Cultural Relativism

Dante's Inferno

I not sure anything could be more sinister than the current idea that morality is culturally relative. But that seems to have become a dominant position. Even my friend Cyrus has bought it—and Cyrus is a very intelligent guy.

If morality is culturally relative, decided by some consensus within a culture to suit its own purposes, we have no business objecting to Hitler and the Nazis. The Nuremberg Trials were not legitimate. It was accepted within that society to kill all Jews. If we object, we are simply being cultural imperialists and showing our intolerance.

Not, of course, that there is anything necessarily wrong with intolerance or imperialism, right? After all, they too might be sanctioned by our culture...

So too with slavery, or child sacrifice, or torture, or suttee, and so forth.

There are other problems with the premise. Suppose you live in one of the anti-slavery counties in the antebellum US South. So, if you hold a slave, you are immoral locally, moral at the state level, and immoral at the federal level? The same act at the same time is both moral and immoral.

Most people, it seems, avoid moral choices by going along with what everyone around them is doing, and doing the same. This is an attempt to justify that attitude. But it is unjustifiable. It is lynch mob morality. It is the attitude that makes mobs in general so dangerous: if everyone else is smashing windows, tonight, I can smash windows.

It would make you a willing executioner in Hitler’s Germany.

It would make Oskar Schindler a moral reprobate.

Or Socrates. Or Qu Yuan. Or Jesus Christ.

Is just going along and never making individual moral choices immoral? Dante thought so. He put all such people in the first circle of Hell.

God thinks so too, according to the New Testament: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” (Revelations 3:16).

Literally, this says it is better to be deliberately evil than to just go along—at least you are acknowledging morality. That means there is some hope for you. None so guilty as the “innocent bystander.”

Worse than doing evil is denying the existence of evil.