Cultural Relativism

When Franz Boas began observing other cultures anthropology as we know it today did not exist. Cultures always interacted for trade or war, but never for observation and understanding. With Franz Boas came the school of anthropology it brought with it a need to state the actions of differing cultures. Boas’ student Ruth Benedict defined the primary law of the school by explaining the pitfalls of ethnocentrism in her writing “Anthropology and the Abnormal”. An anthropologist’s duty as a researcher is to view, learn, and interact while leaving judgments of the culture studied out of the equation; in ethics, this is an example of cultural relativism. Anthropologists use cultural relativism, a form of descriptive ethics, in their ethnographies to define a culture’s practices. Where cultural relativism only states the customary behavior of a culture, ethical relativism, a normative ethical theory, evaluates how another culture should view the moral decisions of the society under observation by defining the reason for the behavior in question. Ethical relativism is the search for a global ethical understanding, this is to say that whatever ethical standards a culture holds should not be judged negatively or positively because, just as in the culture doing the observing, their values evolved within the society on a basis of necessity or belief.

Many arguments debase ethical relativism as a plausible moral theory. The intrinsic problem within ethical relativism is that moralists think a line should be drawn about what are considered universally wrong behaviors and spread their opinion. If the culture’s values being observed evolved allowing men to impregnate any woman within the community at will, but the observing culture has allowed women the right to choose when, if, and in what fashion they should conceive would the observing culture be justified in condemning or warring with the culture under observation? In ethical relativism there is no justification