Rachel's challenge of cultural relativism

¶ … Cultural Relativism

The passage of this chapter that most interested me was the author's description of the first consequence of adhering to cultural relativism (under the subheading "2.4. The Consequences of taking Cultural Relativism Seriously."). These two short paragraphs really show how a good thing like understanding and respecting cultural differences can go too far, beyond the bounds of respect and into a realm of more sinister allowance and even, to a degree, denial.

The main point of this passage is that if we believed in Cultural Relativism, "we could no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own." There are good aspects to this, as Rachels points out first -- judging morality based solely on the standards that one is use to is not a fair way to view other cultures. This at first sounds like a convincing argument for Cultural Relativism -- after all, many of our habits and feelings of morality, especially in regards to the environment and materiality, might be seen as immoral by other cultures.

This ties in to the other side of Cultural Relativism mentioned in this passage, which is really the same as the first but more extreme. The author points out that under Cultural Relativism, nothing that is part of another culture could be considered immoral, as there would be no universal morality to judge it against. This passage specifically uses anti-Semitism to illustrate this point; we could not call it wrong for a society to try to destroy the Jews, and we could not even say "that a society tolerant of Jews is better than the anti-Semitic society" because it would imply some moral qualification. The idea that it could ever be considered right to slaughter other people is abhorrent, and I don't think any human philosophy that allows for this is worth practicing. It is also not rational, as such morality would be deemed immoral if the tables were turned -- and if it doens't hold true consistently, then there can't actually be truth to that system. This is the major flaw of Cultural Relativism that this passage points out.