Cultural Relativism is the belief that all moral beliefs are relative and depend on culture. I mean relative in the sense that the belief can neither be proven true or false. I will show the flaws in Cultural Relativism by showing that there is an objective moral standard.
Before I get started I believe that it is necessary to define what is a culture and what an objective moral standard is. A culture is the sum of all the practices and beliefs that are passed down generationally through a group of people. As another means of defining culture I will use culture and society interchangeably through this paper. An objective moral standard is a universal moral belief that can be proven true or false. For example, the wrongness of stealing would be a objective moral standard if the wrongness of stealing was a universally proven belief. These definitions will be important in understanding some of my arguments against Cultural Relativism. In order to refute Cultural Relativism we also need to realize that we are looking at societies as a whole or universally. I will explain the basis for Cultural Relativism, the Cultural Differences Argument.
According to James Rachels the Cultural Differences Argument is defined as “different cultures have different moral beliefs (the premise), therefore, there is no objective “truth” in morality. (the conclusion) Right and wrong are only matters of opinion, and opinions are relative.” (Rachels 3) If we can prove the Cultural Differences Argument to be true then the following claims are also true:
Truths of morality are relative to cultures.
There is no objective moral standard that can be used to judge one culture better than another.
Since moral beliefs are relative to cultures; our beliefs do not carry any special status.
There is no objective moral standard to judge ethics by.
The moral beliefs of a culture is the only way of judging what is permittable in a culture.
It would be arrogant to judge any other culture's moral beliefs. (Rachels 2,3)
A good example to show how the Cultural Differences Argument is supposed to work is the one in Rachels's article where he talks about the difference between the Greek and Callatian burial practices. The Greeks burned their dead on the funeral pyre; while the Callatians ate their dead. These were both respected practices in their cultures, but the Greeks viewed the Callatian practice as disgusting, and likewise, the Callatians viewed the Greeks. According to Cultural Relativists, neither of them were necessarily wrong and they shouldn't have judged each other's culture. Another good example from Rachels's article is the Eskimo's use of infanticide. The Eskimos used infanticide to control the population and guarantee the survival of their people. We do not. Since the Eskimo's morality appears so radically different from ours, it appears that Cultural Differences Argument holds true.
People living in a tolerant society would gladly like to accept the belief in Cultural Relativism, because they do not want to be the judge of someone else's culture. Relativism gives tolerant people the right to sit back and not get involved with moral issues. Relativism tries to make the nonrelativist look arrogant and intolerant, while the relativist then gets a nice pat on the back for being so tolerant of other culture's moral beliefs whether or not they are true. By saying that a nonrelativist is intolerant the relativist does not hold up to their own beliefs. However, there are several problems with accepting that Cultural Relativism is true so I do not need to continue on this issue.
Before I flesh out the details of the problems with the Cultural Differences Argument I want to show that relativists are making a very strong claim in believing that all morality is relative. The claim is a strong one to make, because we would have to assume that in every circumstance morality is relative. This logic is flawed due to the fact that the basis for the first premise is held up by a generalization. My job in proving this belief wrong will be easy, because there only needs to be one objective moral standard to show that the Cultural Differences Argument is unsound. Now to discuss in detail the reasons why the Cultural Differences Argument is unsound.
Another way to state the Cultural Differences Argument is to say that because cultures' beliefs differ we can infer that there is no objective moral standard and that culture defines morality. The hole in this logic is that we cannot infer simply due to the fact that some moral beliefs are relative that all moral beliefs are relative and that is what the Cultural Differences Argument intends to accomplish. I believe this to be very arrogant. If there is one objective moral standard than not all moral beliefs are relative and the Cultural Differences Argument is unsound.
