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- Child Labor – Ethical relativism is evident in the varying perspectives on child labor. Some societies may consider it a necessary means of economic survival, while others view it as exploitative and a violation of children’s rights.
- Cultural Practices – Different cultures have unique customs and practices. For instance, some cultures may accept polygamy as a way of life, whereas in others, it’s considered unethical due to concerns about gender equality and individual rights.
- Capital Punishment – The acceptance or rejection of the death penalty varies across countries. Some see it as a just punishment for heinous crimes, while others view it as inhumane and a violation of the right to life.
- Animal Rights – Ethical relativism is clearly visible in the treatment of animals. Some individuals and cultures advocate for vegetarianism and the ethical treatment of animals, while others engage in hunting for sport without ethical qualms.
Examples of Ethical Relativism: Illustrated through diverse practices like dietary customs, business ethics, and views on public behavior, which differ across cultures. Causes of Ethical Relativism: Philosophical, historical, social, and cultural influences, such as colonial expansion and media exposure, contribute to the diversity of moral ...
- Overview
- Arguments for ethical relativism
- Ethical relativism and postmodernism
ethical relativism, the doctrine that there are no absolute truths in ethics and that what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person or from society to society.
(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)
Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century bc, advanced this view when he observed that different societies have different customs and that each person thinks his own society’s customs are best. But no set of social customs, Herodotus said, is really better or worse than any other. Some contemporary sociologists and anthropologists have argued along similar lines that morality, because it is a social product, develops differently within different cultures. Each society develops standards that are used by people within it to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable behaviour, and every judgment of right and wrong presupposes one or another of these standards. Thus, according to these researchers, if practices such as polygamy or infanticide are considered right within a society, then they are right “for that society”; and if the same practices are considered wrong within a different society, then those practices are wrong for that society. There is no such thing as what is “really” right, apart from these social codes, for there is no culture-neutral standard to which we can appeal to determine which society’s view is correct. The different social codes are all that exist.
A second type of argument for ethical relativism is due to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who claimed that moral beliefs are based on “sentiment,” or emotion, rather than on reason. This idea was developed by the 20th-century school of logical positivism and by later philosophers such as Charles L. Stevenson (1908–79) and R.M. Hare (1919–2002), who held that the primary function of moral language is not to state facts but to express feelings of approval or disapproval toward some action or to influence the attitudes and actions of others. On this view, known as emotivism, right and wrong are relative to individual preferences rather than to social standards.
Beginning in the 1960s and ’70s, ethical relativism was associated with postmodernism, a complex philosophical movement that questioned the idea of objectivity in many areas, including ethics. Many postmodernists regarded the very idea of objectivity as a dubious invention of the modern—i.e., post-Enlightenment—era. From the time of the Enlightenment, most philosophers and scientists believed that there is an objective, universal, and unchanging truth about everything—including science, ethics, religion, and politics—and that human reason is powerful enough to discover this truth. The eventual result of rational inquiry, therefore, was to be one science, one ethics, one religion, and one politics that would be valid for all people in all eras. According to postmodernism, however, the Enlightenment-inspired idea of objective truth, which has influenced the thinking of virtually all modern scientists and philosophers, is an illusion that has now collapsed.
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This development, they contend, is due largely to the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his followers. Nietzsche rejected the naive faith that human beliefs simply mirror reality. Instead, each of our beliefs is grounded in a “perspective” that is neither correct nor incorrect. In ethics, accordingly, there are no moral facts but only moral interpretations of phenomena, which give rise to different existing moral codes. We may try to understand these moralities by investigating their histories and the psychology of the people who embrace them, but there is no question of proving one or another of them to be “true.” Nietzsche argues, for example, that those who accept the Judeo-Christian ethical system, which he calls a “slave morality,” suffer from weak and fearful personalities. A different and stronger sort of person, he says, would reject this ethic and create his own values.
- Eating Pork. In Judaism, there is a rule against eating any animal that does not have split hooves and/or does not chew their cud. Leviticus 11:13 says, “You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud… And the pig, though it has a split hoof completely divided, does not chew the cud; they are unclean for you.”
- Tardiness. Scenario: Sam and Andrew are good friends, but Sam knows that Andrew is always late whenever they make plans to do something. Sam thinks it’s wrong that Andrew is such a tardy person; whereas Andrew doesn’t think much of it at all, and he thinks that Sam is being overly sensitive.
- Veganism. Some people live a vegan lifestyle because they consider it wrong to eat animals since animals are sentient creatures that are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain.
- Repaying Credit Card Bills. I have a friend who moved from England to Australia and left his credit card debts behind. He simply stopped paying them and the Credit Card companies couldn’t track him down as he didn’t provide a forwarding address.
Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one's culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES. By the end of this section you will discover: The meaning of ethical relativism and its two forms. How ethical relativism differs from ethical absolutism and ethical objectivism. Why ethical relativism is appealing to many. Strengths and weaknesses of ethical relativism.
Sep 11, 2015 · Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them.
