Moral Relativism vs. Moral Universalism: Are Ethics Absolute or Cultural?
In 1947, the American Anthropological Association submitted a remarkable statement to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which was then drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The anthropologists argued against the very idea of universal human rights. "Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive," the statement read, "so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole."
The anthropologists were raising a genuine and still-unresolved challenge. They had spent careers studying the extraordinary moral diversity of human cultures--from matrilineal societies in Melanesia where inheritance passes through the mother's line to patriarchal societies in the Middle East where women's movement is severely restricted, from cultures where elderly parents are cared for at home as a sacred duty to cultures where leaving aging parents in institutional care carries no stigma, from societies where revenge killing is a moral obligation to societies where capital punishment is considered barbaric. Confronted daily with this diversity, they questioned whether any moral claim could genuinely apply to all human beings everywhere.
The UN commission went ahead anyway. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, asserts that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" and enumerates rights that supposedly apply to every person regardless of nationality, culture, religion, or any other distinction. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the drafting committee, acknowledged the philosophical difficulties but argued that the practical urgency of preventing atrocities like the Holocaust demanded universal moral standards, whatever the theoretical objections.
This disagreement--between those who insist that moral standards are culturally determined and those who insist that some moral truths hold everywhere--defines one of the oldest and most consequential debates in moral philosophy. Moral relativism holds that ethical standards are products of particular cultures, times, and contexts, with no moral framework objectively superior to any other. Moral universalism holds that certain moral principles are valid for all people at all times, regardless of cultural context. The tension between these positions shapes debates about human rights, international law, cultural intervention, tolerance, and the very possibility of moral progress.
Neither position is as straightforward as it initially appears. Relativism, taken seriously, leads to consequences that most relativists find difficult to accept. Universalism, taken seriously, requires foundations that are surprisingly hard to establish. Understanding both positions--their genuine insights, their internal tensions, and the space between them--is essential for navigating a world where moral disagreement across cultures is an inescapable reality.
What Moral Relativism Actually Claims
Moral relativism is not a single position but a family of related claims that range from modest and widely accepted to radical and deeply controversial. Distinguishing these different claims is essential because much confusion in the debate stems from conflating them.
Descriptive Moral Relativism
Descriptive moral relativism is the empirical observation that different cultures hold different moral beliefs and practices. This is not a philosophical thesis but a factual claim supported by overwhelming anthropological evidence.
Cultures differ dramatically in their moral codes regarding:
Sexual morality: Some cultures practice strict monogamy; others practice polygamy, polyandry, or various forms of accepted non-monogamy. Attitudes toward premarital sex, homosexuality, and sexual display vary enormously.
Family obligations: The scope of family duty varies from nuclear family responsibility in much of the individualist West to extended kinship obligations that govern economic life, marriage decisions, and political allegiance across much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Property and sharing: Norms around property range from societies with strong individual property rights to societies where communal ownership is the default and individual accumulation is viewed with suspicion or outright hostility.
Violence and retribution: Some cultures maintain elaborate honor codes that demand violent response to insults. Others have developed restorative justice practices aimed at reconciliation rather than punishment. Attitudes toward corporal punishment, capital punishment, and warfare vary substantially.
Treatment of the elderly and dead: Practices range from ancestor veneration to euthanasia for the terminally ill, from elaborate funeral rites to sky burial, from filial piety as the highest virtue to institutional eldercare as the practical norm.
Descriptive relativism is essentially uncontroversial. Cultures do differ in their moral beliefs and practices. The question is what, if anything, this diversity implies about the nature of morality itself.
Metaethical Moral Relativism
Metaethical moral relativism moves beyond description to the philosophical claim that there are no objective, culture-independent moral truths. Moral statements like "slavery is wrong" or "generosity is good" are not objectively true or false; they are true or false only relative to a particular moral framework, culture, or tradition.
On this view, when a 19th-century American slaveholder said "slavery is morally acceptable" and an abolitionist said "slavery is morally wrong," neither was making an objectively correct or incorrect claim. Each was expressing a judgment that was true within their respective moral frameworks. There is no neutral, framework-independent standpoint from which to judge which framework is correct, because moral frameworks are not the kind of thing that can be objectively correct or incorrect.
