Topics Ethics

Question I am a producer at a network news organization and am working on a piece on "cultural relativism" that will be televised later this year. My particular question is: how to describe cultural relativism in a way that the average television viewer would understand and is cultural relativism a GOOD or BAD thing?

Accepted:
October 18, 2005

Comments

Cultural relativism, as it's restricted to moral matters, might be described as the view that what's right and wrong is relative to culture--the moral status of a given action or practice depends upon the moral code of the culture in which that action is performed.

There are lots of variations, but I think that get's the general idea. Cultural relativism is meant to capture the idea that polygamy, for example, is not absolutely right or wrong: it might be wrong in one culture but perfectly acceptable in another, and neither culture is morally superior to the other.

My own view is that cultural relativism is neither good nor bad, but wildly implausible. Here are a few reasons:

First, and most imortantly, I don't think that on reflection we really believe cultural relativism. We confuse it for attitudes like humility and tolerance that we do believe in. There are lots of practices--human sacrifice, infanticide, extreme torture, sanctioned rape--that may be morally acceptable in some cultures, but that we really think without too much reflection are absolutely wrong. What we really think is that these other cultures are just misguided about the moral status of these practices. (This is not to say that we can't understand how the society might have arrived at these practices.) In milder cases, we may adopt humility about the firmness of our own sense that a practice is right or wrong; and we may, in addition, want to be tolerant of certain milder practices that we regard as wrong. But these attitudes of humility and tolerance shouldn't be confused with cultural relativism. In fact, I think we regard them as absolutely good, and disapprove of societies that are completely intolerant, for example.

Second, it's hard to apply cultural relativism in many cases because it's not always clear what counts as the relevant "culture", much less whether it has a clearly shared moral code. There's lots of disagreement among my neighbors about the status of abortion: so is abortion right or wrong relative to Sunderland, MA? Or even relative to your community of friends?

And these complications lead to others. How do you treat actions that are performed in one culture but have effects on another, or performed by a person form one culture on people from another? You can formulate versions of cultural relativism that give you answers, but it's not clear that these are motivated.

Finally, cultural relativism says the wrong thing about moral reformers. Consider a lone abolitionist living in a society that believes that slavery is perfectly permissible. According to cultural relativism the abolitionist is simply misguided in claiming that slavery is wrong. It is permissible relative to the slave-holding society because the moral code sanctions it. This gets at a deep problem with the view. Cultural relativism doesn't ultimately do justice to our sense that moral matters should be established, at least in part, by reason. The abolitionist has good reasons and arguments to back up her view, but these are irrelevant to cultural relativism. For the cultural relativist, the moral status of an action or practice is ultimately settled by a local popularity contest. And when the abolitionist from an abolitionist culture debates the status of slavery with someone from a slave-holding culture they are not really disagreeing so much as talking past one another. They seem to disagree about whether slavery is wrong, but in fact, they're both right: slavery is wrong relative to the abolitionist's culture and permissible relative to the slave-holders. But this does an injustice to the role we think moral debate and reasoning plays in establishing what is right and wrong within our society and without.