Ethics attempts to answer two simple questions, what is good and what is bad? An ethical crutch pervasive within society is cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism, as articulated by Melville Herskovits, asserts that “evaluative judgements derive their validity from the basic assumptions and values of the culture in which they arise,” in other words our values and morals are derived from the culture they inhabit. This is pretty intuitive and we tacitly embrace this philosophy daily. Phrases like “that’s just how things are done here” or “who are we to judge their traditions?” are the common rationalisation of this framework. The popularity of this attitude is pretty terrifying, it provides a rhetorical scape goat to make any moral claim valid thus making any action permissible. The first section of this essay will chronicle the genesis of cultural relativism to demonstrate it’s logical contradiction.

However the fact is that we still see and practice cultural relativism on a daily basis, so there has to be something to it. The section of the essay will reframe the language of cultural relativism, and through David Hume’s philosophy of the good and the psychology and scientific evidence that supports it.

I will then introduce the idea of I am calling (I think) subjective relativism. This will show how an individual subject adapts to the environments stimuli to conceive of the good in that current moment, as well as demonstrates real world examples of this behaviour.

Finally I will comment on how this understanding of good effects the questions of ethics.

Cultural Relativism

Herskovit’s observation in the Kingdom of Dahomey

Herskovits, an American anthropologist, developed his theory of cultural relativism through anthropological analysis of the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin). In Dahomey, he found cultural practices that would be categorically unacceptable in the eyes of 20th century Western morality.

Dahomean society operated within a complex socioeconomic system where centred around the family units. With the domestic economy predominantly agricultural, production formed the backbone their social and economic system. The family operated as the primary economic units, and the family’s economic output determined their social standing in society. with the patriarch operating as it’s commander. While patriarchal in nature, woman had rights surpassing the bound of the 20th century western morality from which it was being analysed, allowing them to take up many roles in society including the military (such as the infamous Dahomey Amazon force).

Herskovits study of Dahomey found their peculiar acceptance of what his western canon would deem immoral, namely polygamy and slavery.

Polygamy in Dahomey meant a man could have many wives, it was not only accepted by their partners but often encouraged, with wives assisting and at times taking over the responsibility of courting other woman for their husbands. This was as the wives assets (including their slaves and the slave’s children) were incorporated into the wealth of their husband and strengthening their family as an economic unit, increasing their wealth and influence within their community.

Slavery in Dahomey was largely accepted as they were seen a crucial and respected organ of the family. Slaves were not just property but part of the family, and thus treated with respect and afforded significantly more freedoms than other institutions of slavery. Due to their familial incorporation, the insinuation of slavery was never challenged until (ironically) the the French came in and abolished it along with their economic system. This is not akin to a form of adoption, these slave were still the patriarch’s property, free to be sold domesticity or commonly into the Atlantic Slave Trade. These slaves were collected either by purchase or conquest of neighbouring villages.

Herskovits concludes from this that “judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation.” Using this rational he deduced “values are culturally patterned, and often induced by learning and discipline.” With the recongnition that our values(morals) are a product of the culture that surrounds the given subject he believed this knowledge “lift us out of the ethnocentric morass(muddiness) in which our thinking about ultimate values has for so long been bogged down.” Ethnocentrism being “the view that one’s own way of life is to be preferred to all others,” and this notion was the primary obstacle to cross-cultural understanding.

This is where Herskovits (the anthropologist) tries his hand a philosophy. Correctly observing the contradiction of Slavery and Polygamy were bad in America but good in Dahomey, he deduces that morality can not be objective. While nihilists see the same contradiction and say morality dose not exist, he disagrees saying objective morality and values don’t exist: what is ‘good’ is in fact ‘good for x culture’. The resolution for this contradiction is thus the morals of x culture and y culture can be good and bad at the same time. Preciving this to be a moral fact, he arrives at cultural relativists: we ought to be tolerant of other cultures values, and it is wrong to interfere with other cultures practices.

The Logical Contradiction of Cultural Relativism

However, as Bernard Williams pointed out a crucial flaw in his argument: If all moral truths are culturally relative, then the principle of tolerance itself must also be relative, not universal. This creates what Williams termed a “self-defeating argument.” Tolerance can’t be universal as a culture no being tolernet would be moral, or we have a circular justification where tolerance is correct merely because our culture happens to value it. Ironically this circular reasoning feeds into the ethnocentist view that Herskovits developed this theory to combat, as our it states culture is tolerant and that is preferred to the values of all others.

