Is Morality Just Whatever Your Culture Says It Is?

It's wrong to flip someone off in front of a little kid. But what about in a culture where that gesture means nothing? Is it still wrong then?

In 1992, George H.W. Bush visited Australia and flashed what he thought was a peace sign out of his limousine window at some protesters. In Australia, the gesture he made is the equivalent of the middle finger. So the same hand gesture was friendly in one culture and offensive in another. If something that simple can shift from right to wrong depending on where you are, maybe morality itself works the same way.

That's the basic intuition behind cultural relativism.

What Cultural Relativism Claims

Cultural relativism is the view that moral principles are determined by what societies approve of. "Good" just means "socially approved." To say "feeding the hungry is good" is really to say "our society approves of feeding the hungry." There's no deeper moral fact underneath the social consensus.

On this view, "wrong" works like a relative term. Just as "to the left of" doesn't mean anything until you specify what it's to the left of, "wrong" doesn't mean anything until you specify which society's standards you're measuring against. Moral claims aren't true or false in some absolute sense. They're true or false relative to a culture.

Cultural relativism is a subset of moral subjectivism, which stands opposed to moral realism (the view that some things are objectively right or wrong, independent of what anyone thinks). The question is whether any of the arguments for relativism actually hold up.

Argument 1: Moralities Are a Product of Cultures

The most common argument for cultural relativism draws an analogy between moral norms and taste. Both tastes and moralities vary across cultures. Taste is obviously a product of culture (what counts as delicious food in the Philippines, like balut, triggers a visceral disgust response elsewhere). So morality must be a product of culture too.

The examples are vivid. Hair covering requirements, attitudes toward women's roles, what counts as modest or immodest dress: these vary enormously across cultures, and they all seem to be treated as moral issues by the cultures in question.

But there are two strong objections. First, cultures also disagree about anthropology, religion, and physics. The ancient Maya believed the world rested on an alligator. Some cultures believe in reincarnation. We don't conclude from this that there are no objective facts about the shape of the earth or what happens after death. Disagreement about a topic doesn't prove there are no right answers. (The relativist might say reincarnation is "true for them," but as an objection this just collapses into "they believe it," which of course they do. That's not the same as it being true.)

Second, the moral disagreement between cultures is often overstated. Most cultures share basic moral principles; what they disagree on is application. The Golden Rule appears in nearly every moral tradition. Even cultures that practice cannibalism don't think killing is morally neutral. The Aztecs, for instance, embedded their practices in an elaborate religious framework that they understood as serving a greater good. And the United Nations has gotten extraordinarily diverse nations to agree to an extensive statement of human rights. The disagreement is real, but it may be shallower than it looks.

Argument 2: We Can't Resolve Moral Disagreements

A second argument holds that there's no clear way to settle moral disputes. Whenever we argue for a moral position, we inevitably presuppose the standards of our own society. So moral argument is circular, and we can never get to a neutral standpoint from which to declare one culture right and another wrong.

The counterexamples to this are powerful. Martin Luther King Jr. rejected the moral standards of his own society by appealing to objective moral values. William Wilberforce did the same in arguing for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. These weren't people imposing the norms of their culture. They were challenging those norms from a position they believed was objectively correct, and history has largely vindicated them.

There's also a simpler point: there are plenty of propositions whose truth values we can't determine, but that doesn't make them neither true nor false. Whether it rained on this exact spot 500 years ago today is something we'll never know. But it either did or it didn't. Our inability to verify a claim is an epistemic problem, not a metaphysical one. The same could be true of morality.

Argument 3: The Epistemic Problem

This is the argument that comes closest to being genuinely challenging. Even if objective moral facts exist, how would we know them? Moral claims aren't empirically verifiable the way scientific claims are. You can't run an experiment to determine whether lying is wrong.

Kant argued that morality is rationally compelling, that the wrongness of lying can be derived from pure reason. But not everyone finds Kant's arguments persuasive, and there's no way to compel universal agreement the way you can in mathematics. How do we prove that what is rational is what is right?

The honest answer is that this is a real difficulty for moral realism. But it's worth noting the limits of the argument. We can't compel universal agreement about quantum mechanics either, but that doesn't mean there's no fact of the matter about quantum entanglement. The epistemic difficulty of accessing moral truths, if they exist, doesn't prove they don't exist. At best, it proves we may never achieve certainty about who's right. It doesn't prove no one is right. This is an epistemic argument, not an ontological one.

Some rules really are just conventions. Whether you can turn right on a red light varies by jurisdiction. Whether you hold your fork in your left hand varies by culture. These are obviously determined by local standards. So maybe moral rules work the same way.

The moral realist has a straightforward response: these are non-moral rules. Traffic laws and table manners are conventions of coordination, not claims about right and wrong. The realist can happily acknowledge that convention governs etiquette while insisting that something different is going on with morality. And we can often find general ethical principles underneath the local conventions that most people agree on: follow the traffic laws of wherever you are, use the silverware your host provides.

Sometimes cultural relativism is presented as the consensus view among social scientists. But this is a false stereotype. There's a wide array of views on morality in the social sciences. Lawrence Kohlberg's influential theory of moral development, for instance, maps out a series of stages that people progress through in their moral thinking: from a punishment-based morality ("bad" means "what gets me punished") through reward-seeking, parental approval, and social approval, and finally to principled moral reasoning grounded in rule utilitarianism or Golden-Rule consistency. On Kohlberg's framework, cultural relativism corresponds to Stage 4 (social approval), which is an intermediate stage of moral development, not the endpoint.

The Tolerance Argument

One of the most appealing features of cultural relativism is that it seems to promote tolerance. If no culture's morality is objectively better than another's, then we have no grounds for judging or imposing our values on other societies. This feels humble and respectful, especially given the history of moral imperialism.

But the tolerance argument contains a fatal irony. If cultural relativism is true, then morality is whatever your society approves of. If your society happens to be intolerant (and many are, including American society in various ways), then intolerance is morally right. Cultural relativism can't consistently demand tolerance, because tolerance is itself a moral value, and on the relativist's own terms, it's only valid in societies that endorse it.

There's also something condescending about the tolerance move. Refusing to disagree with people from other cultures treats them as too fragile for genuine moral conversation. We can disagree respectfully. If we refuse to, we're implicitly saying either "you're not capable of engaging with my perspective" or "you're too sensitive to hear that I think you're wrong." Neither is respectful.

The Democracy Argument

A final consideration in favor of cultural relativism is that it democratizes morality and builds social solidarity. People tend to support decisions they had a say in, even when those decisions go against them. If moral norms are determined by consensus, everyone has a stake in the system.

But majority rule in morality has the same problem as majority rule in politics: tyranny of the majority. France's restrictions on hijab-wearing illustrate this. When the majority decides that a minority's religious practice is wrong, the minority has no appeal beyond the consensus that excluded them. Objective morality, by contrast, gives the minority something to appeal to, a standard independent of the majority's preferences.

Where This Leaves Us

Cultural relativism gets something right: moral humility is a virtue, and we should be cautious about assuming our own culture has all the answers. But as a philosophical theory, it faces serious difficulties. It can't consistently support tolerance, it confuses disagreement with the absence of truth, it conflates etiquette with ethics, and it leaves us with no grounds to criticize practices like slavery or genocide so long as the relevant society endorses them.

The question isn't whether cultures differ on morality. They obviously do. The question is whether that difference proves there's nothing more to morality than cultural consensus. The arguments for that stronger claim are weaker than they first appear.