This is a far stronger and more controversial claim than descriptive relativism. It implies that moral disagreement across cultures is not a matter of one side being right and the other wrong but of different frameworks that cannot be ranked against each other.
Normative Moral Relativism
Normative moral relativism adds a prescriptive claim: we ought not to judge or interfere with the moral practices of other cultures. Since no moral framework is objectively superior, imposing one culture's moral standards on another is a form of cultural imperialism--an exercise of power masquerading as moral authority.
This position often motivates calls for tolerance, cultural sensitivity, and respect for diversity. It opposes missionary activity, cultural intervention, and the universal application of Western moral and legal standards to non-Western societies.
What Moral Universalism Actually Claims
Moral universalism, like relativism, encompasses a range of positions from modest to ambitious.
Minimal Universalism
Minimal universalism claims that a small number of fundamental moral principles hold across all cultures. These typically include prohibitions on gratuitous cruelty, unprovoked killing of community members, and systematic deception within cooperative relationships. This position is compatible with acknowledging enormous cultural variation in how these minimal principles are interpreted and applied.
Substantive Universalism
Substantive universalism claims that a fairly robust set of moral principles--including individual rights, gender equality, freedom of conscience, prohibitions on torture and slavery--apply universally regardless of cultural context. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodies this position.
Foundational Universalism
Foundational universalism not only claims that universal moral principles exist but provides a theoretical foundation for them--typically grounded in human nature, reason, divine command, or the requirements of social cooperation. Kant's ethics, natural law theory, and various forms of consequentialism all represent foundational universalism, each offering different grounds for universal moral claims.
Arguments for Moral Relativism
Relativism draws support from several powerful lines of argument.
The Argument from Disagreement
The most intuitive argument for relativism begins with the sheer scale of moral disagreement across cultures. If objective moral truths existed, one might expect human societies to converge on them over time, just as they converge on scientific truths. But moral disagreement persists and in some areas seems to deepen rather than resolve.
This argument has force but also significant weaknesses. Disagreement does not prove the absence of truth. Cultures have historically disagreed about empirical facts--the age of the Earth, the causes of disease, the shape of the cosmos--without that disagreement implying there is no fact of the matter. Moral disagreement might reflect genuine difficulty in accessing moral truths rather than the nonexistence of such truths.
Furthermore, the degree of moral disagreement may be overstated. Anthropological research reveals not only dramatic differences but also striking commonalities. Every known culture prohibits unprovoked murder of community members. Every culture has norms of reciprocity. Every culture recognizes some form of obligation to care for dependent children. Every culture distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force. The disagreements, while real, often concern the application of shared principles rather than the principles themselves.
The Argument from Humility
Relativism draws moral force from the historical record of cultural imperialism. Western powers have repeatedly imposed their moral standards on other cultures through colonialism, missionary activity, and military intervention, often with catastrophic consequences. The conviction that one's own moral framework is objectively correct and that others' frameworks are objectively wrong has historically served as a justification for domination, exploitation, and cultural destruction.
Relativism, on this argument, represents moral humility--an acknowledgment that one's own moral convictions, however deeply held, may reflect cultural conditioning rather than objective truth, and that imposing them on others is presumptuous and potentially harmful.
The Argument from Social Function
A sophisticated relativist argument holds that moral systems are best understood as functional adaptations to particular social, economic, and ecological circumstances rather than as attempts to track universal moral truths. Honor cultures developed in environments where state enforcement of law was weak and individuals needed to deter aggression through reputation. Communal property norms developed in environments where shared resources were essential for survival. Strict sexual morality developed in contexts where paternity certainty mattered for inheritance and alliance systems.
On this view, different moral systems are not more or less correct but more or less well-adapted to their environments. Judging another culture's morality by your own standards is like judging a desert cactus by the standards of a rainforest orchid--applying criteria that are irrelevant to the conditions the organism actually faces.
Arguments for Moral Universalism
Universalism responds with equally powerful arguments.
