cultural relativism argument essay

Applied Sentience

A national platform for the next generation of humanist thinkers, cultural relativism: 4 arguments for & against.

Different cultures believe different things.  One doesn’t need to be an anthropologist to see that the morality, ritual, and religion vary more and more the further you travel, no matter what direction.  In fact, these differences are what define these groups of people.  And not only are these values what organize the lives of… well… everyone, but they are also what lay the meaning behind those lives – whether political, cultural or religious in origin.

So what do we do with this fact?  What should we conclude?  How should we treat this difference?

Easy off the bat answer: Cultural Relativism .  Though originally the phrase was coined for a different use, it’s come to signify the idea that every culture’s moral beliefs and rituals are no more true or false, better or worse than anyone else’s.  What is right or wrong is whatever that culture says is right or wrong.  Nothing more.  And because of this what we need is tolerance, acceptance of the equal value of others’ beliefs, and humility in the fact different peoples believe different things.

Now I’m all for tolerance and admitting my passionately held values could easily be incorrect.  But I just cannot see how any of those conclusions can lead to, or even can co-exist with, Cultural Relativism.

Why might one be a Cultural Relativist?  Below I bring up common arguments for Cultural Relativism and then provide counter-arguments.

1. So many cultures disagree about so many different things .

If the world is full of anything it is passionate disagreement.  And because of this  it’s easy to wonder if there is any truth behind our moral claims.  And since everyone seems to be honest when they make these claims, it seems arrogant to presume that any out of the multitude of nearly identical shouting voices is THE right one. 

However, the fact that disagreement exists says absolutely nothing about whether or not there is any truth behind the matter, whether or not one voice among the multitude is closer to the truth.  For instance, people disagree about the causes of cancer – does that mean cancer has no cause?

All that the existence of widespread, honest and heartfelt disagreement tells us is that this shit is really hard to figure out.  Nothing more.

Further, there is more agreement that disagreement.  Like so much in all of the other sciences, though the disagreements we have about morality are salient, we have a vast resource of agreements behind us.  And again like in the sciences, crazy opinions always lurk around somewhere, but people across the board are social animals who place enormous value in giving respect to those who’ve earned it; love among spouses, children, family and friends; in keeping one’s promises; in protecting the innocent, and so on.

2. Without God, all is permitted .

All laws need a legislator.  So if there is no one up there making the rules, then there are no rules.  The presence of ‘moral rules’ is nothing more than what the powerful in each culture have declared or what people, for whatever reason, have simply made up.

I’ve never found this argument to make any sense.  First, you have the Euthyphro Dilemma .  I won’t go into the details, mostly because I’ve already written a post on this.   But, basically, either God has reasons for making the moral rules He does, like human legislators in the analogy, or He doesn’t and makes them up arbitrarily.  If they are arbitrary, then that doesn’t explain the force behind their value.  We don’t think it right to keep promises because some Deity willy-nilly decided that would be ‘right’.  If God had reasons, on the other hand, for commanding this or that, then it is those reasons and not God, or any kind of other legislator, that supports morality.

Looking back at the shortlist of moral values I list above, we can see what kind of things those ‘reasons’ are.  Harm, freedom, love, respect, suffering, reputation, and so on are important in and of themselves.  It is, for example, the intrinsic value of friendship that supports the virtues that surround it – like trust and compassion – and not that some arbitrary legislator happens to declare friendship to be ‘good’.  For a bit more detail, I wrote a long post here on the grounding of ethics without god .

3. It’s important to be tolerant of others’ beliefs .  

If you claim morality is absolute then you are being intolerant of other people’s beliefs.  This leads to imperialism, conflict and maybe even worse: genocide.

But this argument rests on absolute moral claims themselves!  Cultural Relativism would certainly say that the person from a tolerant culture ought to be tolerant.   But it would also say that a person from an intolerant culture ought to be intolerant .  And with the very same force that we in our culture might be required to be tolerant, others should be intolerant.  What is right for each is simply what their respective cultures says is right – and yours arbitrarily says to be tolerant.

Instead, to believe that all people should be fair and tolerant instead of genocidally intolerant is to claim that there are universal values outside of a culture’s beliefs.  It is only the person who rejects Cultural Relativism that intolerance is in itself bad and who instead would promote tolerance everywhere.

Tolerance is about how you treat other people.  It isn’t about what you believe about their beliefs.  So if I kick someone I disagree with out of my store or petition such people be jailed then I’m being intolerant .   If I believe they are wrong, or even tell them I disagree with them, all I’m being is truthful.  I’m stating a fact about our disagreement.  Disagreement itself does not imply disrespect for those you disagree with.

4. Different people in different contexts need different moral codes .

We can’t all have the same moral code because everyone lives in a different world with different demands, expectations, histories, symbols, and problems to overcome.  We need to respect the fact that people live different lives and not impose our rules on others or judge them by what works for us .

Again so true!!  And this does bring up a certain kind of relativism, but certainly isn’t Cultural Relativism as discussed above.  The specific rules and norms at the ‘highest’ day to day level of practice do,  and ought to,  vary culture by culture.  They are only either true or false depending on whether you are talking about this context here or that context there.  However, what makes a set of norms better than another in a given context might be specified at a broader and more ‘fundamental’ or ‘basic’ level.

Think of the classic anthropological distinction between collectivism versus individualism .  Some cultures thrive better as the first, while others value, and rightly so, the latter.  What provides the difference is the kind of values and rules the cultures need to flourish.  In the collectivist culture it might be the case a closer community and deeper inter-dependent bonds are necessary for anyone to be able to flourish or for the group to survive.  However, in another context, where each man and woman might be able to survive more independently, individualism and valuing competition leads to an explosion of creativity, entrepreneurship and invention.

The surface level dispute between individualism and collectivism is relative.  However, it is relative not to the culture but to the environment that culture is currently in.  The values of survival, flourishing, creativity and so on are universal and ground whether this or that moral strategy is best.  It is simply that different contexts mean different norms are needed in order to access or create these universal goods.

It is only because there is some underlying root to morality, whatever it may ultimately be, that we can understand progress.  If morality, as Cultural Relativism argues it is, is nothing more and nothing less than what a particular culture says is right or wrong, then MLK, Ghandi and other social reformers are very simply immoral.  They disagreed with the central norms of their culture, i.e. what was in fact ‘right’.  So they were ‘morally wrong’ for protesting.  Only if we agree that they were all tapping into something more basic and common to humanity that is valuable can we say that they were right.  Only then can we say they fought a good fight; one that others, whether they agreed with these social reformers or not, should have also fought.

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12 responses to “ Cultural Relativism: 4 Arguments For & Against ”

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Beliefs don’t deserve respect, people do. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the closest we’ve come to defining a set of values that apply to every person regardless of race, creed, colour, gender or sexuality. Fundamental human rights are not relative, regardless of what their detractors argue.

How does the UN right to freedom of religion and belief play into that? http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/humanrights/declaration/18.asp

And would you disagree that part of respecting a person is respecting and being tolerant of their beliefs, even when you disagree with them?

We should only be tolerant of people who are also willing to be tolerant. Cultures who marginalize women, persecute ethnic minorities or abuse homosexuals are not worthy of respect.

Being gay is a sin

I agree with your statement behind tolerating, but it gets twisted and confused between the difference of tolerating people and their cultures. Cultural Relativism is more or less the toleration of others’ beliefs and cultures not the individuals themselves. So, tolerating Cultures is not the same as tolerating people. To further explain, and I mean this respectfully, no one in the world can deem who deserves respect or not, even if you don’t agree with one’s moral principles; it’s still their beliefs. Individuals who believe say being gay is a sin does not mean that they are not willing to be tolerant. So, what do you say to those people should we not tolerate them or tolerate them? It’s just not as simple as deeming who deserves to be tolerated and who doesn’t.

I agree that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right. The problem arises when religious beliefs infringe on other human rights, such as a girl’s right to education, or a gay person’s right to love. In such cases I believe that people should be respected more than beliefs, and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a surer guide to morality than religion.

I basically agree. I definitely think that ethics is grounded in more universal qualities than individual ‘cultures’, like reasoned experience and human nature.

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Thank you for that overview and analysis of some of the arguments on this topic.

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Understanding Cultural Relativism and Its Importance

Bartosz Hadyniak/E+/Getty

Beliefs of Cultural Relativism

• Limitations
• In Mental Health

Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism

• How to Promote

Cultural relativism suggests that ethics, morals, values, norms, beliefs, and behaviors must be understood within the context of the culture from which they arise. It means that all cultures have their own beliefs and that there is no universal or absolute standard to judge those cultural norms. 

"Cultural relativism leads us to accept that cultures are foundationally different, with differing social and ethical norms. This includes understanding that a person’s place of birth, including where or how a patient was raised during their formative years, is the basis of a person’s approach to the world and emotional self," says Anu Raj, PsyD , a clinical psychologist at New York Institute of Technology.

Advocates of cultural relativism suggest that one culture's values, beliefs, and norms should not be judged through the lens of another culture.

It is the opposite of ethnocentrism, which involves judging or understanding cultural beliefs from the perspective of your own. Instead, cultural relativism suggests that observers and researchers should focus on describing those practices without attempting to impose their own biases and judgments upon them.

History of Cultural Relativism

The concept of cultural relativism was introduced by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1887. While he did not coin the term, it later became widely used by his students to describe his anthropological perspective and theories.