The contradiction becomes even more apparent when considering historical moral changes. If moral relativism is true, then societies didn’t make moral mistakes in previously accepting practices we now condemn (like slavery or genocide) - they simply held different cultural values. As Williams pointed out, this makes it impossible to explain genuine moral progress or error at a cultural level. Thus cultural relativism is not a valid moral theory.

Why are we all relativists?

As Herskovit was not a trained in ethic I can excuse his rhetorical framing. While recognising that Cultural Relativism logically fails, it is wrong to throw out the idea completely because of it. As stated in the introduction, apart from the most staunch and pompous philosophers, we all employ aspects of cultural relativism in our everyday lives so there must be something there.

Revaluating Herskovit’s conclusion

Lets re-examine Herskovit’s ethical statement ‘we ought to be tolerant of other cultures values, and it is wrong to interfere with other cultures’ practices. Ignoring the contradictions for a second we can restructure the argument to be ‘and it is good to not interfere with other cultures’.

What does good mean in that statement? Under the framework of cultural relativism, ‘good’ being a moral claim must mean ‘good for x culture’. But Herskovits’s own analysis of Dahomey exposes a contradiction. He claims that Dahomean practices like polygamy and slavery are ‘good for Dahomean culture’ while simultaneously being ‘bad for Western culture’. However, this judgment itself comes from Herskovits - an individual subject shaped by Western academia - who is claiming to objectively observe and validate different cultural value systems.

If we follow cultural relativism’s own logic, Herskovits’s Western cultural context should prevent him from making valid judgments about what is ‘good for Dahomean culture’. His very ability to recognize and validate different cultural value systems contradicts the premise that moral judgments are bounded by cultural context.

Following this logic we can arrive at a comfortable conclusion like Williams that cultural relativism is self-defeating. However, we can restructure Herskovits’s argument by reducing the abstract notion of culture to individual subjects - making moral judgments individually. A subject being ‘a being that exercises agency, undergoes conscious experiences, and is situated in relation to other things that exist outside itself’.

Looking at individual cases, we can see how this works in practice. For Herskovits, tolerating Dahomean practices served his practical interest in conducting anthropological research. For a business person in Dubai, adopting local customs serves their commercial interests. For a tourist in Japan, removing shoes when entering homes prevents social friction. In each case, the subject’s tolerance of different cultural practices isn’t based on a universal moral principle, but on how that tolerance serves their specific situation and goals.

This helps explain why relativistic thinking persists despite its logical flaws. When we say “that’s just how things are done here,” we’re not making a philosophical claim about moral truth. Rather, we’re acknowledging that adapting to local practices often serves our practical interests - whether social, professional, or personal. This pragmatic adaptation gets mistakenly elevated into a moral principle through post-hoc rationalization.

Hume’s Good

Why is this the case? Why do we conflate our own self interests with a moral good? Hume proposed a possible explenation for this behaviour in his conception of the good.

Hume understood the good through his theory of human nature. Hume flipped the traditional relationship of reason and passion (appetite) in his Treatise of Human Nature declaring “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Verifying this claim first requires understanding how Hume defined passions.

For Hume, our passions (emotional responses) fall into distinct categories that drive our reasoning and actions. Direct passions like desire, aversion, joy, grief, hope, and fear arise from immediate impressions of pleasure or pain. Indirect passions like pride, humility, love, and hatred are more complex, requiring a double relation of impressions and ideas - they involve both a sensation and a related object or idea. For instance, pride requires both a pleasant sensation and an idea of self to which that sensation is connected through some cause (like achieving something noteworthy).

Hume sees these passions as natural phenomena that form the foundation of human motivation and morality. While reason can inform us about the relations between objects or ideas, it alone cannot move us to action - only passions can do that (“reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”). Education and social convention don’t create new passions, but rather direct and shape our natural passionate responses within social contexts.

The distinction between direct and indirect passions is exemplified in how we experience achievement: direct passion manifests as immediate joy from success, while pride emerges through connecting that pleasant feeling to our idea of self, creating a more complex (and some would say longer lasting/more impactful) emotional response. Regardless both types of passions are guide our practical reasoning and motivate our actions.

Take for instance how we judge the act of friendship. When we say being loyal to friends is ‘good’, we’re not discovering an objective moral truth through reason. Rather, we’re expressing the positive sentiments - joy, security, affection, affirmation - that arise from loyal friendships. Reason helps us figure out how to be a good friend, but it’s our passions that make us value friendship in the first place. This maps perfectly onto our subject-relative framework - being a loyal friend is ‘good for’ both parties because it satisfies their emotional needs and desires, not because loyalty possesses some intrinsic moral value.

