Relativism, Cultural

Cultural relativism has been given at least two distinct definitions. On the one hand, “cultural relativism” is the view that an individual's beliefs and attitudes are largely shaped by the culture in which he or she lives.

Put another way, a culture is the primary source of an individual's views. On the other hand, “cultural relativism” is the view that different societies accept different moral standards, have different moral beliefs, and thus frequently disagree on how to act morally. Both versions of cultural relativism are descriptive claims about the state of the world. Cultural relativism as a descriptive thesis must be kept distinct from ethical relativism. Ethical relativism is a normative thesis that states that one ought to follow the cultural norms of the society in which one lives. Clearly, a person can be a cultural relativist without being an ethical relativist.

Cultural relativism has a long history. The earliest exponent in the West was the Greek Herodotus, who pointed out that the Callatians ate the bodies of their dead fathers while the Greeks burned the bodies of their dead fathers. Both the Callatians and the Greeks were horrified at the practices of the other. Cultural relativism seemed to get a foothold in social science when the discipline of anthropology was born near the beginning of the 20th century. Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and William Graham Sumner, among others, documented the widespread differences in ethical practice that existed throughout the world. In the late 20th century, a number of ethicists criticized the reigning ethical theories of utilitarianism and Kantian deontology for ignoring the influence of culture on our ethical beliefs. As a result of such criticism, John Rawls withdrew his claim for a universal theory of justice and announced that his theory was designed for liberal democracies. Assorted feminists and communitarian moral philosophers seemed to subscribe to both versions of cultural relativism defined above. Alasdair MacIntyre's approach based on communitarian virtue ethics was framed from within a cultural relativist standpoint. This emphasis on the role of culture was also a prominent feature of the advocates of postmodernism—a group of thinkers that went well beyond philosophers. In business ethics, Patricia Werhane, in expanding on the importance of moral imagination in ethical decision making, noted that one of the impediments to moral imagination was the tendency to think that we Americans had discovered the correct version of capitalism and that our form of capitalism could be exported to all other countries around the world. The failure of some prominent American professors to recognize the cultural parameters of American capitalism led them to give the Russians rather bad advice as they transitioned from communism to capitalism. In the context of Russian culture at that time, American [Page 1806]capitalism became, in Russia, a lawless kind of capitalism often referred to as “Cowboy Capitalism.”

At first glance, the descriptive claims of cultural relativism seem to be true. Even in today's “global society,” there are widely different moral beliefs regarding what is right and what is wrong. Terrorists think the killing of civilians is morally justified. “Civilized” societies think that such practice is morally heinous.

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