Moral Relativism
Does morality vary between individuals and cultures, as ethical subjectivism and cultural relativism hold, or is there an objective right and wrong?

Arguments for Moral Relativism
A critical look at the argument from disagreement, the argument from flexibility, and the argument from tolerance.

Arguments Against Moral Relativism
Does moral relativism allow for cross-cultural comparisons, and can it account for moral progress and great reformers?

Moral Relativism
Is Morality Relative to Individuals or Cultures?

Moral relativism is the philosophical theory that morality is relative, that different moral truths hold for different people. It comes in two forms: ethical subjectivism and cultural relativism.

Ethical subjectivism holds that morality is relative to individuals; cultural relativism holds that it is relative to culture. Both deny the existence of moral absolutes, of objective moral truths that hold for all people in all places at all times.

According to moral relativism, it makes no sense to ask the abstract question whether a given act is good or bad. According to moral relativism, there is no goodness or badness in the abstract; there is only goodness or badness within a specified context. An act may thus be good for one person but bad for another, or good in one cultural setting but bad in another, but cannot be either good or bad full stop.

If moral relativism is true, therefore, then we should not ask whether an act is good or bad in the abstract, but only whether it is good or bad in a particular situation.

Some see moral relativism as an obvious truth, as undeniable; others see it as a threatening the moral foundation on which society is founded. This site explores the arguments for each perspective.

Arguments for Moral Relativism

Those who support moral relativism cite various proofs of its truth:

The argument from disagreement holds that moral relativism best accounts for the obvious fact that different individuals and cultures have different moral beliefs. Moral disagreement, on this view, demonstrates that morality is merely a product of personal opinion or culture, which is precisely the claim made by moral relativism.

The argument from flexibility holds that the alternative to moral relativism, moral absolutism, clearly breaks down in certain circumstances; there are exceptions to every moral rule, occasions on which, for example, lying, stealing, and even worse acts are morally justified. If there are no moral absolutes, though, it is argued, then moral relativism is true.

The argument from tolerance suggests that only moral relativism is consistent with the fact that we ought to be tolerant of those with whom we disagree, particularly those from different backgrounds to our own. Moral criticism, though is intolerant; we ought not to think that we or our culture is morally better than any other. We therefore ought to be moral relativists.

Arguments Against Moral Relativism

Those who reject relativism, of course, have arguments of their own:

In some cases, it does seem to be right to judge one culture to be morally superior to another, to make cross-cultural comparisons. To make cross-cultural comparisons, though, one needs a cross-cultural standard, which is precisely what moral relativism says there isn’t.

Not only does moral relativism entail that we cannot make legitimate moral comparisons of different cultures, it also entails that we cannot make legitimate moral comparisons of a single culture across time; we cannot judge whether a changing society is getting better or worse. Generally, though, we do think that we have made moral progress. Moral relativism, arguably, cannot make sense of this.

Further, when we consider the great reformers that have helped to bring about those changes that we take to constitute moral progress, e.g. the abolition of slavery, or granting the working classes and women the right to vote, we generally think these reformers are moral exemplars. According to cultural relativism, though, these great reformers were bad people; they acted in opposition to the values of their particular cultural contexts.

Moral relativism, because of its liberal implications for ethics, is a matter of great importance; what we think about moral relativism matters. This is one of those cases where philosophy has a practical impact on society as a whole. It is important that the theory, and its consequences, become more widely understood.