Cultural relativism suggests that:

• Different societies have their own moral codes and practices.
• Norms, beliefs, and values must be judged and understood from the context of the culture where they originate.
• No culture is objectively better than others; cultures and their customs and beliefs are not objectively superior or inferior to any other culture.
• Practices and behaviors considered acceptable or unacceptable vary from one culture to the next.
• Cultural relativism aims to help promote acceptance, tolerance, and an appreciation for diverse cultural beliefs and practices.
• No universal ethical or moral truths apply to all people in all situations.
• What is considered right and wrong is determined by society’s moral codes.
• Researchers and observers should strive to observe behavior rather than pass judgments on it based on their own cultural perspective.

Different Types of Cultural Relativism

There are two distinct types of cultural relativism: absolute cultural relativism and critical cultural relativism.

Absolute Cultural Relativism

According to this perspective, outsiders should not question or judge cultural events. Essentially, this point of view proposes that outsiders should not criticize or question the cultural practices of other societies, no matter what they might involve.

Critical Cultural Relativism

Critical cultural relativism suggests that practices should be evaluated in terms of how and why they are adopted. This perspective suggests that cultural practices can be evaluated and understood by looking at factors such as the historical context and social influences.

It also recognizes that all societies experience inequalities and power dynamics that influence how and why certain beliefs are adopted and who adopts them.

Strengths of Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism has a number of benefits that can help people gain greater insight into different cultures. This perspective can help:

• Promote cultural understanding : Because cultural relativism encourages seeing cultures with an open mind, it can foster greater empathy , understanding, and respect for cultures different from ours. 
• Protect cultural respect and autonomy : Cultural relativism recognizes that no culture is superior to any other. Rather than attempting to change other cultures, this perspective encourages people to respect the autonomy and self-determinism of other cultures, which can play an important role in preserving the heritage and traditions of other cultures.
• Foster learning : By embracing cultural relativism, people from different backgrounds are able to communicate effectively and create an open dialogue to foster greater learning for other cultures of the world.

Cultural relativism can also be important in helping mental health professionals deliver culturally competent care to clients of different backgrounds.

"What’s considered “typical and normal versus pathological” depends on cultural norms. It varies between providers and patients; it impacts diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis," Raj explains.

When mental health professionals account for the differences in values, and attitudes towards and of marginalized people (including communities of color and LGBTQ+ communities), providers develop respect for individual patients. Consequently, patients are less likely to be misdiagnosed and more likely to continue treatment.

Limitations of Cultural Relativism

While cultural relativism has strengths, that does not mean it is without limitations.

Failure to Address Human Rights

This perspective has been criticized for failing to address universal rights. Some suggest that this approach may appear to condone cultural practices that constitute human rights violations. It can be challenging to practice non-judgment of other cultures while still protecting people’s right to live free from discrimination and oppression.

Cultural relativism may sometimes hamper progress by inhibiting the examination of practices, norms, and traditions that limit a society’s growth and progress.

Reducing Cultures to Stereotypes

Cultural relativism sometimes falls victim to the tendency to stereotype and simplify cultures. Rather than fully appreciating the full complexity and diversity that may exist within a culture, people may reduce it to a homogenous stereotype. This often prevents outsiders from seeing the many variations that may exist within a society and fully appreciating the way cultures evolve over time.

Individual Rights vs. Cultural Values

This perspective may sometimes lead observers to place a higher priority on a culture’s collective values while dismissing individual variations. This might involve, for example, avoiding criticism of cultures that punish political dissidents who voice opposition to cultural norms, and practices.

Examples of Cultural Relativism

In reality, people make cultural judgments all the time. If you've ever eaten food from another culture and described it as 'gross' or learned about a specific cultural practice and called it 'weird,' you've made a judgment about that culture based on the norms of your own. Because you don't eat those foods or engage in those practices in your culture, you are making culture-biased value judgments.

Cultural differences can affect a wide range of behaviors, including healthcare decisions. For example, research has found that while people from Western cultures prefer to be fully informed in order to make autonomous healthcare conditions, individuals from other cultures prefer varying degrees of truth-telling from medical providers.

An example of using cultural relativism in these cases would be describing the food practices of a different culture and learning more about why certain foods and dishes are important in those societies. Another example would be learning more about different cultural practices and exploring how they originated and the purpose they serve rather than evaluating them from your own cultural background. 

In medical settings, healthcare practitioners must balance the interests and autonomy of their patients with respect and tolerance for multicultural values.

Cultural Relativism in Mental Health

Cultural relativism can also play an important role in the practice and application of mental health. "An individual’s perception of mental health, including stigma, is often influenced by their cultural identity and social values," explains Raj.

People who experience cultural discrimination are also more likely to experience higher stress levels, which can seriously affect mental health. Research has shown that perceived discrimination increases psychological distress and predicts symptoms of anxiety and depression. It also contributes to worse physical health, including a higher risk for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke.

Therapists must strive to understand people from different backgrounds to provide culturally competent care. "Through the lens of cultural competency, providers can educate themselves and elevate the plethora of coping mechanisms that a patient already might possess," says Raj. 

Cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are two contrasting perspectives that can be used to evaluate and understand other cultures.

Ethnocentrism involves judging other cultures based on the standards and values of one's own culture, often leading to a biased or prejudiced perspective .

Where cultural relativism suggests that all cultures are equally valid, ethnocentrism involves seeing your own culture as superior or more correct than others.

Cultural relativism emphasizes the importance of diversity and recognizes that values, beliefs, and behaviors can vary across societies. This can be contrasted with ethnocentrism, which promotes the idea that your own culture is the norm or benchmark against which others should be evaluated. This can limit understanding and decrease tolerance for people of different backgrounds. 

How Do You Promote Cultural Relativism?

There are a number of strategies that can help promote cultural relativism. This can be particularly important for mental health professionals and other healthcare practitioners. 

"Therapists must be able to view the world through the eyes of their patients. Most importantly, culturally competent therapists understand their patient’s behavior through the cultural framework in which they live," Raj says.

Promoting cultural relativism involves adopting an open-minded and respectful approach toward other cultures. Some things you can do to foster greater cultural relativism:

• Embrace cultural diversity : Strive to appreciate other cultures, including their unique values, traditions, and perspectives. Remember that diversity enriches our lives, experiences, and world knowledge.
• Learn more about other cultures : Take the time to explore cultures other than your own, including histories, traditions, and beliefs. Resources that can help include books, documentaries, and online resources.
• Practice empathy : Seek to understand others by imagining things from their perspective. Try to understand their experiences, challenges, and aspirations. Cultivate empathy and respect for the differences between people and cultures.
• Seek diversity : Make an active effort to spend more time with people from different walks of life. Talk to people from diverse backgrounds and approach these discussions with an open mind and a desire to learn. Be willing to share your own perspectives and experiences without trying to change others or impose your beliefs on them.
• Challenge biases : Try to become more aware of how your unconscious biases might shape your perceptions and interactions with others. Practicing cultural relativism is an ongoing process. It takes time, open-mindedness , and a willingness to reflect on your biases.

Promoting Cultural Relativism Among Mental Health Professionals

How can therapists apply cultural relativism to ensure they understand other cultural perspectives and avoid unintentional biases in therapy?   

A 2019 study found that the ideal training for therapists included graduate coursework in diversity, supervised clinical experiences working with diverse populations, experiential activities, didactic training, and cultural immersion when possible.

Avoiding Bias in Therapy

Raj suggests that there are important questions that professionals should ask themselves, including:

• How do I identify?
• How does my patient identify? 
• What prejudices or biases am I holding? 
•  Are there biases or stereotypes I hold based on my own upbringing and culture? 

She also suggests that therapists should always be willing to ask about client involvement in treatment planning. She recommends asking questions such as: 

• What approaches have been successful or failed in the past? 
• How does the patient perceive their ailment? 
• What were the results of the patient’s previous coping mechanisms? 
• How does the patient’s culture drive their behavior, coping skills, and outcomes?

By making clients an active part of their treatment and taking steps to understand their background better, therapists can utilize cultural relativism to deliver more sensitive, informed care.

The New Republic. Pioneers of cultural relativism )

Kanarek J. Critiquing cultural relativism . The Intellectual Standard. 2013;2(2):1.

Rosenberg AR, Starks H, Unguru Y, Feudtner C, Diekema D. Truth telling in the setting of cultural differences and incurable pediatric illness: A review . JAMA Pediatr . 2017;171(11):1113-1119. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.2568

Williams DR, Lawrence JA, Davis BA, Vu C. Understanding how discrimination can affect health . Health Serv Res . 2019;54 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):1374-1388. doi:10.1111/1475-6773.13222

Benuto LT, Singer J, Newlands RT, Casas JB. Training culturally competent psychologists: Where are we and where do we need to go ? Training and Education in Professional Psychology . 2019;13(1):56-63. doi:10.1037/tep0000214

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Cultural Relativism: Do Cultural Norms Make Actions Right and Wrong?

Author: Nathan Nobis Category: Ethics Word Count: 1000

Listen here

Consider these cultural practices:

arranged marriages; female genital cutting; male circumcision; requiring women to wear veils or burkas; canings as punishments; whaling and dolphin hunting; eating cats and dogs; eating meat; human sacrifice; harsh punishments throughout history. [1]  

Many readers will judge at least some practices like these to be morally wrong. If they announce this, however, they might get a response like this:

“Don’t judge these cultures’ practices! It’s their culture, their traditions, so what they do should be tolerated!”

