Moral relativism is probably the dominant popular view of ethics in secular Western culture. The idea is something like this: moral judgements are expressions of cultural norms, personal preferences, or evolutionary programming. There are no objective moral facts — no moral truths that hold regardless of what any person or culture believes. When we say “slavery is wrong,” we are really saying something like “my culture disapproves of slavery” or “I find slavery distasteful.”
Relativism is appealing for several reasons. It seems humble: who are we to impose our values on others? It seems tolerant: if there are no objective moral truths, there is no basis for cultural imperialism. It seems modern: objective moral facts feel like remnants of a pre-scientific worldview.
But on examination, moral relativism fails at every level — practically, philosophically, and in terms of what its own proponents actually believe and live.
The practical problem
If morality is just opinion, then the statement “the Holocaust was wrong” is merely the expression of a preference — like saying “I don’t like the Holocaust.” It is in the same category as “I prefer vanilla to chocolate.” A culture that decided to exterminate a group of people would not be morally wrong on this view — it would simply have different preferences.
Almost no one actually accepts this conclusion. The people most likely to invoke relativism in conversation — typically to deflect moral criticism of practices they wish to protect — are also the people most likely to make absolute moral claims about oppression, exploitation, and injustice. Relativism is used selectively: as a shield when someone else’s values threaten to constrain behaviour, and abandoned immediately when injustice needs to be condemned.
This inconsistency is not accidental. It reflects the fact that relativism is not a liveable position. To live is to make choices, and choices implicitly affirm that some options are better than others — not just preferred, but better.
The philosophical problem: self-refutation
Moral relativism faces a version of the self-refutation problem. The relativist claims that there are no objective moral truths. But is this claim itself objectively true? If it is, then there is at least one objective truth about ethics — namely, that there are no objective moral truths, which contradicts itself. If it is merely the relativist’s personal or cultural opinion that there are no objective moral truths, it has no claim on anyone else’s assent.
Furthermore, the most common relativist argument — that we should respect other cultures’ moral frameworks — is itself an objective moral claim. The proposition “we ought to respect cultural diversity” purports to be universally binding, not merely a local preference. But if morality is relative, this claim has no more force than its opposite.
What moral experience actually shows
The strongest argument against relativism is not philosophical but experiential. Consider your actual response to genuine injustice — not your theoretical position, but your gut-level, immediate reaction when you encounter a case of serious harm being done to an innocent person. The response is not “I personally find this unpleasant.” It is something more like: “This is wrong. This should not be. Something has been violated.”
That phenomenology — the sense of moral reality, of something being genuinely at stake rather than merely distasteful — is one of the most consistent features of human experience across cultures and centuries. It is remarkably difficult to account for on a relativist view. It is exactly what we would expect if there were a genuine moral order — an objective standard built into the nature of things, known imperfectly but unmistakably by conscious beings capable of moral reflection.