Moral relativism is at once one of the most intuitively appealing and philosophically contested positions in ethics. Its appeal is easy to understand: in a world of genuine cultural diversity, the claim that one particular cultural moral framework has access to objective moral truth can seem arrogant, and the willingness to suspend such claims in favor of respectful engagement with other ways of life seems both intellectually humble and politically admirable. The history of Western civilization's confident judgments about the inferiority of other cultures — judgments that were used to justify slavery, colonialism, and genocide — provides ample reason to be suspicious of moral universalism.
But the philosophical difficulties with moral relativism are equally serious. If moral judgments are true only relative to a cultural framework, then the abolition of slavery was not a moral improvement but merely a change — the slave societies of the antebellum American South were not wrong, merely operating under different standards from those that replaced them. The suffragettes who argued that women deserved equal political rights were not making a true claim but merely expressing the values of their own evolving cultural niche. The Nuremberg trials were not genuine justice but the imposition of the victors' moral standards on the defeated. These conclusions strike most people as not merely counterintuitive but morally catastrophic, and the difficulty of avoiding them while maintaining normative relativism is the central challenge the position faces.
The history of moral relativism as a philosophical and anthropological doctrine is intertwined with the development of anthropology as a discipline, with political debates about colonialism and cultural imperialism, and with metaethical questions about the nature and status of moral facts. Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict developed the cultural relativism that became influential in twentieth-century anthropology partly as a corrective to the racist and evolutionary theories that had preceded them. But the philosophical extrapolation from the anthropological observation of moral diversity to the normative thesis that no cross-cultural moral judgment is possible involves additional philosophical work that has proven difficult to complete.
"Morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits." — Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934)
Key Definitions
Descriptive moral relativism — The empirical claim that different cultures hold different and sometimes incompatible moral beliefs. A sociological observation that is largely uncontested.
Normative moral relativism — The philosophical claim that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a cultural framework, and that there is no culture-independent standard by which competing moral systems can be evaluated.
Metaethical relativism — The position that there are no objective moral facts — that moral claims do not express propositions that are true or false independently of the attitudes of the groups making them.
Ethnocentrism — The tendency to evaluate other cultures according to the standards and values of one's own culture, typically with the implicit assumption that one's own standards are universal and superior.
Moral realism — The view that there are objective moral facts — that some moral claims are true and others false, independently of what any individual or culture believes — and that moral disagreement is in principle resolvable by appeal to these facts.
Cultural relativism — The methodological principle (used in anthropology) that practices and beliefs should be understood within their own cultural context before being evaluated, without the assumption that the observer's own cultural standards provide the universal measure.
The Three Types of Moral Relativism Compared
| Type | Claim | Who Holds It | What It Entails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Descriptive relativism | Different cultures hold different moral beliefs | Virtually everyone | Nothing by itself about objective truth |
| Normative relativism | Moral judgments are only true relative to a framework | Many non-philosophers; some philosophers | No cross-cultural moral criticism is valid |
| Metaethical relativism | There are no objective moral facts | Some metaethicists (Mackie, Blackburn) | Moral language does not describe reality |
| Cultural relativism (methodological) | Understand practices in their own context first | Most anthropologists | A research method, not a moral position |
| Individual relativism | Moral judgments are only true relative to individuals | Few serious philosophers | Any individual's moral views are equally valid |
Origins and Anthropological Foundations
Franz Boas and the Critique of Evolutionary Anthropology
The late nineteenth-century anthropology that Franz Boas encountered when he entered the field was dominated by evolutionary frameworks that ranked human cultures on a single developmental scale. Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) divided human social development into stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Herbert Spencer applied Darwinian concepts to social development, generating the doctrine of social Darwinism. These frameworks positioned Western industrial societies at the pinnacle of human development and relegated all other societies to earlier stages, providing apparent scientific warrant for colonial domination.
Boas, who was born in Germany and trained in physics and geography before turning to anthropology, challenged this framework on both empirical and methodological grounds. His field research among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Canada, beginning in the 1880s, convinced him that cultural practices could not be explained by position on a single developmental scale but required understanding in terms of the specific historical, environmental, and social circumstances of each culture. The complexity, sophistication, and internal coherence of cultures that evolutionary anthropologists had labeled "primitive" was evident to Boas from direct engagement.
Boas's methodological principle — that every culture must be understood from within its own framework, in terms of its own logic and values, rather than measured against an external standard — became the foundation of what his students would develop into cultural relativism. His explicit anti-racist commitments, expressed in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and amplified in subsequent decades, connected the methodological point to a political stance: the claim that some cultures or races are inherently superior had no scientific foundation and served primarily to justify exploitation.
