For years, many philosophers have been concerned with finding a criterion of moral rightness. Indeed, a core issue in moral philosophy involved identifying whether universally moral values existed or not. Accordingly, this essay will demonstrate that, although the relativist stance on the philosophical problem may seem quite compelling, the universalist one ultimately proves itself to be the most applicable and reasonable. In other words, moral universalism will win over cultural relativism inasmuch as the relativist will fail to provide compelling responses to the universalist’s objections, as this essay will further explain. However, to balance out the debate, I will additionally highlight the benefits that the relativist theory brings to …show more content…
The relativist Sumner captures perfectly the definition of this moral perspective: “The notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside them, of independent origin, and brought to test them. In the folkways, whatever is, is right” (Sumner, 1906: 28). To explain, the relativist stance involves both a negative assumption, that is the denial of the existence of any “universal moral truth at all” (Driver, 2007: 16), and a positive one, that is the recognition of the existence of a moral truth dependent on each specific culture. With such a definition, cultural relativism distance itself radically from moral universalism that instead holds that “there are derivative norms that may differ across cultures, but at least some basic norms do not” (Driver, 2007: 17). Indeed, universalism does acknowledge the difference in morality between different societies, but it also believes that this is not due to lack of objectivity or universality in morality, but rather to a change in those norms which have been built on the basis of some universally moral values that everybody shares in any beliefs’ system. There are several accounts on this moral issue, as well as considerable amounts of arguments in favour of …show more content…
Indeed, Gowans claims that “despite appearances, at least many moral disagreements are resolvable in principle: insofar as persons were reasonable and well informed, they would tend to agree” (Gowans, 2000: 23). Therefore, as the philosopher points out, the relativist response begs the question against moral objectivity claiming that moral disagreement is not rationally resolvable. Actually, the universalist would rather think that if people knew everything about moral facts, then moral disagreement would definitely cease. Indeed, the inexistence of a universally moral truth, again, does not follow from the premise of seeing moralism differently from scientific matters: even though in scientific concerns an objective truth can be found, saying that moral concerns are different from the scientific ones does not mean that an objective truth cannot be found as