University of Kansas, Fall 2004
Philosophy 160: Introduction to Ethics
Ben Eggleston—eggleston@ku.edu

Cultural Relativism: Its Inferential Relations

Let cultural relativism be characterized by the following set of statements:

  1. Moral truth is culturally relative, or culture-specific.
  2. There is no universal, or even trans-cultural, standard of right and wrong.
  3. If two or more cultures have the same moral beliefs, that is just an anthropological coincidence, not a consequence of both cultures’ being right (or wrong) about morality.

For each of the following statements or sets of statements, ascertain whether

  1. it implies cultural relativism
  2. it is implied by cultural relativism
  3. it is incompatible with cultural relativism
  4. it is described by none of the above answers
statement / set of statements answer
1 What’s right in the United States is not necessarily right in China.  
2 What’s right in the United States is also necessarily right in China.  
3 There is something right in the U.S. that is also right in China.  
4 Different cultures have different moral beliefs.  
5 Different cultures have different moral beliefs.
If different cultures have different moral beliefs, then cultural relativism is true.		  
6 Moral truth is relative to each individual: what’s right for you is not necessarily right for me, and vice versa.  
7 The customs of one culture cannot be compared, morally, with the customs of any other culture.  
8 The customs of contemporary America are morally better than those of North Korea.  
9 Our own culture is not morally perfect: our customs have some room for improvement.  
10 In every society, the way people figure out what’s right and wrong is by consulting the customs of that society.  
11 The customs of contemporary America are morally better than those of early nineteenth-century America.  
12 The customs of contemporary America are the same as those of early nineteenth-century America.  
13 It is virtuous to be tolerant and open-minded about other cultures’ ways of doing things.  
14 If you judge another culture to have immoral practices, that does not mean you have to forcefully intervene.