Comments Elsewhere

eric w. pleasure wrote:

i’ve always thought of it as the belief that morals can be cast aside when it’s necessary, or merely convenient.

Well, relativist arguments probably encourage this kind of opportunistic thinking; and people are probably also often attracted to relativist arguments because they help make excuses for opportunistic thinking. But strictly speaking they are not the same claim; what you mention here is more properly a form of situational ethics.

A consistent cultural relativist, for example, need not hold that white slavers could ignore moral principles when they were enslaving Black people if they could get good results from it. What they hold is that, since the culture in which the white slavers lived generally approved of slavery, there were no true moral principles that condemned slavery for them in the first place. (The relativism happens as soon as you presume that that “for them” can be inserted—that is that making a moral claim doesn’t bind you to holding that claim in all frames of reference.) They might also hold that moral principles can be ignored under the right circumstances, as a separate claim; but they might just as consistently be absolutist cultural relativists (i.e., they could believe that you are always obligated to do what your culture morally approves and avoid what it morally disapproves, whatever the circumstances are).