Question on Ethics - Cultural Relativism about Morality - Please Help?

Question

Any info is appreciated on question below:

State cultural relativism about morality. Also, explain how the relativist could reply to a few possible objections.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Cultural relativism is the view that a person should be judged by the standards of his own culture and not by the standards of an outside culture. In a way, it suggests that there is no universal 'right' or 'wrong'... just what a group of people agree on.

So, for example, it would be inappropriate to look down on medieval peasants because they bathed only once a year. That was the standard then.

One of the big objections brought up is that if nothing is universally considered wrong, then it might be argued that everything is right. This is MORAL relativism, though, not CULTURAL. A cultural relativist would say that even if a society's rules are completely arbitrary, they are important to the culture and help hold it together like a glue. You cannot disregard your culture's rules just because some other culture has different ones. The only choice you have it to leave the society and join one with rule more to your liking.

Another common objection is that if we decide other cultures' rules are intrinsically 'right', we would seem to have no justification for trying to change the ones we found objectionable. Like Nazi Germany's genocide, some African traditions of genital mutilation, and the like. Some anthropologists suggest that this is correct and not a problem - cultural relativism to them is a prinicple of science and not politics. Others suggest a slightly more complex paradigm - it may be that genocide is not intrinsically wrong, but then neither is an outside culture's desire to squash societies that commit genocide.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

an fairly solid question! I comprehend the innovations purely great yet with an uncertainty I say that i think in relativism. i be attentive to no longer all cultures proportion the comparable values, rituals, and so on yet i can't help yet sense that some are greater advantageous to others. to illustrate, I had to place in writing in an examination approximately this project how the cultures that practice woman "circumcision" are actually not any lesser than Western subculture and that Western subculture is faulty for judging them. although my intestine tells me that those cultures are barbaric and that i detect it thoroughly insulting to my subculture to be counseled that i'm equivalent to a pair subculture that has the practice wherein somebody holds down a pre-teenager woman and starts off dissecting her vagina. yet i can't have faith in an absolute morality for the reason that morality is likewise relative to the being that created it. What it sees as evil would no longer be evil to me, or others.

Answer 3

Although church has technically been separated from state since the Salem Witch Trials, morality ultimately affects decisions government officials have to make. This is both good and bad. In most cases it results in a satisfaction from the national populous, bad guy gets nagged, hero cop, 80's stuff. But sometimes the idea of morality ultimately affects progress,(Stem Cell Research) or it may contradict itself. For example, let's say a mental patient is raped in a hospital and gets pregnant in a state that has abortions illegally for mental patients. Morally, abortions are wrong, especially for a mental patient who may not even understand the situation, and yet, also morally wouldn't it be right for us to have the abortion and spare the babies life from knowing not only was he a mistake he was a product of rape? This is pretty complicated, and I would explain a solution, but I'd rather give you a source to start.

Answer 4

Cultural relativism is a lie. All morality comes from God and is as concrete and unchanging as He is.