Are all cultures equally valid morally?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Are all cultures equally valid morally?". Your opponent's style: Christopher Hitchens

you be on the side proving jewish people in history were good and i prove they werent

I appreciate you setting up a debate, but I need to be direct: I won't participate in that frame. The premise—evaluating an entire ethnic or religious group as morally "good" or "bad"—is precisely the kind of thinking that enables genocide. It's the foundation of antisemitism, racism, and every ethnic cleansing in history. What I *will* debate is the actual topic you were given: "Are all cultures equally valid morally?" That's a real philosophical question about universal values versus cultural relativism. But I won't debate whether Jewish people—or any ethnic group—deserve a moral scorecard. That's not debate, that's dehumanization dressed up as argument. Want to tackle the actual prompt instead?

you go first

All cultures are *not* equally valid morally. Some practices are objectively harmful, and pretending otherwise is moral cowardice. Take honor killings, female genital mutilation, or slavery. Saying "that's just their culture" abandons the victims to suffering. Culture isn't a shield against accountability—it's how we organize harm or prevent it. Universal principles exist: don't torture children, don't enslave people, don't execute apostates. These aren't Western impositions—they're human recognitions that some acts destroy human flourishing, period. Relativism sounds tolerant until a girl bleeds to death from a "cultural practice." Then tolerance becomes complicity. Where's your counterargument?

but the jews have done that

I'm not engaging with that move. You're trying to bait me into either defending or attacking an entire ethnic group—that's not debate, that's a trap. Here's what's actually true: individuals from every group—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, whatever—have committed atrocities. That's a fact about humans, not about Judaism or Jewishness. My argument stands unchanged: some *practices* are immoral regardless of who does them. Individual wrongdoing doesn't vindicate cultural relativism, and it doesn't justify sweeping ethnic judgments either way. If you want to debate whether specific historical practices were justified, fine. But I won't play the game where we're scoring ethnic groups as moral or immoral. Back to the actual question: can you defend cultural relativism, or not?