The Argument from Moral Criticism
The most potent argument for universalism is that relativism appears to make moral criticism of other cultures impossible--and that this consequence is unacceptable. If morality is entirely relative to cultural frameworks, then the Nazi genocide was not objectively wrong; it was merely wrong by the standards of other frameworks while being consistent with (or at least accepted within) the framework of Nazi ideology.
Most people--including most self-described relativists--find this conclusion intolerable. The conviction that genocide, slavery, and systematic torture are wrong--not merely disapproved of by our culture but genuinely, objectively wrong--seems too deep and too important to surrender. If relativism requires abandoning the ability to condemn atrocities committed within other cultural frameworks, that counts as a powerful reason to reject relativism.
The Argument from Internal Reform
Relativism also struggles to account for moral reformers within cultures. When abolitionists in the American South argued that slavery was wrong, they were not merely expressing the norms of an alternative culture--they were members of the slaveholding culture arguing that their own culture's practices were morally wrong. On a strictly relativist view, this claim is incoherent: if morality is determined by cultural norms, then slavery was right within that culture, and the abolitionists were simply wrong by their own culture's standards.
Yet moral reform movements are among the most important phenomena in moral history. They depend on the ability to stand within a culture and argue that the culture's current practices violate moral standards that transcend cultural convention. Universalism provides the philosophical ground for this kind of internal moral criticism; relativism does not.
The Argument from Shared Humanity
Universalism argues that certain features of the human condition--the capacity to suffer, the need for cooperation, the dependence of children on adults, the fact of mortality, the requirements of social trust--create moral demands that apply wherever human beings exist. If suffering is bad (not just disapproved of but genuinely bad), then causing unnecessary suffering is wrong regardless of cultural attitudes toward it.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has developed a capabilities approach that grounds universal moral standards in the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Every human being, she argues, needs certain capabilities to live a recognizably human life: bodily health, bodily integrity, the ability to think and reason, emotional development, social affiliation, and others. Practices that systematically deprive people of these capabilities are wrong regardless of whether they are culturally sanctioned.
The Comparison: Relativism vs. Universalism on Key Questions
| Question | Moral Relativism | Moral Universalism |
|---|---|---|
| Are there objective moral truths? | No--moral truths are relative to cultural frameworks | Yes--some moral principles hold regardless of culture |
| Can we judge other cultures' practices? | No, or only with extreme caution | Yes, when practices violate fundamental moral principles |
| What explains moral disagreement? | Different cultures have different valid moral frameworks | Moral truth is difficult to access; cultures can be mistaken |
| Is tolerance required? | Yes--no culture's morality is objectively superior | Tolerance is a value but does not extend to atrocities |
| What grounds morality? | Cultural conventions, social practices, shared traditions | Human nature, reason, shared conditions of existence |
| Can moral progress occur? | No genuine "progress"--only change | Yes--societies can move closer to moral truth |
| How should we handle cultural conflict? | Respect difference; avoid imposing values | Engage in dialogue; defend universal human rights |
| What about internal moral reformers? | Difficult to explain; reformers challenge their own culture's standards | Reformers appeal to moral truths that transcend cultural convention |
Problems with Relativism: The Self-Defeating Trap
Moral relativism faces several internal problems that even sympathetic philosophers have struggled to resolve.
The Self-Refutation Problem
If all moral claims are relative to cultural frameworks, what about the claim that "we ought to be tolerant of other cultures"? This is itself a moral claim. If it is relative, then it applies only within cultures that happen to value tolerance--and cultures that value intolerance are equally "right" by their own standards. If it is universal--if tolerance really is a duty that applies to everyone regardless of cultural context--then relativism has undermined itself by producing a universal moral principle.
This is not merely a logical trick. It reveals a genuine tension at the heart of the relativist position. The moral motivation for relativism--respect for cultural difference, opposition to cultural imperialism--depends on values (respect, equality, humility) that relativism itself cannot justify as universally binding.
The Boundary Problem
Relativism claims that morality is relative to a "culture" or "society." But what counts as a culture? National boundaries? Ethnic groups? Subcultures within nations? Families? Individuals?
