Moral Relativism: Cultural and Metaethical Variants

Moral relativism names not one thesis but a family of related claims that are important to distinguish carefully. Descriptive relativism is the empirical, anthropological claim that different societies, in fact, hold substantially different, and sometimes conflicting, moral codes — a claim documented extensively by early comparative ethnographers such as William Graham Sumner, whose Folkways (1906) catalogued wide cross-cultural variation in customs and taboos, and Edward Westermarck, whose Ethical Relativity (1932) drew on comparative anthropology to argue that moral emotions and judgments vary systematically with culture, upbringing, and circumstance. Metaethical relativism, by contrast, is the stronger philosophical claim that there is no single, universally valid moral standard by which such differing codes can be objectively ranked — that the truth of a moral judgment is relative to a cultural framework, a set of shared social practices, or an individual's own moral outlook, rather than being framework-independent. Normative relativism, a further and logically separate claim, holds that we therefore ought to tolerate other cultures' moral practices and refrain from cross-cultural moral criticism — a practical conclusion that does not automatically follow from either of the first two theses, since one could consistently hold that moral truth is relative while still thinking that certain frameworks are, by some other standard, worth criticizing or opposing.