Relativism

Conceptual Overview

The notion of relativism is itself particularly tricky to pin down. On the one hand, it generates important debate among social scientists, to the point of being more often than not used as a pejorative term that qualifies the theories of others rather than one's own. It follows that finding authors who claim to be relativists is more difficult than finding authors accused of relativism. On the other hand, the term relativist covers a relatively wide range of philosophical positions that may not be consensually identified as such.

The philosophical stances attached to relativism can be distinguished according to the central questions they engage. (1) Should we not treat separately relativism about truth and relativism about morality? (2) What is meant by seeing something in terms that are relative to situations? Does it mean that an insight about a situation cannot be generalized easily to another situation? Or that a statement may be true or ethical for one observer but not for another? (3) Does relativism mean considering that it is strictly impossible to discriminate between “better” and “worse” judgments? Or is it instead that such discrimination may be possible but that it is necessarily done through presupposing sets of values and bodies of knowledge that depend in turn on the person making such judgments?

A closer look at the notion of relativism in philosophy reveals that relativism about knowledge is not necessarily related to relativism about morality. Thus, although philosophers such as David Hume or Richard Rorty would be relativists about both, and authors such as René Descartes or Plato about neither, it is also possible to find authors who are relativists about the one but not the other. For instance, Max Weber mixes a positivist approach to science with a strongly pluralist vision of ethics. On the other hand, Blaise Pascal can be read as a relativist about knowledge but not about morals.

Beyond the distinction between moral and epistemological relativisms, it may also be useful to distinguish between stronger and weaker forms of relativism. Strong relativism usually takes the form of skepticism about the possibility of inferring that a valid judgment in a situation or for a person can still be valid for another situation or person. Well-known examples of strong epistemological relativism are Hume's proposition that it is not because the sun has risen yesterday that we can expect it to rise tomorrow and Protagoras' claim that man is the measure of all things. It is also [Page 1372]common to interpret Friedrich Nietzsche's affirmation that “God is dead” or Ruth Benedict's view that what is morally good for someone is what is habitual for him/her as strong versions of moral relativism.

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