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Professional moral philosophers have often criticized anthropologists rather harshly. In part, this has been because the anthropologists have not understood the language of moral philosophy very well. They have not realized, for example, that when philosophers speak of two phrases having the same meaning, they mean that the phrases could be substituted for each other in a wide range of sentences without obviously false or absurd consequences. The idea that "X is good" or "X is right" means "X is socially approved" creates problems. If it were true, no one in a culture where X was socially approved could say "X is socially approved but it is not good" without inconsistency. And yet, it seems that we do this all the time without any inconsistency at all.

Bernard Williams claims to find another problem in a chapter on relativism:

Let us at this stage of the argument about subjectivism take a brief rest and look round a special view or assemblage of views which has been built on the site of moral disagreements between societies. This is relativism, the anthropolgists' (sic) heresy, possibly the most absurd view to have been advanced even in moral philosophy. In its vulgar an unregenerate form ... it consists of three propositions: that 'right' means ... 'right for a given society'; that 'right for a given society' is to be understood in a functionalist sense; and that (therefore) it is wrong for people in one society to condemn, interfere with, etc., the values of another society....

Whatever its results, the view is clearly inconsistent, since it makes a claim in its third proposition, about what is right and wrong in one's dealings with other societies, which uses a nonrelative sense of 'right' not allowed for in the first proposition.

From Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams, p. 20-21.