What is moral relativism? According to one definition:
"Moral relativism is the philosophical position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute or universal truths, but instead are relative to cultural, historical, or personal contexts. In other words, moral relativism holds that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular standpoint (such as a culture or individual), and there is no single objective standard by which to judge all moral claims."
This may or may not be a good definition, but at least it serves as a point for further discussions
Empirically, one could easily offer observations that different culture/societal groups have different cultural/social practices, for example the Korowai people of SE asia reportedly practices ritualistic cannibalism.
The more interesting question to me is whether one could tender the fact that there are different cultural/social practices as evidence to support moral relativism?
i was waiting for someone to bring up this point. for the puritan, this is probably the most difficult fact to digest. as i claimed before, moral rules are not determined through convenience (i.e cooperation, pure) but are implicit in the moral architecture or syntactical features of a community of speakers.
i think that the objectivist view that moral propositions contain truth values which are globally invariant is false. this, i believe, is due to a kind of model we assume over the architecture. that is, we assume that a moral system is a closed system of propositions with defined transformation rules.
in this sense i am a critical realist. i don't think we have the explanatory power to produce a correct model, hence selectively choosing correct features of a moral architecture may seem like a subjectivist requirement and nothing more, but in actual fact are not contradictory to my original position. so taking this view, the burden placed on an objectivist to explain a cross-cultural ethic is reduced. it is not a consequence of relativism, but a misunderstanding in our own framing of morality. i am not under the delusion that all moral propositions need be invariant across cultures for the claim of objectivism to be true, just that there are certain functional elements which are consistent throughout cultures. i will neglect thinking of how these develop into static systems for now, since i don't think the realist position requires a weak teleology.
in the case of the Korowai people, we must not ask ourselves why they believe cannabilism is not morally unsound, but rather what moral acts are held in equivalence to a normed model? that is, what functionalist argument determines the features of their moral architecture? we can say that certain moral systems which have radical differences to ours are differentiated by their features
there was a culture -- i forget which -- who would inflict injuries or kill members of other tribes if one of their own were to be injured or killed. so an arrow to he foot would result in the maiming of another's foot, and so on. so we can already determine that the concept of degree is implicit here. whether such cultures are good or evil is beside the point.
to put it more simply, what sets cultures apart are not truth-values assigned to root propositions, but those propositions which are defined in the context of a normed model. or else we would be working with an incomplete system which we could not speak of. i can only speak of en ethic with some implicit notion of what a standard ethic entails. this is a kind of occluded metaphysical topic; of which i have rarely seen discourse on, since the requirements for modeling such a hypothesis are too great (i become more of a Platonist day by day). in any case, we may require some mathematician/philosopher in the future to perform logical trickery in order to free the burden of the objectivist.
