Moral Relativism: Good, bad...etc?

[The Mad Monk]

It depends.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
It depends.

[Pekka]

le bien.. le mal.. Je ne sais pas. Viva la résistance?

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Arrian
Moral Relativism

Moral Absolutism

Reasonableness

[Ned]

How can anyone believing in moral relativism know whether moral relativism is good or bad?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Ramo
Yep, moral absolutes are logically inconsistent.*

And everyone's viewpoints on it aren't equally valid.*

*Assuming that contradiction is logically invalid.

Logical validity is DEFINED in terms of contradiction, so those are tautological statements with no need of an asterisk.

[Kropotkin]

Has no one else noticed the irony in the threads title, where Draschasor asks if moral relativism is good or bad?

I'm obviously a moral relativist as I find the contrasting opinion of moral absolutism absurd.

[Snowflake]

The answer to your question Ned, is this:

I like it, but everyone's viewpoint on it is equally valid.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Drachasor
Moral Relativism is the concept that one culture's moral/ethical system isn't any more valid than any other cultures. More generally (and even more controversially) that one person's moral/ethical system isn't any more valid than anothers. In other words, moral systems are only true in regards to the group that holds it as true.

IMHO, it is full of crap, and I haven't met anyone that has ever really believed it.

It's obviously true. A statement such as "it's wrong to kill people" can only be derived from experience or from pure reason. It's clearly impossible to establish "it's wrong to kill people" from experience - you can observe that killing people causes pain, etc., but there's no experiment you can make to determine whether or not it is right or wrong. It is equally clear that you cannot make some proof of a moral statement such as "it's wrong to kill people" a priori, without assuming, as your premise, that "it's wrong to kill people" (or "it's wrong to cause pain", but you get the point). Therefore, all absolute moral statements are dogmatic.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Ned
How can anyone believing in moral relativism know whether moral relativism is good or bad?

The question in the OP was obviously trolling, but if by "good" or "bad" you simply mean right or wrong, then moral relativism is "good".

[BeBMan]

Sound like an absolute statement to me

[Kuciwalker]

But not a moral one.

[Gangerolf]

Cultural Relativism

[Kuciwalker]

Cultural relativism just doesn't make sense. Cultures aren't "valid" or "invalid". They just are there.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Kropotkin
Has no one else noticed the irony in the threads title, where Draschasor asks if moral relativism is good or bad?

I'm obviously a moral relativist as I find the contrasting opinion of moral absolutism absurd.

I think we have to go back to one of the best posts I've seen Ned write. How can it be good or bad? That kind of makes moral relativism absurd.

I'm no absolutist, but saying that one ethical code isn't better than another one ... well seeing it in use I think it's just a way of justifying an action that has no real basis in ethics at all.