Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Ethics, Economics, and Government 151
able to only one. Of course, she might also, if her ire was roused by the
idealist’s tone of moral superiority, borrow a line from Andrew Undershaft
and accuse him of “lusting after personal righteousness.” She might even
declare that to demand the lives of 100 other men in satisfaction of that
lust is an act of extreme egoism and selfishness. Or she might be reminded
of the lesson of The Doctor’s Dilemma and realize that she cannot be sure
of her own motives: there is no such thing as a completely objective decision.
I stress again that there is no rational way to arbitrate between the
choice of the idealist and that of the realist, but in this instance the quest
for personal righteousness would certainly exact a high price.
Moral Development: Male and Female
There is a reason for the identification of the idealist as male and the realist
as female, beyond an acknowledgment that both men and women make
moral decisions. Modern thinking about moral development has caught up
with Shaw in interesting ways. Until recently, ideas about the moral development
of children were dominated by the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg,
who developed a hierarchy of moral development in children that placed
abstract principles as the last and presumably highest stage. Boys did better
than girls on this scale. One of his students, Carol Gilligan, has made
her reputation revising these theories. She did not reject Kohlberg’s empirical
findings, she merely looked at them through different eyes—a
woman’s eyes—and showed that there was no reason why the moral development
of boys should be regarded as normative or superior to that of
girls. The moral criteria that girls used were different, but no less sophisticated
and thoughtful, from those generally employed by boys. Whereas
the boys applied abstract rules, the girls asked how much suffering would
result from a given action. Then they would choose the action that produced
the least harm. Gilligan does not go as far as Shaw; she merely says
that the criteria of the girls is as valid as that of the boys, whereas Shaw
would have declared it superior.
The simplest form of moral relativism can spark conflict between idealists
and realists, but a particularly sensitive area is cultural relativism,
which sees moral values as dependent on the culture in which they exist.
Like moral subjectivism, cultural relativism seems to question the very
validity of moral standards by suggesting that they are entirely arbitrary
and conventional. This objection is more serious than relativists and subjectivists
generally acknowledge. Cultural relativism suggests that good
and ill are whatever the society says they are; moral subjectivism suggests