I’ve found people’s problem with postmodernism to be very revealing. In general, the critique I see about postmodernism is that it invites people to not adhere to any sort of moral values at all. By saying that there is no one thing called “truth”, it argues that nothing can be ultimately justified, nothing is simply “good”, and therefore the things we think of as “evil” are theoretically permissible: if our Book of Morals said that murder was okay, it would be, and the only reason that murder is not okay now is because the Book says it isn’t. For a lot of people, that is an untenable state of affairs.
I believe that the postmodern response to this criticism would be something like this: We are not telling you that there aren’t moral values that people should hold, the point is that there is no certainty, that our values are developed by ourselves. For someone who agrees with the postmodern perspective, this is problably simple. For someone who doesn’t, I accept that this may not be convincing. I’m not bringing this up to argue this point.
The reason I’m talking about this is that I think this situation — the irritation some people feel when faced with a postmodern attitude — illuminates what we as people want out of morality. Morality for most is not the way each person should act individually; this is ethics. Morality is about the larger framework in which ethics reside. Ethics are understood to be situational. Morality is supposed to be universal. The attack on the universality of morality is so shocking to some because that universality is a core part of the concept.
However, I do need to make this clear as well: the general argument made by moral relativism is straightforwardly true. We know very well that moral values, such as the meaning of cruelty, do change from culture to culture. What people are afraid of concerning moral relativism is not its observation of the world but the fact that it seems to block off the possibility for demanding that immoral behavior is changed.
I don’t believe we should be satisfied with the idea that someone might find it morally justified to commit random violence, however we cannot rely on having concrete and immovable moral judgments to condemn that person. Of course, morality exists (in part) as a way to coerce people who might have differing ideas to adhere to the same moral standard. There is a point here involving theology that deserves to be drawn out, but I will leave that for another time.
To oppose Chomsky’s view of moral systems, though, I do not believe moral systems (or any mental construct) are like biological organs, I believe they are like bone tools. Do we need them (or something better) to navigate the world, to get ourselves sustenance, to protect ourselves? Absolutely. But these are things that we have made out of nature, not things that nature has made for us.