Cultural Relativism

First, let me specify that, when talking about cultural relativism, I am specifically referring to morality.

Now, it is difficult for me to argue against cultural relativism, since being an agnostic/atheist I do not have an easy way to apply some sort of cultural standard in it's place. I will, however, try to argue for my own personal standard shortly.

First, the simplest problem. This is the most obvious problem that pretty much everyone who thinks about such things seems to have thought about: if all cultural viewpoints are equally valid, what about those viewpoints that deny the validity of other viewpoints? What about the viewpoints that say that cultural relativism itself is incorrect? It seems to me that the very assertion of relativism is self-contradicting.

This is not the gravest problem I see with cultural relativism, though. A greater problem is: how do we define a culture? For instance, if we say that political repression in China should be accepted because it's their culture, why are we then excluding from our definition of that culture those citizens that argue against repression? Or that in some countries women are considered inferior, and we should accept that as a culural value, why do we exclude the women who try to break free? (These statements are hinting at my proposed cultural standard, by the way...) So far we've considered situations where the minority of a culture is ignored; we can also consider the opposite case, where a minority or slim majority is considered to represent a culture. For instance, does political repression in China, in fact, represent the majority culture, or is it the culture of those who rule? And where does one culture end and another begin? What about sub-cultures? And finally, what if one culture's values entail the destruction/repression of another culture, aka Nazi Germany, or the slave-owning South. Do we allow this to go on? These are important questions to consider if we are going to making judgements based on the concept of cultural relativism.

What, then, is the alternative? As I mentioned, one of the difficulties of cultural relativism is where one draws borders between cultures. Is there some level where a line can be clearly drawn? The clearest line that can be drawn is around individuals. I believe that the fundamental standard we can apply to cultures is the degree to which they respect individual rights (which I will enumerate my concept of in a future post). (Say hello to my civil libertarian tendencies!) Now, if an individual chooses to hand over their individual rights, that is their perogative, but one right must then still remain: the right of choice. Individuals must be able to freely choose to associate and follow a culture. If they choose to be a part of a repressive culture, that's fine, but they cannot be allowed to then insist that others also do so.
This also means that there must be one more standard: information and ideas must be freely available within the culture, since the right to choose is useless and pointless if there are no choices. And I personally believe, but this is getting into mcuh more difficult territory, that children in particular must be given as many choices and ideas as possible, since it's in childhood that one identifies with particular cultures and values.