Five Objections to Cultural Relativism

If everybody jumped off a bridge, should you do it too? Obviously not. But what if you're living in a society where everybody captures rival tribespeople and cuts out their still-beating hearts with an obsidian knife? Should you do it then?

Cultural relativism says yes. If your society approves of it, it's morally right. "Good" just means "socially approved." That's the theory. In the last post, we looked at the arguments in its favor. Now let's look at what goes wrong.

Objection 1: It Fails the Hitler Test

The most immediate problem with cultural relativism is that it can't condemn the things we most need a moral theory to condemn. If morality is nothing more than social approval, then in any society where genocide is endorsed by the majority, genocide is morally right. Not tolerated, not understandable-in-context, but right.

This isn't just an edge case. It's a test that any serious moral theory has to pass, and cultural relativism fails it cleanly. The relativist might respond that Nazi Germany didn't really have majority support for the Holocaust, but that misses the point. The objection isn't historical. It's hypothetical. Even if the majority didn't support it, cultural relativism entails that in a scenario where they did, the Holocaust would have been morally permissible. Any theory that generates that conclusion has something seriously wrong with it.

Objection 2: Cultural Relativism Demands Its Own Rejection

This objection is subtler, and it works from the inside. Imagine two cultures. In Culture A, grifting (deceiving someone to sell them a defective product) is considered morally acceptable. Not only that, but judging grifting as immoral is itself considered wrong. In Culture B, grifting is unacceptable, and judging it as moral is wrong.

Now put these two cultures in conversation. According to cultural relativism, both are right. Culture A is right to approve of grifting, and Culture B is right to condemn it. But here's the twist: each culture is also right to judge the other as morally wrong. Cultural relativism tells us that it is immoral for members of each culture not to condemn the other's view. Both sides are morally obligated to believe the other is wrong, and both sides are, on the theory's own terms, factually wrong about what they're morally obligated to condemn.

So cultural relativism morally requires you to believe something that is factually incorrect, and that belief amounts to a rejection of cultural relativism itself (since you're judging another culture's morality as wrong). The theory doesn't quite refute itself, since it only says you shouldn't believe in it, not that it's false. But a moral theory that morally obligates you to reject it is, at minimum, deeply strange.

A more reasonable position, and one that captures what most people actually mean when they gesture toward relativism, would be: what people think of as right and wrong differs between cultures, and it's hard for us to judge others without having been in their situation. That's a claim about epistemic humility, not a metaethical thesis. And it doesn't generate any of these paradoxes.

Objection 3: The Subgroup Problem

Cultural relativism says morality is what your culture approves of. But which culture? People don't belong to a single, monolithic culture. They belong to overlapping subgroups with different and often conflicting moral commitments.

Take abortion. One large segment of American society considers it morally equivalent to killing a human being. Another large segment considers forcing someone to carry an unwanted pregnancy to be inflicting undue suffering. Cultural relativism says the answer is whatever the culture says. But the culture doesn't say one thing. It says contradictory things, depending on which subgroup you ask.

The relativist might try to resolve this by majority rule: 51% settles it. But this creates more problems than it solves. The threshold is arbitrary (why not 60%? why not 70%?). It changes every time you cross a state or national border. And what happens when the split is exactly 50/50? The theory offers no answer.

The deeper issue is that cultural relativism treats culture as a static, homogeneous thing, and it isn't. Culture is dynamic and non-homogeneous. People hold multiple, conflicting group memberships simultaneously. A theory that grounds morality in cultural consensus needs there to be a consensus, and on the questions that matter most, there usually isn't one.

Objection 4: It Makes International Ethics Impossible

If morality is determined by each society's own standards, then there is no shared moral framework between societies. Each nation sticks to its own ethic, and no one can say anything about anyone else.

Cultural relativism was perhaps more plausible a century ago, when societies were more isolated. But the internet, air travel, and global commerce have made that isolation obsolete. We are constantly in contact with people from other moral frameworks. How are we supposed to relate to each other?

Globalization makes this question urgent. The United Nations attempts to articulate universal human rights, but on cultural relativism, "universal human rights" is a contradiction in terms. Multinational corporations manufacture goods in sweatshops in one country and sell them in another. Which country's moral standards apply? War requires shared rules of engagement, which is why the Geneva Conventions exist. But if each nation's morality is self-contained, the Geneva Conventions have no moral authority beyond the societies that happen to endorse them.

The world we actually live in requires a moral vocabulary that crosses borders. Cultural relativism can't provide one.

Objection 5: A Nation Can Never Be Wrong

This may be the most devastating objection. If morality is whatever your society currently approves of, then your society can never be morally mistaken. Whatever it endorses right now is, by definition, right.

Cultural relativism was once touted as a progressive view, and in one sense it was. It encouraged people to step outside their own perspective and consider how things look from a different social vantage point. But "progressive" implies progress, and progress implies movement toward some goal or ideal. If your society's current moral consensus is always correct, there is nothing to progress toward. You're already there.

Consider slavery. At one point in American history, the majority approved of it. Now the majority condemns it. On cultural relativism, both positions are right at their respective times. Slavery was morally right in 1830 and morally wrong in 2026. But this means the nation didn't correct a moral error. It just changed its preferences. There's no sense in which the later view is better than the earlier one. There's no moral learning, only moral drift.

The case of Emmett Till is instructive. His murder in 1955 was a moment where the nation seemed to choke on its own morality, where the gap between what society endorsed and what was actually right became impossible to ignore. It was a moment of national moral reckoning, a recognition that we were wrong. But on cultural relativism, that recognition is incoherent. A nation can't be wrong about its own morality any more than a ruler can be the wrong length. The standard isthe consensus. If the consensus approved of what happened, then what happened was right.

That conclusion is not just counterintuitive. It's morally repugnant. And the fact that it follows directly from the theory is the strongest reason to reject it.

What We Can Keep

Cultural relativism fails as a metaethical theory. But the impulse behind it contains something worth preserving. Moral humility is genuinely important. Recognizing that we're shaped by our culture, that we might be wrong, that we should listen before we judge: all of this is valuable. The mistake is in elevating that humility into a theory that says no one is ever wrong, because a world where no one is ever wrong is a world where no one can ever get better.