Anti-Anti-Relativism
Anti-anti-relativism is Geertz's carefully constructed methodological position, articulated most completely in his 1984 American Anthropological Association presidential address. The double negative is deliberate: it refuses both the relativist claim that all cultural practices are equally valid within their own contexts and the anti-relativist assertion of universal standards applicable from outside. Geertz held that both positions contained truth and that neither contained enough truth to justify its exclusive claim. The present volume applies the stance to AI ethics, where the universalism of acceleration and the universalism of precaution both mistake the nature of the evaluative judgment the transition requires.
In the AI Story
Relativism holds that evaluative standards are internal to cultures and cannot legitimately be applied across cultural boundaries. Anti-relativism asserts that universal moral standards exist, are accessible to reason, and can be applied from outside to evaluate practices that violate them. Both positions have their advocates, their arguments, and their characteristic blind spots. The relativist risks endorsing practices that his own evaluative resources tell him are wrong. The anti-relativist risks imposing local standards under the guise of universal ones.
Geertz's position refused to choose. Anti-anti-relativism does not endorse relativism — it does not argue that all practices are equally valid. It argues that the confident universalism of the anti-relativist is itself a cultural position that deserves the same scrutiny it applies to others. The anti-relativist who condemns another culture's practices from the vantage of his own is treating his own standards as universal rather than situated, his own framework as the framework rather than a framework.
The AI ethics discourse reproduces this binary. On one side stands the universalism of acceleration: AI is beneficial for humanity, its gains are universal goods, resistance is irrational, embrace is appropriate. On the other stands the universalism of precaution: AI is dangerous for humanity, its risks are universal harms, acceleration is reckless, restriction is appropriate. Both positions treat the technology as having a fixed moral character. Both skip the local — the specific, contextual, culturally situated assessment of what the technology means and does in particular circumstances.
The anti-anti-relativist position on AI ethics is not centrism. It is a methodological commitment to continuous contextual evaluation. The question is not whether AI is good or bad. The question is whether this use, here, now, under these conditions, for these people, produces outcomes more life-giving than life-diminishing. The evaluation is always local. The judgment is always provisional. The practice is always ongoing. The discomfort is a feature, not a bug.
Origin
Geertz delivered the address "Anti Anti-Relativism" as his presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in November 1983. It was published in American Anthropologist in 1984. The deliberately awkward construction of the title was intended to provoke reflection on the binary thinking the talk was designed to resist.
The argument built on Geertz's earlier work on interpretation and local knowledge but pushed it into explicitly evaluative territory that interpretive anthropology had often been reluctant to enter. The address remains one of the most cited texts in the ongoing debate about cultural relativism in philosophy, ethics, and the social sciences.
Key Ideas
Both relativism and anti-relativism oversimplify. The confident universalism of either position ignores the situatedness of all evaluative judgment.
Evaluation is always conducted from somewhere. The view from nowhere is not available; the acknowledgment of position is the beginning of honest evaluation, not its abandonment.
Context determines meaning, context determines evaluation. The same act in different webs of significance produces different meanings and calls for different evaluative responses.
The position is uncomfortable by design. Anti-anti-relativism refuses the resolution both alternatives provide and insists on maintaining the productive discomfort of the unresolved.
The amplifier does not determine its signal. AI ethics must attend to the specific signals being amplified in specific contexts rather than rendering a universal verdict on the amplifier.
Debates & Critiques
Critics have argued that anti-anti-relativism is an evasion — that any serious ethical position must eventually render a verdict. Geertz's reply was that serious ethics does render verdicts, but it renders them locally, contextually, and provisionally, rather than universally, abstractly, and finally. The difference is not between evaluation and its refusal but between evaluation conducted with acknowledgment of its situatedness and evaluation conducted under the illusion of a view from nowhere.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Clifford Geertz, "Anti Anti-Relativism," American Anthropologist 86:2 (1984)
- Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton University Press, 2000)
- Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
- Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985)