What Is Moral Relativism?

Students and selected segments of the general public are either very attracted to or very repelled by moral relativism – and very unlikely to change their minds. Before they make up their minds in the first place, however, they should be clear about what relativism is. Subsequent arguments pro or con may well be off the mark otherwise, and discussion thereby guaranteed to be futile. The clarification also needs to be effected because textbook definitions, which are what most people are exposed to, are helpful but not quite what's wanted.

1.

Different philosophers define relativism in different ways, though the definitions are (so to speak) near relatives. James Rachels, for example, after discussing a number of different theses that are often lumped together under the heading of relativism, states that moral relativism is the view that ‘there is no measure of right and wrong other than the standards of one's society’,¹ while Louis Pojman says that the relativist holds that ‘there are no universally valid moral principles, but rather… all moral principles are valid relative to culture or individual choice.’² In a similar vein, C.E. Harris takes relativism to be the view that ‘moral beliefs are true only relative to principles held by some group’.³ More formally, Bernard Rosen distinguishes direct from indirect relativism, with direct relativism being:

If any person a of culture C performs an action that is believed by (the majority of) people of culture C to be right (or obligatory), then the action is right (or obligatory),

and indirect relativism being:

If any proposed direct moral rule R [e.g., ‘don't kill’] is believed by the (majority of) people of C to be a direct moral rule, then R is a direct moral rule.⁴

Focusing on what he calls ‘Protagorean Relativism’, Emmett Barcalow says that, according to relativism, ‘Each society or culture has its own moral code and whatever a society's moral code says is right and wrong is right and wrong for that society.’⁵

2.

These sample formulations of relativism could be multiplied by several orders of magnitude without exhausting the definitions found in the literature, and even the few quoted aren't free from difficulty, or equivalent to one other. Rather than stop to survey and...