Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
- Sir Charles James Napier, The History of Sir Charles Napier Administration of Scinde
From Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Skepticism:
We say, then, that the standard of Sceptical persuasion is what is apparent, implicitly meaning by this the appearances; for they depend on passive and unwilled feelings and are not objects of investigation. (Hence no-one, presumably, will raise a controversy over whether an existing thing appears this way or that; rather, they investigate whether it is such as it appears.)
Thus, attending to what is apparent, we live in accordance with everyday observations, without holding opinions - for we are not able to be utterly inactive. These everyday observations seem to be fourfold, and to consist in guidance by nature, necessitation by feelings, handing down of laws and customs, and teachings of kinds of expertise. By nature’s guidance we are naturally capable of perceiving and thinking. By the necessitation of feelings, hunger conducts us to food and thirst to drink. By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad. By teachings of kinds of expertise we are not inactive to those which we accept. (I.22-24)
In short, the skeptic cares only for the effective, not for the true. In that manner, the genuine Skeptic is a quack. Like a snake-oil salesman, he can only say that what he does has worked before and he leaves his audience unsure about what conditions the oil has worked in before. Has the oil been found to cure impotence under the conditions of a clinical trail? Or are we supposed to believe the testimony of housewives? Indeed, if we are supposed to “set out without opinions from ordinary life” (I.2454), then how are we supposed to be confident that snake oil is, indeed, snake oil?
The problem is magnified when we consider practices such as Sati and female genital mutilation. Surely there can be a moral standard that can sufficiently transcend our day-to-day lives to help us recognize that those practices, which have been part of the day-to-day lives of many, many human beings, are evil?
Yes, it may take somebody else’s ordinary life to inform somebody else of the monstrosities that lurk within their own ordinary life, but that is why Adam Smith’s fiction of the impartial spectator is so important: Our ability to recognize good and evil is all too often contingent upon the limitations of our ordinary lives. Yet, given impartiality and recognition of those limiting circumstances, human reason is able to come to the recognition of good and evil.
God has played the role of the ultimate impartial spectator in religions like Islam and Christianity. Revelation serves as the sharpest tool for cutting across the ethical contingencies of human culture. The Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments. They admit of no cultural contingencies, and so each person shall be judged according to their injunctions once they have learned of that divinely impartial perspective. To argue that one is merely following everyday observances in acknowledging the emperor as a god is no defense before divine judgment. Both the Bible and the Qur’an argue that the impartial perspective was there, and, as a being able to discern good from evil, one had an obligation to follow it.
Biliography
Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Skepticism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambride, Cambridge University Press.