Quote:
Originally Posted by onetwo_threefour
That's why I said moral relativism aside. Although most people who use that term throw it around like it's a terrible thing that can be used to justify anything, it's really just a fact of life. Most Westerners find eating dog morally distasteful, many Eastern cultures don't think twice about it. That's moral relativism and it's hard to say who's right if we stand apart from our own biases.
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I beg to differ. There are varieties of moral relativism, some more tolerant of things than others. A descriptive moral relativist would agree that, yes, cultures in different parts of the world disagree about moral values, but there are some things morally unjustifiable, such as the holocaust. A meta-ethical moral relativist, on the other hand, who believes that not only do we disagree about moral issues, but that good, bad, right, and wrong hold no universal truth values whatsoever can not adequately state that any sort of moral behaviour is superior to any other; in other words, the holocaust was thought to be good by those belong to the society and culture of Nazi Germany, but bad by those belonging to the Jewish tradition, and neither is more right than the other. They effectively destroy any type of reasonable discussion concerning morality because they believe there is no way to reasonably come to any sort of conclusion concerning them as Truth.
And bear in mind that moral relativism is different and separate from cultural relativism, the position that our ideas and concepts are societally dependent.