Ruth Benedict and Patterns of Culture
Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) is the most widely read statement of cultural relativism and one of the most influential books in twentieth-century American intellectual culture. Benedict argued that each culture is a coherent whole — what she called a "pattern" or "configuration" — organized around a distinctive set of values, and that the proper analogy is to individual personality rather than to mechanical structure.
Benedict compared three cultures to illustrate the point: the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, characterized as "Apollonian" (valuing sobriety, cooperation, and moderation); the Dobu islanders of Melanesia, characterized as suspicious and competitive; and the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest, characterized as "Dionysian" (valuing emotional excess, rivalry, and displays of wealth). Her explicit argument was that what counts as normal or abnormal behavior, admirable or pathological character, varies systematically across these cultural patterns — and that there is no culture-neutral standard by which to adjudicate between them.
The anthropological and philosophical reception of Patterns of Culture was mixed. Critics noted that Benedict's characterizations were highly selective and that her generalizations about whole cultures from limited fieldwork were methodologically problematic. The philosophical conclusion — normative relativism — was contested by philosophers who noted that the descriptive diversity she documented did not entail that no cross-cultural moral judgments were possible.
The Philosophical Structure of Relativism
The Argument from Disagreement
The most influential philosophical argument for normative moral relativism appeals to the fact of persistent cross-cultural moral disagreement. If there were objective moral truths, the argument runs, we would expect moral beliefs to converge over time through reason and evidence, in the way that scientific beliefs about the physical world have converged. Instead, cross-cultural moral disagreement persists and in some domains may be deepening. The best explanation for this persistent disagreement is that there are no objective moral facts to converge on — moral beliefs are expressions of cultural values, not discoveries of moral reality.
The argument faces several objections. First, the analogy with scientific convergence is imperfect: scientific convergence occurred precisely because scientific communities developed methods for testing claims against evidence and revising beliefs in light of results. If moral inquiry has not achieved similar convergence, this may reflect inadequate methods rather than the absence of moral facts. Second, much apparent cross-cultural moral disagreement may reflect disagreement about facts rather than values: many societies that practice female genital cutting do so in the belief that it is beneficial for women's health and social integration — beliefs that may be false. If both societies agreed on the facts, they might agree on the moral conclusion. Third, moral progress within cultures suggests that moral beliefs can be revised in light of reasons, which is more consistent with moral realism than with relativism.
Tolerance and the Self-Undermining Argument
The argument from tolerance — that moral relativism supports the value of respectful tolerance of cultural diversity — faces a fatal problem: it is self-undermining. If normative relativism is correct, then tolerance is not an objective moral requirement but merely a value held by some cultures (those that have adopted relativist frameworks). The relativist cannot consistently argue that other cultures ought to be more tolerant, since "ought" claims are themselves relative to cultural frameworks. A culture that is genuinely intolerant and ethnocentric, on the relativist's own principles, is simply expressing its cultural values and cannot be criticized for failing to live up to a universal standard of tolerance.
James Rachels noted this problem in "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism" (1986): relativism, if consistently applied, removes the basis for criticizing any cultural practice on moral grounds, including practices that virtually everyone finds morally abhorrent — ritual torture, female infanticide, institutionalized slavery. The relativist who says these practices are wrong is inconsistently invoking a universal standard they have officially renounced; the relativist who says they are merely different is accepting conclusions that seem morally catastrophic.
Moral Relativism and Moral Progress
The Progressive Challenge
The most powerful challenge to normative moral relativism comes from our deeply held conviction that moral progress is real. The abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, the prohibition of torture as official state policy, the development of international human rights law — these represent, most people believe, genuine moral improvements, not merely changes in moral fashion. On normative relativism, this belief is systematically mistaken: what we call moral progress is only the replacement of one cultural moral system with another, and there are no cross-cultural standards that could make the replacement an improvement.
Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle (1981) and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) both argue for a conception of moral progress as genuine, driven by the extension of empathy and moral reasoning beyond in-group boundaries. Pinker's data on the historical decline of violence, when measured as rates rather than absolute numbers, suggests that the human moral psychology has genuinely changed over centuries — and that these changes represent progress by standards that are not merely parochial.
The relativist has responses available. Progress within a tradition can be understood as the more consistent application of that tradition's own values — the abolition of slavery was demanded by the application of principles of human dignity and liberty that the slaveholding societies themselves officially endorsed. On this view, moral progress is intra-systemic rather than cross-cultural. But the problem is that the moral reformers who achieved these advances typically appealed to universal principles that they held to be binding on all cultures, not merely to the standards of their own tradition.
