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Moral relativism claims moral truths vary with individuals, cultures, or frameworks rather than being universal. Varieties include individual relativism (morality relative to personal views), cultural relativism (relative to societies), and relative-to-a-framework positions (truth relative to adopted standards). Each form faces distinct challenges: how can we rationally criticize other cultures or individuals? How does relativism avoid self-refutation? What explains cross-cultural moral agreement?
Distinguish carefully between the descriptive claim (cultures differ in their moral beliefs) and the normative claim (morality is relative to culture — there is no mind-independent truth). Many people conflate these. Then stress-test each variety of relativism against the self-refutation objection and the cross-cultural criticism problem.
From your work in metaethics and the realism/antirealism debate, you know that moral realism holds there are mind-independent moral facts — truths that don't depend on what any individual or group believes. Moral relativism is a family of positions that rejects this: moral truth is, in some sense, indexed to something variable — a person, a culture, a framework. The key word is "varieties," because the indexing can happen at different levels, and each level creates different problems.
Individual (or subjective) relativism holds that "X is wrong" just means "I disapprove of X." This makes moral statements self-reports of attitude rather than claims about an external moral order. Its great problem is that it rules out genuine moral disagreement: if you say "slavery was wrong" and someone else says "slavery was fine," on this view you're not contradicting each other — you're each just reporting your own attitudes, like two people saying "I like coffee" and "I don't like coffee." But we experience moral disagreement as a real clash over something, not merely a disclosure of differing tastes.
Cultural relativism lifts the indexing to the group level: moral truth is relative to the standards of one's society. This view is often motivated by descriptive cultural relativism — the anthropological observation that cultures disagree widely about moral norms. But the descriptive claim does not entail the normative one: cultures also disagree about geography and medicine, which doesn't make those disciplines relative. A critical problem for cultural relativism is the problem of cross-cultural criticism: if morality is just what one's culture endorses, then condemning slavery in nineteenth-century America, or genocide in Nazi Germany, is merely imposing one culture's norms on another — which seems clearly inadequate. Relativism threatens to deprive us of the conceptual resources we need to make such judgments.
Framework relativism is a more sophisticated version: moral truths are relative to adopted moral frameworks or standards, which can be rationally assessed on their own terms. This avoids some naivety while preserving the relativist intuition that there is no single, framework-independent standpoint from which all moral questions are settled. The self-refutation objection applies to all varieties: is the claim "morality is relative" itself a relative claim or an absolute one? If relative, it holds only for those who accept that framework. If absolute, the relativist is making exactly the kind of framework-independent claim they deny is possible. Navigating this challenge forces relativists to carefully scope the domain of their thesis — whether it applies to first-order moral claims, metaethical claims, or both.
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