Second, and more importantly: political toleration does not require the strong and doctrine of philosophical relativism. Increased awareness of diversity together with an awareness of the historical contingency of one’s own convictions will promote political toleration just as effectively.

The anti-relativists counter-argue that even if we grant that political tolerance is an important value, and that accepting relativism would promote it, we should never adopt philosophical views about the nature of truth or justification simply because of their assumed good moral or political consequences.

Advocates of relativism, particularly outside philosophical circles, often cite tolerance as a key normative reason for becoming a relativist. On this rationale, all ways of life and cultures are worthy of respect in their own terms, and it is a sign of unacceptable ethnocentrism to presume that we could single out one outlook or point of view as objectively superior to others.

he anti-relativists counter that the very notion of a “faultless” disagreement is incompatible with our common understanding of what it means to disagree. It is a hallmark of disagreement, as commonly understood, that the parties involved find fault with the other sides’ views.

If well-informed, honest and intelligent people are unable to resolve conflicts of opinion, we should, some relativists argue, accept that all parties to such disputes could be right and their conflicting positions have equal claims to truth, each according to their own perspective or point of view.

To take an example, moral relativism, according to this approach, is the claim that the truth or justification of beliefs with moral content is relative to specific moral codes. So the sentence “It is wrong to sell people as slaves” is elliptical for “It is wrong to sell people as slaves relative to the moral code of …”. Or alternatively, as Kusch (2010) formulates the idea on behalf of the relativist: “It is wrong-relative-to-the-moral-code-of-…” to sell people as slaves. The resulting sentence(s) turns out to be true, according to the relativist, depending on how we fill in the “…”. So, “It is wrong to sell people as slaves” comes out true relative to the moral code of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights and false relative to the moral code of ancient Greece.

A second approach to defining relativism casts its net more widely by focusing primarily on what relativists deny. Defined negatively, relativism amounts to the rejection of a number of interconnected philosophical positions. Traditionally, relativism is contrasted with:

Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness.

Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them

Certainly, if we believe that any one moral standard is as good as any other, we are likely to be more tolerant. We shall tolerate widow-burning, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, the infliction of physical torture, or any other of the thousand and one abominations which are, or have been, from time approved by moral code or another. But this is not the kind of toleration that we want, and I do not think its cultivation will prove “an advantage to morality”. (Stace 1937: 58–59)

The social sciences, from their very inception, were hospitable to relativism. Indeed, August Comte, the father of sociology, claimed that a strength of “positive sociology” was its “tendency to render relative the ideas which were at first absolute” (Comte 1976 [1830–42]: 89). Comte also was responsible for the battle cry “all is relative”, but immediately and no doubt self-consciously contradicted himself by adding “and that’s the only absolute”

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