Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[mediamogul]

I don't buy into cultural and moral relativism where nothing is true or ethical.

Sorry.Had to respond to that claim;it's misleading as an in principle definition.

Cultural relativism is simply the recognition that meaning of actions vary between cultures often a lot.


Moral relativism is a broad term.It MAY claim there is no OBJECTIVE reality, (as do I )AND it MAY claim there is no morality,but that is not THE definition of moral relativism. Moral relativism also recognises that moral values tend to vary between societies. By inference,it rejects the notion of absolute universal moral imperatives. Not the same thing as 'no morality'. Moral relativism says nothing about truth. A skeptic, I avoid truth statements as does science.

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Wikipedia is a good place to start:

Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities are understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism

Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

How is that different from what I said? That morality is relative and purely a function of cultures and individual beliefs regarding ethics. I disagree completely. I am not an absolutist but believe that we can know truth in a fallible sense and also morality through the use of logic. Moral relativism states that that there is not morality only morals held by individuals that cannot be considered right or wrong. I think this is the most vapid of moral theories and a complete cop-out. Everything becomes grey and slips into the void of nobody being able to make ethical statements about anyone else's beliefs. Just because the Nazis believed what they were doing was ethical it doesn't mean jack. they caused unnecessary suffering and therefore were unethical in their actions.

I am much more ready to accept cultural relativism in the sense that cultural practices are essentially relative to the cultures and provided that they do not violate ethical principles people are free to practice whatever manner of customs they choose.