If you’ve ever talked about morality, there is a good chance you’ve heard the terms moral relativism or cultural relativism. Moral relativism is the overarching stance that morality is relative, i.e., one cannot declare that certain actions are immoral (like killing). Cultural relativism takes this to an extreme, stating that morality can only be judged within each culture, and not between cultures. Often, cultural relativism goes hand in hand with a principle of tolerance or acceptance, which states that cultures should not judge the actions of another culture based upon the morals of their own. I admit that upon hearing about these two stances, I was drawn to them. They offer an easy way out of the very complex maze of morality. I hope to convince you by the end of this blog that the culture-to-culture tolerance preached by cultural relativism is illogical, while exploring another, more underground stance: that of temporal relativism.

Cultural relativism is illogical, and here I will use a spin-off of an argument that I think was originally developed by English philosopher Bernard Williams to prove why. First, let’s explain what cultural relativism prevents us from doing. Say there is a culture whose core practice involves killing 10-year-olds if they cannot guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. This is pretty messed up, right? But a strict adherence to cultural relativism would prevent us from deeming that practice immoral. After all, we have to judge cultural practices in respect to the culture as a whole. If counting how many jelly beans are in a jar is a key principle to that culture, like strength to the Spartans or intelligence to the Athenians, who are we to judge? See, this is the problem with cultural relativism. Even in the face of something that most of us can acknowledge as supremely horrible, the fact that we are outside of the culture prevents us from interfering. At the surface, this seems like a quick way to avoid a problem. Upon a deeper look, you see that all it creates are more issues.

Cultural relativism essentially renders the outsider powerless, under the guise that they do not understand the cultural practices and therefore should not be able to judge. Here’s the problem. Cultural relativism states that morals are relative to each culture, i.e., no other culture should enforce morals upon other cultures. But wait a second. In the fourth sentence of this post, I mentioned an objective principle of toleration, where all cultures are required to not interfere with other cultures and cannot judge them. Here the relativists have tied themselves into a bit of a knot. If all morals are relative to each culture, and the practice of tolerating other cultures is a moral, it shouldn’t be universally enforced. See where this is going? It’s a complete contradiction. One can try to claim that morals are relative culture to culture, but in doing so, they cannot create an objective, non-relative moral that says judgment/toleration of other cultures is necessary.

Let’s take this discovery back to the jelly bean culture. Since it’s contradictory to insist on an objective principle of tolerance, if one thinks that this culture is doing something immoral, which they are, because they are killing 10-year-olds, there is no relativist logic preventing one from condemning them and then forcing them to change. Morals may be relative, but toleration is not, so cultural relativism offers no logical barrier to intervention by outsiders. So the next time someone tries to rationalize or accept some corrupt practice ingrained into a culture on the grounds of relativism, you can bring up the aforementioned inconsistencies. Of course, historically, claims that one culture is ‘more moral’ have been used to justify oppression, so any intervention should be handled with caution.

I want to spend the second half of this post discussing something called temporal relativism. I have no clue if this concept has some other name I don’t know of—it definitely could, and people have already written about it. By temporal relativism, I mean the possibility of morals to be relative, i.e., change, over time. So for example, there could have been a code of morals in the 1800s, but that code has now changed and will continue to change in the future.

I think this is a very interesting concept. If you are anything like me, your mind first jumped to practices of the past that were deemed worldwide as acceptable—things like racism, sexism, eugenics, discrimination. Or going even further back, things like religious sacrifices or witch hunts—practices that today would be immediately deemed immoral. It feels extremely difficult to think of these things without seeing them as immoral, which is in large part because that is precisely what they are in our society. However, this idea deserves more nuance.

It would be extremely naive to consider that our current frame of morals—the June 23rd, 2025 edition—will be the last moral code that will ever be developed. In the future, I think for better or worse things like eating meat or driving gasoline-powered cars will be deemed immoral. Other crazy developments could happen too, like the allowance of Human-AI marriages. Point is, if someone told us that eating meat, or driving gas cars, or disallowing a human to marry an AI was extremely immoral, most people would think them to be crazy. Case in point: radical climate and animal-rights activists. Again, this is in no way attempting to equate the evils of the past with those of the present, but the point remains the same. We are trapped in the moral framework of our age, and unlike a culture, it is impossible to escape it.

Now that I’ve revealed this dilemma, what I say next might be a little bit surprising. I don’t think we should take into account any perceived moral code of the future, and definitely not live by any moral code of the past. Morals are always evolving, and until we, in 20-ish years, reach that moral code that deems gas immoral, we should not be forced to live by it. If you do, that’s great and I seriously commend you (and vegans). But that is a supererogatory, not obligatory, action. Point is, if we trap ourselves into following perceived moral codes on the behalf of “landing on the right side of history,” we are merely living like shells of ourselves. And if we directly attempt to live by the morals of the future, who’s to say they won’t change, and we’ll be on the wrong side of history again?

What’s really tricky is thinking about how we should judge the morals of the past. I don’t buy the “it’s okay because everyone did it” argument, but when the scope is not a culture, but the whole world, I think the argument becomes more convincing. Like I mentioned above, one can choose to leave a culture, but one can’t decide to leave a time period. I’m not a determinist by any means, but even I can accept that 99 percent of our actions are influenced and determined by our surroundings, upbringing, and biology. So if the world around you carries certain traditions that are inescapable, does it not make sense that you would do the same? Of course, this still feels like a deeply unsatisfying justification for history’s crimes. But I would challenge you to think of something practiced that was nearly universally accepted at a time through history (So not Nazi Germany—that’s an exception, because it was widely opposed at the time, and its actions triggered a global moral and military response. Slavery doesn’t work either, as there has been very clear opposition to it throughout history), and really think to yourself if you wouldn’t have done it. It may be cynical, but I think the vast majority of us would.