According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a relativistic view of morality provides a more tolerant and understanding worldview, in which people are encouraged to view an act from the perspective of the actor (Gowans 2011). The observer may have his or her own moral views, but does not judge the moral actions of others because he or she believes that morality is relative. Instead, the criminal justice community will, ideally, uphold the law, ignoring personal moral beliefs. This may be useful from the perspective of Criminal Justice. Law enforcement officers and others in the system are expected to uphold the law and apply it free of personal moral beliefs.
At whatever rate, moral relativism might imply that our morals have reformed, that they have changed over time, and that they are not absolute. There are two points of moral Relativism firstly, its consents for the wide diversity of the culture and practice. It also allows explaining morality of the culture, understanding, knowledge, and modern change in society. Second, ethical
If the law lacks morality, and principles that ensure justice, and fairness is it even a law at all? . Yes it may be in a book of laws, signed by congress, and enforced by superiors, but the question still remains is a law actually a law if it doesn’t ensure the best interest of all people ? . Is a unjust law one that doesn’t bind lawmakers to obey ?.
In fact, natural and eternal law being a 'higher law' is the basis of King's philosophy of 'non-violent civil disobedience.' King views the segregation laws, a human law, to be in disagreement with natural and eternal law; therefore, he believes that these laws should not be followed. King writes, "Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality" ("Letter"). The first sentence is an appeal to 'higher law'; King claims if a law devalues someone, it is contrary to natural and eternal law, so the law cannot be just.
The Judge states, “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test” (McCarthy 261). This quote is significant because it further indicates how the Judge is trying to make evident that moral law is weak. As well as possibly suggesting that something that is not valid should not dictate ones actions over the values of historical law.
There is no objectivity to the idea of morality; it differs from person to person. For instance, one individual could believe that theft is wrong, however, another individual could very well believe that theft is completely fine. If the general public’s image of what’s right and wrong, then it’s ludicrous
Although the natural world is ultimately composed of nothing, say the relativistic ethics always has a basis in human feelings. Finally moral relativism seems particularly well suited to explain the virtue of tolerance. If from an objective point of view, its own values and the values of its society have no special status, whereas an attitude of "let live"
This creates a problem in that morality impedes on the good because to be moral means to make appropriate sacrifices. What a person wants in life is not always going to be the best choice and thus a person has to give up certain things that he or she wanted for the ultimate good. Morality relies on the ability to make proper decisions, to distinguish between right and wrong, and to understand the subliminal consequences of one’s actions. In a piece known as “Spring and Autumn Annals” composed by Dong Zhongshu, it is mentioned how the term humaneness refers to ‘others,’ while the terms rightness refers to the ‘self’ (De Bary, 1999). As has been previously defined, rightness refers to a realm of morality and thus one can conclude that there is a certain amount of ‘self’ present in
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).
“Is Morality Relative or are there Objective Moral Truths?” In A Defense of Ethical Relativism by Ruth Benedict from her “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology, in her part take on Modern Social Anthropology, Benedict views ethical relativism as part of the new modern civilization in which each society has their own moral views and “like a work of art” each culture has a theme and certain tendencies which they chose to favor. On the contrary, The Case Against Moral Relativism by Louis P. Pojman, moral relativism is viewed as a misled argument by relativists and explains in detail some of the moral differences in each culture and how this affects humanity as a whole. Subjectivism, “Morality is in the eye of the beholder,”