Moral Relativism and Moral Disagreement

There is a considerable amount of moral disagreement both within individual societies and between them. For example, Americans are split almost equally when it comes to the moral rightness and wrongness of abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia, and so on. Similarly, different cultures disagree about women’s rights, the correct level of taxation, the treatment of animals, and many other issues. To what extent these intra- and inter-cultural differences in the moral standards people accept actually exist is an empirical question, and thus mainly to be investigated with the empirical methods of social sciences and anthropology.

There is a family of views in moral philosophy that is often confused with the previous empirical cultural differences thesis. These views are called versions of moral relativism. They tend to agree that (i) there is no objectively correct universal moral standard and (ii) whether a given action is right or wrong depends in some way on the moral standard accepted by some individual or a group. Philosophers then disagree about what the connection is between the cultural differences as an empirical claim and moral relativism as an ethical view. Some argue that we can construct a powerful argument for moral relativism starting from the cultural differences, whereas others claim that moral relativism is implausible because it makes moral disagreements impossible. These two claims are the focus of this chapter.

The first section begins from a contemporary version of moral relativism and the argument from disagreement for it. The following section then explains the problem of disagreement, and it also considers four recent relativist responses to that challenge. The conclusion finally considers where the debate is likely to go next.