Blog #1
In history there have been many cultural disagreements, where cultures clashed and one thought that they were superior to the other. Besides the enslavement of the African Americans one of the other big cultural clashes in history revolved around Hitler’s killing of the Jews. Adolf Hitler saw the Jews as a lesser race and because of this he wanted to rid them from the world so he rounded them all up and sent the to camps where mass killings of these people took place. To a cultural relativist this would be find be they would believe that every culture has its own moral codes and its own beliefs which are neither correct or incorrect. So any other culture who thinks this is wrong is actually wrong because it was their culture to say the the Jews were a lesser person than everyone else. Hitler’s views were definatly an arguement against the views of a cultural relativist, It doesn’t take a genius to say that this is obviously wrong and that is were people stepped in and tried to take Hitler out of power to stop the slaughter he has committing.
Rich's Intro To Ethics Weblog 
September 8, 2008 at 9:22 am
A powerful example. I wonder if we could come at the example from another direction: Hitler wanted to kill Jews because he thought that it would purify the country; in turn, he wanted to purify the country because he thought it would make the world a better place. So, in essence, he held the very acceptable moral belief that it’s a good thing to try and improve the world, and carried it out with some very false beliefs about who is and isn’t pure, etc. If this is true, it might (might!) be argued that we don’t strictly speaking have a moral disagreement with him at all, just a factual one, and thus CR doesn’t even apply in this case.
September 8, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I agree that cultural relativism seems like it only means to justify the unjustifiable. However, you might want to mention that most of the world rejected this way of thinking and that Germany itself, before Hitler, probably would have been against such a mass slaughter and that it was not part of their moral code to kill Jews. It was systematically programmed into them by the distorted mind of a psycopath. This is something that many agreed was wrong, thus the intervention of other countries and this is something they agreed on as being wrong, proving that it is not relative at all. Killing is wrong, no matter who you talk to.
amanda rose