Absolutism, Relativism, and Pluralism: Which One is the Most Effective to Solve Moral Problems?

This is another interesting discussion in the beautiful October 2010. After I learnt about Absolutism, Relativism, and Pluralism, I was challenged with a question, "Which one is the most effective to solve moral problems in a society?". Before I answer that question, first, let me briefly explain my understandings about those three different moral positions.

Moral absolutism believes my culture is the best, the most right, and cannot be challenged. As a result, there will be no other culture except my culture. In the other word, other culture is not right, not good and should not be preserved. In my opinion, this morality is very dangerous because it can lead somebody or a community into intolerance, dogmatism, and even extremism. In the history, we could find many horrible cases as practices of moral absolutism. For examples, Christians who forced native Americans to convert and follow Christians beliefs, Moslem fundamentalists who punished and even killed other people who don't to follow their rules.

Moral relativism believes my culture is my culture, your culture is your culture. In this case, there is no right or wrong, because every community holds different morality (descriptive relativism), and if it is valid or invalid it depends on that culture even on the time which the culture is exist (normative relativism). For example, Jesus is the Son of God according to Christianity; and Mohammed is the God's messenger according to Islam. There's nothing wrong about it. The problem is, if we respect all cultures without considering if it is harmful for somebody or not, we then don't have any responsibility to stand against the evil one. For example, a tradition of women's circumcise in a part of Africa or women's self-burning when the husband dies in old Hinduism tradition; should we preserve those tradition?

Moral pluralism believes every culture has room to be exist but it has limits. For example, in Canada, people from all over the world can live peacefully together because the society respects different cultures. Although Canadian has official English and French as official languages, people from India, Africa, Asia, and other European and American countries are allowed to speak and maintain their languages as well as their dances, foods, fashion styles, et cetera. We will not be punished if we are gays or lesbians. We will not be jailed wether we want to use a small skirt or a niqab. Pluralism holds that believes because as humans, we cannot be 100% right (it means, we can be wrong so why don't we value other cultures instead of believe in only one culture), pluralism respects tolerance, and pluralism values different opinions to enrich society. However, as I mentioned before, pluralism has limits. When a culture causes harm for somebody it is absolutely not allowed to be exist in pluralism. For example, women's circumcise and self-burning are not allowed in Canada.

As conclusion, in my opinion, the most effective moral position for me is pluralism because it respects other cultures but it still has limits in order to save humans' life, and the least effective is moral absolutism because it doesn't respect other cultures and can lead extinction to other cultures that might be also very valuable.