CHAPTER SIX
6. Moral & Cultural Relativism
The terms moral relativism and cultural relativism are synonymous with the denial of objective moral truth. According to moral and cultural relativism, there is no objective moral truth. There are only moral prejudices, different cultural perspectives, and a multitude of points of view, none objectively true.
According to moral relativism, when someone says something is morally “right” or “wrong,” that statement is nothing but an expression of a personal or cultural prejudice. Every moral pronouncement, in other words, is relative to, or related to, some prejudice, perspective, or point of view.
Example: One culture “feels” that it’s morally right to engage in human sacrifice during religious ceremonies. Another culture “feels” that human sacrifice is morally wrong. According to moral relativism, neither of these cultures is correct—and neither is incorrect—because there is no objective moral truth.
These two cultures are merely different from one another. In our modern United States, today, the assumption that moral and cultural relativism accurately describe the world inspires celebrations regarding “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”
Modern theories of moral and cultural relativism can be traced back to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th Century thinker who openly rejected the moral foundation of classic thought, and whose influence continues to dominate the social sciences and humanities within most American colleges and universities today.
Rousseau posited that reason is not natural, that human beings by nature are not rational.
Prior to political life, according to Rousseau, in what he called the “state of nature,” human beings were utterly solitary beings, having little or no interaction with one another except for occasional sex acts, after which both the male and female went their separate ways, and fighting over scarce resources such as an animal carcass or fruit for eating.
Therefore, argued Rousseau, pre-political, solitary, natural human beings lacked language because they had no need for language; and if human beings did not possess language, they could not possess reason. Reason is impossible without language.
For Rousseau, human beings by nature are not very different from any of the irrational beasts, such as apes, monkeys, and other creatures one finds in forests, jungles, and deserts. Human beings began to speak, and therefore think, by some chance natural catastrophe, such as an earthquake or volcano, that brought human beings together, out of fear, and forced them to interact with one another.
For Rousseau, the very nature of language, and the elements of human thought, reflect nothing but the environmental and cultural forces that produced them. All human language and human thought—moral, political, and religious—are the varying and purposeless effects of varying and purposeless environmental and cultural causes.
Upon Rousseau’s theoretical hypothesis—and I emphasize here that his theory was nothing more than hypothesis, though Darwin and his epigones have worked tirelessly, if in vain, to provide physical evidence of Rousseau’s theory—arose the modern discipline of anthropology, the academic study of human cultures.
From the anthropological point of view, it makes no sense to speak of reason as a fundamental faculty that distinguishes humans from non-human beings. Rather, reason becomes one of the many customs or habits of particular peoples living together in particular places at particular times. Different tribes, clans, and villages, and religions result in different languages and different kinds of moral reasoning.
Instead of pursuing objective truth about human beings and how they ought to live, anthropology, and related modern academic disciplines, assume that reason is incapable of telling us how man ought to live, because different kinds of reason are mere inventions of different cultures.
As evidence they trot out various examples of the many disagreements between different cultures about basic moral and political questions, such as whether human sacrifice is right or wrong. From this multiplicity of perspectives, moral relativists conclude, there is no objective ground upon which we can judge or rank the many cultures of the earth—the “values” of each culture are equally valid compared to the values of any other culture.
This is the intellectual basis of moral relativism, and its emphasis on “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” As there are many interpretations of right and wrong, the only thing we can know that is truly wrong is the belief that we can know true right from true wrong. It is wrong, in other words, to think we can objectively distinguish civilized and just regimes from savage and unjust regimes.
To the degree to which the modern academy rests on modern philosophy, this is the basis for much of what is taught under the name “higher education.”
Immediately, however, certain problems arise for the moral relativist. First is the obvious fact that moral relativism is a product of one culture, or sub-culture, modern Western philosophy.
Consider that nowhere in tribal Africa, or among militant Islamists, or in Communist China or North Korea, is there any demand for moral relativism. When a member of the Chinese Communist Party, for example, says that communism is good, he does not think he is uttering a statement of moral relativism. He assumes that he is speaking an objective moral truth.
In short, multicultural moral relativism is not very multicultural. Most cultures do not accept moral relativism.
Most problematic is the fact that moral relativism claims to tell us something true and good about the human world, yet it is founded upon the denial that objective moral truth is possible. Moral relativism insists that it is objectively good to be “non-judgmental” because there is no objective moral truth. Moral relativism contradicts itself.
In its celebration of the diversity of cultural prejudices, perspectives, and points of view—and by denying any objective moral truth—multiculturalism becomes just another prejudice, just another perspective. That is, on its own ground, moral relativism cannot defend itself as any more (or less) true, or any more (or less) good, than non-moral relativism.
In addition, looking at the world through the lens of moral or cultural relativism prevents us from understanding the important primary sources of the past—including the great books and great speeches of Western Civilization—because the authors of those books and the statesmen who delivered those speeches were not moral relativists.
They did not assume there is no moral truth. If a student does—if a student assumes there is no objective moral truth—that student likely will never understand an important primary source document that was written with a premise that the universe includes an objective moral order, objective moral truth.
An Aristotle, Shakespeare, Madison, or Lincoln can understand a moral relativist, but a moral relativist is unlikely to understand an Aristotle, Shakespeare, Madison, or Lincoln. For this reason, teachers should talk with students about the challenge of moral and cultural relativism, and ask students if they are willing to open-minded enough to consider the possibility that there might be objective, universal moral truth. If they are willing, then it is possible for them to understand the great primary source materials upon which Waypoints is based.