There is no question that throughout history and even onward in to the present day humanity has divided itself in to a number of different cultural groups. It’s no less contested that each culture in some varying manner shapes the moral beliefs, practices, and values of its followers. In the same sense people are informed as to what is right and wrong through the same system of cultural normalization. Although people of different cultures may have even very large differences in their moral values, the cultural relativist suggests that this should only be understood as inflexible differences between differing cultures.

If two groups of people really hold contradicting principles, and these principles are informed merely through whatever culture each group happens to reside in, how can we judge one side as being absolutely superior to the other? This is what’s known as the “strong cultural differences” argument, because it holds that since differences in moral values are merely a result of residing in different cultures, there can be no absolute judgments made about moral values. In this sense even practices that we might find extreme like infanticide or cannibalism aren’t objectively incorrect, it just so happens that our society disagrees with them, while others do not. In fact the very idea of cultural relativism arose to explain the existence of the seemingly extreme fascist and socialist political regimes in the early 20th century.

This is likely a better explanation for the existence of such extremes than quickly writing off such cultures as being purely evil. Each culture being autonomous and self-contained, all one must do then is understand the way in which the culture arose in order to understand the values such a culture happens to hold. On the other hand, the explanation itself too seems to be at an extreme. Are there really no values that can be said to be objectively better than another? Under such a system Nazism is equally a valid system of government as say, contemporary democracies, even though we would probably care for it to not return. In the same light, we must allow for unwarranted murder to be deemed a perfectly acceptable practice, as long as a certain culture really does happen to condone it, even though we in our culture are wholly opposed to its existence. Most importantly, how can we even hold that there is no absolute truth when this very idea is an absolute truth in itself?

The first major consequence of attempting to follow strong moral relativism is that although we would very much like to respect the differing values of other cultures, there are still certain actions that we can seemingly never find a rational reason to condone. It would seem that actions like murder and slavery demand a strong moral judgment that is beyond the capacity of cultural relativity. They would instead suggest that it is simply up to each culture to decide whether slavery is acceptable. Such practices create inequalities both within the culture and outside of it, as slavery is almost always based on a system of imperialism. Because of this it seems that we can say when one culture’s practices negatively affect the wellbeing of another culture, we should be able to objectively condemn such an action.

A second consequence for supporting the strong cultural relativism view is that the very idea of cultures being relative implies they aren’t as separate as the cultural relativist would like to hold. It suggests a sort of dialogue in which there is a call and response between the competing values of cultures. They grow up side by side and so often influence one another in certain directions. We are such social creatures, indeed, that it would be impossible for us not to share and communicate our differences and attempt to reason our way towards the optimal moral values to structure society around. If this weren’t the case, it would seem that our evolution of thought, even in the modern day when we believe ourselves to have advanced far past even the people of a hundred years ago, let alone our ancient ancestors, must be entirely random and without rhyme or reason. Not only are our morals objectively incomparable to those of others, but they are also incomparable to those we once held and seemingly decided were inadequate. Instead the cultural relativist must hold that whatever our values happen to be now are no more or less evolved than the ones we held at any point in the past.

Ultimately, the cultural relativist does a good job of deflating the numerous apparent differences that arise between the many cultures of the world. Many values really are simply a matter of cultural upbringing, as in regard to entirely innocent actions like burial practices and dining rituals. However, there also appears to be a line crossed in other practices as in the creation of drastic economic inequalities and the deliberate harming of fellow human beings where we want to be able to condemn such actions as being absolutely wrong. At the very least it would seem that moral values based on mathematical and biological truths must very easily be comparable to one another. For example, who could ever say that eating far too much of only junk food is just as valid as eating a healthy correct amount of nutritious foods? Who would ever agree that a few arbitrary members of society, as in royal families, deserve more than others who work much harder simply because they happened to be born as who they are? Of course these are still both scenarios that take place in the world and cultural relativity would be a good way to explore the reasons for this, but it does not provide any basis at all for their general validity. It would seem to accept a very weak form of cultural relativism, and especially to be used in regard to the historical analysis of differing values, would be the most agreeable way to apply such thought.