Editing Moral relativism (section)

===Meta-ethical===
Meta-ethical moral relativists believe not only that people disagree about moral issues, but that terms such as "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to [[Universality (philosophy)|universal]] [[truth]] conditions at all; rather, they are relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of an individual or a group of people.<ref name="stanford" /> The American anthropologist [[William Graham Sumner]] was an influential advocate of this view.  He argues in his 1906 work ''Folkways'' that what people consider right and wrong is shaped entirely—not primarily—by the traditions, customs, and practices of their culture.  Moreover, since in his analysis of human understanding there cannot be any higher moral standard than that provided by the local morals of a culture, no trans-cultural judgement about the rightness or wrongness of a culture's morals could possibly be justified.{{citation needed|date=April 2020}}

Meta-ethical relativists are, first, descriptive relativists: they believe that, given the same set of facts, some societies or individuals will have a fundamental disagreement about what a person ''ought'' to do or prefer (based on societal or individual [[norm (sociology)|norm]]s). What's more, they argue that one cannot adjudicate these disagreements using any available independent standard of evaluation—any appeal to a relevant standard would always be merely personal or at best societal.{{citation needed|date=April 2020}}

This view contrasts with [[moral universalism]], which argues that, even though well-intentioned persons disagree, and some may even remain unpersuadable (e.g. someone who is closed-minded), there is still a meaningful sense in which an action could be more "moral" (morally preferable) than another; that is, they believe there ''are'' objective standards of evaluation that seem worth calling "moral facts"—regardless of whether they are universally accepted.{{citation needed|date=April 2020}}