Cultural relativism, as it's restricted to moral matters, might be described as the view that what's right and wrong is relative to culture--the moral status of a given action or practice depends upon the moral code of the culture in which that action is performed. There are lots of variations, but I think that get's the general idea. Cultural relativism is meant to capture the idea that polygamy, for example, is not absolutely right or wrong: it might be wrong in one culture but perfectly acceptable in another, and neither culture is morally superior to the other. My own view is that cultural relativism is neither good nor bad, but wildly implausible. Here are a few reasons: First, and most imortantly, I don't think that on reflection we really believe cultural relativism. We confuse it for attitudes like humility and tolerance that we do believe in. There are lots of practices--human sacrifice, infanticide, extreme torture, sanctioned rape--that may be morally acceptable in some cultures,...

There are systems of conduct that individuals or their societies aspire to live by, and then there is the philosophical study of these--that is, the attempt to answer questions such as whether there is really a universal right or wrong, whether (and if so, how) moral claims are grounded in facts, and so on. 'Morality' sometimes refers to the former, and 'ethics' to the latter; but this isn't standard, as far as I know. Sometimes 'ethics' is used to refer to the former, as in "I question his ethics".