critical-realism message, BHA: Re: Tobin Epistemological relativism

The fact that we have many fundamentally similar needs is not very helpful,
unless one is willing to maintain that a need or a desire automatically
confers a right. We all have a need to eat, but does that need confer a
right to eat your neighbor? Does a person's need for sex confer a right to
commit rape? The moment one says, "Well, okay, there are some limits and
needs don't confer unlimited rights," one is on strictly social grounds.
Nature doesn't give a damn what you eat so long as it provides nourishment
that suits your physiology and doesn't poison you in the process; sperm can
be ejaculated and meet an egg whether the sex is consensual or not. People,
however, care a lot.

I would like to make a few comments here. I take it that we are all concerned with emancipatory politics. Tobin here is making an argument for the social construction of ethics. I however would argue the opposite. The ethical faculty is as much an innate faculty of homo sapiens as the language faculty (although I should be careful because even this faculty is supposedly a social construction). Ethics, it seems to me quite clearly, is an adaptation for an intelligent organism such as ourselves. Tobin claims that people care a lot. This of course is true, but the question is why do they care a lot. By holding a social constructivist approach toward ethics one is denying that ethics is an innate faculty of mind. If Tobin, like Bhaskar, is opposed to Capitalism and he lives in a Capitalist society and given that ethics is a social construction how is that Tobin opposes Capitalism? Does he oppose Capitalism merely because, for whatever reason, he has found himself living within a sub culture or that he has read some books but not others? Or is that his use of his innate ethical faculty, which he shares with us all, is telling him that there is something fundamentally wrong with Capitalism, enabling him to persuade others outside of the sub culture that his views are necessarily correct?

Constructivist ethics leads to moral relativism. Moral relativism of course precludes universal emancipation. We are in the happy circumstance of knowing that science tells us that the ethical faculty is an innate feature of homo sapiens and that thereby science does not logically preclude universal human emancipation. For all those concerned with a "realist philosophy of science" this is something to celebrate, in my opinion.

Marko.