I would actually be operating on a false premise to act as if we did have reciprocal moral claims. What you are approaching is morality as a kind of social contract, which isn't really morality.
There are axiomatically true statements, and saying that 1+1=3 is as valid as 1+1=2, or even a historical claim that says the Holocaust didn't happen, are statements that lack authority and are "untrue," from a correspondence-theory of truth. They are problematic statements for different reasons: the first is inconsistent with the system of mathematic expression, the latter is "not founded on good authority," as a post-structuralist would put it. It is still possible that the Holocaust didn't happen (and that we are brains in vats and the universe is 10 minutes old, etc.) but these are uninteresting possibilities. There is still a lot that can be contested about "what happened," including its historical meaning, its moral import (while few would defend it, some place it as a moment in the history of the state, others as a moment in the history of Judaism, others as a moment in the history of Europe, or as a consequence of modernity - as a term, it doesn't mean the events that occured in German-controlled land in the early 1940s. It is deployed for a variety of rhetorical purposes.) The ontological status of numbers isn't that straightforward, however.
The position you are dismantling is one that would state that absolutely no statement has any claim to more authority than any other, a form of "relativism" that I challenge you to identify "in the wild." My 3 different relativist claims are not only not the same as that claim, they remain healthily undismantled.
The claim that "we cannot know anything to be absolutely true" is 1. not post-modernism (nor poststructuralism) 2. not new at all, and not even modern 3. doesn't necessarily undermine anything 4. is not what i claimed. It's the mother of all straw men used by cranky adherents to an insular conservative appeal to a lite-version of what they think is the Western tradition. It shows a very poor grasp of intellectual history (such as the fact that most all of what I said about discursive relativism is well within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.)
Green-ness is not directly percieved, and different brains do percieve it slightly differently, even on an empirical basis. In human brains that don't have one or another form of color-blindness, most people within the same gender will percieve the same wavelengths as primary, though men and women actually have slightly different perceptions of just what wavelength produces a primary color.
There are very few perceptual primitives. They include color, line/edge detection, and other types of abstract pattern detection, in typical human brains. These primitives seem relatively adaptive - they must describe the world well enough that we can get by with them. The farther away you get from these primitives, the farther away you get from the world itself. Instead of rehashing the entire discourse of cognitive linguistics, I recommend that you do some basic reading on cognitive linguistics and vision if you want to talk about any possible "realism" in perception. Outside of those primitives, the empirical anthropological and cross-linguistic evidence weighs against you: ontologies defer wildly between cultures.
All John has to do is say "Jane is outside of my circle of reciprocal moral expectations." Yes, Jane can shoot him, and he will be unable to object on the grounds that she is within a circle of moral expectations. At this point, we have only logical consistency. We don't have morality. We put people and other beings within and outside our circle of expectations all the time, and sometimes we are unilateral, in that we constrain our own behavior to something which cannot reciprocate those expectations (children, animals, etc.) But you don't need a unique moral language to identify inconsistency and contradiction, and inconsistent and contradictory behavior often overlaps between categories we think of as moral and non-moral.
That Lockean notion of ownership of land serves agrarian societies over livestock-keeping or nomadic ones, even when the latter have a demonstrated pattern of land use (see how Australian aboriginals used a complex system of images and stories to manage land rights between different nomadic groups, for example.) And in many cases, we actually can determine someone in Mexico who had land rights given to them that was taken by the US during the Mexican-American war, who have known legitimate descendents. We may want to give back Santa Fe, New Mexico to the families that used to own that land.
In the case of Israel, there are still Palestinian families who have legal documents of ownership from land that they have been expelled from. It would be quite interesting if a lands-rights approach to the conflict were followed.
This means that all of the former Mexican territory should be returned to Mexico, which then needs to return it to the proper indigenous polities. Also, the territory of the former Iroquois nation needs to be returned, etc. etc.
The fact that I would also be horrified at someone having an abortion 2 minutes before birth is just part of that not-black-and-white that I was talking about. And I would identify some attitudes as problematic or disappointing - casual use of even early-term abortion as birth control - without believing it rises anywhere close to the point of the criminal. I don't believe that a fixed point of personhood is going to ever be uncontested.
I will start with your conclusion: it's essentially ad hominem, and suggests you have a cultural antipathy to late modern thought, rather than a reasoned disagreement. I think your appeal to so-called certainties is wishful thinking and curmudgeonry, and is ultimately anti-intellectual. But that isn't a reasoned response.
