Moral Relativism is the philosophized notion that right and wrong are not absolute values but are personalized according to the individual and his or her circumstances or cultural orientation. Moral objectivism is the position that moral truths exist independently from opinion. The difference between moral relativism and moral objectivism is that they are basically polar opposites when it comes to the conceptions of truth, ethics, and integrity.
Moral relativists believe that there is no concrete moral good because if morality is defined by the individuals’ feeling of what is right or wrong then you cannot say a thing is right or wrong. To a relativist, a person’s view of truth is just as valid as any other person’s view of truth. Therefore, who is to say that a thing is wrong if another person says it is right? The moral objectivist says that you can say something is right or wrong with absolute certainty. There is a transcendent reality of truth and morality. This reality is cross-cultural and universal in its nature.
Ethically speaking, a moral relativist sees an action as good if in the context of the culture or of the individual it is considered good. There is no way to gauge the ‘goodness’ of an ethical principal aside from determining the value for yourself. When it comes to moral absolutism, the ethical action is defined by a set of moral rights and wrongs. These absolute values of good and bad are what determine if an action is ethical or not, according to a moral objectivist.
Integrity is hard to define in a worldview of moral relativism. Can you be consistently an ethical person if morality is subjective upon the whims of culture and an individual’s feeling it so? On the other hand, integrity is clearer in the eyes of a moral objectivist as they would say that a person has integrity if they can consistently apply the absolute moral truths to their ethical behavior.
Personally, I align mor with moral objectivism. As a Christian I believe that the truth and objective morals come from the very character of God. Since I believe that God is never changing and perfectly good, it follows that the definition of what is perfectly good lies in who God is and what he has said is good. The worldview of relativism to me has too many flaws and cannot be compatible with a biblical worldview because individuals are flawed and prone to sin.