Gonzalo asked:

I am enrolled in a class about Gender and Politics. In it we read books about people who use
constructivists or postmodern methods of analysis to show how institutions create the concept of
"gender", "natural," "male" and "female". I think that even though it is important to know the nature of
those concepts, postmodernism can be taken to ridiculous extremes. Most of the writers insist that
most, if not, all of what we think about ourselves is a social construct. I understand how this can be
used as a tool to get rid of ideologies based on bigotry, but I also think it is damaging to blame
psychology, and science in general as well as economics for the evils of society. As I stated earlier
even though it can do good it can also harm by negating the possibility of real knowledge about our
surroundings. If they insist in the use of the subject of social constructs then it reaches a point where
everything is excusable, because there was no agency involved in the process of making decisions.

[...] I also wanted to know how, if is possible at all, one can reconcile the concepts of responsibility,
the concept of good and bad and postmodernism. I would like to know if you could recommend a few
critiques of postmodernism. I hope that my request is not too demanding. I hope to hear from you
soon.

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Your request is, actually, extremelydemanding. I will answer you here briefly... but I cannot possibly
do justice to this issue in this forum. Anything I can say here can only be a very rough approximation
to what I'd consider a reasonable argument. But, given that caveat, I'll proceed. So... I agree with you
about postmodernism as usually presented. That is, as "cultural relativism" for morality, ethics,
construction of concepts, and so forth, it is, in my very strong opinion (and I'm not alone, as you will
see) basically a form of nihilism. The problem here, that is, the problem for one, like myself, holding
this position yet sympathetic to many of postmodernism's motivations, is that postmodernism is in part
a response to very real inequities: toward women, toward minorities, and so forth... and it is certainly
correct that social factors enter into, to varying extents, such concepts as gender.

But to address those inequities by claiming that the culture (let us say, as a rough categorization)
which possesses them, or people within that culture, are motivated solely by considerations of power
and of status (and there's nodoubt that those are very powerful motivations for many) is to denigrate
both the culture and those within it who are attempting to act morally. In addition, to claim that one
can toss out one set of values and substitute others because all values are ultimately equal is simply
to claim that there are no values, merely whatever considerations move one at the moment. This has
been argued, indeed... and it is nihilism, or at best the reduction of values to those of animals. On the
other hand, there is certainly a point to publicizing the inequities which do exist.

Thus, I regard such social constructivism notas philosophy but at best as rhetoric; and as such its
proper venue is not academia but literature, popular magazines, works of art, and so forth. And
indeed, many writers in the field employ those latter venues, quite appropriately, in my opinion. One
might, against this, argue that art, for example, isa form of philosophy... and indeed that has been
argued. However I don't agree with that viewpoint; but I simply don't have the space to follow that up
here (and there are those who explicitly attempt to straddle the gap, e.g., Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs
of the blind: the self-portrait and other ruins.Chicago, The University of Chicago Press... a wonderful
book; but I'd argue that it isn'tphilosophy).

So one problem with mypoint of view is of course to specificallystate why I hold this position.
Another problem is to present a reasonable alternative. Instead of doing those things, I'm going to
give you some references that argue those issues tremendouslybetter than I could in this limited
space.

Why, then, deny cultural relativism? Well, what if we can show, or at least present a strong case, that
there are some cultures whose values are objectivelybad? What could that mean? Well, what if
people in those cultures holding those values simply do worse than those who do not, and worse than
people in othercultures who do not? Wouldn't that be a good argument that those values are just
wrong? I mean, if people holding a certain set of values are poorer, more diseased, etc., than people
in comparablywealthy cultures, with comparable resources, but differentvalues, then we'd at least
have to entertainthe possibility that there was something wrong with the former values, wouldn't we?
So look at these (and of course they have lists of references to lead you further):

Edgerton, R. B. (1992). Sick societies: challenging the myth of primitive harmony.New York, The
Free Press.

Gintis, H. (2003). "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism: Genes, Culture, and the Internalization of
Norms." Journal of Theoretical Biology220(4): 407-418.

Harrison, L. E. and S. P. Huntington, Eds. (2000). Culture matters: how values shape human
progress.New York, NY, Basic Books.

Lopez, S. R. and P. J. Guarnaccia (2000). "Cultural psychopathology: uncovering the social world of
mental illness." Annual Review of Psychology51: 571-598.

Now, what alternative positions to relativism are there? Well, first, there's always my favorite book
relating to truth: Kitcher, P. (1993). The advancement of science; science without legend, objectivity
without illusions.New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

And here are some more readings on naturalizing morality:

Held, V. (1998). Whose agenda? Ethics versus cognitive science.L. May, M. Friedman and A. Clark.
Cambridge, The MIT Press: 69-87.

Jackman, H. (1999). "Prudential arguments, naturalized epistemology, and the Will to Believe."
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society35(1): 1-37.

May, L., M. Friedman, et al. (1998). Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics.
Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rachels, J. (1986). The elements of moral philosophy.Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Annis, D. B. (1978). "A contextualist theory of epistemic justification." American Philosophical
Quarterly15(3): 213-219.

Clark, A. (1998). Connectionism, moral cognition, and collaborative problem solving.L. May, M.
Friedman and A. Clark. Cambridge, The MIT Press: 109-128.

Dewey, J. (1988). Human nature and conduct.1922. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.

Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of moral personality: ethics and psychological realism.Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.

Gintis, H., S. Bowles, et al. (2003). "Explaining altruistic behavior in humans." Evolution and Human
Behavior24: 153-172.

Henderson, D. K. (1994). "Epistemic competence and contextualist epistemology: why contextualism
is not just the poor person's coherentism." The Journal of Philosophy91(12): 627-649.

Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: implications of cognitive science for ethics.Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press.

Nussbaum, M. C. (1988)."Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach." P. A. French, T. E. J.
Uehling and H. K. Wettstein. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press. 13: 32-53.

Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the limits of philosophy.Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

All the above is just the tip of a huge iceberg of controversy and writings, pro and con, on this subject.
This is why I started with my initial disclaimer.

Steven Ravett Brown