What is meant by the term Moral Relativism?
...western countries. A Relativist however would argue that even though we see this practice like this, the cultures that practice this see female circumcision as normal and indeed they would see some of our customs and practices as strange. Moral Relativists believe that each individual derives their behaviour and the decisions that they make from their own personal, unsharable, aesthetic moral code that provides the foundation from which all of the persons moral choices are made from. So in effect, each person’s morals are individual to them and cannot be taken away. A simple way to sum this up is, ‘everyone draws their own moral conclusion from the same story’ and we behave according to our own impression, acceptance and interpretation of the story. The term Moral Relativism is quite often confused with the term ‘ethical relativism’ which holds that morality can be shared between closely knit groups sharing a moral code or are committed to a joint action. A Moral Relativist on the other hand would argue that people in such a circumstance do not follow a common code and are acting in accordance with what their action is and may not necessarily morally agree with what they are doing. Moral Relativism is an ethical judgement that claims that no ethical system is better than another. This leads to the fact that to judge an ethical system, it must be judged by a moral standard and since there is no such thing as a universal moral standard then this would not work. And, since every ethical system evaluates itself as the best and that every other system is flawed and immoral, moral judgments about other ethical systems are practically meaningless. Moral Relativism rests on the belief that values and morals ar...