You are right, we are going in circles. We have heard each other’s arguments, and neither of us is convinced by them. That’s the best we can do. For that reason, We should probably wind this up, but I will try to give a bit of my complicated answer to your last question. I’m a philosophy professor, so most of my answers to these questions are complicated.

The word relative is usually conflated with two other words “subjective” and “arbitrary”. I do believe that morality is relative, in the sense that what is right and wrong is context dependent. But that does not mean that anybody can make up their own rules, or that what is right and wrong is arbitrary. Most of my students, especially the Anthropology majors, do believe that morality is arbitrary, and I consider it one of my most important missions as a teacher to show them why that view is dangerously wrong. I think in any given context there is a right or wrong way to behave, and we put ourselves in great moral peril if we do the wrong thing. But I also think that you have to be living in that moral context to be able to make that judgment, and consequently morality can’t be reduced to a set of universal rules.

I also think that moral judgments are extremely difficult to make, especially for people who are raised in morally deficient societies. Consequently, I think that what is forgivable is even more context-dependent than what is right and wrong. The possession of empathy is not going to be enough to free someone from the cultural prejudices of their time. Abraham Lincoln had tremendous empathy for enslaved people, and put that empathy into action. But he also believed (or at least said) that Black people were biologically inferior to Whites, and shouldn’t be allowed to vote or hold office. In spite of this, he believed that black people should not be enslaved, which was a morally heroic position in the context of his time.