Within any society, there are deep moral disagreements. Were American abolitionists part of the same "culture" as slaveholders? Is the feminist movement within Saudi Arabia part of "Saudi culture" or a foreign imposition? When a culture is internally divided on a moral question, relativism has no principled way to determine which group's moral beliefs constitute the culture's actual moral framework.
If we draw the boundaries narrowly enough, relativism collapses into individual subjectivism--the view that moral truth is relative to each individual, which makes moral disagreement meaningless and moral persuasion pointless.
The Moral Progress Problem
If moral frameworks cannot be objectively ranked, then the claim that societies have made moral progress over time becomes incoherent. We cannot say that the abolition of slavery represented moral improvement, only that moral standards changed. We cannot say that extending rights to women was progress, only that cultural norms shifted. For most people, the inability to affirm that these changes were genuine improvements--not merely changes--is a devastating consequence.
Problems with Universalism: The Foundation Challenge
Universalism faces its own serious difficulties, primarily concerning the grounds for universal moral claims.
The Grounding Problem
If some moral principles are universally true, what makes them true? Possible answers include:
Divine command: God establishes universal moral law. This grounds universalism but only for those who share the relevant religious beliefs, and different religious traditions disagree about what God commands.
Human nature: Universal moral truths are grounded in features shared by all humans. This is promising but faces the "is-ought" problem--the difficulty of deriving moral conclusions from factual claims about human nature.
Reason alone: Pure rational reflection can establish universal moral truths. Kant pursued this approach, but critics argue that rational argument alone underdetermines moral conclusions--the same starting premises can support different moral frameworks depending on how they are weighted and applied.
Overlapping consensus: Universal moral principles emerge from the convergence of different moral traditions. This pragmatic approach avoids deep metaphysical commitments but may yield thinner universalism than advocates want.
The Imperialism Worry
Even if universal moral principles exist, the question of who gets to identify and enforce them is politically charged. In practice, "universal" moral standards have often turned out to be the standards of powerful Western nations imposed on less powerful societies. The language of human rights has been used both to challenge genuine oppression and to justify military interventions, economic sanctions, and cultural domination that served Western interests.
Universalists must take this worry seriously. The existence of universal moral truths does not automatically legitimize any particular culture's claim to have identified and properly understood those truths. Epistemic humility is compatible with moral universalism--you can believe that universal truths exist while acknowledging that your own understanding of them is partial and fallible.
The Application Problem
Even when cultures agree on abstract moral principles, they often disagree profoundly on how to apply them. Nearly everyone agrees that "harming the innocent is wrong." But cultures disagree about who counts as innocent, what constitutes harm, and what justifications override the general prohibition. Nearly everyone agrees that "fairness matters." But cultures disagree about whether fairness means equal treatment, proportional treatment, need-based treatment, or merit-based treatment.
These disagreements about application are not peripheral--they are where most real moral conflict lives. Agreement on abstract principles may create less practical convergence than universalists hope.
The Middle Ground: Pluralism and Moderate Positions
Most contemporary moral philosophers occupy territory between strict relativism and strict universalism, recognizing valid insights in both positions while rejecting the extreme forms of each.
Moral Pluralism
Moral pluralism holds that there are multiple legitimate moral values that cannot be reduced to a single supreme principle and that may conflict with one another in ways that admit no unique resolution. Different cultures may legitimately emphasize different values within this plural set. A culture that prioritizes communal solidarity is not wrong; neither is a culture that prioritizes individual liberty. Both are responding to genuine moral values that cannot be hierarchically ordered.
Isaiah Berlin, who developed this position most influentially, argued that the plurality and incommensurability of human values is a permanent feature of the moral landscape, not a problem to be solved through more sophisticated theorizing. Some trade-offs between values--between equality and freedom, between security and liberty, between individual rights and collective welfare--are genuinely tragic: choosing either option involves real moral loss.
Thick and Thin Morality
The philosopher Michael Walzer distinguished between thin morality--a minimal set of moral principles shared across cultures (prohibitions on murder, gratuitous cruelty, and systematic deception)--and thick morality--the rich, detailed, culturally specific moral systems that give meaning and structure to particular ways of life.