People who say things like this may be expressing sympathy for an ethical theory called cultural relativism . [2] This essay introduces this theory. [3]

1. Understanding Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism proposes that what is ethical is relative to , or depends on , cultural attitudes:

• if a culture disapproves of people doing an action, then it is wrong for people in that culture to do that action;
• if a culture approves of people doing an action, then it is not wrong for people in that culture to do that action. [4]

Cultural relativism is not the empirical observation, accepted as true by everyone , that different cultures sometimes have different ethical views, or that what people believe , think , or feel about the morality of an action is sometimes “relative” to the culture they are in.

Cultural relativism is a theory of what makes actions right and wrong. The “don’t judge!” and “be tolerant!” reactions above might be based on it and reasoning like this:

“People in other cultures aren’t doing anything wrong because ethics is determined by cultural attitudes: so they shouldn’t be judged; they should be tolerated.”

2. Cultural Relativism’s Implications

We can better understand cultural relativism by thinking about what follows from it: [5]

if cultural relativism were true or correct , then:

1. the majority view on any moral issue is always correct;

relativism identifies the majority view with what’s ethically correct in that culture, so the majority view is always correct, no matter what;

2. people who criticize majority views and advocate for change are always wrong:

since according to relativism, majority views are always correct, anyone who critiques them must be mistaken;

3. what’s ethical is identified by opinion polls;

according to relativism, to find out whether an action is ethical or not, we survey the population to find the majority view: research, reflection, and wise guidance aren’t needed;

4. there is only cultural change, never progress or improvement:

according to relativism, if, e.g., a culture approved of slavery then slavery was not wrong in that culture at that time; if that culture came to reject slavery, then slavery would become wrong in that culture; this, however, was not moral improvement or progress since slavery earlier was not wrong according to relativism: there was merely a change of views.

Many people think these implications show that relativism is a false theory since the majority isn’t always right, cultural critics are sometimes correct, opinion polls don’t tell us what is really ethical, and cultural views really can improve and, unfortunately, decline.

3. Arguments For Cultural Relativism

What can be said for cultural relativism? What’s appealing about it?

3.1. Tolerance

Some people argue for cultural relativism on the grounds that we should be tolerant and accepting of cultural differences .

One problem with this reasoning is that (almost?) no culture holds that we should tolerate and accept everything , no matter what. So, a principle of universal tolerance and acceptance contradicts relativism, which maintains that ethical standards are culture-bound and not universal. To think that we should be tolerant and accepting of everything is to reject relativism. 

According to relativism we should accept and tolerate only what our culture accepts. Since many cultures condemn many of the actions above, relativism implies that people who reject these judgments – like those above who urge toleration – are usually mistaken. So, if our cultures should be even just more accepting and tolerant, we should reject relativism.

3.2. Disagreements

Everyone observes that there are some profound ethical disagreements between cultures. From this fact, relativists conclude we should accept relativism.

This reasoning, however, is doubtful. In general, when there are disagreements on an issue, at most one general “side” can be correct: [6] e.g., if one person believes the Earth is spherical and another believes the Earth is flat, they can’t both be correct. Relativists urge that everyone can be right when they should think that, at most, one “side” is correct. [7]

But how can we tell which side is correct? Evaluate the arguments on each side : e.g., do cultures that support female genital cutting give good reasons for the practice? Or is the case against it stronger? [8]

About many issues, understanding and evaluating the arguments in genuinely fair and balanced ways is difficult. Whatever the challenges though, they don’t support accepting cultural relativism, which makes answering hard ethical questions very easy: do an opinion poll! [9]

Finally, some people might appeal to relativism to try to avoid challenging issues: if relativism is correct, it’s a simple “the majority rules” and there’s no need to investigate and discuss. [10]

4. Conclusion

Cultural relativists are correct that sometimes we should be more tolerant and accepting of cultural differences. [11] Some things done in other cultures are unfamiliar and may seem strange. But “different” is not the same as “wrong,” and learning about relativism can remind us of that.

But just because some culture approves of something does not mean it’s OK. Cultures, like individuals, sometimes approve of practices that are very wrong: they aren’t perfect and neither are we.

Rejecting cultural relativism usually involves accepting ethical realism , that what’s ethical is determined by factors that are “objective” and not relative to cultural attitudes: e.g., whether actions are harmful or beneficial to whoever is affected by them, or whether actions are done with the consent of all involved, and other objective considerations.

What’s of primary philosophical interest is not that some culture approves or disapproves of an action, but why , their reasons. Do they have good arguments for what they support? Do we? That’s the question that ethics is all about.

[1] For information on these cultural practices, see Wikipedia, “Arranged marriage”; Brian Earp,  “Boys and girls alike: An un-consenting child, an unnecessary, invasive surgery: is there any moral difference between male and female circumcision?” Aeon , 1/13/2015, and Brian Earp, “Does Female Genital Mutilation Have Health Benefits? The Problem with Medicalizing Morality.” University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog , 8/15/2017; James Vyver, “Why do Muslim women wear a burka, niqab or hijab?” ABC News , 8/17/2017; Wikipedia, “Caning in Singapore”; Natasha Daly, “Japan’s controversial annual dolphin hunt begins,” National Geographic , 09/09/2021; Justin McCurry, “Japan resumes commercial whaling for first time in 30 years. The Guardian , 06/30/2019; George Petras. 2/25/2019. “South Koreans eat more than 1 million dogs each year — but that’s slowly changing. Here’s why. Young Koreans lead efforts to end a centuries-old practice.” USA Today ; Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism , Red Wheel, 2020; Wikipedia, “Human sacrifice”; Greta Christina, “How Religious Fundamentalism, Ironically, Leads to a Screwed-Up Moral Relativism,” The Orbit , 4/17/2014.

[2] Cultural relativism is an ethical theory , or a normative ethical theory. Such theories attempt to explain, in general, why actions are wrong (or right, or permissible) or what makes them so.

“Cultural relativism” is also sometimes called “ethical relativism,” “moral relativism” and sometimes even just “relativism.” These are names for the same view, which proposes that what’s really right and wrong – not just believed to be right and wrong – is relative to , or dependent on , cultural approval.

Another form of relativism is “individual relativism,” which is also sometimes (but sometimes not) called “ethical subjectivism,” which holds that what is right and wrong for a person to do is relative to, or dependent on, that person’s own approval or attitudes towards what they are doing. Individual relativism is very implausible since it seems to suggest, e.g., that if a person approves of their being, say, an ax-murderer, it is not wrong for them to be an ax-murderer: any action can be morally permissible provided the person doing the action approves of what they are doing.

Another view called just “relativism,” is “relativism about truth,” which claims that if someone, or a group, believes some claim, that claim is true. This view, however, is not true because belief and truth are distinct, and so what anyone believes to be true, or thinks is true, need not be actually true: e.g., sincerely, confidently believing you are a billionaire doesn’t mean or make you a billionaire and someone merely believing you are dead or imprisoned doesn’t make you that. Usually, if someone says something is “true to them” or “their truth,” they are best understood as stating what they believe or think, which may or may not be true. For more discussion, see Huemer, Michael. “Relativism: What is this Nonsense?” Fake Noûs , December 25, 2021.

[3] The understanding of relativism discussed in this essay is the version developed and discussed by James and Stuart Rachels in their Elements of Moral Philosophy textbook, as well as James Rachels’ “Some Basic Points About Arguments” chapter from their anthology The Right Thing to Do.

[4] Cultural relativism is sometimes presented as “if a culture believes an action is wrong , then that action is wrong in that culture” and “if a culture believes an action is permissible , then that action is permissible in that culture.”

This statement of the view, however, doesn’t make sense and is incorrect, since what would it be to “believe an action is wrong” on this proposal of what relativism is? What would a culture be believing or thinking here, if they believed an action is wrong? What thought would they be thinking about what “wrong” means? What would the content of the thoughts or judgments “is wrong” and “is permissible” be? 

[5] There are deeper concerns about cultural relativism in terms of simply understanding what the view actually is. 

Cultural relativism claims that ethics depends on cultures’ attitudes, but exactly what is a cultures’ attitudes? What percent of the population or how pervasive must some attitude be to be considered representative of the culture?

And what is a culture anyway? What is it to be part of a culture? (Is a visitor in a new culture “part of that culture”?).

However cultures are defined (can an individual person and their views be considered a culture?), each individual person is a member of different cultures, which often have different attitudes on the same actions. E.g., suppose some college students are also part of a “conservative,” “traditional” religion. Their college student culture may approve of what their religious cultures disapprove of, and vice-versa, and so it is unclear what action cultural relativism would require of them in these cases of intra-personal cultural conflicts. Which culture should an individual “follow” in cases of conflicts?

These interesting, theoretical questions about defining cultural relativism will not be addressed here.

[6] A potential exception to the rule that, in cases of disagreement, at most one general position is correct are aesthetic disagreements, disagreements about what’s most beautiful or attractive or pleasing.

For example, one person might think that the first song on an album is the best song, but their friend thinks that song is the worst. They seem to disagree, but it also might seem that neither of them is correct: no song is “objectively” best if “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as is sometimes said: it just depends on what someone likes, and we often like different things.

One theory of aesthetic judgments is that they are about what someone finds pleasing or attractive. So, on this view, one person here is saying, “I enjoy this song the most,” whereas the other says, “I don’t enjoy this song the most.” On this view, they don’t really disagree, since they are both just talking about what pleases them most: they are both accurately reporting what they like; they are both telling the truth. 

A difficulty for this view, however, is that it sometimes seems that people can be mistaken in their aesthetic judgments: e.g., if a beginning songwriter claims his songs are as good as Dolly Parton’s, or a tone-deaf singer thinks she’s as good a singer as Whitney Houston, or a local church choir thinks they are as good as the Mormon Tabernacle choir, it seems to many like all those judgments are false. If that’s correct, that means that beauty isn’t quite “in the eye of the beholder,” since some judgments about what’s beautiful, or more or most beautiful, can be mistaken. What might make them mistaken, however, is a challenging philosophical issue.

