"Ethical or moral relativism is the position in meta-ethics that morality is not universal, but that moral truths can be determined by factors relative to one's society or culture.
Ethical relativism generally follows the general attitudes of the group of people. For example, in areas of the United States prior to the Civil War, slavery was morally permissible, whereas in modern Western culture it is not. In most modern cultures, the consumption of animals is currently morally permissible, but if tomorrow the majority were to adopt vegetarian or vegan lifestyles, it would no longer be morally acceptable, at least on a strict account of moral relativism."
From Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams, pp 156-158):
"If we reflect on disagreements of a certain kind and come to the conclusion that they cannot be objectively settled, we may react by adopting some form of relativism. Relativism is not peculiar to ethics; it can be found in many places, even in the philosophy of science. Its aim is to take views, outlooks, or beliefs that apparently conflict and treat them in such a way that they do not conflict: each of them turns out to be acceptable in its own place. The problem is to find a way of doing this, in particular by finding for each belief or outlook something that will be its own place.
The simplest method, and the one that is in the most precise sense relativistic, is to interpret the original claims as each introducing a relation to a different item. The Greek thinker Protagoras, generally acknowledged to have been the first relativist, started from conflicting sensory appearances, as when I find the wind cold and you find it warm, and claimed that there was no answer to the question whether the wind was really “in itself” warm or cold— the fact of the matter is simply that it is cold for me and warm for you. It was this relational treatment that I mentioned in the last chapter as a way, though not the most convincing way, of treating variations in the perception of secondary qualities, not (as in Protagoras’ original case) between individuals but between different kinds of perceiver.
The aim of relativism is to explain away a conflict, and this involves two tasks. It has to say why there is no conflict and also why it looked as if there were one. Strict relational relativism performs the first task very crisply, by finding in the two statements a logical form that makes them straightforwardly compatible, so that there is no problem in accepting both. It tends to have less success with the second task because, the more convincing it is to claim that the statements are really relational, the more puzzling it is that people should have thought there was a conflict. Relational relativism introduces a clearly compatible structure and then has to say what disguised it. It may be helpful to approach relativism from the other direction, and ask what happens if we start by conceding that two beliefs or outlooks do indeed conflict and are genuinely exclusive. The problem will then be to find a sense in which each may still be acceptable in its place.
One idea that requires us to think in a broader way about relativism is incommensurability. Some philosophers of science hold that scientific theories may be incommensurable with one another because they differ in the concepts they use, the reference they give to various terms, and what they count as evidence. These theories will not straightforwardly contradict one another. Yet they do exclude one another. If they did not, there would be no difficulty in combining them, as one can combine the topography of separate places. They cannot be combined, and it was this fact that started the discussion in the first place. Those supporting one of the theories try to find reasons for rejecting the other; one of them may drive out the other in the course of the history of science. How can this be? Some radical philosophers of science will say that you cannot combine the two theories merely because you cannot combine accepting both theories: the research activities characteristic of each theory, the direction of attention appropriate to each, and so on, cannot be combined. You cannot work within both of them.
This account of rival scientific theories makes them sound like two cultures or forms of life. As an account of science, it seems to me a wild exaggeration, but a story of this kind may be appropriate to what really are different cultures or forms of life, such as that of the hypertraditional society considered in the last chapter. The outlook of one such society might to an important extent be incommensurable with that of another, but they would still exclude one another. The conflict would lie in what was involved in living within them.
If two cultures, or outlooks, or ways of life exclude one another, is there any room for relativism? Not instantly. Someone who has certain dispositions and expectations as a member of one culture will often be unwilling, when confronted with an alternative way of life, to do what is done in the other culture. Moreover, it is part of what makes his responses ethical responses that they are deeply internalized enough for his reaction, in some cases, to be not merely unwillingness but rejection. For rejection to be appropriate, it is not necessary that the parties conceptualize in the same way the actions in question, and, granted the situation we are supposing, they will not do so. Thus members of a culture that does not admit human sacrifice encounter members of another that does. They conceptualize differently the ritual killings, but this does not mean that the first group, if horrified, are laboring under an anthropological misunderstanding. It is, as they might put it, a deliberate killing of a captive, which is enough for their ethically hostile sentiments to extend to it. (It does not follow that they have to blame anyone: that is another question.)"
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