Moral Relativism vs Absolutism: The Debate Explained

Question

Is morality relative or absolute? The question is one of the most urgent of the moral life: it decides whether we can judge the practices of other cultures, whether human rights are universal, and whether our own moral convictions are more than the customs of our place and time.

Quick Answer

Moral relativism holds that moral truths are relative to the culture or the individual: what is right in one society may be wrong in another, and there is no culture-independent standard by which the practices of a society can be judged. Moral absolutism holds that some moral truths hold everywhere and always: certain actions — torture, slavery, the killing of the innocent — are wrong regardless of what any culture believes. The debate turns on three questions. The descriptive question: do moral codes in fact differ across cultures? They do — the practices of honor, marriage, punishment, and hospitality differ enormously. The metaethical question: do the differences show that there is no objective moral truth? This is the point of division — the relativist says yes, the differences show that moral truth is relative; the absolutist says no, the differences show only that cultures have different beliefs about the same objective truth. The normative question: how should we respond to the differences? The relativist counsels tolerance and the suspension of judgment; the absolutist insists that some practices — slavery, genocide, the subordination of women — must be condemned whatever the culture.

Historical Wisdom

The debate is as old as philosophy. The relativist impulse goes back to the Greeks: Herodotus observed that each culture regards its own customs as the best, and Protagoras taught that "man is the measure of all things." The absolutist impulse goes back to the same tradition: Socrates and Plato sought the moral truths that hold beyond the customs — the Forms of the Good that the philosopher discovers, not the conventions that the city happens to hold. The modern debate was shaped by the encounter with cultural diversity: Montaigne's essays on the cannibals, the colonial encounters, and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries supplied the evidence of diversity, while the Enlightenment's doctrine of universal human rights supplied the counter-evidence of a common humanity. The twentieth century made the debate urgent: the Holocaust and the genocides demanded the judgment that relativism seemed to withhold, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) declared the universal standards that the absolutist requires. The debate between the two is now the framework of the ethics of culture and the politics of rights.

Philosophical Perspectives

The argument for relativism has two forms. The empirical form appeals to diversity: the moral codes of the world differ in fundamental ways, and the differences persist even among reasonable people — the moral disagreements are not simply the result of ignorance or error. The conceptual form appeals to the analysis of the concepts: moral judgments are expressions of the values of a culture or an individual, and the notions of objective right and wrong are the residue of a religious metaphysics that cannot be sustained. The strength of the relativist case is its humility: the recognition that our own moral convictions are historically situated, and that the arrogance of the colonizer who condemns the practices of the colonized is a moral failure. The weakness is its inability to condemn: the relativist who cannot say that slavery is wrong simpliciter, that the Holocaust was evil whatever the culture that committed it, has lost the moral ground that the twentieth century most needed.

The argument for absolutism is the argument from the moral life itself. The practice of morality presupposes the objectivity of at least some judgments: the condemnation of the atrocity, the claim of the human right, the protest of the victim — all claim a validity that does not depend on the culture of the speaker. The absolutist does not deny diversity; they deny that diversity shows relativity. The differences of the moral codes are differences of belief about the same domain, as the differences of the scientific theories are differences of belief about the same world. The strength of the absolutist case is its capacity for judgment: the universal rights, the condemnation of the atrocities. The weakness is the danger of arrogance: the absolutist who mistakes the customs of their own culture for the universal truth, and who imposes the one as the other. Between the extremes lie the middle positions: the universal human rights framework defends a minimal core of universal values — the prohibitions of slavery, torture, genocide — within a tolerant respect for the legitimate diversity of cultural practices. The middle ground is where most thoughtful people stand: universal at the core, tolerant at the periphery.

Lessons From Thinkers

From Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things" — the ancient statement of relativism. From Plato: the Forms — the moral truths beyond the customs. From the Enlightenment: the universal rights — the standard by which every culture can be judged. And from the twentieth century: the middle ground — the universal core of human rights within the tolerance of cultural difference.

Practical Application

The debate has direct practical application. For the person: the recognition of the middle ground — the moral convictions that are non-negotiable (the respect for persons, the prohibitions of cruelty) and the practices that are legitimately diverse (the customs, the manners, the forms). For the citizen of the world: the judgment of the other culture begins with the humility of the relativist — the attempt to understand the practice from within — and ends with the firmness of the absolutist where the universal core is violated. For the policy-maker: the human rights framework is the working resolution — the universal standards that every culture is asked to meet, and the respect for the diversity that the standards do not touch. The question "is morality relative or absolute?" is not answered once but lived daily: in the balance of the judgment and the tolerance, the universal and the particular.

Quotes

Protagoras states the relativist ground: "Man is the measure of all things." The Universal Declaration states the absolutist ground: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." And the middle ground is stated in the tradition: "Universal at the core, tolerant at the periphery — the human rights that bind every culture, and the diversity that no culture need surrender."

Related Questions

• What Is Moral Relativism? — the relativist position in detail.
• What Is Moral Naturalism? — the objectivist alternative.
• What Is Moral Realism? — the metaethical ground of absolutism.
• What Is the Is-Ought Problem? — the logical challenge to naturalism.