What Is Moral Relativism?

Quick Answer

Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments — claims about what is right, wrong, just, or unjust — are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint, and that no standpoint is privileged over any other. What counts as morally required in one culture may count as forbidden in another, and on the relativist view, there is no neutral ground from which to decide who is correct. The appeal of the position is obvious: it seems to respect cultural diversity and to avoid the arrogance of imposing one set of values on everyone. But the philosophical tradition has been deeply skeptical of it. Plato attacked relativism in some of the earliest dialogues, and Aristotle defended an alternative rooted in human nature and the conditions of flourishing. The debate has not gone away, and getting clear about what relativism actually claims — and what it would cost to accept it — remains one of the central tasks of ethics.

Core Concept

Moral relativism comes in several varieties, and it helps to keep them distinct. Descriptive relativism is the straightforward observation that different cultures hold different moral beliefs. This is an empirical claim, and it is almost certainly true: practices around marriage, diet, burial, and punishment vary enormously across time and place. But descriptive relativism does not by itself establish moral relativism. The fact that people disagree does not show that no one is right. People once disagreed about the shape of the earth, and that disagreement did not make the earth's shape a matter of opinion.

Metaethical relativism is the stronger claim. It holds that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular framework, and that frameworks themselves cannot be ranked. On this view, "slavery is wrong" might be true relative to a modern human-rights framework and false relative to an ancient one, and there is no further fact of the matter that could settle the dispute. Normative relativism goes further still, adding that we ought to tolerate the practices of other cultures because we have no basis for criticizing them. These are distinct claims, and they can be held separately. A person can accept that moral beliefs vary without accepting that no framework is better than another, and a person can endorse tolerance without endorsing relativism.

The distinction matters because much of the rhetorical force of relativism comes from sliding between these positions. The fact of moral diversity is used to license the conclusion that no moral view is objectively better — but that conclusion does not follow from the premise. The philosophical question is whether the move from "people disagree" to "no one is right" can be made good, and the major figures of the tradition have generally thought it cannot.

Historical Context

Relativism is not a modern invention. The view was already alive in ancient Greece, associated with the sophists — itinerant teachers who offered instruction in rhetoric and persuasion. Protagoras is the figure Plato most often targets, with his famous claim that "man is the measure of all things," which Plato reads as the thesis that what seems true to each person is true for that person. If this is right, then there is no truth independent of appearance, and moral claims collapse into expressions of local convention.

Plato's response, worked out across dialogues including the Theaetetus and the Republic, is that relativism is self-defeating. If what seems true to each person is true for that person, then the relativist's own claim is true only for the relativist — and there is no reason for anyone else to accept it. Worse, the view makes disagreement unintelligible. If both parties are right relative to their own frameworks, then they are not really disagreeing at all; they are just talking past each other. But we do experience genuine moral disagreement, and the relativist cannot explain what we are doing when we argue about justice. Plato's deeper point is that the relativist wants to have it both ways: to deny that there is any objective truth, while presenting that denial as something everyone should accept.

Aristotle takes a different route. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he acknowledges that ethical matters are variable and that exactness is not to be expected. But he does not conclude that ethics is therefore arbitrary. He argues that there is a human function — the activity of the soul in accordance with reason — and that virtue is the excellence that enables a human being to perform that function well. This gives ethics a standard that is grounded in human nature rather than in local convention. The standard is not mechanical, and applying it requires practical wisdom, but it is a standard nonetheless. Aristotle's position is a kind of objectivism that is sensitive to context without collapsing into relativism: the same virtue may be expressed differently in different circumstances, but the underlying structure of human flourishing provides a basis for judgment.

The Appeal of Relativism

If the major philosophers have been so skeptical, why does relativism keep returning? Part of the answer is historical. The encounter with other cultures — through exploration, colonialism, and anthropology — made the fact of moral diversity impossible to ignore. When European thinkers encountered societies with radically different practices, some concluded that moral beliefs must be products of culture rather than discoveries of reason. This seemed like humility: instead of assuming one's own culture had gotten it right, one would recognize that other cultures had their own valid perspectives.

