Ethical Relativism Anita Ho Summary

Critical Reflection 6 At the beginning of Anita Ho’s article she gives examples of ethical relativism. Ethical relativism means nobody should have the right to determine if what someone does is moral or immoral. Nobody has the right to tell others what they believe is right or wrong. People have their own customs, and nobody should be able to tell them they are not doing something correctly. There are a lot of different cultures in the world and we all come from different experiences. For this reason everyone should respect others customs. She gives an example of her classroom and asked them if they thought that it was right for the Nazis to kill six million Jews. All her students said they would never do something like that but they don’t think it is wrong because they thought it was right. Another example that was given was when she asked her students what they thought about people who believed that it was acceptable to burn babies for fun. The students thought that was gross but still began to say that they are not God so have no right to judge other people on their actions. A different example would be if your culture believes it is right

It causes problems because it fails to show the distinction between actions that are harmful to other people and actions that are not. It also causes problems because we are unable to talk about all actions people do are right if they believe in them such as burning babies for fun which is disgusting and wrong. Anita Ho says, “If we accept relativism, we will have to say that all these actions are morally right for those who believe in them. If we disagree with such actions, all that means is that we will not condone it in our society.” Everyone has their own opinions of what is right and what is wrong, so it is wrong to say that if one person believes it then nobody is able to think badly about their