Chapter 2 Culture and Ethics PDF

## Chapter 2 Culture and Ethics ### Overview This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethics. It provides an understanding on how differences between cultures can lead to ethical relativism. This view holds that standards for ethical values (moral and immoral acts) are dependent...

## Chapter 2 Culture and Ethics ### Overview This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethics. It provides an understanding on how differences between cultures can lead to ethical relativism. This view holds that standards for ethical values (moral and immoral acts) are dependent on a culture. American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) holds this view. ### Objectives At the end of the chapter, you should be able to: * Define the relationship between ethics and culture * Explain ethical relativism * Analyze and determine the validity of ethical relativism ### Cultural Relativism Any discussion on ethical relativism requires an understanding of cultural relativism, which depends on the knowledge of the fundamental meaning of culture. Interestingly, the term "culture" as a word and concept is full of differing meanings with diverse contexts. Raymond Williams (1921-1988) describes culture as "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language." Its etymology is the Latin infinitive *colere* meaning "inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship." It reveals the complexity that spans its meaning. ### Culture and Ethics The etymologies of ethics and its closely identical term "morality" are the keys to finding the relation between ethics and culture. Generally, ethics and morality concern right and wrong actions. Ethics can be traced to the Greek term *"ethos"* and morality to the Latin term *"mores"*, both roots connoting "customs." In this particular sense, the term "customs" refers to a people's way of life as in "Philippine culture and tradition" and "Philippine customs and tradition." ### Ethical Relativism The concepts of right and wrong in ethics are values in society, which arise from "general customs and beliefs" and a "particular way of life." Ethical values are then informed or determined by culture. Whether good or bad, or right or wrong, the values are dependent on the culture in which they are conceived and employed. This is called ethical relativism. Ethical relativism is the doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions varies from society to society, and there are no absolute universal moral standards binding on all men at all times. It holds that whether or not it is right for an individual to act in a certain way depends on or is relative to the society to which he belongs. There are as many values as there are cultures, and there are as many cultures as there are people. People with different cultures have different values. This is called cultural relativism. A society’s experience to certain phenomena solidifies to become part of its culture. For instance, the Philippines being a tropical country makes it suitable for rice planting and farming. Thus, rice is the staple of Filipino diet. People have developed linguistic terms for the different uses of rice that seem foreign to people of other cultures. In the Bisaya language, there are different lexemes for rice, such as *humay* for the rice plant, *kan-on* for the cooked rice, *bugas* for milled but uncooked rice, *dukot* for burnt rice, and *lugaw* for rice porridge. These names of rice in many Filipino language like Bisaya are possible because rice is part of the Filipino way of life. However, because of its climate, the Philippines does not experience, so to speak, snow and winter. Since snow is absent in the Filipino way of life, there are no Filipino words for it, except perhaps for *niyebe/niebe*, which is borrowed from the Spanish *nieve*. Unlike the Filipinos, the Inuit people living in the cold north of the globe have close to a hundred lexemes associated with snow. Values are dependent on culture, that is, the general customs and beliefs in a society, as well as the particular way of life of the people. Like language and diet, they are dependent on the experience of people in the environment. Because different societies are founded in different environments, and cultural values are the effect of how people adapt to a certain environment, then cultural relativism is plausible. The term "culture shock" is derived from the fact of cultural relativism. In an environment in which the values are alien to someone’s own, he or she experiences a sudden change in way of life. For instance, someone who is used to have pork in his or her diet arrives in a country that prohibits the eating of it. Having no pork in their lunch or dinner would be a culture shock for them, and all of a sudden they feel that the change is quite discomforting. ### Ruth Benedict’s Theory on Ethical Relativism The values of right/wrong and good/bad are relative to one’s culture. They may vary from one culture to another. Ethical relativism, therefore, implies cultural relativism. This relation suggests that what is good in a culture can be bad in another. Thus, there is no singular standard in determining ethical values. Ruth Benedict theorizes that ethical and moral values, which vary in different societies and cultures, are really just "convenient term[s] for socially approved habits." The example below shows how a society in Northwest Melanesia considers a general attitude that goes “beyond the border of paranoia" as socially acceptable. Benedict writes: > In this tribe the exogamic groups look upon each other as prime manipulators of black magic, so that one marries always into an enemy group which remains for life one’s deadly and unappeasable foes. They look upon a good garden crop as a confession of theft, for everyone is engaged making magic to induce into his garden the productiveness of his neighbors; therefore no secrecy in the island is so rigidly insisted upon as the secrecy of a man’s harvesting of his yams. Their polite phrase at the acceptance of a gift is, "And if you now poison me, how shall I repay you this present?" Their preoccupation with poisoning is constant; no woman ever leaves her cooking pot for a moment untended….Anyone else’s food is deadly poison to you, so that communality of stores is out of the question. For some months before harvest the whole society is on the verge of starvation, but if one falls to the temptation and eats up one’s seed yams, one is an outcast and a beachcomber for life. There is no coming back. It involves, as a matter of course, divorce and the breaking of all social ties. The attitude described would definitely be considered to be wrong or immoral, for instance, to most Cebuanos. Following from Benedict’s theory, the reason for such a moral judgement is that the attitude is not socially acceptable among Cebuanos or even among Filipinos in general. ### Conclusion Ruth Benedict claims that the organizing principle of ethical relativism is not a universal standard for what is good and bad, or right and wrong, but rather what is socially acceptable. Ethical relativism is dependent on what she calls the normal-abnormal categories of society, which show social acceptability in relation to what is good and bad in a given culture. Ethical relativism is based on the idea that values are relative to culture, which refers to the way of life in a society. It implies ethical relativism, which holds that what is good and bad or right and wrong depends on a culture. According to Benedict, such idea or belief depends on what is acceptable in a society.