ABSTRACT

Moral relativism can take different forms and be given different definitions. It can be defined as affirming equally valid conflicting moral opinions or as the denial of a single moral standard applicable to all persons or as affirming context-dependent values. When moral relativism makes what is morally right or wrong relative to a culture or the individual, it makes evil–or moral evil–relative. However, both the home of modern cultural moral relativism and the main arena of its shifting fortunes was anthropology. Cultural moral relativism and subjectivism may be called determining types of moral relativism. In the twentieth century, cultural moral relativism and subjectivism were accepted and proclaimed, often with enthusiasm. The individual form of determining moral relativism, subjectivism, continued to hold a place in popular thinking, as it still does in the twenty-first century, albeit in an inchoate attitudinal form.