A vicious circularity in one kind of moral relativism

It’s just occurred to me that simple moral relativism on its face just makes no sense as a metaethical position. It holds:

1. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one believes the action to be morally required.

But here we have an account of a property, namely moral requirement, where the account makes use of that very property.

Here’s another way to put the point. The moral relativist presumably also accepts:

2. What it is for an action to be morally forbidden is that one believes the action to be morally forbidden.

Now, claim (1) says the same thing about the morally required as (2) says about the morally forbidden. Thus, (1) cannot be a correct account of the morally required, since the morally required and the morally forbidden are different. A correct account of X cannot say about X the same thing that a correct account of Y says about Y when X and Y are different!

In other words, the morally relativist metaethicist needs some replacement for “believes the action to be morally required/forbidden” in (1) and (2) that does not employ the concepts of the morally required and forbidden.

Related point: Here is a way to see that (1) is not the right definition of moral requirement. Suppose I am wrong about what I believe, and so I believe that I believe that A is morally required, but in fact I don’t believe that A is morally required. (Perhaps I would like to be the sort of person who believes that A is morally required, and by wishful thinking I come to believe that I believe it, but in fact my actions belie my alleged belief, and I don’t actually believe that A is morally required.) But if to be morally required is defined as to be believed to be morally required, then believing that A is believed to be morally required is believing that A is morally required. So, I cannot have a case where I am wrong in believing that I believe that A is morally required. But clearly I am fallible in my introspection!

A better move, then, for the relativist seems to be to replace beliefs with other attitudes, such as:

3. What it is for an action to be morally required is that one have an attitude of moral disapproval towards refraining from the action.

On this version of relativism, our moral beliefs can be incorrect. For it is quite possible for our attitudes of moral disapproval to fail to match our moral beliefs. And this is especially true if (3) is the right account of moral requirement. For we can easily be self-deceived about whether in fact we exemplify an attitude of moral disapproval, and hence we can be self-deceived about whether the action is wrong. The moral relativist now owes us an account of moral disapproval that does not depend on first order moral concepts, and that’s tough, but at least we don’t have a vicious circularity like in (1).