Moral Relativism In Trying Out One's New Chores

Moral relativism is one’s perception of what is acknowledged to be morally just or unjust depending on accepted demeanor. Certain behaviors and manners that a specific culture may consider to be acceptable, another culture may consider to be unethical. In such an instance, neither one of the cultures would be incorrect. Morals are culturally defined in that it originates from the root as to what is considered socially acceptable. In Mary Midgley’s “Trying out one’s new sword”, she argues that moral judgment between cultures is a necessity. The main example that she uses to justify her case is that without moral judgment, we would not be able to express disapproval of the ancient Samurai custom where they evaluate the effectiveness of a new sword by slicing an innocent passerby into halves with a single stroke. Samurais would justify this action by saying that passerby’s give consent to be sliced. She claims that people who don’t believe in morally judging others are considered moral isolationists, based upon their belief that one does not understand enough about another’s culture in order to be able to make an intelligent
The defense that one would have when we are criticizing their culture would be to say that we don’t understand. This infers that if we did understand, only then would we be able to pass judgment and criticize their practices. Thus, they believe that we will be able to understand once we are informed. The only defense of proving that one’s culture’s practices are morally just is to explain and inform the foreigner as to why they are not unjust. If one persuades the foreigner to agree with them, it would only make sense that the foreigner incorporates their newly informed values to improve their own culture. This proves that there is indeed a relationship between morality and