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13 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1979)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi13 and id is 1 raw text is: 1 ETHICAL RELATIVISM SOCRATES QUESTION In the Euthyphro Socrates confronts Euthyphro with a question. Socrates asks him: What is piety? An odd question to our ears perhaps; but in contemporary language his question is this: What is it that defines moral rightness? Or, put differently: What is it that makes something morally right? Euthyphro's reply is drawn from the conventional wisdom of his day, that of Athens in the fifth century B.C., and it seems as evident to him as daylight. His answer is in the air: What makes something morally right is its being pleasing to the gods, and what makes something morally wrong is its being not pleasing to the gods. If his answer were put into contemporary language, it would be in terms of what a monotheistic God commands or approves. So translated and modernized Euthyphro's answer seems less quaint, for it has been shorn of its polytheistic assumption, but still, I think, it seems lacking to contemporary ears. If a present-day Euthyphro were asked Sort qLutnu his answer woulu nL Ue in terms o1fU Go or g s0 at all. I do not mean that no contemporary would give such an answer, for some would. But if there is an answer in the air today, as there was in Athens in Socrates' time, it is not such an answer. A present-day Euthyphro would reply that there is no absolute or objective standard in the sense of a standard that holds for all men at all times, but, rather, what is right for different men at different times varies and is determi- ned by different standards. Here indeed we have an answer to Socrates' question; it is the answer of ethical relativism. Elaborating it further: these different moral standards are not absolute - that is, can vary - for a reason, namely because they are relative to something that is capable of change and, in fact dones change. If we ask what this changeable something is, we will find that there is more than one sort of answer. One kind of answer is the feelings - or choices- of tiilUlvual. Ath1111r1 HU V1 d anW1 ls wiat sUiociy s ays. DUL 1 these answers are in accord with the general position of ethical relativism, but each generates a different version of the view. The first answer is that of Individual Ethical Relativism (IER), which Nietzsche and Sartre, in his existentialist phase, were committed to and championed. 1 The second answer is that of Societal Ethical Relativism (SER), which appears to have the support of many in the social sciences. 2 1 See Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Sec. 260, various editions: and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 626-27. 2 The noted anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, for instance, accepted SER. See his

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