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[paracelsus]

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue82/Morality_is_a_Culturally_Conditioned_Response

This is a deeply bad article. For example:

Allegation: Relativism doesn’t allow moral progress

Comments

[philosophyjeff]

But if moral relativism is true, then increasing consistency in the moral standards won't be morally important unless such increasing consistency is itself part of the cultural standards. It need not be. The same point holds for a new set of standards being more conducive to social stability. That will not be morally relevant unless social stability is itself a cultural standard.

Maybe I'm not locking on to the dialectic. Was my response part of your frustration with the original article?

[paracelsus]

I guess I see the term 'moral relativism' as an inadmissable abstraction from the get-go (at least one far too tenuous to use as a premise). Moral codes, statements or judgements tend to be intensely specific - appealing to particular history, personal experience, religion, tradition etc - rather than the product of the article's very general sort of reasoning.

As such, by papering over the particularity of moral systems, the article's moral relativism is promoting a specific value claim - the ultimate comparability and homogeneity of moral values such that they can be used as tools, as means to an end. So the article tries to establish a meta-moral position accounting for cultural differences, only to iron out those differences by saying they're all only relative. The final position could just as well be a recipe for disengagement, "Oh, yes, those people would think that wouldn't they? No accounting for morality!"