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?

Great Reformers

A final argument against cultural relativism is that cannot account for the existence of great moral reformers. When we consider those people 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, excellent people.

According to cultural relativism, though, these great reformers were bad people. According to cultural relativism, moral goodness consists in acting in the ways prescribed by the values of one’s own culture. Those who seek to change those values, then, are bad people. Martin Luther King, Emily Pankhurst, and Gandhi, all of whom opposed existing values and sought to improve them, must all be judged by cultural relativists to have acted immorally. Those who we tend to think of as heroes must, if cultural relativism is true, be condemned.

This, many people think, is the final nail in the coffin of moral relativism.