Cultural Relativism: Objective Moral Standards Or Facts

A question raised when we discuss metaethics is; objective moral standards or facts. Whenever we talk about cultural relativism then the question about the existence of objective moral facts gets heated. Cultural Relativism believes that the things that is right or wrong which is known as morality, is based on what culture tells us is right or wrong. Basically society and culture tells us what’s acceptable and what unacceptable. For instance the United States has taught us that driving on the right side of the rode is acceptable. The U.S society has taught us that we should go on green, slow down on yellow and stop on red. Hope that gave you a little understand of what culture relativism mean. Culture Relativism has some failures when they

The subgroups in society all have different moral codes, so it will be hard to know what’s morally right or wrong. If different people belong to different groups in society; how will they distinguish which groups is morally right or wrong? Culture Relativism claims that “if something is socially accepted then an individual belonging to that society must either accept it or disagree with cultural relativism”. (Gensler, 1998, pg.186). According to this claim if an individual wants to be morally correct then they must never go against what society claims to be right or wrong. You must no matter what agree to what our culture and society tells us. Both arguments show how cultural relativism fails and how one cannot fully explain morality in every social

According to Mackie (1977), “if we were aware of them, it would be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else” (p.177) Mackie is saying if we know these bizarre moral standards, then we can only do so by unnatural process. This means if objective moral facts were crazy, then the only way of knowing that it crazy is by having crazy ways of doing so. Some people act like morality was objective but it can be because of social pressure. According to Mackie, individuals can sometimes internalize the social values that are believed to be needed by society in order to function and then treat them as if they had objective meaning (Notes, slides). All of this is saying that for a person to think of something as being objectively moral, they must in turn either suffer from a sort of nonsensical way of being or be pressured into the thought by the society around them resulting in an unsound