道德相对主义

title: 道德革命.
content: Many people in other times and places thought slavery, for example, acceptable, even good; while most today view it as a great evil. Many writers and thinkers have held that one can justify any number of evils based on subjective or cultural preferences, and that morality requires some universal standard against which to measure ethical judgments. A moral relativist might respond that this criticism is only valid if one already accepts that such acts are indeed fundamentally evil - a position which the moral relativist would deny - and that the objection is therefore nothing other than an uncritical statement that morals are in fact absolute.  However, if it is "their" society that has, for instance, rejected slavery, they presumably agree that it is wrong, if their position is one of social or cultural moral relativism. This presents a meta-ethical problem in explaining what happens when a society has a collective change of heart. Consider the case of someone who has minority moral views within their society, and yet is vindicated (even relativistically) by future developments. If "right" and "wrong" literally mean "what my society accepts/rejects" then a social moral relativist in a slave-owning society of the past who says "slavery is wrong" is effectively saying "slavery is not approved of by my society", which is false — "factually" false. Yet, the relativist of the present is committed to agreeing with the relativist of the past, since they both oppose slavery.
title: Drawing boundaries.
content: There are also difficulties in putting a boundary upon "society" or "culture" - what people feel to be their social or cultural groupings may well not align with legal and national groupings. The person holding "minority moral views within their society" may consider their "culture" more aligned with that minority than with the larger state or national society which determines what is lawfully acceptable. This can be seen, for instance, where religious communities within a nation or state hold views on the morality of issues such as abortion or homosexuality which differ from the current legal position on those issues. This flexibility could lead to the objection that cultural moral relativism is "anything goes", since one could find — or found — a society that condones whatever one wishes to do.
title: 理乍得·默文·黑尔.
content: Some philosophers, for example R. M. Hare (1919 – 2002), argue that moral propositions remain subject to logical rules, notwithstanding the absence of any factual content, including those subject to cultural or religious standards or norms. Thus, for example, they contend that one cannot hold contradictory ethical judgments. This allows for moral discourse with shared standards, notwithstanding the descriptive properties or truth conditions of moral terms. They do not affirm or deny that moral facts exist, only that logic applies to our moral assertions; consequently, they postulate an objective and preferred standard of moral justification, albeit in a very limited sense. Nevertheless, according to Hare, logic shows the error of relativism in one very important sense (see Hare's "Sorting out Ethics"). Hare and other philosophers also point out that, aside from logical constraints, all systems treat certain moral terms alike in an evaluative sense. This parallels our treatment of other terms such as "less" or "more", which meet with universal understanding and do not depend upon independent standards (for example, one can convert measurements). It applies to good and bad when used in their non-moral sense, too; for example, when we say, "this is a "good" wrench" or "this is a "bad" wheel". This evaluative property of certain terms also allows people of different beliefs to have meaningful discussions on moral questions, even though they may disagree about certain "facts".

Summary: 在哲学中,道德相对主义是一种立场,认为道德或伦理并不反映客观或普遍的道德真理,而主张社会、文化、历史或个人境遇的相对主义。道德相对主义者与道德普遍主义相反,坚持不存在评价伦理道德的普遍标准。相对主义立场认为道德价值只适用于特定文化边界内,或个人选择的前后关系。极端的相对主义立场提议其他个人或团体的道德判断或行为没有任何意义。

Moral relativism: Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is a term used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and their own particular cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often labeled simply as a relativist for short. In detail, "descriptive" moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgement being expressed on the desirability of this. "Meta-ethical" moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong. "Normative" moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when considerably large disagreements about the morality of particular things exist.