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1.3.18 Cultural Relativism, Moral Relativism, and the Banning of Music
Believers in the Standard Social Science Model refuse to make value judgments about anything that goes on in a culture other than their own. This is called cultural relativism or the relativistic fallacy. It’s really moral relativism, although believers in cultural relativism deny it.
According to cultural relativism, all cultures are “equal.” So you must not condemn the practices of any culture other than your own. Practices such as barring women from positions of social, political, or religious power. Banning music. Arranging and forcing marriages between three-year-old children. Ostracising, torturing, or executing homosexuals. Cultural relativists insist that, if you’re an outsider, you have no business criticizing such cultural practices. If you do, you’re an intolerant, ethnocentric racist bigot.
Cultural relativists assume, contrary to empirical evidence, that:
- Culture creates the individual instead of the other way around, and
- People do not have shared cultural values, the same biologically-driven wants, needs, and aspirations everywhere in the world, regardless of culture.
Cultural relativists simply deny, in the face of all evidence, that there’s any such thing as human nature—a large group of inborn behavioural traits that are common to people of all cultures. According to cultural relativists, everything’s political. Everything’s subjective. There’s no such thing as an objective fact.
The implication of cultural relativism is that universal, inborn ethical or moral standards do not exist. Cultural relativism is based on the mistaken notion that people learn morality and therefore you ought to expect people in different cultures to have different senses of morality.
The evidence, however, indicates every normal member of the human species is born with an evolved moral sense. Morality is not something you acquire from your culture. You don’t learn morality from your Mom or by attending your local church, mosque, or synagogue. Atheists, agnostics, and orphans behave just as morally as everybody else in society.