Ethical relativism or "relativism" may be used to indicate several different views. One view, which is also called "ethical subjectivism," is the view that the truth of some ethical judgment as applied to a person's behavior depends on whether the person believes the actions to be right or wrong. This view is commonly expressed as "there is no right or wrong, it's only a matter of opinion." Acceptance of this view undermines the claim of any ethical judgment to have validity. One who believes in ethical relativism in this sense would have to agree that there was nothing objectively wrong with a person torturing or killing another person, as long as the individual committing those actions sincerely believed it was not wrong to do so.

A second view, which is sometimes called "cultural relativism," is the view that ethical judgments and moral rules always reflect the cultural context from which they are derived and cannot be immediately applied to other cultural contexts. Some who......

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Title: Ethical Relativism
Approximate Word Count: 376
Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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