Ruth Benedict believed that "Most individuals are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born"(Sommers 205), and since each individual is influenced by many different societies, individuals develop differently as well. Individuals are exposed to a wide array of beliefs and values, and because humans have freewill they have the ability to choose what aspects of society's morality they want to accept and/or adapt to their own morality. Subjective moral relativism is the belief that morality is relative to the individual and that every individual can have his or her own morality. This theory is commonly opposed mainly for the fact that those who accept it are denying philosophers the right to judge morality. Philosophers use their theories of morality to judge other people's morality. In order for a philosopher to unbiasedly judge someone's morality they must have an Universal Law of Morality by which to judge, without one philosophers are just, in an essence, comparing two relative views of morality and saying "my views are better than yours". The Judeo-Christian tradition says "Do not judge.Do not condemn"(Sommers 93) so philosophers, in theory, have no right to judge the decision of another.

             Louis Pojman believed that "If Morality is relative to its culture, then there is no independent basis for criticizing the morality of any other culture but one's own"(Sommers 248). When philosophers who judge someone else's morality, unless that someone has the same morality of the philosopher, the philosopher is trying to compare the person to a set of standards that aren't relative to the person. In a sense, philosophers, who believe their moral theories to be universal, are ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is a form of prejudice in which a person rejects the views of all cultures except his or her own, and when philosophers criticize someone else's moral beliefs the philosopher isn't being tolerant of other cultures/individuals.