We now have some basis for saying what makes "green" is a certain wavelength. But that wavelength only becomes green when it reaches a human eye, travels up a human optic nerve, and gets processed in a way that produces what we call the experience of "green." The gap between 'greenness' and that wavelength is huge. It's called the problem of qualia.
The properties of "trees" as a category really is imaginary. Each tree is a specific event, and that's why speciation occurs.
You have made morality only as relevant as the internal logic within a set of norms. That does get you from action to morality: that gets you from general claims of morality to specific ones. Hardly an escape from "relativism." Your appeal to the categorical imperative only works for moral agents that believe that there is symmetry between themselves and the object of their activities. In practice, that symmetry doesn't even exist among agents who claim it does, much less in those who don't.
There are no pure statements about truth. Utterances can be understood as having a propositional component, and that component can have a truth-value (within the limits of epistemology itself.) But no utterance is reducible to its propositional component. This is orthogonal to the question of "bias."
As far as your "straightforward cases" go, too: even assuming that we shared a general belief that killing other people is always wrong except in certain cases (which seems to be the basis of allowing abortion for rape/incest) then we can have a real departure on "personhood." An embryo is a cluster of cells - it has never evinced any more sentient behavior that a mouse until well into the 2nd trimester. Unless you are relying on a kind of genetic-determination based update of a Christian story of human conception, that a soul or such actually winds up in the zygote at the moment a unique chromosome pattern is created, I don't see on what basis you assign "human rights" to an embryo.
The issue of the Israelis and the Palestinians largely depends on a complicated set of beliefs about what constitutes nationhood, entitles a people to land, even questions about cadastral rights and reimbursement (if I take something from you that I owned and wanted, can you say, "I'm not going to let you have it, but I'll give you $200,000 instead?" If I die, can you force that same deal to my kids? At what point do you "wash the slate" and say that the original theft doesn't matter? And on a macro level, what is the relationship between ethnicity, ideology, and religion? And how is it related to state, nation, and government? When two different societies have a different view of what is "private" and "public", and how those relate to things like family, self, and governance, you can see how an appeal to moral truths isn't going to go very far.)
A lot of your discussion about rape is selective about when genders are and are not in a symmetrical situation, too. Perhaps I'll discuss that more, later. In any case, I still think that you haven't risen above the level of simple opinion in your discussion about it - certainly not to the level of confirmed, "objective" moral truth.
You've actually blurred different relativisms here, from epistemological to moral to discursive.
The first is about knowledge: there may be a true world out there, but we may not really be able to know anything, or at least anything stable about it. Perhaps the world is just "stuff," what we now call atoms made of subatomic particles or whatever the physical substrate of the universe is. But our objects of knowledge are based on "things" that are mind-produced: what we call a "tree" is a swirling collection of atoms. The connection it has to another "tree" is that it shares similar process - but even the similarity between processes that we identify is an overlay of our minds. We don't actually use language and thought to arrive at Absolute Truths, we use them to cope, so the failure to create a permanent, stable and static representation of the world (that, except for this "stuff" that lies under it, is itself an unstable field of representations) isn't really an issue.
This epistemological relativism becomes more pronounced when the "things" we are talking about don't even correspond to clusters of matter: things like justice, freedom, the self, rights, fairness, value, truth. When even the likeness that makes us identify two different trees as the same thing is based on perceived properties, how less stable the basis for those "things" which are conceptual, then.
Moral relativism is more straightforward, although it can be based on epistemological relativism. It is the claim that morality is a social and historical invention. There are two alternative explanations: one, that the universe actually has a code for right and wrong in it (a theological explanation, whether described as the law of God or karma or what have you), or that human morality is hard-wired. The first is a position which is outside philosophy and becomes religion, really; the second is dispensed with fairly easy by noting that the bases of altruistic feeling and what has been called the "fairness module" have not, historically, produced anything like universally equivalent moral behavior, and that there is a huge gulf between those moral-seeming "hard-wired" elements and actual human moralities.
Discursive relativism is, at first, also pretty straightforward, though when you open it up, there's a lot more under the hood. It says that even if you could have certainty about the order of things in the world and a stable moral code, that no statement about them is ever neutral or reliable: that there are always illocutionary and perlocutionary considerations behind any utterance: often, claims of power or appeals to mercy, postures of enmity or claims of authority, didactic positions, abasement, etc. A scientist doesn't just stand around "uttering truths," they are in a system of funding, politics, and rhetoric, for which whatever empirical methods, and the language they use to portray the use of those methods, is just a partial factor.
A Nietzschean critique of morality bridged moral and discursive relativism.
