4.1 Moral Relativism

“Well, it’s moral for them.” – this seems to be where ethics starts and in many people’s minds where it ends. They have a right to their opinion about right and wrong and I have a right to mine, so let’s just leave it at that. Given what we have been looking at so far, not to mention all the unread pages still ahead, it is probably already apparent that this is not going to be the whole story about ethics. It is nevertheless a deeply rooted public assumption that ethical claims must be opinions, since they are clearly not factual claims and that seems to be the only other sort of claim we can possibly be making when we are using language to state things. That this assumption does not in fact hold up to closer inspection is what this chapter is going to argue.

Humans are incredibly diverse. We are diverse in appearance; we live in many ways in many different environments; we speak many different languages and embrace many different beliefs, practices and norms. People live in almost any conceivable physical environment, from dense tropical jungles to frozen polar deserts, from small villages with thatched huts to modern industrial cities made of concrete, steel and glass. In addition, our cultural practices and norms reveal perhaps an even greater diversity. Some human cultures place value on devotion to the group at the expense of individual liberty, others emphasize the unique individual while downplaying our relationship with others. Some cultures value continuity and tradition while others value innovation and rapid change. Some cultures value constant productive work while others place far more emphasis on living well and enjoying social interaction with others. Some cultures allow men and women to participate equally in all areas of social life, while others have entirely separate spheres for the two sexes. Recognition of this diversity is what has led some philosophers and social scientists to formulate a theory known as “cultural relativism,” which takes these casual observations and turns them into an explicit set of claims about the nature of value judgments. This theory is not only a popular theory about the nature of values. It also presents a challenge to the whole enterprise of philosophical ethics since it leads to the view that rational discussion and argument have little role to play in ethical decision making. Ethical decisions, opinions and judgments, according to cultural relativism, are always relative to the cultural environment within which they are made.

Cultural relativism is one variant of a broader position that holds that moral universals are impossible in principle and that moral judgments are closer to judgments of taste than they are to anything else. Just as with judgments of taste, according to this view, sometimes called “moral anti-realism” for its denial that there is any basis in reality for determining what is right and what is wrong, there is little point in arguing about moral issues since they reduce to personal preferences. I won’t go into the various versions of this idea here but will focus on the claim that moral values and judgments are essentially rooted in culture. The issues that this view raises, it seems to me at least are broadly the same as those faced by other variants and so dealing with cultural relativism will be enough for our purposes here.

So let us then look more carefully at what cultural relativism claims. It is a meta-ethical position that boils down to a few simple and seemingly obvious claims:

According to cultural relativism:

• Ethical or moral claims are not objective in the way factual claims are.
• There is no neutral standard for determining right or wrong.
• All value judgments are relative to our personal or cultural perspective.