The purpose of this paper is to show you that at least one objective moral standard exists. I will show you this through examples of morals that need to exist in order that society can exist. Murder is detrimental to society, because a society cannot exist for long if murder is considered a good practice. People in that society would be forced to become as self sufficient as they can. Trusting in other people could possibly get them killed. Eventually, small groups of people within that culture would form a new culture that would declare murder as morally unjust in order that the members of that sub-culture could stay secure. This example shows that murder breaks the fabric that holds societies together and that there has to be an objective moral standard about murder. Another good example is that of lying. If a culture values lying as a good standard to live by then that culture could not communicate with itself. Each person in this hypothetical society would have no reason to believe what another person in that society says. Without trust the society would fall apart. One more example that follows under the same logic as the murder example is rape. If rape was encouraged in a society and held as a cultural norm people would become scared of one another and trust would be lost. As we have seen in my other examples the society would then fall apart, until sub-cultures emerged that did not condone rape. All of these examples conclusively show that objective moral truths exist. The reason why all of these show that Cultural Relativism is a false belief is not because they exist but because they prevent a relativist from saying that all morals are relative. A society could not exist for very long that values any of the above examples as morally good.
If my last argument wasn't convincing enough for you consider this: a relativist cannot even state that relativism is true. If relativism were true than the belief in relativism would also be relative by the definition of relativism. Cultural Relativism fails by its own standards. Also, relativists tend to believe that relativism is the superior way to view the world. We have already shown that if the relativist claim were true than judging non-relativists would be ignorant. The relativist can neither claim that relativism is true or that relativism is superior to other views.
To lead into my next argument I will give an example. Let's say that me and my friend are discussing the moral implications of illegal downloading. I say that illegal downloading is morally wrong, but my friend says that illegal downloading is nothing but sharing, and we both agree that sharing is not morally wrong. We then begin to discuss whether or not the sharing aspect makes it good. We realize that we must make a moral judgment. We are allowed to believe either that downloading is good or bad, but it does not matter which outcome we get when asking this question; that is beside my point. My point is that we should be allowed to make moral judgments.
Moral judgments almost come second nature to us. And if we cannot judge what is good can we ever progress morally? This is a problem for Cultural Relativism. In human history, it appears that we have matured morally over time. How could we if we are not allowed to judge one set of moral practices as worse than another? One belief would never be better than another. We couldn't say that our morality is better now than it was two hundred years ago. It would be a logical fallacy to say that we morally progressed. Although, we can look to history to show that there has been moral progression. Our culture started out as a culture that did not allow voting rights to minorities or women, that systematically murdered thousands of Native Americans, and that enslaved minorities. Any common man will say that we have morally progressed since two hundred years ago, since none of these practices remain in our culture.
One objection a relativist can raise to my last point is that not all societies are progressing morally. First off, I will say that the relativist could not make this judgment if cultures were relative. Secondly, in order to make that judgment implies that we have a objective moral standard to judge it by. The fact that a society is morally progressing or morally digressing is irrelevant. Both could be true and that fact does nothing to improve the relativists argument, and does nothing to disprove that objective moral standards exist. All this logic leads to is the belief that cultures are either running toward or running away from an objective moral standard.
We then begin to realize that we must never be at the objective moral standard. Because our definition of morality is always in constant change. Our beliefs about morality are relative, but that is not what defines morality. As I said earlier, we say things like “we are better off then we were two hundred years ago”. We could make that statement if morality was relative, but we would not be justified in our belief. I believe that we are justified in saying that we are better off then we were two hundred ago, because the benefit it has had on our society. If relativism were true we would never be better or worse off than we our now. Appealing to simplicity, it seems as though we are better off so relativism fails on this account as well.
Since we have proved that there is a objective moral standard. We in turn have proved Cultural Relativism false, because any objective moral standard is contradictory to the entire idea of moral relativism. Since we know that objective moral standards exist we can conclude that:
Not all truths of morality are relative to cultures.
There is an objective moral standard which can be used to judge a culture's moral beliefs.
A culture carries a heightened status if that culture is more in line with the objective moral standard.
There is an objective moral standard which applies to all cultures at all times.
Objective moral truths decide what is morally right in a culture.
There is no arrogance in making moral judgments.
I have successfully proven that the Cultural Differences Argument is unsound by showing that an objective moral standard exists. We can conclude that Cultural Relativism is a self contradictory belief to hold, because it fails to account for objective moral truths, it fails to give an account for why we believe we have a right to judge by moral standards, and it fails to explain how relativism itself is not relative.
Thank you for reading.
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