The psychology of Hume’s good

Modern psychological research strongly supports Hume’s framework across multiple psychological perspectives:

Biologically, fMRI imaging has shown that emotional centers of the brain (like the amygdala) activate before rational decision-making areas (in the prefrontal cortex) when making moral judgments (Greene et al., 2001). Greene et al showed participants emotionally charged moral dilemmas while monitoring their brain activity, the emotional response consistently preceded any rational deliberation, biologically suggesting our moral intuitions are primarily emotional rather than rational.

Socioculturally, Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory demonstrates that moral judgments are primarily emotional responses that we later rationalize (Haidt, 2001). Through extensive cross-cultural research, Haidt showed that people make moral judgments almost instantaneously based on gut feelings, then spend considerable effort constructing post-hoc rational justifications. When presented with moral scenarios that triggered strong emotions but participants couldn’t articulate why (like the famous Jack and Jill incest example), people maintained their moral condemnation even while admitting they couldn’t provide rational grounds - a phenomenon Haidt termed “moral dumbfounding.”

Cognitively, Behavioural economics reveals how emotions drive economic decision-making. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory (1979) showed that people’s choices systematically deviate from rational economic models due to emotional biases. For instance, people feel losses more intensely than equivalent gains, leading to risk-averse behaviors in gains but risk-seeking behaviors in losses. The endowment effect shows people value items more once they own them, purely due to emotional attachment rather than rational valuation. There are plenty more cases Tversky and Kahneman show where “rational” decisions are fundamentally shaped by emotions across every domain, these are just two I picked out.

Evolutionarily, Antonio Damasio’s work with brain-damaged patients provides compelling evidence for emotions’ crucial role in decision-making. Patients with damage to their vmPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) maintained their logical and intellectual capacities (reason in Hume’s language) but failed to make basic life decisions. In the famous Elliot case, the previously successful business and family man lost his job, marriage, and savings through poor decision-making. Despite retaining his intelligence and ability to analyze situations logically, without emotional guidance he couldn’t prioritize or make effective choices. This suggests that emotions evolved as essential decision-making tools, not obstacles to rational choice.

Subjective Relativism

This understanding of morality is fittingly called subjective relativism, I think. To be honest I haven’t been able to find anyone else who has explained those words how I have. I have found an guy called Kevin at UBC who has one slide on it and this unreadable HTML file from Buffalo. The stanfurd page on it may call it alethic relativism, but this is kind of different as in is not creating an philosophical framework on ethics, truth or asthenics, but just stating how subjects create these claims. Objective truths still exist, the methods of mathematics and the nature of the measurable measurements are not falsified by this framework, although under this framework one could ignore those truth if it is advantageous. For example explaining physical phenomenon with myth to gain power and influence or determining that the stating said truth in the particular moment is more advantageous (for safety, or affection or reputation etc) then stating it. I think I may be doing new actual philosophical research but also wrote this based off things I have read in the past and minimal research.

Regardless, subjective relativism posits that moral decisions are driven by subject relative goods, which themselves are determined by the interplay between our passions and reason. Unlike cultural relativism’s problematic universal claim about tolerance, subjective relativism recognizes that we accommodate different cultural, religious, traditional practices or any belief that operates outside of what we already conceive because it satisfies various subject-relative goods - whether emotional, practical, or both.

It is crucial to understand a subject can an organisation an not just an individual. In fact the ordinal idea for this paper was looking at different fortune 500 companies ethical guidelines and finding direct contradictions in their business practices when entering new markets. A famous example of this was Google initially agreed to censor search results in China (2006-2010) despite their guidelines committing to free information access. The subject (Google) determined that market access outweighed their usual ethical principles, shifting their ethical rhetoric to provide free information access to the most people (most profits) rather then complete information.

Twitter’s handling of content moderation exemplifies subjective relativism in action. While claiming to be the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” Twitter’s actual moderation practices shift based on subject-relative calculations of benefits. For instance, in 2020-2021, Twitter maintained a ban on then-President Trump citing risks of violence, while allowing other world leaders like Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei to post arguable much more dangerous content. The company determined that the potential harm and business impact of Trump’s tweets outweighed their free speech principles in that specific case, while reaching different conclusions for other leaders based on market considerations and political context. This selective application continued under Elon Musk’s ownership - despite promising “absolute free speech,” Twitter still complies with government takedown requests in countries like India and Turkey when market access is at stake, and maintains certain content restrictions to preserve advertising revenue. The subject (Twitter) consistently makes ethical decisions based on situational assessments of business interests, regulatory pressures, and potential consequences rather than adhering to any absolute principle of free expression, demonstrating how moral stances shift according to subject-relative calculations of good rather than universal rules.