Nevertheless, judgments about what’s, say, the most flavorful ice cream or who the best guitar player is or whether someone is more beautiful or attractive than someone else are importantly different from whether killing someone was wrong or not, whether a law is just and other weighty ethical concerns.

[7] Another response to ethical disagreements is concluding that nothing is wrong or not wrong at all : there is no such thing as “wrongness.” Ethical irrealists or anti-realists called “error theorists” develop this position. See Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf and Moral Error Theory by Ian Tully. For a critique of moral error theory, see “Bah Fortiori: On the peculiarly specific character of our moral outrage” by Oliver Traldia.

[8] In “What’s Culture Got to Do with It? Excising the Harmful Tradition of Female Circumcision” it is observed that female genital cutting is sometimes argued, by its advocates in cultures where it is practiced, to be morally permissible because it is a tradition , it reduces promiscuity , it increases fertility and eases childbirth , it is required by their religion(s) , and it makes women more attactive to the men in these cultures . Whether any of these arguments is sound might depend on any of those claims being true and that claim’s corresponding, unstated premise being true also: all traditions are morally permissible (a premise similar to cultural relativism); all actions that decrease promiscuity are morally permissible ; all actions that increase fertility and/or ease childbirth are morally permissible ; all actions required by someone’s religion are morally permissible ; and all actions that make someone more attractive to someone else are morally permissible .

[9] Another potential motivation for relativism is people simply not knowing much about better methods to ethical reasoning. Few people take ethics classes where they learn to systematically engage issues using ethical theories that are arguably better than relativism. In such classes, students are usually exposed to ethical theories that deny cultural relativism, see Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman, Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz, and John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies. For an approach that seeks to combine positive insights of many of these theories, see Principlism in Biomedical Ethics: Respect for Autonomy, Non-Maleficence, Beneficence, and Justice by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Some people seem to assume that the only options for what could make wrong actions wrong is either individual or cultural approval (so relativism) or God’s approval and commands: this explanation is known as the “Divine Command Theory” of ethics. There are, however, as noted there are many other plausible explanations for what makes wrong actions wrong and, interesting, the Divine Command Theory is subject to some objections that are similar to objections to relativism since both claim that its “just because ” some authority disapproves or approves of an action that makes that action wrong or not. See Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory by Spencer Case.

[10] For this interpretation of common appeals to relativism, which sees these appeals as attempts to avoid careful and rigorous discussion, see Satris’s (1986) very insightful discussion of what he calls “Student Relativism.”

[11] Cultural “conservatives” sometimes claim that “liberals” accept relativism since liberals sometimes say things along the lines of “people should be able to do what they want,” “if people like doing that, they should be able to do that,” and so on. But what they don’t notice is that liberals say this only about actions they argue are not wrong , since, for actions that are not wrong, it makes sense to say that people should be able to do them, if they want. It’s not like “liberals” claim that if someone wants to be a school shooter or dump toxic waste in the river, they should do it. So “conservatives” sometimes do not think about the contexts and subjects that relativistic- sounding , but not genuinely relativistic, claims are made.

Christina, Greta. 4/17/2014, “How Religious Fundamentalism, Ironically, Leads to a Screwed-Up Moral Relativism,” The Orbit .

Daly, Natasha. 9/09/2021. “Japan’s controversial annual dolphin hunt begins.” National Geographic .

Earp, Brian. 1/13/2015. “Boys and girls alike: An un-consenting child, an unnecessary, invasive surgery: is there any moral difference between male and female circumcision?” Aeon .

Earp, Brian. 8/15/2017. “Does Female Genital Mutilation Have Health Benefits? The Problem with Medicalizing Morality.” University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog.

Huemer, Michael. December 25, 2021. “Relativism: What is this Nonsense?” Fake Noûs .

Joy, Melanie. 2020. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism . Red Wheel.

McCurry, Justin. 6/30/2019. “Japan resumes commercial whaling for first time in 30 years.” The Guardian .

Petras, George. 2/25/2019. “South Koreans eat more than 1 million dogs each year — but that’s slowly changing. Here’s why. Young Koreans lead efforts to end a centuries-old practice.” USA Today .

Rachels, James and Stuart. 2019. The Elements of Moral Philosophy , 9th Edition . McGraw Hill.

Rachels, James. 2019. “Some Basic Points About Arguments.” In James and Stuart Rachels’ The Right Thing to Do , 8th Edition, Rowman & Littlefield .

Satris, Stephen. 1986. “Student Relativism.” Teaching Philosophy . 9(3). 193-205.

Traldia, Oliver. January 27, 2019. “Bah Fortiori: On the peculiarly specific character of our moral outrage.” Arc Digital .

Vyver, James. 8/17/2017. “Why do Muslim women wear a burka, niqab or hijab?” ABC News .

“What’s Culture Got to Do with It? Excising the Harmful Tradition of Female Circumcision.” 1993. Harvard Law Review . 106( 8). 1944–1961.

Wikipedia, “Arranged marriage.”

Wikipedia, “Caning in Singapore.”

Wikipedia, “Human sacrifice.”

For Further Reading and Viewing

Boghossian, Paul. July 24, 2011. “The Maze of Moral Relativism.” New York Times. 

Brain in a Vat . August 16, 2020. “Is Cultural Relativism Racist? With Justin Kalef.” Youtube. 

Edgerton, Robert B. 1992. Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony . Free Press.

Huemer, Michael. 2013. “The Progress of Liberalism”: Michael Huemer at TEDxMileHigh. Youtube.

King, Nathan. January 18, 2017. “Donald Trump and the Death of Freshman Relativism.” Huffington Post. 

Prinz, Jesse. January/February 2011. “Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response.” Philosophy Now . 82.

Related Essays

Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker?  by Carolina Flores

Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman

Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz

John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies

Principlism in Biomedical Ethics: Respect for Autonomy, Non-Maleficence, Beneficence, and Justice by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory by Spencer Case

Moral Education: Teaching Students to Become Better People  by Dominik Balg

Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf

Moral Error Theory by Ian Tully

Evolution and Ethics by Michael Klenk

Ignorance and Blame by Daniel Miller

What Is Misogyny?  by Odelia Zuckerman and Clair Morrissey

Aristotle’s Defense of Slavery  by Dan Lowe 

The Moral Status of Animals  by Jason Wyckoff

Speciesism  by Dan Lowe

Theories of Punishment  by Travis Joseph Rodgers

Responding to Morally Flawed Historical Philosophers and Philosophies by Victor Fabian Abundez-Guerra and Nathan Nobis

Acknowledgments

The author appreciates feedback and guidance on this essay from Felipe Pereira, Dan Lowe, Thomas Metcalf, Chelsea Haramia, and a set of Facebook friends who helped him develop a list of cultural practices of ethical significance. 

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About the Author

Nathan Nobis is a Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA. He is co-author of Thinking Critically About Abortion , author of Animals & Ethics 101 , and the author and co-author of many other writings and materials in philosophy and ethics. NathanNobis.com

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Cultural Relativism: Definition & Examples

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Key Takeaways

• Cultural Relativism is the claim that ethical practices differ among cultures, and what is considered right in one culture may be considered wrong in another. The implication of cultural relativism is that no one society is superior to another; they are merely different.
• This claim comes with several corollaries; namely, that different societies have different moral codes, there is no objective standard to judge how good or bad these moral codes are, and that the job of those who study cultures is not to compare these customs to their own, but to describe them.
• Moral relativism claims that what is customary in a culture is absolutely right in that culture. Cultural relativism is not as strong, sometimes asserting that there is no real way to measure right or wrong.
• Cultural relativism is contrary to ethnocentrism, which encourages people to look at the world from the perspective of their own culture.
• While cultural relativism has been the subject of controversy — especially from philosophers — anthropological and sociological studies have led to a widespread consensus among social scientists that cultural relativism is true.

Cultural relativism is the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself.

It states that there are no universal beliefs, and each culture must be understood in its own terms because cultures cannot be translated into terms that are accessible everywhere.

The principle is sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research and to avoid judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture. For this reason, cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism.

Cultural Relativism refers to the ability to understand a culture on its own terms and consequently not make judgments based on the standards of one’s own culture.

Implications

From the cultural relativist perspective, no culture is superior to another when comparing their systems of morality, law, politics, etc.

This is because cultural norms and values, according to cultural relativism, derive their meaning within a specific social context.

Cultural relativism is also based on the idea that there is no absolute standard of good or evil. Thus, every decision and judgment of what is right or wrong is individually decided in each society.

As a result, any opinion on ethics is subject to the perspective of each person within their particular culture.

In practice, cultural relativists try to promote the understanding of cultural practices that are unfamiliar to other cultures, such as eating insects and sacrificial killing.

There are two different categories of cultural relativism: absolute and critical. Absolute cultural relativists believe that outsiders must and should not question everything that happens within a culture.

Meanwhile, critical cultural relativism questions cultural practices regarding who is accepting them and why, as well as recognizing power relationships.

Cultural relativism challenges beliefs about the objectivity and universality of moral truth.

In effect, cultural relativism says that there is no such thing as universal truth and ethics; there are only various cultural codes. Moreover, the code of one culture has no special status but is merely one among many.

