Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Moral Relativism & Cultural Chauvinism

Members of different cultures with different values and beliefs come into frequent conflict, sometimes violent. Exploiter or entrepreneur? Murderer or martyr? “Great Satan” or “Great – Santa!” Gerald Lang asks if we can still pass judgment.

Depending on whom you ask, moral relativism is either an overdue and salutary antidote to imperialism and cultural arrogance, or else it represents a self-defeating, wishy-washy gesture in the direction of cultural evenhandedness. The often excitable and high-voltage nature of popular debates about these issues suggests that many of us feel unsettled about them. We may feel torn between the two camps: while we deplore imperialism and cultural chauvinism, we are also likely to have weighty moral commitments that we take to have application beyond our immediate cultural or political borders. What seems undeniable is that all the mudslinging and raised hackles stand in the way of precise and careful thinking. Relativism’s prospects deserve to be debated in a more sober spirit.

…