system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Moral relativism isn't very popular among western philosophers today (especially the naive kind), but has it ever been popular among eastern philosophers?
gpt
It should probably be noted that moral relativism as commonly understood in modern day stems from specific meta ethical concerns that before modern day would have been something that didn't really occur to people as often. Yes, there were analogues of explicit relativists in the ancient world, but not very many.

You are more likely to find things in the east that look relativistic, but this is not because they are necessarily relativistic in the "moral relativism" sense per say, but rather because of how exactly they highlight ethics. They talk about ethics more like a path than like a law or fact. And so necessarily it would follow that the language regarding this implicates that different places you are involves different movements to progress on it. But this isn't necessarily them implying a lack of an objective state underlying ethics, more that since in the east their language focuses on the practical rather than the theoretical, then the way they describe it will focus on the differences in these practical situations.

For instance, in hinduism they talk about the dharma that everyone follows and the individual dharmas for your life position. But this doesn't necessarily imply relativism in the modern western sense, but more like contextualism and simply highlighting that different people have different particular duties.