Assumptions

Cultural relativism has several different elements, and there is some disagreement as to what claims are true and pertinent to cultural relativism and which are not. Some claims include that:

Different societies have different moral codes;

There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one societal code as better than another;

The moral code of one’s own society has no special status but is merely one among many;

There is no “universal truth” in ethics, meaning that there are no moral truths that hold for all people at all times;

The moral code of a society determines what is right and wrong within that society; that is, if the moral code of a society says that a certain action is right, then that action is right, at least within that society and;

It is arrogant for people to attempt to judge the conduct of other people. Instead, researchers should adopt an attitude of tolerance toward the practices of other cultures.

Illustrative Examples

Food choices.

Cultural relativism does not merely relate to morality and ethics. Cultural relativism, for example, explains why certain cultures eat different foods at different meals.

For example, traditionally, breakfast in the United States is markedly different from breakfast in Japan or Colombia. While one may consist of scrambled eggs and pancakes and the other rice and soup or white cheese on a corn arepa, cultural relativists seek to understand these differences, not in terms of any perceived superiority or inferiority but in description (Bian & Markman, 2020).

Mental Illness

One of the biggest controversies concerning classification and diagnosis is that the ICD (the manuals of mental disorders) are culturally biased because they are drawn up and used by white, middle-class men. This means they tend to use definitions of abnormality that are irrelevant to all cultures.

For example, Davison & Neale (1994) explain that in Asian cultures, a person experiencing some emotional turmoil is praised & rewarded if they show no expression of their emotions.

In certain Arabic cultures, however, the outpouring of public emotion is understood and often encouraged. Without this knowledge, an individual displaying overt emotional behavior may be regarded as abnormal when in fact, it is not.

Cross-cultural misunderstandings are common and may contribute to unfair and discriminatory treatment of minorities by the majority, e.g., the high diagnosis rate of schizophrenia amongst non-white British people.

Cochrane (1977) reported that the incidence of schizophrenia in the West Indies and the UK is 1 %, but that people of Afro-Caribbean origin are seven times more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic when living in the UK.

Hygienic Rituals

Another phenomenon explained by cultural relativism is hygienic rituals. Different cultures may use different modes or methods of disposing of waste and cleaning up afterward.

Ritualized ablution, or washing, also differs across cultures. Catholics may dip their fingers into blessed water and anoint themselves at church, and Jewish people may pour water over their hands in a specific way during Shabbat.

Although toilet and washing practices vary drastically across cultures, cultural relativists seek to describe these differences, noting that what is customary to culture is not necessarily “right” or “wrong.”

Cultural vs. Moral Relativism

Cultural relativism is a claim that anthropologists can make when describing how ethical practices differ across cultures; as a result, the truth or falsity of cultural relativism can be determined by how anthropologists and anthropologists study the world.

Many sociologists and anthropologists have conducted such studies, leading to widespread consensus among social scientists that cultural relativism is an actual phenomenon (Bowie, 2015).

Moral relativism, meanwhile, is a claim that what is really right or wrong is what that culture says is right or wrong. While moral relativists believe that cultural relativism is true, they extend their claims much further.

Moral relativists believe that if a culture sincerely and reflectively adopts some basic moral principle, then it is morally obligatory for members of that culture to act according to that principle (Bowie, 2015).

The implication of moral relativism is that it is absolutely necessary for someone to act according to the norms of the culture in which they are located.

For example, when asking whether or not it is ethical to bribe government bureaucrats, a moral relativist would look for the answer in the norms of how people within their country deal with bureaucracy.

If people bribe government officials, then the moral relativist would consider bribery not to be wrong in that country.

However, if people do not normally bribe bureaucrats, offering them a bribe would be considered morally wrong.

A cultural relativist would posit that while bribery is an ethical norm in the cultures where it is practiced, it is not necessarily morally right or wrong in that culture (Bowie, 2015).

Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world largely from the perspective of one’s own culture.

This may be motivated, for example, by the belief that one’s own race, ethnic, or cultural group is the most important or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups.

Ethnocentrism can often lead to incorrect assumptions about others’ behavior based on one’s own norms, values, and beliefs (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero, 2021a).

Cultural relativism, meanwhile, is principled in regarding and valuing the practices of a culture from the point of view of that culture and avoiding making judgments stemming from one’s own assumptions.

Cultural relativism attempts to counter ethnocentrism by promoting the understanding of cultural practices unfamiliar to other cultures. For example, it is a common practice for friends of the same sex in India to hold hands while walking in public.

In the United Kingdom, holding hands is largely limited to romantically involved couples and often suggests a sexual relationship.

Someone holding an extreme ethnocentrist view may see their own understanding of hand-holding as superior and consider the foreign practice to be immoral (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero; 2021a).

Controversy

Cultural Relativism has been criticized for numerous reasons, both theoretical and practical.

According to Karanack (2013), cultural relativism attempts to integrate knowledge between one’s own culture-bound reality. The premise that cultural relativism is based on that all cultures are valid in their customs is vague in Karanack’s view.

Karanack also criticizes cultural relativism from a theoretical perspective for having contradictory logic, asserting that cultural relativism often asserts that social facts are true and untrue, depending on the culture in which one is situated.

Nonetheless, cultural relativism also has several advantages. Firstly, it is a system that promotes cooperation. Each individual has a different perspective that is based on their upbringing, experiences, and personal thoughts, and by embracing the many differences that people have, cooperation creates the potential for a stronger society.

Each individual definition of success allows people to pursue stronger bonds with one another and potentially achieve more because there are no limitations on a group level about what can or cannot be accomplished (Karanack, 2013).

Secondly, cultural relativism envisions a society where equality across cultures is possible. Cultural relativism does so by allowing individuals to define their moral code without defining that of others. As each person can set their own standards of success and behavior, cultural relativism creates equality (Karanack, 2013).

Additionally, Cultural relativism can preserve cultures and allow people to create personal moral codes based on societal standards without precisely consulting what is “right” or “wrong.”

However, it can do so while also excluding moral relativism. This means that the moral code of a culture can be defined and an expectation implemented that people follow it, even as people devise goals and values that are particularly relevant to them.

Lastly, cultural relativism has been praised for stopping cultural conditions — the adoption of people to adapt their attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs to the people they are with on a regular basis (Karanack, 2013).

Despite these advantages, cultural relativism has been criticized for creating a system fuelled by personal bias. As people tend to prefer to be with others who have similar thoughts, feelings, and ideas, they tend to separate themselves into neighborhoods, communities, and social groups that share specific perspectives.

When people are given the power to define their own moral code, they do so based on personal bias, causing some people to follow their own code at the expense of others (Karanack, 2013).

Nonetheless, cultural relativism promotes understanding cultures outside of one’s own, enabling people to build relationships with other cultures that acknowledge and respect each other’s diverse lives.

With cultural relativism comes the ability to understand a culture on its own terms without making judgments based on one’s own cultural standards. In this way, sociologists and anthropologists can draw more accurate conclusions about outside cultures (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero, 2020).

Bian, L., & Markman, E. M. (2020). Why do we eat cereal but not lamb chops at breakfast? Investigating Americans’ beliefs about breakfast foods. Appetite, 144, 104458.

Bowie, N.E. (2015). Relativism, Cultural and Moral. In Wiley Encyclopedia of Management (eds C.L. Cooper and ). Culture and Psychology. (2021). Glendale Community College.

Brown, M. F. (2008). Cultural Relativism 2.0 .  Current Anthropology, 49 (3), 363-383.

Cochrane, R. A. Y. M. O. N. D. (1977). Mental illness in immigrants to England and Wales: an analysis of mental hospital admissions, 1971.  Social psychiatry, 12 (1), 25-35.

Davison, G. C., & Neale, J. M. (1994). Abnormal Psychology . New York: John Willey and Sons.

Kanarek, Jaret (2013) “ Critiquing Cultural Relativism ,” The Intellectual Standard: Vol. 2: Iss. 2, Article 1.

Spiro, M. E. (1992). Cultural relativism and the future of anthropology .  Rereading cultural anthropology , 124, 51.

Tilley, J. J. (2000). Cultural relativism .  Hum. Rts. Q. , 22, 501.

Worthy, L. D., Lavigne, T., & Romero, F. (2020). Self and Culture. Culture and Psychology .

Zechenter, E. M. (1997). In the name of culture: Cultural relativism and the abuse of the individual .  Journal of Anthropological Research, 53 (3), 319-347.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Cultural Relativism — Rachels Arguments Against Cultural Relativism

Rachels Arguments Against Cultural Relativism

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Cultural Relativism by Mayanthi Fernando LAST REVIEWED: 25 June 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 25 June 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0003

In a 1580 essay called “On the Cannibals,” early Enlightenment thinker Michel de Montaigne posited that men are by nature ethnocentric and that they judge the customs and morals of other communities on the basis of their own particular customs and morals, which they take to be universally applicable. Montaigne’s essay foreshadowed the emergence in early 20th-century American anthropology of the principle of cultural relativism in a more robust and programmatic form, as a descriptive, methodological, epistemological, and prescriptive approach to human diversity. Franz Boas and his students, especially Melville J. Herskovits, were at the forefront of this new development, one that became foundational to modern anthropology. Against the biological and racial determinism of the time, they held that cultures develop according to the particular circumstances of history rather than in a linear progression from “primitive” to “savage” to “civilized,” that culture (rather than race or biology) most affects social life and human behavior, and that culture shapes the way members of a particular cultural group think, act, perceive, and evaluate. This new theorization of the culture concept led to a multifaceted approach to studying human diversity called cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is an umbrella term that covers different attitudes, though it relies on a basic notion of emic coherence: Each culture works in its own way, and beliefs and practices that appear strange from the outside make sense when contextualized within their particular cultural framework. More specifically, descriptive relativism holds that cultures differ substantially from place to place. Methodological relativism holds that the ethnographer must set aside his or her own cultural norms in order to understand another culture and explain its worldview. Epistemological relativism holds that because our own culture so mediates our perceptions, it is often impossible to fully grasp another culture in an unmediated way. Prescriptive or moral relativism holds that because we are all formed in culture, there is no Archimedean point from which to evaluate objectively, and so we must not judge other cultures using our own cultural norms. Recently, cultural relativism has become a straw man term, defined pejoratively as the strongest form of moral relativism; namely, that we cannot make any kind of moral judgments at all regarding foreign cultural practices. At the turn of the 20th century, cultural relativism was a progressive anthropological theory and methodological practice that sought to valorize marginalized communities in an inegalitarian world. Now cultural relativism is criticized as doing precisely the opposite: allowing repressive and inegalitarian societies to hide behind the cloak of cultural difference.

