I recall a situation when my brother was getting married. Marriage is often viewed as a beautiful occasion when two loving people tie the knot for the rest of their lives. My brother and his Polish fiancĂ© had been preparing for this occasion for more than eleven months. However, a moral dilemma appeared for his fiancĂ©. Her mother died three months before the wedding, and due to Polish Christian traditions, she was supposed to mourn for a year and not attend any celebrations, dance, or sing. However, my brother and our family related to a culture where people are usually atheists. It was already impossible to postpone a wedding since everything was already booked, but my brother’s fiancé’s religion strictly opposed organizing this event.
In terms of relativistic approaches, people’s opinions on the topic may differ. A subjective moral relativist would say that each person is their authority on the moral life and the source of their ethical principles (Wreen, 2018). That is that a fiancĂ© would still let the wedding happen because she wants to marry my brother despite traditions in her country. Subjectivism insists that the main source of knowledge is the individual’s perception, so if the fiancĂ© wants this wedding to happen, it should be held. A cultural relativist would say that the tradition and culture of the bride should be respected and more astutely related to her position (Teira, 2021). Moral philosophy studies human behavior and judges its correctness but does not put forward any precise statements on which people should act (Rachels & Rachels, 2012). Therefore, morality has no objective truth, so my brother and his fiancĂ© have to decide what to do without considering the mourning tradition.
This argument does not follow a form of premise and is fallacious, so it proves nothing. My brother and his fiancé decided to get married because they had good intentions of starting a new loving family. This approach was not morally correct since it did not obey the moral or social standards that most people accept, in this case, the Polish fiancé’s family side. It is difficult to say there was an objective moral truth in this situation because the decision was not made independently of their beliefs and feelings.
References
Rachels, J., & Rachels, S. (2012). The Elements of Moral Philosophy. McGraw Hill.
Teira, D. (2021). On the limits of cultural relativism as a debiasing method. Philosophy of Science, 88(5), 1079-1089.
Wreen, M. (2018). What is moral relativism? Philosophy, 93(3), 337-354.