{"agent_id":"rachels","agent_name":"James Rachels","slug":"cultural-relativism","label":"Cultural relativism: does the existence of moral disagreement across cultures entail that there is no objective moral truth, or is the *Cultural Differences Argument* invalid — with the apparent disagreement masking shared underlying values that any functioning culture must hold?","topic":"Cultural relativism","question":"Does the existence of moral disagreement across cultures entail that there is no objective moral truth, or is the *Cultural Differences Argument* invalid — with the apparent disagreement masking shared underlying values that any functioning culture must hold?","position":"The *Cultural Differences Argument* runs as follows. Premise: different cultures have different moral codes. Conclusion: there is no objective moral truth; right and wrong are culturally relative. The argument is invalid. The premise is a claim about what people *believe*; the conclusion is a claim about what *is* the case. The premise is a descriptive observation of disagreement; the conclusion is a metaethical thesis about the nature of morality. The inference does not go through — the existence of disagreement no more entails the absence of objective truth than the existence of disagreement about the shape of the earth (flat vs spherical) entailed the absence of objective truth about that question. Beyond the invalidity of the inference, the relativist position has further problems. It commits the moral reformer (Martin Luther King, the abolitionist, the suffragette) to being wrong by definition, since the reformer opposes the dominant moral view of his or her society. It commits us to the position that moral progress is impossible, since \"progress\" would require a standard external to the changing moral view. It mistakes the surface diversity of moral practices for diversity of underlying values — Eskimo infanticide reflects survival pressures in extreme conditions, not a value-disagreement about the importance of children's lives; the Greek and Callatian disagreement Herodotus describes was about the proper way to honor the dead, with the shared underlying value being that the dead must be honored. Some values must be shared by all functioning cultures: a culture cannot survive without rules against arbitrary killing of its members, without standards of truth-telling that allow communication, without care of the young who would otherwise perish. Less disagreement than there appears to be.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The *Cultural Differences Argument* runs as follows.","n":[]},{"t":"Premise: different cultures have different moral codes.","n":[]},{"t":"Conclusion: there is no objective moral truth; right and wrong are culturally relative.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The argument is invalid.","n":[]},{"t":"The premise is a claim about what people *believe*; the conclusion is a claim about what *is* the case.","n":[3]},{"t":"The premise is a descriptive observation of disagreement; the conclusion is a metaethical thesis about the nature of morality.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The inference does not go through — the existence of disagreement no more entails the absence of objective truth than the existence of disagreement about the shape of the earth (flat vs spherical) entailed the absence of objective truth about that question.","n":[]},{"t":"Beyond the invalidity of the inference, the relativist position has further problems.","n":[]}],[{"t":"It commits the moral reformer (Martin Luther King, the abolitionist, the suffragette) to being wrong by definition, since the reformer opposes the dominant moral view of his or her society.","n":[]},{"t":"It commits us to the position that moral progress is impossible, since \"progress\" would require a standard external to the changing moral view.","n":[]},{"t":"It mistakes the surface diversity of moral practices for diversity of underlying values — Eskimo infanticide reflects survival pressures in extreme conditions, not a value-disagreement about the importance of children's lives; the Greek and Callatian disagreement Herodotus describes was about the proper way to honor the dead, with the shared underlying value being that the dead must be honored.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Some values must be shared by all functioning cultures: a culture cannot survive without rules against arbitrary killing of its members, without standards of truth-telling that allow communication, without care of the young who would otherwise perish.","n":[]},{"t":"Less disagreement than there appears to be.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"Primary works: *The Elements of Moral Philosophy* Chapter 2 'The Challenge of Cultural Relativism' (the canonical and most-taught critique, in all editions through the 10th); the related discussion in *Elements* Chapter 3 'Subjectivism in Ethics' on the Linguistic Turn and the Rejection of Value; *Can Ethics Provide Answers?* Chapter 1 'Moral Philosophy as a Subversive Activity' on the role of philosophical critique in moral progress. Reception: Herodotus's Greek/Callatian funerary-practices example (the canonical historical case Rachels uses to introduce the relativist temptation); William Graham Sumner's *Folkways* (1906) as the canonical anthropological-relativist source; Ruth Benedict's *Patterns of Culture* (1934) as the mid-century classic; the contemporary popular relativism that takes 'cultures disagree' to entail 'no objective truth'; Bernard Williams's distinction between 'real confrontation' and 'notional confrontation' in cross-cultural moral disagreement; Martha Nussbaum's universalist-capability-based response to relativism; the contemporary debate over female genital cutting, honor killings, and other practices where Western critics' authority to judge is itself disputed.","works":["Primary works: *The Elements of Moral Philosophy* Chapter 2 'The Challenge of Cultural Relativism' (the canonical and most-taught critique, in all editions through the 10th)","the related discussion in *Elements* Chapter 3 'Subjectivism in Ethics' on the Linguistic Turn and the Rejection of Value","*Can Ethics Provide Answers?