Stocking 1982 analyzes the emergence of American cultural anthropology, the rise of Franz Boas and his students, and their lasting influence. Kuper 1999 offers the most comprehensive overview of American cultural anthropology, though from a critical, social anthropological perspective dominant in Britain. The best overview of major French thinkers on the question of cultural diversity from Montaigne to Lévi-Strauss remains Todorov 1993 , which provides a good companion piece to overviews of cultural relativism that largely focus on the United States. Shweder 1984 traces American cultural anthropology’s roots in German Romanticism. Hatch 1983 and Fernandez 1990 examine anthropology’s and especially Boasian anthropologists’ relationship to cultural relativism. Renteln 1988 provides a short but comprehensive overview of more general approaches to cultural relativism within and beyond anthropology.

Fernandez, James W. 1990. Tolerance in a repugnant world and other dilemmas in the cultural relativism of Melville J. Herskovits. Ethos 18.2: 140–164.

DOI: 10.1525/eth.1990.18.2.02a00020

A close reading of Herskovits’ work on cultural relativism by one of his last students. Argues that cultural relativism was not an abstract philosophical issue but a practical and political one and that Herskovits considered cultural relativism as both a scientific method and a tool to fight injustice. Also examines some of the specific impasses that arose for Herskovits between his commitment to objective science and to political and social justice. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

Hatch, Elvin. 1983. Culture and morality: The relativity of values in anthropology . New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Gives a critical overview of Boasian cultural relativism, including some of its epistemological, methodological, and ethical impasses. In addition to a historical overview, also argues for a new iteration of cultural relativism that overcomes what Hatch considers its earlier problems.

Kuper, Adam. 1999. Culture: The anthropologists’ account . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Though often critical of cultural anthropology, and especially of cultural relativism, provides a comprehensive account of the development of the culture concept from its evolutionary civilizational sense to its contemporary, plural meaning. Examines the work of the Boasians, David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and recent poststructural anthropology.

Renteln, Alison Dundes. 1988. Relativism and the search for human rights. American Anthropologist 90.1: 56–72.

DOI: 10.1525/aa.1988.90.1.02a00040

First half of the article is useful for outlining the various versions of cultural relativism in philosophy and anthropology. Provides a brief but comprehensive historical overview of the different approaches and ensuing debates. Latter half of the article takes up the question of contemporary human rights, arguing that cultural relativism is compatible with cross-cultural universals. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

Shweder, Richard A. 1984. Anthropology’s romantic rebellion against the enlightenment, or there’s more to thinking than reason and evidence. In Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion . Edited by Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine, 27–66. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Locates anthropology’s celebration of local context, its commitment to local rationalities, and its notion that primitive and modern are coequal within a longer genealogy that stretches back to the German Romantic movement.

Stocking, George W., Jr. 1982. Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

A classic text by the leading historian of the discipline charting the emergence of American cultural anthropology. Gives a good sense of the theoretical and political stakes in the development of Boasian anthropology and its culture concept against the racial theories popular at the time.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1993. On human diversity: Nationalism, racism, and exoticism in French thought . Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Excellent overview of French thought from the Enlightenment onwards on the unity and diversity of the human species and its values. Particularly useful for defining key terms, including ethnocentrism , humanism , scientism , cultural relativism , universalism , and exoticism . Shows how ethnocentrism underpins certain forms of both universalism and cultural relativism. The author also offers his own theory of a universalism without ethnocentrism.

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Understanding Cultural Relativism: A critical Appraisal of the Theory

2017, International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding

The aim of this review article is to reveal the cons and pros of ethical relativism, especially conventionalism. This article is written with the intention of showing some of the practical upshots of conventionalism without totally denying some of its virtues in a world where diversity of cultures and customs is apparent. The article inquires the question: Is ethical relativism tenable? The review article relies on reviewing secondary sources. What I am arguing in this article is that despite the attraction of ethical relativism as an intellectual weapon to fight against ethnocentrism and cultural intolerance, the view still goes against the idea of intercultural comparison, criticism and moral argumentation, so that it would have serious disastrous implication on practice, especially on the universal character of human rights and shutters all together any sort of moral progress and reform. The article concludes that we can set forth certain objective moral codes, discovered through...

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From left to right: Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

The Critical Bite of Cultural Relativism

The pioneers of cultural anthropology taught not just how to study other cultures, but how to criticize their own.

Gili Kliger

• October 10, 2019

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century Charles King Doubleday, $30 (cloth)

“I have had a curious experience in graduate work during the last few years,” the anthropologist Franz Boas wrote to a colleague in 1920. “All my best students are women.”

The sea change was telling. Now often called the father of American anthropology, Boas—Prussian-born, Jewish, and male—in fact exerted tremendous influence far beyond the academic discipline he helped to establish, presiding over a revolution in the social sciences and becoming one of the best-known public intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. While his work ranged widely, from linguistics to mythology and physical anthropology, he is now mostly remembered for the methodological rigor he brought to the field, the many students he mentored, and his career-long opposition to scientific racism.

In hundreds of academic essays, as well as in his public writing and activism, Boas developed a view of human cultures that was at once empirically grounded and historically sensitive, emphasizing the socially contingent in place of the biologically determined. This outlook influenced many prominent intellectuals of the day, from John Dewey to W. E. B. Du Bois. (Looking back on Boas’s commencement address at Atlanta University in 1906, Du Bois wrote that Boas’s message—“You need not be ashamed of your African past”—inspired a “sudden awakening.”) His books, including his best-known The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), found a wide audience—earning him a place on the cover of Time in 1936—and were among the first to be burned by the Nazis.

These ideas challenged prevailing conceptions of racial and social hierarchy. Where the natural sciences had taught that humans were divided into fixed, biological types, Boas argued that the data called for a more nuanced account of human difference. Contrary to the dispensations of social Darwinism, he contended, differences observed across human groups—from the physical to the cognitive and social—were often the result of their distinctive cultural environments, rather than inherited biological traits. His many influential students would extend this insight to other categories used to sort people. For them, all observable differences—in sexual mores, in religious beliefs, in everyday customs—reflected the variety of ways humans had devised for living, no one way superior to any other. “Cultural relativism,” as it became known, was born.

This, in brief, is the story of Charles King’s new book Gods of the Upper Air , which makes a compelling case for the importance of the work of the Boas circle in shaping many of the ideas about human variation that we take for granted today. A group biography of Boas and four of his disciples—Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria—the book illuminates the context and stakes behind a transformative period in the history of the social sciences. Boas’s other influential students receive much less attention, among them the linguist Edward Sapir, who applied methods typically reserved for “civilized” languages to the study of indigenous ones and advanced the still controversial thesis of the linguistic relativity of thought, and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, who helped establish African and African American studies in the U.S. academy.

But King’s selection of characters may be his most instructive contribution. The story he tells is not only about an important moment in the history of the social sciences, but also about a group of women whose travels across the American empire liberated them, in some measure, from the constraining norms of their time. Not all cultures, it turned out, were as good as any other. And it was, in particular, the culture at home that they found wanting.

Race thinking has always been a preeminently American occupation. When President Trump complained in 2018 that the United States was admitting too many immigrants from “shithole countries” instead of places like Norway, many were quick to decry his comments as un-American. Fewer acknowledged that race has long been the criterion par excellence for entry into the life of the republic.

In 1790 Congress passed the first naturalization act restricting citizenship to “free white persons.” Five years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had asked in Notes on the State of Virginia , “Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?” Three years after the Civil War ended, the Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The latter clause would allow the Supreme Court, sixteen years later, to deny citizenship to John Elk, an American Indian living in Omaha, because Elk was born on a reservation and therefore not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Governing an empire requires defining categories of difference—giving them content, regulating their margins. It requires no small feat of mental acrobatics to codify universal principles that grant rights and privileges to some but not others. The early phase of anthropology was serviceable in this regard. In the late eighteenth century the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach collected and catalogued human skulls, measured them, and concluded that humanity divided into five racial groups: “Caucasians” who were of European, Middle Eastern, and North African origin; “Mongolians” from East and Central Asia; “Malayans” of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands; “Ethiopians” of sub-Saharan Africa; and “Americans.” Blumenbach plucked the word “Caucasian” from the stuff of fantasy. Citing a seventeenth-century traveler who visited the mountain range nestled between the Caspian and the Black Seas and found the Georgian women attractive, Blumenbach decided to adopt the name of those mountains as a label for the people who shared his own skin color. Craniometry and phrenology may be discredited sciences, but we continue to employ terms of their invention.

