Ethical relativism

Garcia, J., "African-American Perspectives, Cultural Relativism and Normative Issues Some Conceptual Questions.," In H.F. Flack and E. Pellegrino (eds.), African-American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics. Washington, DC Georgetown University Press, pp. 11-66 (1992). 

Professional codes of conduct are, by their very nature, collectivist and rale-based. Nevertheless, rule-based ethical systems always seem too rigid and restricted to handle complicated situations on their own and they are incapable of handling situations in which rales conflict or several different actions are possible but all in some way violate the rules. The interpretation of the rules and their application to specific situations may therefore involve individual, consequential reasoning. Although the individual codes themselves have an absolutist tone, the difficulty of establishing international codes has led professional bodies collectively to accept a moral relativism and to dechne, for example, to insist that all professional codes demand that members respect human rights. 

Keywords Conquest of nature Naturalistic fallacy Engineering ethics Free economy Liberal democracy Moral relativism Distinction between facts and values Human well-being... 

The Spanish ethics course does not use a textbook readings from several books and journals are used to complement the material shown during lectures. When providing an overview of the Western ethical theories, such as, subjectivism (Rachels 1993), relativism (Wong 1993), Kantianism (O neill 1993), utilitarianism (Goodin 1993), and social contract (Kymlicka 1993), we used the Spanish version of the book A Companion to Ethics by Singer et al. (1995). 

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