* Chapter 1 'Moral Philosophy as a Subversive Activity' on the role of philosophical critique in moral progress"],"reception":"Herodotus's Greek/Callatian funerary-practices example (the canonical historical case Rachels uses to introduce the relativist temptation); William Graham Sumner's *Folkways* (1906) as the canonical anthropological-relativist source; Ruth Benedict's *Patterns of Culture* (1934) as the mid-century classic; the contemporary popular relativism that takes 'cultures disagree' to entail 'no objective truth'; Bernard Williams's distinction between 'real confrontation' and 'notional confrontation' in cross-cultural moral disagreement; Martha Nussbaum's universalist-capability-based response to relativism; the contemporary debate over female genital cutting, honor killings, and other practices where Western critics' authority to judge is itself disputed.","status":"The cultural-relativism critique is Rachels's most-taught position and broadly accepted in contemporary analytic philosophy of ethics. The contested ground is not whether the inference from disagreement to relativism is valid (the consensus agrees with Rachels that it is not); it is whether the *cross-cultural moral judgment* the critique licenses is itself ethically justifiable, given historical Western moral imperialism and the genuine difficulty of judging practices from outside the cultures that produced them. The *Elements* Chapter 2 critique stands; the practical politics of when and how to criticize other cultures' practices is a related but distinct question that the chapter does not fully resolve. The position defends the critique as the standard *Elements* version, engages Sumner and Benedict by name, and acknowledges the hard cases (female genital cutting, honor killings) as genuinely difficult — not because relativism is true but because cross-cultural moral judgment requires care.","era":"1941-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy","page":"pp. 33–34","canonical":"","quote":"Should we *always* tolerate them? What if the norms of our society favor *not* tolerating them? For example, when the Nazi army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus beginning World War II, this was an intolerant action of the first order. But what if it conformed to Nazi ideals? A cultural relativist, it seems, cannot criticize the Nazis for being intolerant, if they're following their own moral beliefs.","label":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy, pp. 33–34"},{"n":2,"work":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy","page":"p. 37","canonical":"","quote":"These three consequences of Cultural Relativism have led many people to reject it. 2.5. Why There Is Less Disagreement Than There Seems to Be Cultural Relativism starts by observing that cultures differ dramatically in their views of right and wrong. But how much do they really differ? It is easy to exaggerate the differences. Often, what seems like a big difference turns out to be no difference at all.","label":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy, p. 37"},{"n":3,"work":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy","page":"pp. 34–35","canonical":"","quote":"In other words, even if the premise is true, the conclusion might still be false. The premise concerns what people *believe*—in some societies, people believe one thing; in other societies, people believe something else. The conclusion, however, concerns what is *really the case*. You cannot deduce what is true merely from knowing what people believe.","label":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy, pp. 34–35"},{"n":4,"work":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy","page":"pp. 31–32","canonical":"","quote":"There are many examples of this. Consider the Eskimos of the early and mid-20th century. The Eskimos are the native people of Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and northeastern Siberia, in Asiatic Russia. Today, none of these groups call themselves \"Eskimos,\" but historically the term has referred to that scattered Arctic population. Prior to the 20th century, the outside world knew little about them.","label":"The Elements of Moral Philosophy, pp. 31–32"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"active-and-passive-euthanasia","label":"Active and passive euthanasia: is there a morally significant difference between killing a patient and letting a patient die, or is the *Equivalence Thesis* — that if passive euthanasia is sometimes permissible, active euthanasia must sometimes be permissible too — the precise conclusion the *Bare Difference Argument* establishes against the AMA's 1973 doctrinal distinction?"},{"slug":"biographical-life-vs-biological-life","label":"Biographical life vs biological life: is the moral rule against killing the protection of biological functioning (the traditional sanctity-of-life view) or the protection of *lives* in the biographical sense — the sum of a person's aspirations, decisions, activities, projects, and human relationships — that some humans (Mrs Florian, Quinlan, Baby Jane Doe) do not have and that some non-human animals do?"},{"slug":"moral-individualism-and-the-critique-of-speciesism","label":"Moral individualism and the critique of speciesism: does the bare fact that one is a member of the human species entitle one to special moral consideration, or does *moral individualism* — the position that how an individual should be treated depends on his or her own particular characteristics rather than on group-membership — replace the discredited doctrine of human dignity once Darwinism has removed its metaphysical supports?"},{"slug":"ethical-egoism","label":"Ethical egoism: do the *Two Arguments Against Ethical Egoism* in *Elements* Chapter 5 and *Legacy of Socrates* Chapter 10 successfully refute the position that one ought always to act in one's own self-interest, given that the documented late-life qualification (Stuart's *Legacy* preface: in the 1990s Jim said he had lost confidence in the argument because he had changed his mind about the role of intuitions in moral theory) is treated as authorship-internal tension rather than retraction?"}]}