The Concise Oxford Dictionary (p925) describes morality as: '1) Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour; a system of value and moral principles. 2) The extent to which an action is right or wrong'. What is morally right in relation to one moral framework can be morally wrong in relation to another, and unfortunately no one moral framework is the final word in true morality. We all live our lives by moral rules, the statement in the essay question states the relativist thesis about justification of out moral principles. This essay will look at the different approaches to morality.

Relativism and absolutism are theories which are concerned with morality and the justification of our moral judgements. Relativists believe that all moralities are equally valid, that there is no single true morality, and that there are many different moral frameworks, none of which are any more correct than the others. Relativism has been criticised quite heavily because it implies the validity even of the view that relativism is false, and because of such views they are undermining the act to try and improve the way in which we think. Moral rules, values, and beliefs, vary from society to society and relativists claim that even if our society see other societies values as 'bad', it is just as correct as our own values, they argue that even if something is wrong, as long as we thought it was right at the time then it was.

Few philosophers describe themselves as relativists, but some include, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Emile Durkheim. There are many different types of relativism. Two of these are individual relativism (subjectivism), and social relativism. Individual relativism makes the claim that individual humans are responsible for their morals, where as social relativism makes the claim that society decides what is right or wrong, i.e. we inherit our moral principles from our society. Both these theories have their problems. With individual relativism moral debate becomes impossible, because if you accept that the individual may be wrong, you cannot agree with individual relativism as according to this theory the individual cannot be wrong, also individuals could not improve or reform if they were to change their minds.

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Bertrand Russell (1935) in his chapter on 'Science and Ethics', in his book 'Religion and Science', basically states that if two men have a disagreement about their values then they are not actually having a disagreement but simply a difference in taste, he moves on to say that this is so because it would be impossible to prove that this or that has inherent value, basically because there is not way to decide who is right in a difference of values it has to be a difference of tastes, not one of any objective truths.

With social relativism the problems ...

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