Absolutism Vs Relativism

Relativism is a thesis that there is no single correct view of reality; nothing is intrinsically right or wrong. Absolutism is the opposite of relativism; the thesis that there is but one correct view of reality and it maintains that some things are always right and some things are always wrong. There are few philosophers who described themselves as relativists, but most of the leading thinkers who have been accused of relativism are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. There are many different kinds of relativism, all of them only have two features in common: 1. they all assert that one thing (e.g., moral values, beauty, knowledge, taste, or meaning) is relative to some particular framework or standpoint (e.g. the individual subject, a culture, an era, a language, or a conceptual scheme) and 2. they all deny that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. …show more content…
The differences between the relativism and absolutism is that the absolutists believe that there are principles that must be held true for all situations whoever the person maybe, whereas relativists believe that their different rules for different people and therefore different truths. I’m going to use murder as an example: both absolutist and relativist would both see the action as wrong, but the relativist would say that though it was wrong in his or her eyes, it may not have been wrong from the murderer’s point of view. Everybody has their own opinions against absolutism when it comes to facing our worlds. It’s impossible to use the same principles for the value systems (like different religions, regions, and cultural backgrounds) for each