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So? If one's kid is downloading music illegally at home, in "complete violation" of the family's policy, does that protect the parents from the various industry groups that might press lawsuits?
It "achieves" something all the time, if nothing but the relentless downward social mobility of its practitioners punctuated by occasional spasms of quasi-sociopathic violence.
Money is stability and resources for a child, at least in modern societies.
If you want to get completely evolutionary-psychological about it, women want attractive, confident and strong men as fathers for their children. And wealthy, gentle and patient men to raise them. Sometimes, they are even the same man.
So, if I gun your family down, but then buy an airplane ticket to somewhere, you think the government would have no right to inquire where I went to from the airline, in order to protect the privacy of airline ticket buyers?
I think you're insane.
What's amazing is how not-new this lame adolescent misanthropic posturing really is.
I'm sorry, but "n+2" isn't a secured future per se, it's a deferred one. Adding features incrementally is a lot more promising. It isn't as if Mozilla is seen as on the verge of extinction.
The way to communicate a secured future is to say "we are constantly improving our software" and having new features get added bit-by-bit. The n+2 release is almost a way of saying that the n+1 release is going to be completely reinvented anyway, so don't get too comfortable. It is a poor communication strategy.
I actually like to attack Microsoft-bashers, but the problem with IE wasn't the integration with the OS, it was the bundling and integration with the OS. Clearly, the OS will work fine if you don't install Mozilla, no matter how much they integrate the browser with it.
No kidding. In a commercial product, promoting the n+2 version when you are on the n version and about to release the n+1 version would be suicide. Can you imagine if, just before the iPhone release, Steve Jobs said, "the iPhone 2.0 will have built-in GPS, 3G, and shoot lasers!" Granted, free software is somewhat different than for-pay gadgetry, but it still takes the winds out of the sails of the pending next release.
That would involve doing math. We're talking about Mac users.
(Ob. disclosure: I'm a Mac user.)
There is a difference between status symbol and design aesthetics, you know.
I hate brands. But I like things that are designed well and are attractive. I don't want to live in a strictly utilitarian environment - ultimately, that leads to nihilism.
Talk about a sudden outbreak of common sense. I tip my hat to you.
I'm not interested in Vista. Vista seems to be struggling to get a foothold in the market place.
But:
Security doesn't seem to be its problem. Compatibility and performance are. I don't know why people are surprised whenever Vista performs reasonably well in some security evaluation or another - other than a reflexive dislike of Microsoft, I haven't seen anything that would incline one to assume Vista would lose this sort of contest.
While I am also pretty much unconcerned by RF and think that there's a streak of instinctive ludditism at work here, I don't think hypocrisy is a fair accusation. I know Sebastapol pretty well. It's not just a liberal town: it's partially an outright hippie town, and a lot of the people involved in this story probably don't have mobile phones, televisions and microwave ovens.
I agree with you. The relative value of the space program is definitely worth talking about, over and over, particularly since it uses public funds. I defend the space program, but don't think that the argument put forward by the OP is a troll position.
I don't think the fallouts of space research are the best argument for it. They are nice, but they may have come at an opportunity cost, as well, and there are other avenues of research that might be going unfunded because of it.
The best argument for space research is the one I made elsewhere: the value of scientific curiosity itself, the intrinsic value of the research to our society. It's not worth our bottom-dollar, maybe, but it's worth something. Especially if it can't be justified in terms of markets for consumer goods.
Knowing more about our universe improves the quality of life, period. I know that you want to help everyone at the bottom, but a culture that maintains intellectual curiosity evinces and spreads values that benefits everyone. And your argument can spiral downward: why spend money teaching people art and music when some can't read? Why spend money on parks when some people have no homes, and don't have any way of visiting the parks? Etc. etc.
Besides, I like the Utah landscape, and I'm not even Mormon.
I personally believe that for most people, the sociopolitics of high school are never completely abandoned.
And yet their accident rate is comparable to ours.
Indeed, they are comparable. And the comparison is: theirs is higher.
The differences I'm discussing are ontological - in the "thingness" of a thing, in its unity and behavior as a member of a category.
The argument about primitives of perception is the closest thing to a domain of possible concession for a realist position, which is only true if a mechanistic argument about perception holds true. Your claim that it is a logical fallacy is essentially a way of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, "la-la-la, I can't hear you."
There is nothing irrational about treating anything as an extra-moral entity. If he does, in fact, argue with her about morality, then one can only claim that his behavior contradicts his claims. If I know, empirically, that you subscribe to a cosmological position (such as fundementalist Islam) that puts me outside your circle of reciprocal moral behavior, I would actually be operating on a false premise to act as if we did have reciprocal moral claims. What you are approaching is morality as a kind of social contract, which isn't really morality.
