Methodological Relativism and Moral Relativism

Dedicated to Themis, Megacles.

Today, after the class, I stayed with my anthropology’s teacher, this time talking about the referred subject. It took time for me to understand and now I resume what I have learned, in a clear way. Methodological Relativism is a method used, in the social sciences, to explain a certain social phenomenon through its social context, in another words, to understand a social phenomenon knowing the variables/propellant factors of it, in their context. Let’s take the following example: the police caught a serial-killer and take him now in custody before the trial. Facing this situation, an anthropologist is called to search and explain/understand what led him to such acts. Shocked with the route of investigation, someone solves to accuse the anthropologist of using the methodological relativism to take off the guilty from the accused or exonerating the acts, decreasing the morality of what he (murderer) have done on the social context, clarifying, the anthropologist is accused of having used the Moral Relativism. Obviously is easy to understand that explain is different from justify, it must be translucent, the methodological relativism doesn’t even speculate about the moral content of social related variables/propellant factors etc. Usually the accuser of such statements has an imperative moral point about.