On Walzer's view, thin morality is universal and provides legitimate grounds for cross-cultural moral criticism. Thick morality is culturally specific and should be respected rather than imposed. This framework preserves the universalist ability to condemn atrocities while maintaining the relativist insistence on respecting cultural difference in domains where genuine moral pluralism exists.
The Capabilities Approach
Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach attempts to ground universal moral standards in a substantive but culturally sensitive way. Rather than specifying particular moral rules, Nussbaum identifies a set of central human capabilities--life, bodily health, bodily integrity, the ability to use senses and imagination, emotional development, practical reason, affiliation, relation to other species, play, and control over one's environment--that every society should secure for its members.
This approach allows for significant cultural variation in how capabilities are realized while maintaining universal standards about what must be secured. It provides grounds for criticizing practices like forced marriage, female genital cutting, or caste-based discrimination without requiring that all cultures organize their social lives identically.
Real-World Implications: How the Debate Shapes Policy
The relativism-universalism debate is not merely academic. It directly shapes consequential policy decisions about human rights, international intervention, immigration, and law.
Human Rights Discourse
The international human rights framework is built on universalist assumptions--that certain rights belong to every person by virtue of their humanity, not by grant of any government or culture. The relativist challenge to this framework has real consequences. When governments invoke "cultural values" or "national sovereignty" to deflect human rights criticism, they are making a relativist argument. When human rights organizations insist that practices like child marriage, political repression, or torture are wrong regardless of local cultural approval, they are making a universalist argument.
Immigration and Multiculturalism
Multicultural societies face the relativism-universalism tension practically every day. When immigrant communities bring practices that conflict with host society norms--arranged marriages for very young people, corporal punishment practices, gender-segregated social spaces--the question arises: should the host society tolerate these practices in the name of cultural respect, or prohibit them in the name of universal values?
Most democratic societies have settled on a pragmatic compromise: tolerance for cultural practices that do not cause serious harm, combined with enforcement of fundamental rights (physical safety, freedom of movement, access to education) that are treated as non-negotiable. This compromise reflects neither pure relativism nor pure universalism but a negotiated position that most citizens find workable, even if philosophers find it theoretically unsatisfying.
International Development
Development organizations must navigate this terrain constantly. Promoting girls' education in societies where it is culturally disfavored raises the question: is this legitimate promotion of universal human development, or illegitimate imposition of Western values? The answer often depends on whether the initiative grows from internal demand within the society or is imposed entirely from outside, and whether it respects local agency or treats local cultures as obstacles to be overcome.
What Both Sides Get Right
The enduring power of this debate reflects the fact that both positions capture genuine moral insights that cannot be dismissed.
Relativism is right that moral humility is a virtue, that cultural imperialism is a genuine danger, that moral diversity reflects genuine differences in social circumstances and legitimate ways of organizing human life, and that confidence in the superiority of one's own moral framework has historically been used to justify terrible things.
Universalism is right that some moral standards transcend cultural boundaries, that the ability to condemn atrocities regardless of cultural approval is morally essential, that moral progress is real and depends on standards that transcend any particular cultural moment, and that shared humanity creates genuine moral obligations that cross cultural lines.
The most productive moral thinking does not choose sides in this debate but holds both insights in productive tension--maintaining universal commitments to human dignity and the prevention of serious harm while approaching cultural difference with genuine respect, epistemic humility, and awareness of the complex historical relationship between moral certainty and the exercise of power.
What is needed is not a final resolution to the debate--which may be impossible--but the wisdom to navigate its tensions thoughtfully: defending universal principles when genuine human welfare is at stake, respecting cultural difference when legitimate moral pluralism is in play, and maintaining the intellectual honesty to acknowledge when we are uncertain which category a given case falls into.
References and Further Reading
Rachels, J. (2003). "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism." In The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Moral_Philosophy
Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capabilities_approach
Berlin, I. (1969). "Two Concepts of Liberty." In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/
Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. University of Notre Dame Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Walzer
Moody-Adams, M. (1997). Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674299559
Gowans, C. (2021). "Moral Relativism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/