Ethical Reasoning for and Against Cultural Relativism
Cultural Relativism
Introduction
According to www.gotquestions.org/cultural-relavitsim, cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are related to the social norms and culture that one comes from. In other words, right and wrong or good and bad are culture-specific, meaning that what is reflected moral in one society may be reflected immoral in another. Therefore, since no collective standard of morality subsists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs or to hold one society as better than the other. Ethical relativism is closely related to cultural relativism in that ethical relativism views truth as capricious and not absolute. What establishes rights and wrongs is determined merely by the individual or by humanity. Truth is not objective, henceforth there can be no objective standard which applies to all cultures. It is a matter of personal opinion of what is right and wrong or good and bad, so no society can pass judgment on another society.
For Cultural Relativism Cultural relativism sees nothing essentially wrong (and nothing essentially good) with any cultural expression (www.gotquestions.org); this lack of official superiority or inferiority between cultures indicates a very positive result—little to no disputes. This leads to the conclusion that the answer to world peace is simply cultural relativism; if no judgments were ever passed on another culture simply because they were only practicing what they, as their own society, believes in then cultures would have fewer reasons to fight. There would still be issues regarding land, money, and power that complications would arise from, but levels of racism, stereotyping, bullying, and other social problems like discrimination would drop dramatically. Cultural relativism is a virtuous form of moral thinking because it allows people to think for themselves and to be who they were raised to be as this is only natural. This way of thinking enables one to follow their
Introduction
According to www.gotquestions.org/cultural-relavitsim, cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are related to the social norms and culture that one comes from. In other words, right and wrong or good and bad are culture-specific, meaning that what is reflected moral in one society may be reflected immoral in another. Therefore, since no collective standard of morality subsists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs or to hold one society as better than the other. Ethical relativism is closely related to cultural relativism in that ethical relativism views truth as capricious and not absolute. What establishes rights and wrongs is determined merely by the individual or by humanity. Truth is not objective, henceforth there can be no objective standard which applies to all cultures. It is a matter of personal opinion of what is right and wrong or good and bad, so no society can pass judgment on another society.
For Cultural Relativism Cultural relativism sees nothing essentially wrong (and nothing essentially good) with any cultural expression (www.gotquestions.org); this lack of official superiority or inferiority between cultures indicates a very positive result—little to no disputes. This leads to the conclusion that the answer to world peace is simply cultural relativism; if no judgments were ever passed on another culture simply because they were only practicing what they, as their own society, believes in then cultures would have fewer reasons to fight. There would still be issues regarding land, money, and power that complications would arise from, but levels of racism, stereotyping, bullying, and other social problems like discrimination would drop dramatically. Cultural relativism is a virtuous form of moral thinking because it allows people to think for themselves and to be who they were raised to be as this is only natural. This way of thinking enables one to follow their