by Justin Webb

Created on: January 10, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

The philosophical issue dealing with absolute versus relative truth is a complex one; in order to understand exactly what we're talking about, we need to find a middle-ground first (so to speak). For an argument to be formulated, either for or against this question, we need to define terms concisely and coherently. Dictionary.com defines society as "an organized group of persons associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes." Now, as you can see, there are a lot of different directions we can take with this, but for the purposes of our argument we'll say that a society is a group of people living together with a commonality amongst them, a community.

There are a lot of different roads we could take, so the next thing to decide is exactly what we want to talk about; what kind of absolutist truth are we looking at? Is the absolute truth morally/ethically based? I think that when we look at most forms of absolute truths, they generally end up the same way, so I will talk about this specific group.

Next,in order to offer some sort of perspective, we must talk about what moral truth realists and moral relativists are exactly. The moral realist is simple enough: someone who believes that there are indeed certain moral truths, and that there is a specific right and wrong value associated with corresponding actions pertaining to those truths.

The moral relativist is a little more complicated, but not by much; there are two kinds of truth relativist: individual moral relativist and cultural moral relativist. Quite simply the opposite of a moral realist, an individual moral relativist believes that moral truths are relative to a specific individual, whereas the cultural moral relativist believes that they are relative to a specific culture.

Now, with the relativist (whether cultural or individual), the basic theme of their argument is simple: that no action can be deemed right or wrong because the action can only be right or wrong to a specific person or culture. If that action is right for that individual/culture, then it is in fact the correct action, regardless of the standard of an opposing individual/culture.

Allow me to offer an example to show the absurdity of this: A person could posture that is unethical for the first born to get beaten to death in America, but does not deem it so in countries that might think that every first-born child is a "holy" relic and has the right to skip life in this world to

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