Imagine a society of farmers who, for some reason, have a total disinterest in the arts, in science (except in such products as assist them in farming), in religion, in short, in everything spiritual or cultural. (I don't mean to suggest that actual peasant societies are or ever have been like this.) These people need not be imagined as being bad people; imagine them as cooperative, pacific, reasonably kind to one another, if you like. What I wish the reader to imagine is that their interests are limited to such minimal goals as getting enough to eat, warm shelter, and such simple pleasures as getting drunk together in the evenings. In short, imagine them as living a relatively animal' existence, and as not wishing to live any other kind of existence.
Such people are not immoral. There is nothing impermissible about their way of life. But our natural tendency (unless we are entranced with Ethical Relativism) is to say that their way of life is in some way contemptible. It is totally lacking in what Aristotle called 'nobility'. They are living the lives of swine – amiable swine, perhaps, but still swine, and a pig's life is no life for a man.
At the same time – and this is the rub – we are disinclined to say the pig-men are in any way irrational. This may be the result of our long acculturation in the Benthamite use of 'rational' and ‘irrational', but, be that as it may, it is our present disposition. The lives of the pig-men are not as good as they might be, we want to say, but they are not irrational.
We do not want to say that it is just a matter of taste whether one lives a better or worse life. We don't see how we can say that it is rational to choose the better life and irrational to choose the worse. Yet not saying some such things seems precisely to be saying that 'it's all relative'; the ground crumbles beneath our feet.
Perhaps some of the corrections to Benthamite psychology suggested by Bernard Williams will help with this case. Let us assume the pig-men are born with normal human potential (if they aren't, then their lives aren't worse than they might be, and we are not justified in feeling contempt, but only, at most, pity). Then they might be led to appreciate artistic, scientific, and spiritual aspects of life; to live more truly human lives, so to speak. And if any of them did this, they would doubtless prefer those lives (even though they might be less fun) to the lives they are now living. People who live swinish lives feel shame when they come to live more human lives; people who live more human lives do not feel ashamed that they did when they sink into swinishness. These facts give one grounds for thinking that the pig-men are making the sort of error, the sort of cognitive short-fall, that Williams discussed; grounds for thinking that they have overlooked alternative goals, and certainly grounds for thinking that they have never made vivid to themselves what realization of those alternative goals would be like. In short, one cannot really say that they have chosen the worse life; for they never had an adequate conception of the better.
– Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981)