Moral relativism
... Relativism seems to be a good system for promoting acceptance and tolerance in the world and stopping another tragedy like the Holocaust ever reoccurring, because it states that everyone is entitled to their own point of view, and no one group is superior to another. Another strength of relativism is that it encourages people to be open minded and challenge their existing beliefs. When you believe yourself to be right there is a danger of becoming narrow minded and self congratulatory to the point where you stop any personal growth. The worse cases of injustice occur when people refuse to consider the fact that they might be wrong, and other people’s opinions may be valid, for example the slave trade, apartheid or, again, the Holocaust. But a relativist approach encourages people to be constantly evolving their belief system and exploring new things. Relativism does not mean having no ethics because ‘anything goes.’ Relativists can have a very sense of right and wrong, they just accept that it is not the definitive version. Relativism can be very good for promoting acceptance of other culture’s customs and practices which may seem alien to us, and also guards against hypocrisy. We may be outraged to find that the Chinese eat dogs, but a Hindu would be equally disgusted to find that we eat cows. Maybe it all is a matter of personal opinion. But a weakness of relativism is that it doesn’t accept that anything is ever really wrong. On relativist grounds you could excuse rape, torture and even genocide as ‘part of their culture.’ Because a relativist would say that we don’t know that these things are wrong, we ...