If a man in an unknown country eats part of a domestic animal, like a dog or cat, in his meal in order to survive, and I as an American do not agree with
this, does that mean the man is morally wrong? Although people with different
morals than this theoretical man would be quick to disagree with me, in the grand
scheme of things this man would not be morally wrong as it is acceptable in his
cultural code. This conundrum based off of morals and ethics is known as cultural
relativism. The basic idea of this conundrum is that there is no universal
truth or right and wrong, only various cultural codes. In a perfect world,
people would easily understand cultural relativism as true and would accept
that others do not have the same morals and that that fact is perfectly okay.
Yet, we do not live in a perfect world. In the book Things Fall Apart this obvious
imperfect world is created where the natives and the foreign missionaries do
not see eye to eye on morals. One issue presented by this book and seen in society
in general is the need to force ones moral codes on other people. The
missionaries try to push their moral codes onto the natives and although they
do have some natives who come to agree with them, many of the natives do not.
If cultural relativism was a reasonable concept, then the missionaries would
not have attempted to push their morals out on the masses in this fictional
case, but rather just accepted that the natives believed something different
and left it at that. Another issue with cultural relativism is that at this
time cultural code is no longer simply based of a country, but by millions of
subcultures and beliefs. In America there is simply no two people with the
exact same set of moral beliefs. Due to this increase of such drastic
differences in thinking, it guarantees that there will always be conflict and
lack of understanding on at least one idea, let alone a whole moral code. An example of this could easily be the division among the country about Darren Wilson. Half the country strongly believes that Darren Wilson is morally wrong for killing an unarmed teenager while the other half strongly believes that Darren Wilson did the right thing in this case. You could easily go even deeper into this and compare the reasons why people believe it is morally wrong or right, further showing this drastic difference in thinking of the people in just one country. Ultimately I think this whole idea that there could be an
understanding that there is a variety of codes rather than one ‘correct’ set is
nice but it is completely unrealistic and inappropriate in this day and age.
