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As we have seen, moral rules are made by your conscience.

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They are your personal opinions about what is right or wrong.

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If you think about this for a while, you will realize that different people might have different

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moralities because they can have different opinions about what is correct or incorrect.

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My morality can be different to your morality, and the morality of a certain country or society

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can be very different to the morality of another social group.

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Think about slavery, for example. This is something that today we consider absolutely

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immoral and unacceptable, but in the past it was quite normal because there was slavery during

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antiquity and it was a common social practice. So what happens here? Is it that they were wrong

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in the past? They didn't realize that slavery was immoral? Or is it simply that they had a

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different morality that for them was right and for us is immoral? This is a big question,

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and there are different ways to answer to this question, different philosophical points of view

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about this. One of them, one of these points of view, is called moral relativism. According to

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moral relativism, the rules, the moral rules that we follow are relative. They depend on the

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historical moment and the society we live in, because moral rules, for relativists, are learned.

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They are the things our parents, our teachers, our friends, our society tell us that are correct

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and incorrect. So, if we grow up in a different society, they will give us different norms and

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we will consider correct or incorrect different things. Now, think about this for a moment.

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if relativism is correct then we have no right to say that slavery is absolutely immoral and

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incorrect because in the past they had a different morality and they saw things otherwise. What we

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can say from our relativistic point of view is that for us morality is incorrect. For ancient

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Romans for example morality was all right. Now there is a different point of view about this

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which is called moral objectivism. For moral objectivists, morality is objective, it is not

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subjective. So, this means that morality is something that exists in itself. There are some

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things that are absolutely right and absolutely wrong. For example, slavery is absolutely wrong

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for an objectivist. The problem is that people in ancient times, like the Romans, didn't know,

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didn't realize. They were not aware of the immoral circumstances that appear in slavery.

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According to moral objectivism, every human being, by nature, has the possibility to determine what

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is right and wrong. So there are some basic moral rules that are part of our human nature

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that are not learned.

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Of course, many of the things we do

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and consider correct or incorrect are learned,

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but for a moral objectivist,

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some of them, very basic, are not learned.

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They are part of our nature.

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And that's what permits an objectivist

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to determine that some moral rules

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should be valid for everybody,

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regardless of the time and place we live in.