In Defense of Cultural Relativism

I affirm moral relativism. Specifically, I affirm cultural relativism and reject moral subjectivism. 

It has become extremely common to conflate relativism with subjectivism. Even W.L. Craig made this mistake in one of his videos. From my observation, most who think themselves cultural relativists are not such. Instead, they are usually moral subjectivists. Indeed—at this rate—moral subjectivism trends to be the hottest meta-ethical theory of the 21st century.

So, what is the difference? Well, relativism means to work relative to a paradigm, and subjectivism means appeal to personal preference or individual experience. Moral relativism itself evaluates action relative to a paradigm—in the case of cultural relativism, culture is assigned as the paradigm—and moral subjectivism holds evaluations of action to be personal preferences. Contemporary literature has debated whether moral subjectivism is its own meta-ethical theory, or a subcategory of moral relativism. One might reason moral subjectivism to be its own theory since it asserts having no right or wrong preferences whereas paradigms definitionally generate truthhoods and falsehoods relative to the paradigms themselves. Another might reason it part of moral relativism (some even refer to moral subjectivism as individualist relativism) since it evaluates action relative to personal preferences insofar that personal preferences constitute a paradigm.

Either way, cultural relativism is totally distinct from moral subjectivism. In fact, cultural relativism is a taboo among philosophers which moral subjectivism is not. Its taboo prompted me to write a positive account about it in the first place. Why is it taboo? Because academic philosophy (as it stands today) treats Nazism or the Holocaust as the paradigm of evil, and the contemporary literature has firmly established that non-pluralistic cultural relativists must recognize the Holocaust to be part of Nazi culture and therefore praise it if they want to be logically consistent.

Defending cultural relativism starts with debunking the myth that it praises a Nazi Holocaust. Because the Nazi reductio ad absurdum is the primary barrier preventing serious engagement with cultural relativism, we must ask: Why then, is this myth so pervasive? It's because academia operates with an egalitarian framework for thinking. Without opening another door for discourse, egalitarianism is an intellectual plague upon society since it hurts our capability to understand each other in communication. Here, egalitarianism caused people to think that cultural relativism means a culture's majority approval. Cultural relativism is not about a culture's majority approval, although it is often thought the case since Western scholarism treats rights, freedom, individualism, consent, or somesuch principle as the bedrock of the good. Consequently, if somesuch principle is the ultimate good and cultural relativism is about the majority approval within a culture, then cultural relativism has to be bad when it praises non-egalitarian cultures. This explains why philosophers think cultural relativism endorses the Holocaust; it has become treated as a view favoring the popular majority rule of a culture, and the Holocaust was favored by the Nazi majority at the time.

However, cultural relativism means something completely different when divorced from egalitarian thinking. When divorced from egalitarian thinking, cultural relativism just means recognizing that some cultural values or moral values may be good for one group of people and bad for another group. When viewed through this functionalist lens, the entire volume of contemporary literature is wrong about cultural relativism positively evaluating the Holocaust. Under this lens, the Holocaust is rendered bad for Nazi culture and therefore bad. Why is it bad for Nazi culture? The simple answer is: it is the chief reason why Nazism is taboo. In this sense, the Nazis have sabotaged their own culture. There is no Nazi culture anymore, only sporadic Neo-Nazi cultures. The difference between the two is that Nazism is centralized and Neo-Nazism is decentralized. Today, Neo-Nazis comprise a weak force.

This brings me to my basis for moral relativism: care for what is internally beneficial for a culture without ranking which culture is good or bad. I am not a cultural supremacist, so I cannot discriminate against any ideology. I could only be considered a cultural supremacist insofar as I view the sabotage of a parent culture's functional cohesion or survival—whether self-inflicted or caused by a subculture—as a negative. But this is not judging cultures, merely judging what is good or bad for a culture in question. So, it would still not be cultural supremacy.

Henceforth, as per my findings, egalitarianism renders cultural relativism an endorsement of the Holocaust, whereas substituting egalitarianism with functionalism paradoxically renders cultural relativism a condemnation of the Holocaust. By disbanding from egalitarianism, cultural relativism becomes a compelling, internally consistent, and incredibly underrated meta-ethical theory for the 21st Century.

Verdict: I affirm a functionalist (or at least non-egalitarian) treatment of cultural relativism.