Not only did Osama bin Laden rejoice in his actions, he believed they were appropriately justified. He provided reasoning for his actions, suggesting his targets were legitimate enemies in a war, considering America remains the largest single donor to Israel who continues to oppress the Muslim Palestinians. He further used religion as a justification claiming 'we are carrying on the mission of our prophet Muhammad. this is defensive Jihad.'1 Despite a Western audience viewing such an act as morally abhorrent, a cultural relativist would propose that bin Laden's actions were only wrong for those who did not share the same reasoning as him and his supporters. This would likely lead to the cultural relativist agreeing that these actions were wrong, but only wrong from our perspective. What seems to be a conflict of morals to an objective moral realist is explained by the cultural relativist theory, making it an appealing theory to those who argue this provides evidence to suggest that what is considered morally right in one group of people is determined by that group of people, and another group of people with different cultural experiences can well hold different, but equally valid ideas of what is right or wrong. .
Anthropologist and proponent of Cultural Relativism, Ruth Benedict claims that 'morality is a convenient term for socially approved customs' and suggests we should accept cultural relativism because morals appear incredibly diverse and often even polar opposites across cultural contexts. She argues this this point, using a plethora of examples, but emphasises the actions of the Kwakiutl tribe, where "it did not matter whether a relative had died in bed of a disease, or by the hand of an enemy, in either case death was an affront to be wiped out by the death of another person."3 When a Kwakiutl Chief's sister and her daughter were presumed dead after a hunting trip, the Chief gathered his warriors together and determined that they must remediate the deaths by killing other members of the tribe, including two children whom they'd discovered children.