There is also a political appeal. Relativism seems to underwrite tolerance. If no moral framework is objectively better than another, then we have no basis for imposing our values on others, and we should let each culture govern itself. This connection between relativism and tolerance is one reason the view remains popular in certain intellectual circles. But the connection is weaker than it appears. Tolerance is itself a moral value, and if relativism is true, then tolerance is no more objectively valid than intolerance. The relativist who says "we should tolerate other cultures" is making a moral claim that, on their own view, is only relatively true. A culture that practices intolerance is, by relativist lights, acting correctly relative to its own framework. Relativism cannot ground the very tolerance it is invoked to support.

The Objections

The philosophical objections to moral relativism are formidable, and they cluster around a few central difficulties. The first is self-refutation. The relativist claims that all moral judgments are relative. But this claim is itself a moral — or at least metaethical — judgment. Is it relatively true or universally true? If it is relatively true, then it holds only within the relativist's own framework, and there is no reason for anyone else to accept it. If it is universally true, then it contradicts the relativist's own thesis, because at least one moral judgment would be universally valid. This is the dilemma Plato identified, and it has never been satisfactorily answered.

The second is the loss of moral criticism. If relativism is true, then we cannot say that the slave trade was wrong, that genocide is evil, or that the oppression of a minority is unjust — at least, not in any sense that transcends our own framework. We can say that these things are wrong relative to our values, but the perpetrators were acting relative to theirs, and by relativist logic they were no more mistaken than we are. Most people find this conclusion intolerable, and it is one of the strongest intuitions pushing against relativism. The conviction that some acts are wrong regardless of who commits them or where they occur is difficult to give up, and relativism asks us to give it up.

The third is the problem of identifying the relevant framework. If moral truths are relative to a culture, what counts as a culture? Nations contain subcultures; subcultures contain individuals; individuals hold conflicting views. The boundaries of a "framework" are vague, and relativism gives no principled way to draw them. If each individual is their own framework, relativism collapses into subjectivism, where each person's moral views are true for them. If the framework is the culture, then we need an account of what unifies a culture's moral views — and the empirical record shows that cultures are not morally homogeneous.

The fourth is moral progress. We commonly think that some moral changes represent progress — the abolition of slavery, the extension of rights to women, the rejection of torture. But if relativism is true, there is no standpoint from which to judge these changes as improvements rather than mere shifts. The abolitionist and the slaveholder were each acting relative to their framework, and neither was closer to the truth. Relativism makes moral progress unintelligible, because it removes the standard against which progress could be measured.

A Middle Path

Many philosophers who reject relativism also reject a naive universalism that treats moral rules as fixed, context-free, and obvious. The most defensible position may be the one Aristotle gestures toward: an objectivism that is grounded in human nature and the conditions of flourishing, but that recognizes the role of judgment in applying it. On this view, there are facts about what human beings need to flourish, and these facts provide a basis for evaluating moral practices. But the application of these facts to particular circumstances requires practical wisdom, and the same underlying value may take different forms in different cultural settings.

This middle path preserves what is right in the relativist's appeal — the recognition that context matters and that cultural arrogance is a real danger — without abandoning the conviction that some moral judgments are better than others. It allows us to criticize practices that undermine human flourishing while remaining humble about the difficulty of applying that standard and the risk of mistaking our own conventions for universal truths. The task is not to choose between relativism and a rigid absolutism, but to find a position that is objective enough to support moral judgment and flexible enough to respect the genuine diversity of human life.

Conclusion

Moral relativism captures something real — the diversity of moral belief and the danger of uncritical ethnocentrism. But as a philosophical thesis, it struggles to sustain itself. It cannot ground the tolerance it is invoked to support, it makes moral criticism and moral progress unintelligible, and it faces a self-refutation problem that the tradition has never resolved. The more promising path, sketched by Aristotle and developed by many subsequent thinkers, holds that there are standards grounded in human nature and flourishing, while insisting that applying those standards requires judgment, humility, and attention to context. The question is not whether some cultures are morally better than others — sometimes they are — but how to make that judgment without falling into either the arrogance of assuming one's own culture is always right or the paralysis of assuming no judgment is possible.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Moral Relativism. A thorough survey of the varieties of relativism, the arguments for and against, and the historical development of the debate.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle's Ethics. Details Aristotle's account of human function, flourishing, and the objectivity of virtue grounded in human nature.