The Rights Of A New Community

Moral Relativism is defined as the belief that conflicting moral beliefs are true. This carries the impression that what you respect as a right behavior may be a right conduct for you, but not for me. Moral Relativism is an attempt to

Where both moral realists and moral anti-realists belong to meta-ethics, cultural relativism belongs to normative ethics. According to cultural relativism moral facts are not universal; they are essentially indexed to a culture at a time and each can be determined by the time, place, and circumstance of that culture. In other words, what can be considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another society, and, since there are no universal standards of morality, no one can judge or punish another society’s customs. As for the time and circumstance, we can

Pope Benedict once said, “We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” When discussing the idea of Moral Relativism there are conflicting arguments as to if it is true in society or not. As much as Americans wish to ignore it, and although it has negative as well as positive effects, moral relativism is apparent all over the world. Moral Relativism is true and relevant today through individuals and cultures.

According to moral relativism, there are no guidelines as to what is considered right or wrong, therefore we are unable to judge one’s beliefs. The two types of relativism are individual and cultural. Individual relativism is the view that each person creates their own standards, while cultural relativism is that the societies create moral standard which are authoritative over the people. The founder of relativism, Protagoras, said “man is the measure of all things- of all things that are, and of things that they are not.” This ideally means that each person sets their own standards of truth by their own judgements. Moral relativism is practically the idea that a given thing is based upon the perception from which it is viewed.

In philosophy there are many theories that philosophers argue, James Rachels argues the main points of moral relativism, where he describes the differences within cultures. Philosophers attempt to prove their theories to be true, but it can be complicated because if someone proves one premise false of your argument then the entire argument is invalid. There are different types of relativisms that favor moral relativism, such as, personal belief relativism, societal belief relativism, and then there is the cultural beliefs argument. All of these topics of relativism fall into the same category as moral relativism, meaning they all have the same general statement. Which is one cannot declare what is morally right or morally wrong. Moral relativism is the umbrella term and the others are points that can affect it. Moral Relativism claims that there is no objective truth concerning morality, therefore no one can draw a line between what is right or wrong.

Ethical relativism states “there is no universal right and wrong”, and no matter what decision I will come to, will have consequences to my actions (Kottler & Shepard, 2015). We have several students here at our

To thoroughly understand subjectivism, it is important to consider how we decide what ethical views to agree with. When faced with two different ethical views, we gather our knowledge and experiences of each of the views together and compare them. Then we use our best judgement on the comparison to choose the ethical view that aligns most with our knowledge and experience. According to subjectivism, the view we choose becomes morally right for us (Shafer-Landau, 296). Further, it is important to note that our knowledge and experiences regarding ethical views can change over time. This means that our approval of an ethical view can change as well.

The concept of individual rights refers to the freedom each individual possesses to pursue life without interference from other individuals or the government. A community is a collection of said individuals, with common interests and values, who take up community responsibilities to ensure that the collection holds objective standards that are beneficiary to all. Even though these concepts are intrinsically linked, in that one cannot survive without the other, there is often a desire to separate them and define where one ends and the other begins. Human social life can often be seen as a unity of two seemingly contradictory behavioral ideas: status competition and reciprocity. Status competition is the practice of striving to establish

Before diving into the arguments for and against moral relativism, it is important to define some key terms including morality, cultural diversity, and tolerance. David Fisher, a Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London defines morality in his book, Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-first Century?. “Morality is thus neither mysterious nor irrational but furnishes the necessary guidelines for how we can promote human welfare and prevent suffering” (Fisher 134). Cultural diversity is simply the existence of various cultures in society. Tolerance is just the ability to accept something that you would not normally agree with.

Moral Relativism is generally used to describe the differences among various cultures that influence their morality and ethics. According to James Rachels, because of moral relativism there typically is no right and wrong and briefly states : “Different cultures have different moral codes.” (Rachels, 18) Various cultures perceive right and wrong differently. What is considered right in one society could be considered wrong in another, but altogether all cultures have some values in common.

Newsstands proclaim it. Talk shows trumpet it. Scandal, murder, and deception! People share a common disdain for these evils, scorning those who commit the dirty deeds. Laws are upheld to prevent people from doing “bad” things, but how do people come to an agreement on what is truly wrong? Even as society moves away from traditional teachings and perspectives, many acts are still universally looked down upon. Throughout history, the majority of civilizations have held surprisingly similar moral ideals regarding acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Although moral relativists believe that morality is individually determined, there is, in fact, an objective moral standard that governs all humanity, because a sense of right and wrong is universal, transcends time and culture, and is evident in the majority of people.

Each individual person is worthy of respect and given dignity is the rights approach. These are not legal rights, but our right to life, freedom, speech, well-being, etc. The rights approach applies to every individual. Under this approach we should take into consideration our actions or behavior and how they affect a individual's rights. Courage, compassion, integrity, fairness, honesty are a few ideal characteristics that we as individual's should strive to use each and every day

To begin, the term moral subjectivism implies that beliefs are individualized and correct for the said individual. In essence, there is no “real” definitive truth that can be applied to moral sentences or beliefs. For example, two people can have beliefs about the number 13 (or number 4 in the Chinese culture) One highly religious person can believe it’s the devil’s number and will lead to murder, chaos, and violence and for another person, possibly of a different moral code or of time period, (such as the ancient Egyptians), it can be their lucky or spiritual number. Our text provides four reasons for supporting moral subjectivism. These reasons include: The fact that feelings are subjective, often disagreed on, and no one feeling or belief

Ethical Relativism What is right and wrong is a widely opinionated discrepancy among the human race. It varies between cultures, societies, religion, traditions, and endless influential factors. Ethical relativism is described by John Ladd as the “doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions varies from society and that there are no absolute universal moral standards binding on all men at all times. Accordingly, it holds that whether or not it is right for an individual to act in a certain way depends on or is relative to the society to which he belongs”(Pojman, 24).

In the last part of the course, we studied different forms of relativism and how they can be applied to morality. Relativism is in contrast to the universal laws that we studied when we were studying Kant’s Groundwork earlier in the semester. Instead, relativism makes the claim that there are no universal laws that can be applied to morality because every point of view is equally valid and therefore nothing can be said to be morally right or wrong. What we perceive to be right or wrong is based on our own perception and is shaped by our cultural upbringing (Drogalis, Lecture, March 31). In this paper I intend on describing the three kinds of relativism and demonstrating how they can be applied in a real world context. I will then focus on normative relativism in particular and describe two arguments in support of normative relativism as well as three arguments in opposition to normative relativism. I will wrap up the paper by summarizing why I believe normative relativism seems to be incorrect when applied to morally complex circumstances.