There are axiomatically true statements, and saying that 1+1=3 is as valid as 1+1=2, or even a historical claim that says the Holocaust didn't happen, are statements that lack authority and are "untrue," from a correspondence-theory of truth. They are problematic statements for different reasons: the first is inconsistent with the system of mathematic expression, the latter is "not founded on good authority," as a post-structuralist would put it. It is still possible that the Holocaust didn't happen (and that we are brains in vats and the universe is 10 minutes old, etc.) but these are uninteresting possibilities. There is still a lot that can be contested about "what happened," including its historical meaning, its moral import (while few would defend it, some place it as a moment in the history of the state, others as a moment in the history of Judaism, others as a moment in the history of Europe, or as a consequence of modernity - as a term, it doesn't mean the events that occured in German-controlled land in the early 1940s. It is deployed for a variety of rhetorical purposes.) The ontological status of numbers isn't that straightforward, however.
The position you are dismantling is one that would state that absolutely no statement has any claim to more authority than any other, a form of "relativism" that I challenge you to identify "in the wild." My 3 different relativist claims are not only not the same as that claim, they remain healthily undismantled.
The claim that "we cannot know anything to be absolutely true" is 1. not post-modernism (nor poststructuralism) 2. not new at all, and not even modern 3. doesn't necessarily undermine anything 4. is not what i claimed. It's the mother of all straw men used by cranky adherents to an insular conservative appeal to a lite-version of what they think is the Western tradition. It shows a very poor grasp of intellectual history (such as the fact that most all of what I said about discursive relativism is well within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.)
Green-ness is not directly percieved, and different brains do percieve it slightly differently, even on an empirical basis. In human brains that don't have one or another form of color-blindness, most people within the same gender will percieve the same wavelengths as primary, though men and women actually have slightly different perceptions of just what wavelength produces a primary color.
There are very few perceptual primitives. They include color, line/edge detection, and other types of abstract pattern detection, in typical human brains. These primitives seem relatively adaptive - they must describe the world well enough that we can get by with them. The farther away you get from these primitives, the farther away you get from the world itself. Instead of rehashing the entire discourse of cognitive linguistics, I recommend that you do some basic reading on cognitive linguistics and vision if you want to talk about any possible "realism" in perception. Outside of those primitives, the empirical anthropological and cross-linguistic evidence weighs against you: ontologies defer wildly between cultures.
All John has to do is say "Jane is outside of my circle of reciprocal moral expectations." Yes, Jane can shoot him, and he will be unable to object on the grounds that she is within a circle of moral expectations. At this point, we have only logical consistency. We don't have morality. We put people and other beings within and outside our circle of expectations all the time, and sometimes we are unilateral, in that we constrain our own behavior to something which cannot reciprocate those expectations (children, animals, etc.) But you don't need a unique moral language to identify inconsistency and contradiction, and inconsistent and contradictory behavior often overlaps between categories we think of as moral and non-moral.
That Lockean notion of ownership of land serves agrarian societies over livestock-keeping or nomadic ones, even when the latter have a demonstrated pattern of land use (see how Australian aboriginals used a complex system of images and stories to manage land rights between different nomadic groups, for example.) And in many cases, we actually can determine someone in Mexico who had land rights given to them that was taken by the US during the Mexican-American war, who have known legitimate descendents. We may want to give back Santa Fe, New Mexico to the families that used to own that land.
In the case of Israel, there are still Palestinian families who have legal documents of ownership from land that they have been expelled from. It would be quite interesting if a lands-rights approach to the conflict were followed.
This means that all of the former Mexican territory should be returned to Mexico, which then needs to return it to the proper indigenous polities. Also, the territory of the former Iroquois nation needs to be returned, etc. etc.
The fact that I would also be horrified at someone having an abortion 2 minutes before birth is just part of that not-black-and-white that I was talking about. And I would identify some attitudes as problematic or disappointing - casual use of even early-term abortion as birth control - without believing it rises anywhere close to the point of the criminal. I don't believe that a fixed point of personhood is going to ever be uncontested.
I will start with your conclusion: it's essentially ad hominem, and suggests you have a cultural antipathy to late modern thought, rather than a reasoned disagreement. I think your appeal to so-called certainties is wishful thinking and curmudgeonry, and is ultimately anti-intellectual. But that isn't a reasoned response.
