Morality is a tricky beast. Everyone, regardless of how they try to portray it, has a sense of morality that is different from others. Some people might identify as a Christian in terms of morality. You know the type: "I am a good Christian". Most of the time people say this it is not to say I believe in God, but instead, I am a moral person. Some people try to foist their moral beliefs on others, not willing to accept that they may be wrong.
We live in a globalizing world. The internet connects everyone who uses it to the whole world by itself, massive global trade efforts bring resources from halfway around the world to areas that can't get them normally, and banks are starting to oppress via debt internationally. Ever since people have explored the world and saw/traded with other cultures we have been exposed to different ways of thinking. People exposed to other ways of thinking tend to do one of two things. If a foreign tradition matched slightly with theirs or was demonstrably superior in some way they would sometimes adopt part of their practice and vice versa. If a tradition of one culture addressed a problem that another culture had, but had been unable to deal with, it would get adopted immediately.
Another way people react to other cultures is to reject it outright in the belief that they are intrinsically superior (I am looking at you France/America/a significant population of any country). This is the origin of nationalism/racism. I equate those two because they are less related and more the same thing with a different paint job- "My nation/race is superior because its mine and I'm awesome". This way of thinking is damaging to all involved pretty much.
The first way of looking at other cultures is where moral relativism is born. We see that there are other ways of looking at the world from a moral standpoint. We also begin to see these differences between us, as individuals, within our own culture. Though I would point out that we've always seen these differences but relativism drove home the point as to how far apart these views could get. I thought about this when moral relativism became open for discussion as a concept in college and had a question: If people's views are already different on morality, how can people live together in a society? The answer was quite simple. Society creates a list of ethics that people follow called laws. Laws borrow the language of morality but (ideally) are only concerned with what a society needs to function. Laws develop around the sort of things that would cause society to go to shit if they were not stopped. No murder, because we need people. No stealing, because it fucks with economies. Minimum wage, so that people have enough money to live.
Dietary stuff is left off from laws, because some people think that meat is morally wrong to eat, while others don't. Adultery if left off because people gonna fuck no matter what. Being an asshole is also not illegal, despite people who are assholes making the world as worse place. Because these are more aesthetic points and less necessary for the running of a society they are merely publicly looked down upon rather than be a crime.
A common argument against moral relativism is that it looks at the world via the subjective point of view, so you could feasibly disagree with some laws, such as murder being wrong. The flaw with this is that there are still ethical laws that pose a threat to that person. Just because they view murder as acceptable, that doesn't make them exempt from the law. They still live in a society, and there are consequences for that action within that society.
I wanted to write about this because we are at a point in the world's history where we will be seeing more and more of other cultures on a regular basis and we need to not try to enforce morality on them, since that would be fucked up. I wanted to show that cultures learn from each other all the time, and that this can be healthy, and that by trying to view yourself as an authority you forgo learning from other peoples experience. There are people who believe that we should make laws more restrictive at home, such as with gay marriage. There are also people that believe they should enforce morals on other countries, such as religious extremists (I will not point specifically because they literally all do this). You shouldn't tell people how to live. Just because you find something displeasing doesn't give you the right to forbid it.
There is a major problem with my point of view. This problem is known as the "liberal's dilemma". The liberals dilemma sets up one major problem with interacting in a more accepting way. In short: You believe that you cannot tell people how to live, but in another country, they do something horrid like kill rape victims or something atrocious like that. How are you able to react? I think I have an answer. We as a global community can't afford to let wicked shit go unpunished. Anytime someone fucks with someone else's basic rights (the UN has some problems but this is at least a good start), they need to be stopped. When it comes to protecting each other and ourselves from abuse we all have and ought to have the right to do so.
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