Moral Relativism
Why 'That's Just Their Culture' Is Both Obvious and Dangerous
Moral relativism starts as an act of humility and ends, if you're not careful, as a way of refusing to think.
The Idea
The core claim of moral relativism is deceptively simple: moral judgments are not universal truths but expressions of cultural, historical, or personal frameworks. What counts as just, cruel, or honourable varies across societies — and relativism says that variation isn't just a fact about human disagreement, it's a fact about morality itself. There is no view from nowhere, no cosmic scoreboard. This is genuinely important. It corrects the arrogance of assuming your society has solved ethics while others are simply behind. Anthropologists in the early twentieth century — Ruth Benedict in particular — pushed this view hard, partly as a corrective to colonial attitudes that ranked cultures on a single ladder with European norms at the top. The relativist instinct was, in that context, an ethical achievement. But the position contains a trap. If morality is entirely relative to culture, then you cannot coherently criticise any cultural practice — including genocide, slavery, or the systematic oppression of women — as wrong in any meaningful sense. You can only say: 'That conflicts with my framework.' The Nazi regime had a culture. So did the antebellum American South. Relativism, taken seriously, leaves you without the vocabulary to object to either. The more honest position most philosophers land on is something like moral pluralism: values differ across cultures in genuine and important ways, moral humility is warranted, and yet some ethical claims — particularly those concerning extreme cruelty or the denial of basic dignity — resist reduction to mere cultural preference. The challenge is knowing where that line falls without simply reinstating your own assumptions as universal law.
In the World
In the early 1990s, the Chinese government hosted a series of international human rights conferences in which it repeatedly invoked moral relativism — not as an academic position, but as a diplomatic shield. Human rights, officials argued, were a Western imposition, incompatible with Asian values and traditions of collective harmony. Individual rights, they said, were not universal but culturally specific — a product of Enlightenment Europe with no necessary claim on China's governance. This was relativism deployed with precision. And it made many Western delegates profoundly uncomfortable, because they had no clean rebuttal. If they insisted that individual rights were universal, were they not doing exactly what their own postcolonial guilt had taught them to avoid — projecting their values outward? Philosopher Amartya Sen, who grew up in India and was deeply invested in not being lectured to by the West, dismantled this argument methodically. He showed that the 'Asian values' framing was itself a selective construction — one that erased centuries of internal debate, dissent, and pluralism within Asian philosophical traditions. Indian, Chinese, and Japanese thought contained rich strands of individualism, tolerance, and democratic reasoning long before European contact. The appeal to cultural uniformity was, Sen argued, not a defence of diversity but a suppression of it — a way of silencing internal dissidents by claiming their objections were un-Asian. Relativism, it turned out, could be wielded by the powerful against the vulnerable just as easily as by the humble against the arrogant.
Why It Matters
Most of us arrive at moral relativism not through philosophy but through lived experience — travel, friendship across difference, the dawning realisation that the way you were raised is not the only way. That journey is genuinely valuable. It loosens certainty that was never earned, and it builds a capacity for listening that moral dogmatism forecloses. But the endpoint matters. Relativism as a posture of curiosity and humility is a beginning. Relativism as a conclusion — as a reason to stop judging, to treat all practices as equally beyond evaluation — is where it curdles. The more useful skill is learning to distinguish between the moral disagreements that reflect genuine plurality of values worth respecting, and those that are better understood as injustice wearing the costume of culture. That distinction is hard. It requires exactly the kind of careful, situated reasoning that both rigid universalism and easy relativism let you skip. The question moral relativism actually pushes you toward isn't 'Who am I to judge?' — it's 'On what grounds am I judging, and have I examined those grounds honestly?'
A Question to Ponder
Is there a practice somewhere in the world — or in your own culture — that you currently defend as 'just how things are done' but would condemn immediately if you encountered it somewhere else?
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