“You have no right to tell me what to do” and “What is true for you is not true for me” are great examples of how we do not always accept the real truth in life and these statements are both examples of relativism. There are four kinds of relativism: metaphysical, epistemological, religious and moral which I am going to talk about. Every choice we make is due to each person’s individual morality.
Morality is concerned with the free choice of rational human beings, therefore Protagoras shows that there are no moral absolutes when he said “Man is the measure of all things” in addition moral relativism is the belief that morality does not relate to any absolute standards of right and wrong but good and bad are dependent on culture and circumstance meaning that moral relativism is deontological because it all depends on something being right and wrong.
Having a morality may mean that different groups of people may play different versions of football, just like different countries have different legal systems, in addition having a certain moral could just be chosen by the mood that you are in at that certain time of day because moralities accepted at one time may fail to be accepted at another time. What is it for a group or an individual to have a particular morality? In some ways it is like having a particular language with a particular syntax (The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language) and also how we use certain vocabulary.
The Essay on Moral Relativism 2
The world is becoming an increasingly smaller place, culturally speaking. The modern world has more bridges to other cultures and ways of thinking than ever before. This phenomenon is due largely to the advent of the internet, global industry, and increased travel for business and pleasure to opposite corners of the world. This “global village” we live in introduces the average person to more ...
Your morality explains something about the way you act and about the way you react to the actions of others. In my opinion moral relativism is very contradictive and a good example of this would be law enforcement within America because we and they say “murder is wrong” and their solution is to murder the murderer via execution. We say “theft is wrong” and then take taxes from people without consent. If someone doesn’t pay taxes and even resists then they will be judged as being morally wrong even though they are doing moral wrongness themselves.
Moving on, normative ethics is the main concept of moral relativism because it is the examination of issues of right and wrong and how people justify the decision they make when faced with situations of moral choice an example of this would be the ten commandments because they are a set of rules to stop us from being miss lead in life. In addition a great example of this would be when morality is determined by situations, for example, lying is wrong. But lying to the Nazis where the Jews are is right.
Since situations are relative and changing, then morality is relative and changing, however morality is not always determined by situations but conditioned by it for example murder is wrong, but one must murder someone for self-defence. So therefore this situation makes a deed right, Killing for self-defence makes killing not murder. Therefore killing for self-defence is not wrong. Another point people think is true is that good intentions is enough. It is not. Hitler had good intentions, but his actions were not. A good intention can make a deed good, but a good intention does not make a bad deed good.
