The Myth of Moral Relativism

Why Everyone Should Reject Relativism About Morality

Note: This is a lightly revised and expanded version of an essay that I originally published in 2021.

Introduction

Consider the claim that “morality is subjective”. It’s commonly said, but what does it mean? One possibility is that it amounts to an expression of some form of moral relativism. In this brief essay I argue that the only even superficially plausible form of moral relativism is one which grounds moral truth in cultural consensus — and that, given a moment’s reflection, it too should be rejected.

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1. Relativism About Truth

The most radical form of relativism is relativism about the truth, itself. According to this form of relativism, all truth claims are relative, such that there is no objective (i.e., stance-independent) truth about anything — merely different (and often competing) perspectives and opinions. The ancient Greek sophist, Protagoras, is sometimes identified as a proponent of relativism about truth. Arguably, it lives on in certain strains of postmodernist thought which cast doubt on the idea that there is any “way that things truly are” above and beyond the way in which things are perceived and conceptualized by individuals and groups.

The universality of various features of experience is a puzzle for such relativists. For example, people in the same room will invariably give very similar accounts of its features, which would be surprising if we did not suppose that the same objects out in the world were causing those experiences.

More devastatingly, relativism about truth seems straightforwardly self-refuting: if it is true that “no truth claim is objectively true”, then this claim, too, would have to be true only relative to some standard (a point which Socrates famously makes in The Theaetetus, when presented with Protagoras’s theory of truth).

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2. Moral Relativism

More commonly, various forms of local relativism (i.e., relativism confined to a certain domain) are defended. Relativism strikes many of us as true when it comes to matters of taste, for example: I might prefer chocolate while you prefer vanilla, but it seems odd to suppose that one of us could be right and the other wrong. If I like chocolate, that entailsl nothing about whether you like chocolate, too.

Relativists about morality think that our moral judgments are akin to our judgments concerning taste: there is no objective fact of the matter, just differing preferences and points of view.

2.1 Individualistic Moral Relativism

Individualistic relativists hold that we each determine the moral truth for ourselves, such that morality just is whatever we each believe it to be. If I believe that lying is wrong, then lying is wrong for me – but if someone else thinks that lying is right, then lying will be right for this person. That seems like a very implausible view of morality. Our moral concepts are not such that we take them to apply only to ourselves: when I say that murder is wrong, I don’t just mean that I personally disapprove of murder: I mean that everyone has a very strong reason not to murder. Moreover, most of us take it that there are such things as moral discovery and moral education: that we can both discover and be taught various moral truths. But if the moral truth is indistinguishable from our individual moral opinions, then one could never be mistaken about the content of morality: it will simply be whatever one takes it to be.

2.2 Cultural Moral Relativism

The more common form of moral relativism is cultural moral relativism (CMR). According to this view, the moral truth is determined by the cultural consensus of the community in which one happens to find oneself. Some think that CMR just obviously follows from the fact of cross-cultural moral disagreement. But to argue for CMR merely from this fact is to confuse the question of what actually is the moral truth with the question of what people believe to be the moral truth. One is a question about the content of morality; the other is a question about people’s psychological states.

A superior strategy for the proponent of CMR is to argue that there is something about the existence of disagreement in the moral domain, specifically, that gives us reason to believe there are no objective truths in that domain.

But it’s very difficult to run such an argument without simply begging the question (i.e., presupposing the very point in question): disagreement is obviously not a consideration counting against belief in objective truth in other domains of human inquiry, so the proponent of CMR owes us some story about why the moral domain might be unique in this regard.

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3. Against CMR

Setting to one side the question of whether there is any good argument for CMR, the view has several deeply implausible implications. Let’s consider just a handful.

First, it has the implication that making cross-cultural moral judgments is impossible: if the moral facts are indexed to the culture in which one finds oneself, then it makes no sense to form moral judgments about cultures with different moral beliefs. But that seems obviously wrong: surely we can meaningfully say (and ought to say) that the Roman gladiator fights were immoral; that the Aztecs were wrong to sacrifice humans to their Sun god; that the American slaveholders were wrong to keep slaves; etc.

Second, CMR implies that moral progress is impossible: if there are no objective moral standards, then the concept of progress is meaningless. There can be change over time if CMR is true, but that change admits of no normative evaluation, absent some standard by which it might be assessed.

Third, CMR has the implication that moral reformers are always bad people, insofar as they advocate for moral changes that cut against the cultural consensus. That, too, seems wrong: surely some of those who have morally critiqued their societies throughout history have been right about some very important things.

Fourth, there is the problem of clearly identifying cultures and the moral matters about which they’ve achieved consensus. What, exactly, are the moral opinions which are endorsed by 2026 American, French, or Chinese culture?

Finally, CMR has the implication that if cultural consensus formed around some ghastly moral proposition — such as, say, that human sacrifice is good — then that ghastly moral proposition would thereby be made true. That’s a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one, and it reveals a deeper truth: moral relativism (of all forms) ultimately collapses into moral antirealism — nihilism — and therefore inherits all the insanity of that view.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s not obvious that the claim, “morality is subjective”, can be defended by appeal to any form of relativism. If anything like the commonsense view of morality is true, then there are some moral truths that hold in all times and places, for all people. In other words, morality (as we understand it) is not, as CMR entails, radically contingent: there are some moral truths that are necessary: torturing babies for fun, for instance, couldn’t possibly be permissible, however many people thought otherwise. CMR, and other relativistic theories of morality, therefore fail to capture one of the most basic features of moral thought: some things are wrong for everyone, everywhere, regardless of what anyone happens to think about them.

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References

Harman, Gilbert. 1977. The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Plato. 1992. Theaetetus. Translated by M. J. Levett. Revised by Myles Burnyeat. Hackett.

Rachels, James. 1999. The Elements of Moral Philosophy. 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill.