Definition
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. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.
Haidt’s Conclusion via Isaiah Berlin — pluralism is not relativism
Haidt closes The Righteous Mind by adopting Berlin’s distinction. Relativism makes a judgment’s authority dependent on a person’s or culture’s framework. Value pluralism can instead hold that several human values are genuine, finite, and sometimes irreducibly in conflict while still rejecting some ends and criticizing false claims, unjust rankings, or impermissible means. Understanding why another person pursues liberty, loyalty, equality, holiness, mercy, or order is therefore compatible with moral judgment.
Haidt’s evidence supports a descriptive claim that people experience several kinds of moral concern. It does not by itself prove Berlin’s normative pluralism or decide whether moral truth is stance-independent. Keep descriptive diversity, normative value structure, and metaethical relativism separate. → full distinction and case audit · Haidt and Berlin, PDF p. 353 (file not included in this release) · Conclusion endnotes 1–2, PDF p. 433 (file not included in this release) · Conclusion source audit
References
Relativism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Relativism - Wikipedia