Geographical and cultural moral relativism

Geographical and cultural moral relativism is the claim, advanced by Dubois to Therese, that what a society calls crime or virtue changes with its laws, customs, and location. In the conversation, this premise becomes a practical weapon against conscience: if moral labels vary from place to place, Dubois argues, remorse can be dismissed as an effect of prohibition and overcome by repeated transgression. The doctrine is therefore not a detached comparison of cultures but one step in Dubois’s effort to persuade Therese to abandon her scruples.

Definition and Argument

Dubois rejects the idea that actions carry universally recognized moral classifications. She argues that conduct deemed criminal in France may count as virtuous elsewhere, and that an act condemned in one country may be praised in another. Her examples of China and Siam sharpen the point: an act undertaken for pleasure or self-interest in France, she reasons, need not cause guilt if it would be regarded as a virtue in China; an action that could bring burning in Siam might be ordinary in France. Geography, in this account, unsettles the authority of any single society’s moral verdict.

The argument extends beyond differences in national custom. Dubois asks whether there is any act considered criminal everywhere on earth, and concludes that moral categories are matters of opinion and geography. Since the same act may be vicious in one place and praiseworthy in another, she portrays adherence to local virtue as arbitrary: it may require avoiding conduct another society approves and practicing conduct another condemns. Her reasoning makes cultural variation a challenge to moral universality, but it does not establish a common ethical standard across cultures; instead, it treats variation as grounds for refusing constraint.

From Cultural Difference to the Rejection of Conscience

Dubois connects relativism to an account of remorse. She tells Therese that guilt is not proof that an action is inherently wrong; it may arise because a person has violated a rule. Her example is deliberately simple: someone ordered not to leave a room might feel guilty on leaving even if the departure harms nobody. For Dubois, that feeling shows the force of prohibition, not the moral character of the act.

The distinction lets her recast conscience as something that can be retrained. If remorse follows from an internalized restraint, she advises becoming accustomed to the act that provoked it. Studying other nations’ customs is supposed to make the act seem indifferent; repeating it, or committing stronger versions, is then supposed to erode guilt through familiarity. In this sequence, geographical relativism supplies the rationale, while habituation supplies the proposed method. The argument moves from observing moral disagreement to urging the listener to silence the response that might otherwise oppose wrongdoing.

Nature, Society, and the Case for Vice

The cultural argument belongs to Dubois’s larger defense of vice. She presents society as already corrupt and claims that a person who refuses to follow its prevailing course will collide with everyone encountered and, being weak, be crushed. In her account, laws are too unjust to restore order and too inadequate to make people abandon the conduct the general interest supposedly favors. Moral conduct thus appears not as a safe alternative but as opposition to the social current.

Dubois also invokes Providence and Nature to make resistance seem pointless. She points to war, plague, famine, and disorder as evidence against the idea that Providence consistently favors virtue. She further argues that human impulses and desires come from Providence, so that vices, too, serve its design. If crime is part of the workings of Nature, she asks, why should people disown or suppress it? Her appeal to cultural variation joins this naturalistic defense: both are used to unsettle the idea that moral prohibitions express a universal order.

The reasoning is self-serving in its declared aim. Dubois does not merely observe that societies disagree; she uses that disagreement to encourage conduct useful or pleasurable to the individual, whatever barriers must be crossed. She says that magistrates and legislators condemn crimes with rigor while preaching virtues they do not practice and never reward. Against such hypocrisy, she presents moral restraint as an imposed convention rather than a trustworthy guide. Her argument therefore links cultural relativism to a critique of law and social authority, while directing that critique toward the loosening of personal restraint.

Therese’s Resistance and the Argument’s Significance

Therese answers Dubois by asking how she could embrace these doctrines without continuing to feel guilt. Her question makes the dispute concrete: the issue is not only whether moral standards differ across countries, but whether an abstract argument can undo an inward response. Dubois replies that guilt is an illusion and recommends opposing qualms with passion and self-interest. The exchange leaves Therese’s scruples visible even as Dubois tries to define them as weakness.

The scene’s structure reveals the limits of Dubois’s relativism. Her appeal to cultural difference may show that moral judgments are not uniform, but she turns that observation into a prescription: because standards vary, the individual should disregard them and pursue advantage. That conclusion does not follow simply from the existence of disagreement; it is the self-interested purpose of the counsel. By making the argument part of a direct attempt to convert Therese, the narrative distinguishes analysis of moral conventions from the use of such analysis to excuse harm.

Geographical and cultural moral relativism thus functions in the conversation as both philosophical proposition and instrument of persuasion. It undermines the claim that local law and custom supply universal moral truth, then feeds into Dubois’s broader portrayal of virtue as perilous in a corrupt society. Therese’s resistance, especially her concern about guilt, prevents the doctrine from appearing as an uncontested resolution: its force lies in how it recasts conscience, and its danger in how readily that recasting serves the advocate’s own pursuit of pleasure and self-interest.