@johannw,
johannw;154482 wrote:The thing is that the evil society is evil according to you. But in their perspective, they are not evil. We are talking about how relative morality can be. You may think that good is good and evil is evil, but that is totally dependent on your definition of good and evil and that definition differs from culture to culture.
Ancient cultures saw human sacrifice and cannibalism as a normal if not holy thing to do, while other cultures that existed at the same time saw those practices as horrifying and diabolical. Who was right? According to each, they considered themselves right, but each other wrong: making the morality of those practices completely relative.
But it does not follow that because the people in a society do not believe that their society is evil, that their society is not evil. Why should it? A person may not believe that lots of sugar is not good for him, but it does not follow that lot's of sugar is (in fact) not good for him. Nothing about whether something is true follow from whether it is believed true. I suppose that many people in Nazi Germany did not believe that their society was evil. But, so what?
Whether morality is, in fact relative is an issue that is independent of whether there are, in fact, different beliefs in different societies. We should distinguish between
cultural relativity and
moral relativity. Cultural relativity is just an anthropological fact. It is a fact that in different societies moral beliefs differ. But moral relativity is the view that what a particular society believes is right is, in fact, right in that society. But moral relativity is a moral view, not an anthropological view. And moral relativity does not follow from cultural relativity. Do you see the difference?
---------- Post added 04-20-2010 at 11:26 AM ----------
johannw;154490 wrote: but someone's opinion on ice cream doesn't (or at least it shouldn't).
Is that a moral judgment? That it shouldn't. In Jonathan Swift's,
Gulliver's Travels, two countries are constantly at war with each other because one of the countries believes that soft-boiled eggs ought to be opened on the small end of the egg. The other country believed they should be opened on the large side of the egg.