@salima,
Moral relativism is the idea that morality is subjective, or at least context-dependent. The world as a thing-in-itself is neither good nor bad, pretty nor ugly, right nor wrong, blah blah blah. Classically speaking, it's just a system of particles that have positions and trajectories in space and time, masses, momenta, charges and the like. Soulless, mechanical, mathematical stuff.
However, relativism in and of itself doesn't imply that value judgements are arbitrary illusions, floating around untethered to any objective physical facts. A value judgment is a real causal relationship between the world as a thing-in-itself and an observer with emotional and aesthetic faculties. Both the world and the observer participate in this relationship. You can't just swap out the facts of the external world and expect an observer's value judgments to be unaffected.
I'm a moral relativist. But there are two arguments that often spring out of relativism that don't sit well with me.
The first argument is that if morals are relative, then who am
I to impose my morals on someone else? Shouldn't I just live and let live and keep my opinions to myself?
Well, if all "shoulds" and "should nots" are subjective, then it would make no sense to infer a
universal "should" to the effect that everyone, or even
anyone, "should" butt out of anyone else's business. The "virtue" of minding one's own business is as subjective as any other virtue. Maybe Alice thinks it's best always to keep her nose high and dry. Maybe Bob feels free to coerce others with whatever it takes. Who's right? The question is meaningless until you frame it in terms of an individual perspective. All Alice has accomplished from an objective perspective is to take herself out of the game.
My point is that if anyone concludes that they should just live and let live, that's fine, but there's no basis for concluding that
solely on the basis of the fact that morality is subjective. The only available basis is individual morality.
The second argument is that if all morals are relative, then doesn't that mean that anything goes? Isn't moralizing inherently silly?
This one is similar but trickier. Some sceptics write off our efforts at moralizing as silly because there is no absolute moral standard. I agree that there is no absolute standard. But I also believe that it's a mistake to hold out for an absolute when no coherent description of what it would be to
be "an absolute" can be expressed. Failure to meet an incoherent (and therefore impossible) standard is no failure at all.
Take free will, for example. So-called "hard determinists" and "libertarians" both believe that free will is incompatible with strict laws of physics. Hard determinists believe that physics is strict, therefore there can be no free will. Libertarians believe that there is free will, therefore physics can't be strict. The problem is that neither position can express a coherent description of what it would take to be "really" free
according to their standards. For any given act of will, either it is caused or it isn't. If it's uncaused, then it's the fruit of a random accident for which no moral agent can be held responsible. If it's caused, then the event that caused it is itself either caused or uncaused. If
that event is uncaused, then again, it's another random accident. And if it's caused, then we have to ask the same questions again, and so on down the line.
Basically, everything we do is either a random accident or the fruit of a causal chain that extends outside our bodies and / or before our birth. So what does this prove? That we have no free will? Or does it prove that whatever "free will" is, it isn't (indeed,
can't be) what the hard determinists and libertarians are fighting over? I believe that this argument proves the latter.
Similar thing with morality, and value judgments in general. No value judgments are absolute. But who cares? Who
should care? Can anyone coherently describe what it would be for any moral judgment,
any moral judgment at all, to be "absolute"? Absent such a description, why should I care whether any of my moral judgments are "absolute"? Are any of my judgments flawed
simply because they fail to meet an incoherent, and therefore impossible, standard? They may be flawed according to some other (non-absolute) standard, but surely not according to astandard that can't even be substantiated.
Whatever standard we use to evaluate value judgments, that standard
can't be absolute because any such standard is inherently incoherent (according to the relativist). So let's not even go through the motions of evaluating moral claims relative to that criterion. There
is such a thing as good and bad, even if you and I happen to disagree, and even if there is no final authority to which we can appeal to settle which is which.