For the latter societies, human rights have a community basis, and more emphasis is to be placed on economic and social rights. Socialist trends stress economic and social rights which are based on communal principles. The principle of cultural relativity does not mean that because the members of some savage tribe are allowed to behave in a certain way that this fact gives intellectual warrant for such behaviour in all groups. Cultural relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits.
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The concept of culture, like any other piece of knowledge, can be abused and misinterpreted. If we define a "culture" in terms of a common set of values and place no limits on how small cultures can be, allows for us, in accordance with the cultural relativist theory, to make anything we want to be right by forming our own subculture with the appropriate value system. Some fear that the principle of cultural relativity will weaken morality. Cultural Relativism is one of the most controversial challenges to the study of social ethics. It comes from a methodological approach of the social sciences. Herskovits explains that "Cultural relativism is, in essence, an approach to the question of the nature and role of values in culture" (Herskovits 1973, p. 14). If values are shared ideals which give rise to beliefs and norms of behaviour around which a people or a group organizes its collective life and goals, cultural relativism declares that these values are relative to the cultural ambiance out of which they arise. If values are relative to a given culture than this must mean that there are no universal moral absolutes by which the behaviour of people can be judged. Therefore, "if there is no observable control transcending all cultures, no eternal book of rules, then right and wrong are a matter of opinion and it doesn't matter what we do: anything goes!" (Ruggiero 1973, p.