It didn’t take long for the new science of mankind to find a receptive audience on the other side of the Atlantic. A popular U.S. textbook from 1854 declared:

There are reasons why Ethnology should be eminently a science for American culture. Here, three of the five races, into which Blumenbach divided mankind, are brought together to determine the problem of their destiny as they best may, while Chinese immigration to California and the proposed importation of Coolie laborers threaten to bring us into equally intimate contact with a fourth. It is manifest that our relation to and management of these people must depend, in a great measure, upon their intrinsic race character.

When the Supreme Court was again asked to rule on the question of citizenship, it found Blumenbach’s distinctions useful. In 1914 Takao Ozawa, who was born in Japan but had spent much of his life in California, applied for citizenship under the Naturalization Act, arguing that his light skin color made him a “free white person.” In 1922 the Court denied his request. It was well understood, they said, that “white person” meant “a person of the Caucasian race,” but Ozawa was “ clearly of a race that was not Caucasian. ”

Just three months later, in yet another citizenship case, the court heard arguments from Bhagat Singh Thind , who was born in India but had moved to the United States and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Thind argued that he was Caucasian and therefore a “free white person,” citing Blumenbach’s findings that the home of the “Caucasian” race extended from Europe to the Ganges. This time the justices retreated from the earlier analysis, arguing that since the framers of the naturalization statute were unfamiliar with the term “Caucasian,” it was inappropriate to use a word of scientific origin rather than popular understandings of “white person.” “The words of familiar speech,” they argued, “which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white.”

It was in this morass that Franz Boas intervened. Born in Germany, Boas studied physics at the University of Kiel, receiving a doctorate in 1881 for measuring the distortions of light as it moves through water. He soon lost interest in the subject and decided to switch fields. Inspired by tales of Arctic exploration, he proposed to study the migration patterns of the Innuits of Baffin Island in northern Canada. He convinced a Berlin newspaper to publish his stories of the journey, billing himself as the German Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer famous for his expeditions into central Africa.

After a few months living among the Innuit, learning their language, and recording their stories, Boas wrote to his friend (and future wife) Marie Krackowizer, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages.’” In 1887 he immigrated to the United States, where he married Marie, the daughter of a prominent physician, worked as a curator at the Smithsonian (then the chief center of U.S. anthropology), and became a professor of anthropology at Columbia. He carried out research in the Pacific Northwest and, in collaboration with his informant George Hunt, published a series of works on the myths and folklore of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia.

Boas got his first taste of both the possibilities and limitations of his science in combating racial politics. In 1907, in response to an uptick of immigrants from places that weren’t Norway, the U.S. Congress set up a commission to study the effects of immigration on the body politic, engaging Boas the following year to prepare a report on “the immigration of different races into this country.” Boas and his assistants traveled around New York City measuring the head sizes and other physical features of different immigrant populations: Jews on the Lower East Side; Italians in Yonkers; Hungarians, Poles and Slavs in Brooklyn. All together some 17,821 individuals participated in the study.

The results surprised Boas. In the mid-nineteenth century the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius had developed the so-called cephalic index, the ratio of the maximum width of the skull to it its maximum length. Physical anthropologists seized on the measure as a way to quantify racial differences; it was thought that the average cephalic index of a group could tell you something about its distinctive inherited traits. Boas’s findings shattered this bedrock of racial anthropology. The U.S-born children of immigrants, he found in his study, had strikingly different skull shapes than their European-born parents, suggesting that environment, much more than heredity, determined cranial form. “The adaptability of the immigrant,” Boas wrote, “seems to be very much greater than we had a right to suppose before our investigations were instituted.”

For Boas, the conclusion was clear: fixed, racial types did not exist. Rather, “all the evidence is now in favor of a great plasticity of human types, and the permanence of types in new surroundings appears rather as the exception than as the rule.” There was no reason to suggest that immigrants, of any origin, could not adapt to their new environment, he argued; nurture shaped individuals as much as nature. In his careful study In Search of Human Nature (1991), the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Carl Degler characterized Boas’s work for the immigration commission as “a stunning empirical blow against those who doubted the power of the social environment on human beings.”

These claims did not go uncriticized. The prominent English statistician Karl Pearson, an avowed eugenicist and student of Francis Galton, published a critique in 1924. And regardless, the senators behind the commission all staunchly opposed immigration; they virtually ignored Boas’s findings. In their final report they wrote that the commission “deemed it reasonable to follow the classification employed by Blumenbach.” And, though many of the recent immigrants were technically white, the report pointed out they hailed from the “less progressive and advanced countries of Europe.” Aggressive immigration quotas followed.

Around this time a Vassar graduate named Ruth Benedict started taking classes at the Free School (which would later become the New School for Social Research), an antidote to her otherwise suburban role as the wife of a biochemist. There she was introduced to the latest studies of the Native Americans of the Southwest. She enrolled in the graduate program in anthropology at Columbia, earning her doctorate in 1923. She was one of only forty women in the country that year, in all of the social sciences, to receive a PhD. The following summer she traveled to New Mexico to study Zuñi culture. She spent hours talking to people, transcribing folktales, and observing practices. She was struck by what she saw: women held exclusive property rights, wealth passed from mothers to daughters, and descent was traced through the mother’s line. A woman who wanted to divorce her husband needed only to leave his possessions out on the doorstep. “When he comes home in the evening,” Benedict wrote, “he sees the little bundle, picks it up and cries, and returns with it to his mother’s house.”

Benedict found the Zuñi enlightening not only on matters of matriarchy but also with regard to gender and sexuality. “Western civilization,” she wrote, “tends to regard even a mild homosexual as an abnormal. . . . We have only to turn to other cultures, however, to realize that homosexuals have by no means been uniformly inadequate to the social situation.” Among the Zuñi, not only were “homosexuals . . . often regarded as exceptionally able,” but there was also a recognized third gender role. “Men-women,” as Benedict called them, were often respected healers or organizers. (Contemporary indigenous activists use “two spirit” as an umbrella term for the many forms of this third gender role traditionally practiced in a number of Native American communities.) “Men who have chosen openly to assume women’s dress,” she wrote, “have the same chance as any other persons to establish themselves as functioning members of the society. Their response is socially recognized.”

All of this led Benedict to push Boas’s thought into more radical territory. She had learned the “ease with which our abnormals function in other cultures.” And in her 1934 Patterns of Culture , she argued that each culture selects from “the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations” a pattern of characteristics that it privileges. “Normal” behavior, she wrote in a 1934 essay “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” is constituted not by a universal code of moral conduct, but by the particular set of traits selected by the society. To feel abnormal was to experience “the psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable.” This claim has had a long intellectual legacy. In his first book, Mental Illness and Psychology (1954), Michel Foucault credited Benedict with recognizing that culture, not nature, defined what constituted “normal” and “pathological,” but he also criticized her for understanding the pathological only in negative terms, as behavior that deviated from an accepted norm.

Benedict had a great deal of firsthand knowledge of “the socially unavailable.” Columbia appointed her as an assistant professor only after she divorced her husband in 1931. (Before that point it was deemed unnecessary.) She was the first woman there to hold a full-time faculty position, but her salary was less than that of a male visiting scholar. She was never allowed in the men-only faculty club, and she spent years as Boas’s teaching assistant in order to fund her research.

It was in one of Boas’s classes that Benedict met Margaret Mead, a Barnard undergraduate, and convinced Mead to apply to do graduate work in anthropology. The two would become close friends, colleagues, and lovers. Mead traveled to another corner of the U.S. empire to carry out fieldwork—American Samoa—and found her encounters eye-opening, as Benedict had. She spent extended time with teenage girls studying adolescence. She wanted to understand: “Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?”

Her answer was firmly the latter. She wrote to Benedict from the field: “Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa.” Mead’s own “psychic dilemmas” made the possibility of alternatives to monogamous heterosexual relationships liberating. Writing to Benedict of her second (of three) husbands, she quipped, “So I do feel I’ve given monogamy, in an absolute sense, a pretty fair trial and found it wanting, and now it’s fair for him to try ‘my culture’ for a change, if he can do so without violence to his own temperament.” Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) would become a national bestseller, though it also came in for repeated attacks: first from Mead’s contemporaries for too freely blending scientific observation with more impressionistic reflection, and, later, by scholars who returned to Samoa and disputed her findings.

King spends less time with his other two characters—Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Cara Deloria—though the scale of the obstacles to their success was far greater. All four of Hurston’s grandparents had been enslaved in Georgia and Alabama. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated African American city, and would return there to carry out field research. Her studies of their folklore—“the boiled-down juice of human living”—became the basis for her 1937 novel Their Eyes were Watching God . Boas praised her work for portraying “the true inner life of the Negro,” but she faced heavy criticism from the circle of Harlem Renaissance writers in which she sometimes ran. They found her depictions of southern black life prone to quaint stereotype. The title of King’s book comes from a line in Hurston’s autobiography that celebrates the perspective of the “gods of the upper air,” as opposed to the “gods of the pigeonholes.”

Deloria, a member of a prominent Yankton Dakota family, grew up on the Standing Rock reservation. She was studying for a degree at Teacher’s College when Boas called on her to help him teach a class on the Dakota language. They later collaborated on a volume on Dakota linguistics. Like Hurston, Deloria bore a fraught relation to the people she studied in ways that other members of the Boas circle could hardly appreciate. Deloria wrote to Boas from the field, which was also her home:

I can not tell you how essential it is for me to take beef or some food each time I go to an informant—the moment I don’t, I take myself right out of the Dakota side and class myself with outsiders. . . . later I can go back, and ask them all sorts of questions, and get my information as one would get favors from a relative. It is hard to explain, but it is the only way I can work. To go at it like a white man, for me, an Indian, is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and the people.

