The Moral Relativism Theory

Today, we live in a world that has never been historically so internationally connected and profoundly directed toward the steadfast belief that a better future for all nations is intrinsically related to a better awareness of the other. Being internationally connected is, by will or by force, an aspect that has profoundly changed the societies at a degree that is obviously different from a country to another. Yet, we can talk to more people than all our ancestors reunited did thanks to tools like social networks or telecommunication technology. We have the ability to know each other better by communicating, talking and delivering our thoughts without having an iron wall separating us from the so called strangers or foreigners we could not

The theory has revealed its first weaknesses what reinforces the view that moral relativism is fragile and probably wrong if we consider the following as a first argument: Moral relativism represents a dampening to moral progress. In moral relativism, we can tell between two intellectual current: individual and cultural relativism. The first one considers that what is right is contingent to the individual concerned, while the second say that ethics are relative to the culture to which each individual belongs. Among those two, cultural moral relativism represents the biggest threat to moral progress. Indeed, moral progress or even moral change seems to be impossible for people adopting this kind of thinking which seems to infer the suspicious idea that the majority is always right (relatively to the culture). Why people who considered their rules of what is ethical and what is not as right would change them? One simple answer would be that they figured out that their rules were inappropriate. The problem is how would they consider that they were wrong if their unique standard is themselves? No way! Unless we consider meta-ethic relativist point of view who would not see any conflict between their beliefs and an internal relative trend of change inside this culture because they will not see it as positive or wrong, but only as a change. These explanations seem to be an escape or a loophole that does not really represent an assertive answer to the problem. In fact, moral progress has always been a huge source of conflicts inside the moral relativist current. This complexity of answering may illustrate why moral relativist struggle to explain how nations such as USA, France have come to the idea that slavery was at a certain time morally legitimate but no