Alternative Frameworks for Cross-Cultural Ethics
The Capabilities Approach
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed the capabilities approach as a framework for evaluating human development and social arrangements that is neither imperialist universalism nor normative relativism. Rather than specifying a particular conception of the good life, the capabilities approach identifies a set of central human capabilities — the ability to live a life of normal human length; to have good physical health; to use one's senses and imagination; to experience emotions; to exercise practical reason; to affiliate with others and to live with concern for other species and the environment — whose development is required for any minimally dignified human life.
Nussbaum's version of the approach, developed in Women and Human Development (2000) and Creating Capabilities (2011), is explicitly non-relativist: practices that systematically deprive people of basic capabilities — female genital cutting, restrictions on women's education and mobility, discrimination based on caste or sexual orientation — can be criticized on grounds that apply across cultural contexts without claiming that every aspect of Western liberal culture is universally valid. The capabilities approach provides a floor of requirements while leaving substantial space for cultural variation above that floor.
Overlapping Consensus
John Rawls's approach in The Law of Peoples (1999) distinguished between reasonable pluralism — the diversity of comprehensive moral and religious doctrines that characterizes any free society — and fundamental human rights. Rawls argued that while a global "liberal" consensus is neither achievable nor appropriate as an aim, an overlapping consensus around a limited set of basic human rights — prohibitions on slavery, torture, genocide, and arbitrary killing — can be justified from within many different cultural and religious frameworks.
This approach is philosophically interesting because it does not require a universal foundation for human rights but only convergence from different starting points. It is also politically pragmatic: rather than demanding that all cultures adopt a comprehensive liberal political philosophy, it identifies the minimum conditions for international order and cross-cultural moral discourse.
Disagreeing Across Cultures
The Anthropological Hermeneutic Circle
Anthropological fieldwork has produced an important practical insight about cross-cultural moral disagreement: apparent disagreements often dissolve under close examination. James Rachels and others have noted that many practices that seem morally different across cultures reflect different factual beliefs rather than different underlying values. A society that leaves elderly people to die alone does not necessarily value the elderly less than one that provides elaborate care; they may believe that the dying prefer solitude, or that the afterlife is more important than the dying process, or that resources are needed for children. Identify the shared underlying values and the practices can be evaluated against them.
When genuine value disagreement remains after factual clarification, the appropriate response is not the relativist suspension of judgment but moral argument: the presentation of reasons, the identification of inconsistencies, the appeal to analogy, the exploration of implications. Moral argument across cultural lines is possible and has been historically effective — the international abolitionist movement, the global women's suffrage movement, the post-Holocaust development of international human rights law all involved successful cross-cultural moral persuasion.
References
- Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin.
- Boas, F. (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. Macmillan.
- Rachels, J. (1986). The challenge of cultural relativism. In The Elements of Moral Philosophy. McGraw-Hill.
- Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press.
- Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Anchor Books.
- Rawls, J. (1999). The Law of Peoples. Harvard University Press.
- Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin.
- Singer, P. (1981). The Expanding Circle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters (Vols. 1-2). Oxford University Press.
- Wong, D. B. (2006). Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. Oxford University Press.
- Moody-Adams, M. M. (1997). Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Harvard University Press.
- Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. Viking.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between descriptive and normative moral relativism?
Descriptive relativism is the uncontested empirical observation that different cultures hold different moral beliefs. Normative relativism is the philosophical claim that moral judgments are only true relative to a cultural framework — a much stronger position that does not follow logically from the descriptive one.
What is cultural relativism in anthropology and how did Boas and Benedict develop it?
Boas argued that every culture must be understood on its own terms rather than ranked against Western standards — a reaction against racist evolutionary anthropology. Benedict extended this in Patterns of Culture (1934), arguing each culture is a coherent whole. Both were advocating a methodological principle, not necessarily normative relativism.
Can moral progress be real if moral relativism is true?
No, and this is the sharpest objection to normative relativism. If moral judgments are only true relative to a framework, then abolishing slavery was not an improvement but merely a change. Most people find that conclusion unacceptable — moral reformers like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King appealed to universal principles, not just local standards.
What are the main arguments for moral relativism?
Three main arguments: the argument from disagreement (persistent cross-cultural disagreement suggests no objective moral facts), the argument from social construction (moral norms are products of historical circumstances, not discovered truths), and the argument from tolerance (judging other cultures is arrogant). All three face serious objections.
How should we approach moral disagreement across cultures?
The capabilities approach (Nussbaum, Sen) identifies a floor of basic human capabilities that apply cross-culturally without imposing full cultural uniformity. Rawls's overlapping consensus identifies minimal human rights that can be justified from within many different frameworks. Both avoid both cultural imperialism and complete relativism.