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moral relativism

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Also known as ethical relativism

philosophical positions about the differences in moral judgments across peoples and cultures

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643 papers

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Wikidata facts

Subclass of
relativism
Said to be same as
cultural relativism
Has parts of class
cultural relativism
Show 2 more facts
on focus list of Wikimedia project
WikiProject Human rights
opposite of
moral absolutism
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~26 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.

Descriptive moral relativism holds that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, without passing any evaluative or normative judgments about this disagreement. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that moral judgments contain an (implicit or explicit) indexical such that, to the extent they are truth-apt , their truth-value changes with context of use. Normative moral relativism holds that everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist. Though often intertwined, these are distinct positions. Each can be held independently of the others.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “moral relativism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.