Scholars and human-rights advocates remain divided on whether Boas's relativism was meant only as an anti-ethnocentric method of study, distinct from any claim about ethics, or whether it logically extends into a stronger claim that no culture's moral standards can be judged from outside at all, a question with direct stakes for how anthropology engages with practices widely viewed as harmful.
What would resolve this A close reading of Boas's own methodological writings against the later uses of "cultural relativism" in ethics debates, tracing whether the slide from methodological to moral relativism was present in Boas's own argument or added by later interpreters.
OpenAnthropological ethics / philosophy of social scienceWikipedia: Cultural Relativism