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Moral relativists hold that an unsharable, personal, and aesthetic moral core lies at the foundation of personal choices. They deny the possibility of sharing morality at all, except by convention. A simple way to express this view is that "everyone draws their own moral from the same story" and behaves according to their own impression, acceptance, or rejection of it.
It is often confused with ethical relativism which holds that morality can be shared but only between closely-knit groups sharing a moral code and committed to joint action, e.g. an ethnic minority in a hostile situation.
A moral relativist, on the other hand, would hold that even people in such a circumstance do not follow a common moral code, but are simply unable to follow their varying personal urges due to social pressure.
Moral relativism stands in contrast to moral absolutism, which sees morals as fixed by an absolute human nature ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau), or external sources such as deities (many religions) or the universe itself (as in Objectivism).
Protagoras' notion that "man is the measure of all things" may also be seen as an early philosophical precursor to relativism.Those who believe in moral absolutes often are highly critical of moral relativism; some have been known to equate it with outright immorality or amorality. Moral universalism is a humanist neologism that exhorts the use of logical and universally-common ethical standards, which together may form a philosophical alternative to both static absolutism and murky relativism.
Moral relativism is in direct opposition of moral realismMoral realism is the philosophical doctrine that moral claims are cognitive claims that are at least sometimes true. Moral realism, therefore, contrasts with non-cognitivism (which variously holds that moral claims are prescriptions, commands, or expressi, which contains the concept of moral absolutism.
The individual viewpoint, also known as emotivism, argues that people judge morality based on their emotions and feelings. UniversismUniversism (prounounced "universe-ism") is a religious philosophy which aims to unite freethinkers, whether they use the term atheist, agnostic, deist, transcendentalist, pantheist, scientific materialist or other to describe their beliefs. Universism pos further argues that only those individuals causing or directly affected by an action can make any judgment about the action's ultimate rightness or wrongness. Those judgments can be made on the basis of reason, experience and emotion.
Moral relativism has sometimes been placed in contrast to ethnocentrismEthnocentrism coined by William Graham Sumner, is the viewpoint that one's ethnic group is the center of everything, against which all other groups are judged. Within culture, language, behaviour, customs, and religion can be a basis for ethnic distinctio. Essentially, the claim is that judging members of one society by the moral standards of another is a form of ethnocentrism. Some moral relativists claim that people can only be judged by the moresThe term mores (pronounced mor-ayz) as used in Sociology is a plural noun. The Latin singular, which is not used in English, is mos''. The English word morality comes from the same root, as does the noun moral which can mean the 'core meaning of a story'. of their own society while other moral relativists argue that, as moral codes have some commonalities among societies, one can utilize the "common ground" to judge moral matters between societies.
One consequence of this viewpoint, also known as cultural relativism, is the principle that any judgment of society on the basis of the observer's moral code is invalid: individuals are to be judged against the standards of their society only, there being no larger context in which judgement is meaningful. This is a source of conflict between moral relativists and moral absolutists, since a moral absolutist would argue that society as a whole can be judged for its acceptance of "immoral" practices, such as slavery or the death penalty. Such judgments can be argued to be arbitrary through cultural relativism, although some relativists may still condemn slavery.
The philosopher David Hume suggested principles similar to those of moral relativism in an appendix to his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).