People in different times and places have held very different moral views about marriage, food, punishment, gender and the treatment of outsiders. Faced with this variety, many conclude that morality is simply relative to culture: what is right is whatever a society approves. This view is called moral relativism. It deserves careful attention, because it gets some important things right and some important things wrong.
An ancient observation
The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BCE) told a story about the Persian king Darius. Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their fathers' dead bodies; they said no amount of money would do it. He then asked members of an Indian people, the Callatians, who did eat their dead parents, what it would take for them to burn the bodies as the Greeks did. They cried out in horror. Herodotus concluded, borrowing a line from the poet Pindar, that custom is king of all.
Two different claims
- Descriptive relativism is the factual claim that moral beliefs differ across cultures. This is plainly true to some extent.
- Normative relativism is the much stronger claim that what is actually right or wrong depends on what one's culture approves, so there is no standard beyond culture by which to judge.
The first does not prove the second. People once disagreed about the shape of the earth, but that did not make its shape relative to culture. Disagreement shows that people believe different things; it does not show that no belief is better than another.
What relativism gets right
- Humility. Many things people once called universal morality turned out to be local custom. We should be cautious before assuming our own habits are the moral law.
- Context. The same value can require different practices in different settings. Respect for the dead is shown by burial in one place and cremation in another; the Greeks and Callatians may have shared the value while differing in practice.
- Opposition to arrogance. Modern relativism arose partly as a reaction against colonial attitudes that treated other cultures as simply inferior.
The problems
- The reformer problem. If right simply means “approved by my society,” then anyone who challenges their society's morality is wrong by definition. Abolitionists who opposed slavery where it was legal and approved would have been mistaken. Most people find that conclusion unacceptable.
- No moral progress. If each culture's standards are correct for it, then ending slavery or extending the vote to women was not progress, only change. Yet we seem to judge these as genuine improvements.
- Which culture? People belong to many overlapping groups: nation, religion, profession, generation. Relativism does not say which group's approval decides.
- The tolerance trap. Many relativists argue that because morality is relative, we should tolerate other cultures. But “everyone should be tolerant” is itself a universal moral claim. If a culture approves of intolerance, consistent relativism gives no reason to object.
Disagreement may be smaller than it looks
Many moral differences rest on different factual or religious beliefs rather than different values. A society that believes certain spirits must be appeased may share our concern for welfare while disagreeing about what threatens it. Anthropologists also find broad agreement across cultures on some core norms, such as caring for children, forbidding murder within the group, and valuing reciprocity, even when the details vary.
Subjectivism
A related view, individual subjectivism, says right and wrong depend on each person's own feelings. It faces similar problems and one more: it makes genuine moral disagreement impossible, since two people with different feelings would simply be reporting different facts about themselves, not contradicting each other.
Rejecting relativism does not require certainty, only the belief that some moral claims are better supported than others.
Worked example: foot-binding and reform
For roughly a thousand years, many families in China bound the feet of young girls, breaking and folding the toes to produce very small feet considered beautiful and a sign of good marriage prospects. The practice caused lifelong pain and disability. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese reformers formed anti-foot-binding societies, whose members pledged not to bind their daughters' feet and not to let their sons marry women with bound feet. Within a few decades the practice had largely disappeared.
How should we describe this? A strict normative relativist must say that foot-binding was right in China while it was approved, and became wrong once opinion changed. The reformers, on that view, were simply wrong until they won. Most people find that description strange. The reformers seem to have been right, and right before the majority agreed with them.
Yet relativism's caution still has a point. Some outsiders who condemned the practice did so with contempt for Chinese culture as a whole, and lasting change depended heavily on Chinese reformers, people who understood why families felt pressure to bind. The families who bound their daughters' feet generally wanted good lives for them; they shared the value of caring for children while being trapped in a harmful custom.
The balanced lesson: we can judge a practice harmful without judging a whole culture inferior, and the most effective moral criticism often appeals to values the culture already holds.