This extends to governments as well. The United States’ relationship with democracy globally demonstrates subjective relativism in practice. While positioning itself as democracy’s leading advocate, the US maintains strong ties with Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy despite it embodying everything the US claims to oppose: autocratic rule, restricted religious freedom, limited women’s rights, and human rights violations. This partnership persists because the subject (US) determines practical benefits (oil stability, regional alliance against Iran, arms sales, military bases, intelligence cooperation) outweigh moral considerations. Yet conversely, the US has repeatedly overthrown democratically elected governments when their policies threatened American interests in Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960-61), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Greece (1967), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Turkey (1980), Nicaragua (1981-90), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Haiti (1991, 2004), Honduras (2009), and attempted in Cuba (1960s), Ecuador (1961), Bolivia (1971), Jamaica (1976), Venezuela (2002), and Libya (2011). This pattern demonstrates subjective relativism because the subject’s actions contradict stated universal principles, with decisions driven by calculated benefits rather than consistent moral values, and ethical stances shifting based on context and strategic interests.

This also presents itself professionally, take active euthanasia. A doctor’s approach to active euthanasia presents a clear example of subjective relativism. While the Hippocratic Oath explicitly states “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan,” many doctors in countries like Netherlands, Belgium and Canada actively participate in euthanasia when they believe a patient’s suffering outweighs this traditional principle. It legal in those countries but there are countless instances of the same behaviour happening even when the doctor phase criminal charges for doing so. These doctors make a subject-relative judgment that their primary duty to relieve suffering can, override their oath to never intentionally end life. Consider a doctor who normally opposes ending patient life but chooses to administer lethal medication to a terminal cancer patient experiencing unbearable pain with no prospect of improvement. The same doctor might refuse euthanasia for a depressed patient with treatable conditions, showing how their ethical stance shifts based on context rather than following a universal rule. The doctor’s choice demonstrates subjective relativism because their moral decision depends on their personal assessment of each situation’s circumstances, the quality of life, extent of suffering, and patient autonomy, rather than adhering to an absolute prohibition against ending life.

In conclusion, subjective relativism thus offers a more nuanced and psychologically accurate explanation of moral behaviors. It acknowledges that our moral accommodations stem from subject-relative calculations of good, driven by both emotional and rational considerations, rather than adherence to universal principles of tolerance.

A Note on Where This leaves Ethics

This little bit is more for me to feel better feel free to ignore.

In terms of an examination of ethics, subjective relativity leaves us in a bit of a pickle. Attempting to solve the problem of what is ethics (moral good and bad) seems kind of pointless at this point. Intellectually it is a fun exercises to build on our current moral theories to explain what ought to be the good, however sometimes its difficult to care about the what when the how and why are already answered. Good is the a subjective evolutionary response, it is malleable and adapts to the subjects external stimuli. So what is good, it is whatever were the subject is feeling like in it’s current context, the rest we make up after.

Missing from that statement however is what is permissible. The natural reaction to provocation, whether via a direct or indirect emotion used to be murder. There was nothing wrong with slavery, genocide, sexism, racism, exploitation, torture or whatever the first thing is that pops into your head when you think of bad without people daring to answer the question ethics. Those inquests into ethics bred religions, math, science, politics, economics… all looking for what is good in different fields of life. Every era of history across the globe has had a philosopher to thank for lives preservation and cultivation. Philosophy must continue to progress and humanity will follow behind.

Notably this does not effect things like aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics… as it is just a framework to understand moral action.

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Citations

Primary Sources:

Herskovits, M. J. (1938). Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. New York: J. J. Augustin.

Herskovits, M. J. (1948). Cultural Relativism and Cultural Values. In Man and His Works (pp. 61-78). New York: Knopf.

Hume, D. (1739/2000). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Empirical Research:

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105-2108.

Haidt, J. (2001). The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.

Contemporary Cases:

Drummond, J. (2010). Google in China: A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 92(2), 299-319.

Rogers, K., & Bromwich, J. E. (2021). Trump’s Twitter Account Permanently Suspended. The New York Times, January 8, 2021.

Theoretical Framework:

Baghramian, M., & Carter, J. A. (2020). Relativism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/

MacFarlane, J. (2014). Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.