Cultural Relativism
Do Moral Truths Vary Between Cultures?
Cultural relativism holds that moral truths vary from one culture to another. According to cultural relativism, the fact that a given practice is morally wrong in one culture does not entail that it is morally wrong in another. This is both a strength and a weakness of the theory.
It is a strength of the theory insofar as attempts to impose our moral standards upon other cultures appear to be unjustified. Such judgements often seem to be mere cultural prejudice, attempts to impose a set of arbitrary values upon those who do not share those values. This is a form of cultural imperialism.
It is a weakness, however, to the extent that it sometimes seems right to judge other cultures by our standards. Some cultures do seem to be morally inferior to others, and in such cases it seems right to judge those cultures not by their own moral standards but by ours. Cultural relativism does not allow us to do this.
Relativist theories may vary in what they take to determine morality. For some relativists, it is majority opinion that is important; for others, typical practice may effect moral values. For all relativists, though, the fundamental claim is the same: morality is merely a product of culture, and there are therefore no objective moral truths, only truths relative to specific cultural settings.
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