Your culture says eating cows is fine but eating dogs is horrific. Other cultures flip that completely.
Who’s right?
Moral relativists say nobody. And everybody. Right and wrong aren’t universal truths waiting to be discovered. They’re just what your society decided to value.
This sounds reasonable until you push it. If morality is just cultural opinion, then slavery wasn’t actually wrong when societies practiced it. It was just different. Female genital mutilation isn’t wrong in cultures that practice it today. It’s just their way.
Most people’s stomachs turn at this point. Mine does.
But the relativist has a point too. We do disagree about morality across cultures. Dramatically. And we can’t just assume our way is automatically correct because it’s ours.
Maybe some moral rules are universal—don’t torture innocents for fun. Others might be genuinely relative—how much you owe your parents, what counts as fair punishment.
The hard part is figuring out which is which.
I lean toward thinking some things really are wrong, period. Not because my culture says so, but because they cause unnecessary suffering. But I could be wrong about that. Maybe I just can’t see outside my own cultural bubble.
The fact that I’m uncertain doesn’t make me a relativist. It just makes me honest about the limits of what I can know.