Right and wrong are neither pure custom nor one fixed code

The strongest version of moral relativism starts with a fact everyone can accept: moral codes really do differ, dramatically, across cultures and history. Practices that seemed obviously right in one era — conquest, slavery, the exclusion of women from public life — came to seem obviously wrong in another. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in the 1930s, documented just how wide this variation runs. Her evidence for descriptive relativism — the observation that values differ — was solid.

But she and others slipped from that observation to a further claim: that therefore no culture's values are objectively better than any other's. The philosopher Peter Singer pressed the key objection here. The fact that cultures disagree about something does not, by itself, prove that none of them is closer to right. People once disagreed about whether the earth was flat. That disagreement did not make both views equally true.

The Bhagavad Gita offers a third position that is worth holding alongside these two. Dharma in the Gita is not the same for everyone — it depends on your role, your moment, your capacity. What is right for a warrior is not right for a renunciant. This makes ethics context-sensitive, but it does not make it arbitrary. The Gita is not saying that right and wrong are mere preference; it is saying that what right requires of you depends on who and where you are. That is different from saying there is no right.

The single most important distinction in this debate is one that often gets skipped. Descriptive moral relativism is the factual claim that cultures have different moral codes — this is true, and documenting it is the job of anthropology. Normative moral relativism is the philosophical claim that therefore no code is better than any other — this is a further step, and a much weaker one.

The move from the first to the second is not automatic. The mere fact of disagreement does not settle who is right. Historians and scientists disagree constantly; we do not conclude that history and science are just matters of opinion. People disagreed for centuries about whether slavery was acceptable. That disagreement did not make both positions equally valid — it made one side wrong in a way that later became visible to more people.

This is why most philosophers today neither embrace crude relativism nor swing to crude absolutism. The defensible middle position holds that there is probably a thin universal floor — that gratuitous cruelty to innocents is wrong regardless of cultural context, that basic human dignity is not a local preference — while above that floor, a great deal of genuine variation is legitimate and should be respected. Finding where exactly that floor is, and who gets to draw it, is where the hard work is. But the hard work is worth doing. The alternative — saying the floor does not exist — gives up the ability to condemn anything at all.

The first confusion is treating relativism and open-mindedness as the same thing. They are not. If all values are merely local, then so is tolerance — a culture that prizes intolerance would be just as valid as one that prizes tolerance. You cannot get a universal duty to be open-minded out of the claim that nothing is universal. Tolerance needs a different argument, one that appeals to something beyond just the fact of difference.

The second confusion is assuming that rejecting relativism means imposing one culture's rules on everyone. Not necessarily. A universalist can hold that a few deep principles are shared while most customs are rightly local and varied. The claim that torturing children for pleasure is wrong everywhere is universalist, but it is not an imperial demand that all societies adopt one particular way of life. The thin floor and the rich variation above it can coexist.

The third confusion is the mirror image of the first: assuming that if you reject relativism, your own society must have it all figured out. The opposite is true. Believing that some moral claims are really better than others is exactly what allows you to say that your own past — and your own present — got things wrong. Moral progress only makes sense if better means more than just different. Relativism, followed all the way through, cannot account for the idea that we have improved — because improvement requires a standard, and relativism denies any standard that is not local.

This is not a seminar game. How you answer the relativism question shapes whether you can criticise a custom you were raised inside, whether you can defend a stranger's rights across a cultural line, and whether you believe your society can get better at all. Lean too far into relativism and you lose the standing to condemn anything. Lean too far into absolutism and you risk mistaking your own habits for the laws of the universe.

The lesson — and it is a practical one — is that taking moral questions seriously does not require pretending you have all the answers. Moral humility, the recognition that you might be wrong, is different from moral nihilism, the belief that there is no right or wrong at all. The first keeps you open to evidence, open to other perspectives, and honest about your own blind spots. The second disarms you entirely.

What the long history of this debate teaches is something quieter than a verdict. It teaches you to ask two questions when you encounter a moral difference: is this genuine variation above a shared floor, or does it cross the floor? And when you are the one making a moral judgment — which you will be — to ask whether your certainty rests on something defensible, or on the accident of where and when you were born. That discipline is not weakness. It is the only kind of moral seriousness that survives contact with the actual range of human experience.