Moral Relativism: A Reader

Book Overview

Are all moral truths relative or do certain moral truths hold for all cultures and people? In Moral Relativism: A Reader, this and related questions are addressed by twenty-one contemporary moral philosophers and thinkers. This engaging and nontechnical anthology, the only up-to-date collection devoted solely to the topic of moral relativism, is accessible to a wide range of readers including undergraduate students from various disciplines. The selections are organized under six main topics: (1) General Issues; (2) Relativism and Moral Diversity; (3) On the Coherence of Moral Relativism; (4) Defense and Criticism; (5) Relativism, Realism, and Rationality; and (6) Case Study on Relativism. Contributors include Ruth Benedict, Richard Brandt, Thomas L. Carson, Philippa Foot, Gordon Graham, Gilbert Harman, Loretta M. Kopelman, David Lyons, J. L. Mackie, Michele Moody-Adams, Paul K. Moser, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Karl Popper, Betsy Postow, James Rachels, W. D. Ross, T. M. Scanlon, William Graham Sumner, and Carl Wellman. The volume concludes with a case study on female circumcision/genital mutilation that vividly brings into focus the practical aspects and implications of moral relativism.
An ideal primary text for courses in moral relativism, Moral Relativism: A Reader can also be used as a supplementary text for introductory courses in ethics and for courses in various disciplines--anthropology, sociology, theology, political science, and cultural studies--that discuss relativism. The volume's pedagogical and research value is enhanced by a topical bibliography on moral relativism and a substantial general introduction that includes explanatory summaries of the twenty selections.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195131304
• ISBN13: 9780195131307
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Want to Know about Relativism? Start Here.

This is an anthology of papers by contemporary analytic philosophers about moral relativism. It's chalk full of papers in which analytic philosophers do what they do best: clarify the nature of positions, lay out the arguments for and against various positions, relate various positions and arguments to one another, etc. If you want to know just what relativism is, just why someone might defend it, and just why someone might criticize it, this is the place to go. And, clearly, this is a topic where the clarity and patience you find in this collection is sorely needed. Relativism is something about which there is a lot of discussion in academia, in the media, and in everyday conversation. But rarely, if ever, do people discuss what they think relativism really is. This is where this anthology can be very helpful, for many of these papers go to great pains to spell out just what relativism is and why it may or may not be a defensible position. The way to get at relativism is to look at various common-sense ideas that are connected to relativism: that the same thing can be right for people in one group and wrong for people in another, that morality is relative to a person's group, that there is no single true morality, that morality isn't objective, etc. And it is also important to focus, as many of these papers do, on the fact that moral relativism is not simply a matter of the sociological and anthropological facts about moral disagreement and differences. These facts are often take to suggest relativism, but it is important to recognize that they do not immediately imply it. Relativism is one possible response to these facts about disagreement and differences in moral codes between different groups of people. What we need is a way to formulate something approaching a theory of the status and nature of morality from this response to diversity in moral views and these common-sense ideas about relativism says and implies about morality.Here's a first pass. The basic ideas of relativism are that the moral facts are somehow constituted by the moral attitudes, beliefs, conventions, standards, etc. of a group of people, and that the truth and falsity of particular moral claims depends upon the moral attitudes, beliefs, conventions, standards, etc. of a group of people. But, as David Lyons points out in his paper, there are two ways to understand this dependence, because there are two different groups that might matter here: the group of the person making a moral judgment and the group of the person whose action is being judged. I'll explain the distinction by focusing on what the two types of relativism tell us about the truth of a particular person's, b's, moral judgment that another person, a, ought not to commit murder. One way of understanding this dependence gives us agent relativism, a view according to which b's judgment that a person a ought not to commit murder is true if and only if people in a's group have a negative moral a

A *Serious* Beginners Guide

Contrary to the previous reviewer's statements, this is not a terrible introduction to the topic of moral relativism. In fact it is a rather good one. I suspect the previous reviewer was put off with the very slightly technical stage setting that goes on in contemporary philosophical ethics. For those who can't handle this, avoid this book and look forward to a life of conceptual confusion. Some of the selections of this reader are excellent, tightly (but not necessarily correctly) argued intro-level articles, particularly the pieces by Harman, Mackie, Scanlon, Nagel and Nussbaum (all very accomplished writers in this area). Others are not as well-written or tightly argued, but they nevertheless raise the crucial issues at stake in discussion of moral relativism, and, therefore, have at least a pedagogical value. Overall a solid starting point for those with a serious interest and willing to think about the issues in detail.