Think of this:

An explorer encounters a society completely cut of from the rest of the world. In his opinion, they are primitive. He witnesses a woman being burnt for being raped.

Does he have the right to intervene?

I will wait until someone states an opinion and why he/she thinks this before explaining anything in detail.

I don't have any idea whether he has the right to intervene. But I am pretty sure he would be right to intervene.

Think of this:

An explorer encounters a society completely cut of from the rest of the world. In his opinion, they are primitive. He witnesses a woman being burnt for being raped.

Does he have the right to intervene?

I will wait until someone states an opinion and why he/she thinks this before explaining anything in detail.

Depends on what you mean by intervene.

In that situation I would probably strongly voice my opinion and try to get them to see the issue from my point of view but if they chose to not listen then I would probably leave it at that.

Morality is not something that is relative. If it were then why would we have ever progressed from the time of slavery to the time of now? Culturally we had no reason to. Society dictated that it was morally permissible and everyone in that society benefited.

There are certain principles that should never be violated. I think we must always challenge ourselves to look for the next "slavery" if you will.

It's part of our culture to intervene in situations like that.

Only if the situation occurs in our culture.

Morality is very relative. It is relative (on the whole) to social norms. We have progressed (from our point of view 'progressed'), from slavery because of a change in ideas and those ideas causing the social norms to change. As these norms have changed, what is and what is not moral have also changed.

In this case it is what the aim of society should be that has changed. Back then, society was aimed towards the happiness of the elite, so morality was what helped achieve that end. Now it is aimed at the happiness of everyone.

That's not true. Part of our culture is the belief that we have the right to interfere with other cultures. Do you believe we should change that belief of ours?

I would argue that that says social norms are relative not morality. We progressed because we became more enlightened; we moved more towards the truth. social norms change, the truth does not.

If the court says that it's acceptable to have slaves again. I still wont, because it's wrong despite social norms

What truth? Enlightened about what?

For the courts to say it's acceptable to have slaves again, the overwhelming majority of people would have to agree. You won't know if you would still think slavery is wrong because in that case you would have been brought up in a totally different society, so your values would be different.

Right and wrong are based on social norms. Therefore, from the society being encountered's point of view, burning the woman is the right thing to do, it is their social norm (sorry, perhaps I did not make this clear). It is only from the explorer's view that what they are doing is wrong, and since there is no one else from his society, this view is meaningless. As the opinion only has meaning in the context of his society, his beliefs do not apply to those not from his society.

Does he have the right, or would he be right, to intervene?

Right and wrong are based on social norms. Therefore, from the society being encountered's point of view, burning the woman is the right thing to do, it is their social norm (sorry, perhaps I did not make this clear). It is only from the explorer's view that what they are doing is wrong, and since there is no one else from his society, this view is meaningless. As the opinion only has meaning in the context of his society, his beliefs do not apply to those not from his society.

In this case it is what the aim of society should be that has changed. Back then, society was aimed towards the happiness of the elite, so morality was what helped achieve that end. Now it is aimed at the happiness of everyone.

I thought it was a norm that we should tolerate other cultures. If you are talking about the present, technically the whole world is part of the same society because we are all under the United Nations.

For the courts to say it's acceptable to have slaves again, the overwhelming majority of people would have to agree. You won't know if you would still think slavery is wrong because in that case you would have been brought up in a totally different society, so your values would be different.

Right and wrong are based on social norms. Therefore, from the society being encountered's point of view, burning the woman is the right thing to do, it is their social norm.

The truth is what is right regardless of circumstance. By enlightened I simply mean that we come to a realization that leads us closer to the truth. In the case of slavery, I figure someone got to know one of their slaves and realized they were people too.

Are you suggesting that we can't hold a different moral view on an issue other than what is the social norm? How do you suppose the first person who owned a slave came to the conclusion that slavery was wrong? Moral progress is impossible if morals are relative. To say morals are relative is to say that no one can be wrong.

I'm saying that the social norms are that in society which are agreed by the overwhelming majority of people, for example: murder is wrong, everyone has equal rights.

I suppose people came to the realisation that slavery made no sense in their current society because it was contradictory to other aspects of that society, for example: 'Wait, black people don't seem like idiots, I've talked to them. Now that that has been established, surely there is no reason to treat them as sub human?'

I do not see how social progress is impossible if morals are relative to social norms. I never said that social norms can not change-- they do, and when they do, morals do to.

People can be wrong, but only in the context of their society. This is not to belittle the importance of being wrong in that context-- it is the only context in which someone can be right or wrong.

Bolded statement is false--right and wrong are based partly on biology and instincts. Social norms merely mold. We all have a shared humanity, you are suggesting vast and impenetrable differences between other societies and our own.

But society was aimed at the happiness of the elite because they had all the power. If you accept that a minority view can trump a minority view, then how is that different from saying that the explorer's view can trump the natives view because he has guns and they don't?

:listening: The united nations is weak and has very limited influence.

Anyway, we are not discussing tolerating other cultures, we are discussing intervening in certain circumstances. And you haven't answered to the point: if a culture's values allow them to interfere with another culture, do you respect those values?

It's not the values that would be different, it's the perception of african american's as subhuman. You are arguing that values are subjective, but you agree that facts aren't, yes?

The weird thing about cultural relativism to me is that most of it's followers are liberal, i.e. they want to change the current culture of the society they live in. In other words, they want to impose their beliefs on the rest of their society that doesn't agree with them. But that contradicts cultural relativism, because you can have multiple cultures in the same country.

I agree that it's hard to judge other cultures because we don't understand them fully, that they can have different ways of doing things that are perfectly valid, different standards of morality if that is what they need for their country to function. But I feel like moral and cultural relativism overgeneralizes from that.