4.5 Chapter Glossary

Argument from Diversity – A defense of relativism that argues that because people have different views about right and wrong, therefore, there are no universal moral standards.

Argument from Learning – The defense of relativism that suggests that because we learn our moral values from our cultural environment, morality must be relative to culture.

Argument from Tolerance – A defense of relativism that is based on the idea that people mean different things when they use moral terms.

Cultural Relativism – The position that all moral rules are derived from culture.

Descriptive Relativism – The idea that there are fundamental disagreements about morality between cultures and individuals that are pervasive and cannot be resolved.

Moral Anti-Realism – A meta-ethical doctrine that denies the existence of objective moral values or normative facts.

Moral Realism – The idea that there are moral facts that exist independently of the human mind and that people can make true or false statements about them.

Normative Realism – A theory that claims that there are no universal moral principles and that the rightness or wrongness of actions varies from society to society.