Sorry this post is late... I was working on something else and then i looked at the time and it had passed midnight... not that it is a good excuse but here is the post...
I personally do not think we should leave room for cultural relativisim. It is an easy way out, a way not to think about what other people are doing simply beacuse it is eaier to say that we cannot judge their morals because we do not understand their societies. When discussing scentient beings and attempting to discern which ones are or are not, should not change our moral code. Regardless of which being has a greater capacity for thinking, it is also a living breathing being. Those beings on the alien world presented in The Sparow are obviously scentient, obviously within a moral code of some sort. That between the two races one dominates the other is not ok under what humans have defined as morally just. Instead of attempting to qwell murders while they are happening, what Sophia should have done was gathered together and organized the Runa to work against their agressors. Granted, they were not expecting a slaughter and she felt compelled to step forward and speak out against the killings, but that did not help her on moral grounds. If you are attampting to eliminate a source of moral injustice, then the best rout is to shed light on the matter from one intelligent being to another.
Im not quite sure what one should do if the other does not comply. Are we morally justified in forcing someone to comply with what we concider to be moral behavior? If human brought guns, and threatened the Jana'ata with death or pain in order to save the Runa, would that really be the moral way to stop the killings of the Runa people? Is it better to have population control or homelessness and hunger? Is there no way to find an equilibrium or does there need to be an imposition of one cultures morals upon another? And then, why is it that we do not all conclude the same moral strucutre? The very existance of cultural relativism suggests that different beings suppose different ways of being to be the correct way of conduct. The way to eliminate relativism would then be to collectively bring people to believe in one standard... but if people are from a galixy far far away, how is that possible?
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But look at historical examples of what happens if we leave no room for cultural relativism! The crusades! Colonialism! Slavery!
Basically, this appeals to any period of time in which one group of people has persecuted or dominated another because they were considered barberous and "un-cultured". Such cultural absolutism either leads to isolationism or the "superior" culture or subjugation of the "inferior" culture. Not respecting cultural relativism will create conflict between groups of different cultures because, by judging the other cultures against your own, you are asserting the implicit superiority of your own culture. One is not going to say, "I think his culture is superior to mine" because ALL cultures are ethnocentric. Thus, forcing one to conform to a "universal" standard of what is right/correct necessarily involves coercion and force--in short, violence of some sort.The only way to avoid such things is to allow the possibility that something which is different can also be equal--relativism. Thus, I do not think relativism is an "easy way out". Rather, it is acknowledging that people can be different yet still equal and that one's own views are not necessarily correct--how is that easy?
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