val wrote:If you make value or moral judgements on any part of a culture, those values are yours, values we received from your own culture. I don't care what is in vogue. But would you apply christian values to make moral judgements about, let's say, the state city of Sparta? What would your point of reference be to establish those judgements?
If you actually believe in Christian values, then you would apply them to anywhere. If you think something is wrong, then it is wrong anywhere. Of course, you have to look deeply into what is going on to determine morality.
If you believe that it is good to help your fellow man, then that pretty much applies in all cases. But if you think, say, it is pretty much always wrong to murder someone in the United States, you might not be able to apply it to a different society. Maybe the society has rampant crime and no system of prison or punishment. In this case, if might be OK to murder big-time criminals to save the society from crime. But this difference is not based on cultural beliefs, it is based on cirumstance. If the US developed the problem this society has, then murder might become OK there. If that society developed a prison system, murder would not be OK.
Moral relativism between cultures is in a way an exaggeration of the fact that morality depends on circumstances, and different cultures exist in different circumstances.