As a group, King tells us, the Boas circle championed positions that many of us now take for granted: that categories of race and gender are a product of culture, rather than biology, and that ethnocentrism is bad. Though their methods soon fell out of favor—anthropologists came to question their view of “culture” as a unified phenomenon and to propose more self-reflexive approaches to fieldwork—King means for us to celebrate their work for advancing “a theory of humanity that embraces all the many ways we humans have devised for living” and for helping us “get smarter” about “the many possible ways of living a meaningful, flourishing life.”

But this argument, on the whole, boils down to the banal observation that the people who studied other cultures taught us to appreciate diversity. It has historically been the rule, rather than the exception, that the encounter with a different society induces a measure of humility and relativism about one’s own. In his 1580 essay Of Cannibals Montaigne famously wrote about the ceremonies relayed to him by a traveler to the New World: “every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live.”

Fortunately, the story King tells is more interesting than he allows. Part of the problem is that—in the service of a whiggish narrative about “American progress and the opening of the modern mind,” as the book jacket announces—King has a tendency to neutralize the critical bite that underwrites the work he surveys. In its place he substitutes a triumphalism that is not entirely warranted. Boas’s foundational insight, King writes, was to show “that the people whose remains had been put on display, whose cultures were made over as pop primitivism, were fully human after all.” Does this supposed innovation really merit feel-good claims about progress?

Moreover, to suggest that the Boas circle singlehandedly inspired the later overhaul of universalist truths under the banner of relativism may be to overstate their influence, as wide-ranging as it was. Certainly, the reception of more than a few European philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and Foucault for a start—also had something to do with the relativistic impulses that dominated humanities departments in the final decades of the twentieth century. As King points out, when Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind , his 1987 screed against cultural relativism, both Mead and Benedict proved easy targets. But so did many others: Nietzsche but also Theodor Adorno, Yoko Ono, Louis Armstrong singing “Mack the Knife,” Woody Allen in Zelig .

The celebratory mode of King’s narrative might appear excessive for other reasons as well. Discrimination and financial precarity plagued the careers of all four women King studies. Stable academic employment was closed off to most of them. Deloria lived for a time out of her car. “It is thrilling,” Hurston wrote, “to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame.” Her 1960 obituary in the Associated Press read, “Zora Neale Hurston, author, died in obscurity and poverty.” When Langston Hughes published his memoir about the Harlem Renaissance, he dismissed her with the line, “Girls are funny creatures!” Mead, who for much of her career held a curatorial position at the Museum of Natural History, wrote to Benedict, “I don’t think having the worst paid job in the Museum, and never having been offered another job, and having been panned or damned with faint praise in all the journals of my own science, is wonderful recognition.” As Benedict wrote in her journal, “So much of the trouble is because I am a woman. To me it seems a very terrible thing to be a woman.”

Was it any wonder that they found liberation in cultures that seemed to treat women not just differently, but better? And that the lesson they took from this was, the way things are is not how it has to be? King ends his book with a litany of bromides, telling us that cultural relativism is about “realizing the limitations of your own culture, even if it claims to be cultureless and global; feeling the power of prayer if you reject someone else’s god; understanding the inner logic of bewildering political preferences.” This is a blunted gloss of what Mead writes in Coming of Age in Samoa : “Realizing that our own ways are not humanly inevitable nor God-ordained, but are the fruits of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine in turn all of our institutions, thrown into strong relief against the history of other civilizations, and weighing them in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.” Benedict likewise wrote, “It is possible to scrutinize different institutions and cast up their cost in terms of social capital, in terms of the less desirable behavior traits they stimulate, and in terms of human suffering and frustration.”

The writing of these women was thus not quite a celebration of the many wonderful “ways humans have devised” for living. It was rather a pointed critique of the institutions and arrangements that then prevailed in the United States. What they imagined was not a future in which we all might get together despite our differences, but one in which we regularly take stock of prevailing norms and ask whether they are serving us all—in which we consider whom those norms sideline, whom they subjugate, whom they render abnormal or second-class. “No society,” Benedict wrote, “has yet attempted a self-conscious direction of the process by which its new normalities are created in the next generation.” What we have, in the end, is a story of a group of scholars who reformed an imperial science to make it a little more accountable to its legacy of human suffering. As we continue to imagine new “normalities,” whether in college classrooms or beyond, we might draw wisdom from the women who were first in the room.

Gili Kliger is postdoctoral College Fellow at Harvard.

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Cultural Relativism and Ethics: Ethical Issues and Context Essay

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Cultural Relativism Theory

The cultural differences argument, the criticisms of the cultural difference argument.

Cultural relativism theory is the view that moral and ethical structures which differ from culture to culture are similarly effective. This denotes that there is no cultural structure that is superior to the other. The theory is based on the idea that there is no decisive standard considered good or evil. Therefore, every judgment about right and wrong is a product of the society. This means that we cannot learn or adopt another cultural code of standard (Rachels, 2006).

It is also imperative to use an individual’s culture to determine whether our actions are ethical or unethical. Ethics is relative because what one culture perceives as bad might be good to the other society (Rachels, 2006). This theory of culture also points out that there is no universal truth in ethics. Indeed, this implies that ethical issues are out of bounds to outsiders in a given culture and it can only be analyzed within the context of the culture in question.

It would then be wrong to judge cultural actions as unethical since no culture is better than the other and every cultural standard is guaranteed to a specific culture. Ethical subjectivism further explains cultural relativism. It states that there is no neutral truth in principles, no correct answers to ethical questions and that there are no moral queries with the right answers.

The notion of cultural relativism and culture specificity is exemplified by different life cases appertaining to various cultures that exhibit tendencies of what we might term unethical. Cultural relativism hence acts like a shield against criticism of actions emanating from a particular culture (Rachel, 2006).

Among the Eskimos, regulation of births via birth control method was not possible. As a result, the birth rate was high. This phenomenon is mostly observed in communities where food supply is unable to support a vast population. The Eskimos practiced infanticide as a way of regulating birth and the population (Rachel, 2006). Infanticide was mostly done to female children after birth to lessen the burden of providing food for the men.

Killing of children is unethical but in the Eskimo case it was a way of ensuring survival for some members. Among the Greeks it was normal for them to bury their dead fathers. In Galatians, cannibalism was practiced. They ate their dead fathers instead of burying them. In the modern American society such cases would be morally wanting and some would be considered unethical.

These similar but differently performed and interpreted cases show how ethical issues remain muddled in cultural activities. Although, these cultural differences occur, some similarities in cultures are also observed.

The cultural differences argument holds that each culture has its unique customs, worldviews and moral codes that the members of the society abide by. Cultures are imperatively understood as unique entities that can only be comprehended within their context and not from outsiders’ views. In support of these argument is the notion that there exists no bad or good culture. Cultural activities are coined to suit the demands of a certain society in a given geographical setting.

For example, infanticide among the Eskimos is a way of controlling the population due to scarcity of food resources (Rachels, 2006). This argument also states that there are no universal standards to judge what is wrong or right. Objectively, there neither radiate any good or evil nor bad or wrong since all acts within a society are restricted to the moral codes of cultures.

Therefore, there are no objectives truths in morality, no right answers to moral questions, right or wrong are mere matters of opinion that vary between cultures or groups. Rachels (2006) argues that this cultural differences argument is invalid in the sense that it lacks deductive validity and therefore cannot be proven.

Although, sociology and anthropological studies provide ample evidence about the differences in moral codes among different societies, the argument still holds no deductive validity and therefore cannot be concluded as right. Rachels also stated that the argument cannot be true due to existence of universal moral codes.

For example, different communities have different ideas about the shape of the earth. Thus, the argument holds that there is no independent truth about the shape of the earth and that the notions are views that vary from culture to culture but this does not state that the earth has no definite shape.

Rachel criticizes the cultural differences argument by stating that the argument cannot be deductively validated, although, sociology and anthropological studies among communities has provided evidence of different moral codes. Another criticism stems from the fact that the different cultures share some moral and ethical values in common; the cultural universals.

For example, all societies do not condone murder; take care of their young ones and places significance on expressing the truth. Further, the argument tries to drift away from the fact that cultures have different opinions regarding a certain issue and the conclusion that such an issue has an objective truth. The argument also discards the presence of any collective ethical values, ideals or facts that may strengthen the basis for inter-cultural comparative judgments.

For that reason, this does not mean that there are no inferior cultures in existence. It also implicates the notion that other societies are not entitled to having an ethical stand over the actions of other societies deemed unethical. Genocide and slavery practices in societies serve as good illustrations that cannot be termed as ethical within the context of other cultures.

Rachels, J. & Rachels, S. (2006). The Elements of Moral Philosophy . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies.

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1 The Debate on ‘Universalism’ and ‘Cultural Relativism’ in International Human Rights Law

• Published: February 2014
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Chapter 1 analyses the origins and development of the debate on ‘universalism’ and ‘cultural relativism’ of human rights. In order to properly understand and contextualize such a debate, the philosophical foundations and development of international human rights are also investigated, emphasizing that they are based on natural law and are made effective within human societies through the associative process of the social contract. The meaning of ‘inherent human dignity’ and the significance of human rights in epistemological terms are finally addressed. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the main problem preventing the finding of a generally agreed solution to the debate on ‘universalism’ and ‘cultural relativism’ of human rights is probably represented by the fact that so far it has mainly been considered according to rigid and monolithic schemes of universalism and relativism For this reason, at the end of the chapter a methodological revisitation of the problem is proposed.

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