We now have some basis for saying what makes "green" is a certain wavelength. But that wavelength only becomes green when it reaches a human eye, travels up a human optic nerve, and gets processed in a way that produces what we call the experience of "green." The gap between 'greenness' and that wavelength is huge. It's called the problem of qualia.
The properties of "trees" as a category really is imaginary. Each tree is a specific event, and that's why speciation occurs.
You have made morality only as relevant as the internal logic within a set of norms. That does get you from action to morality: that gets you from general claims of morality to specific ones. Hardly an escape from "relativism." Your appeal to the categorical imperative only works for moral agents that believe that there is symmetry between themselves and the object of their activities. In practice, that symmetry doesn't even exist among agents who claim it does, much less in those who don't.
There are no pure statements about truth. Utterances can be understood as having a propositional component, and that component can have a truth-value (within the limits of epistemology itself.) But no utterance is reducible to its propositional component. This is orthogonal to the question of "bias."
As far as your "straightforward cases" go, too: even assuming that we shared a general belief that killing other people is always wrong except in certain cases (which seems to be the basis of allowing abortion for rape/incest) then we can have a real departure on "personhood." An embryo is a cluster of cells - it has never evinced any more sentient behavior that a mouse until well into the 2nd trimester. Unless you are relying on a kind of genetic-determination based update of a Christian story of human conception, that a soul or such actually winds up in the zygote at the moment a unique chromosome pattern is created, I don't see on what basis you assign "human rights" to an embryo.
The issue of the Israelis and the Palestinians largely depends on a complicated set of beliefs about what constitutes nationhood, entitles a people to land, even questions about cadastral rights and reimbursement (if I take something from you that I owned and wanted, can you say, "I'm not going to let you have it, but I'll give you $200,000 instead?" If I die, can you force that same deal to my kids? At what point do you "wash the slate" and say that the original theft doesn't matter? And on a macro level, what is the relationship between ethnicity, ideology, and religion? And how is it related to state, nation, and government? When two different societies have a different view of what is "private" and "public", and how those relate to things like family, self, and governance, you can see how an appeal to moral truths isn't going to go very far.)
A lot of your discussion about rape is selective about when genders are and are not in a symmetrical situation, too. Perhaps I'll discuss that more, later. In any case, I still think that you haven't risen above the level of simple opinion in your discussion about it - certainly not to the level of confirmed, "objective" moral truth.
You've actually blurred different relativisms here, from epistemological to moral to discursive.
The first is about knowledge: there may be a true world out there, but we may not really be able to know anything, or at least anything stable about it. Perhaps the world is just "stuff," what we now call atoms made of subatomic particles or whatever the physical substrate of the universe is. But our objects of knowledge are based on "things" that are mind-produced: what we call a "tree" is a swirling collection of atoms. The connection it has to another "tree" is that it shares similar process - but even the similarity between processes that we identify is an overlay of our minds. We don't actually use language and thought to arrive at Absolute Truths, we use them to cope, so the failure to create a permanent, stable and static representation of the world (that, except for this "stuff" that lies under it, is itself an unstable field of representations) isn't really an issue.
This epistemological relativism becomes more pronounced when the "things" we are talking about don't even correspond to clusters of matter: things like justice, freedom, the self, rights, fairness, value, truth. When even the likeness that makes us identify two different trees as the same thing is based on perceived properties, how less stable the basis for those "things" which are conceptual, then.
Moral relativism is more straightforward, although it can be based on epistemological relativism. It is the claim that morality is a social and historical invention. There are two alternative explanations: one, that the universe actually has a code for right and wrong in it (a theological explanation, whether described as the law of God or karma or what have you), or that human morality is hard-wired. The first is a position which is outside philosophy and becomes religion, really; the second is dispensed with fairly easy by noting that the bases of altruistic feeling and what has been called the "fairness module" have not, historically, produced anything like universally equivalent moral behavior, and that there is a huge gulf between those moral-seeming "hard-wired" elements and actual human moralities.
Discursive relativism is, at first, also pretty straightforward, though when you open it up, there's a lot more under the hood. It says that even if you could have certainty about the order of things in the world and a stable moral code, that no statement about them is ever neutral or reliable: that there are always illocutionary and perlocutionary considerations behind any utterance: often, claims of power or appeals to mercy, postures of enmity or claims of authority, didactic positions, abasement, etc. A scientist doesn't just stand around "uttering truths," they are in a system of funding, politics, and rhetoric, for which whatever empirical methods, and the language they use to portray the use of those methods, is just a partial factor.
A Nietzschean critique of morality bridged moral and discursive relativism.