Cultural Relativism PDF

8 Ethics 1 Cultural Relativism Cultural Relativism (CR): “Good” means “socially approved.” Pick your moral principles by following what your society approves of. Cultural relativism (CR) says that good and bad are r...

8 Ethics 1 Cultural Relativism Cultural Relativism (CR): “Good” means “socially approved.” Pick your moral principles by following what your society approves of. Cultural relativism (CR) says that good and bad are relative to culture. What is “good” is what is “socially approved” in a given culture. Our moral principles describe social conventions and must be based on the norms of our society. We’ll begin by listening to the fictional Ima Relativist explain her belief in cultural relativism. As you read this and similar accounts, reflect on how plausible you find the view and how well it harmonizes with your own thinking. After listening to Ima, we’ll consider various objections to CR. 1.1 Ima Relativist My name is Ima Relativist. I’ve embraced cultural relativism as I’ve come to appreciate the deeply cultural basis for morality. I was brought up to believe that morality is about objective facts. Just as snow is white, so also infanticide is wrong. But attitudes vary with time and place. The norms that I was taught are the norms of my own society; other societies have different ones. Morality is a cultural construct. Just as societies create different styles of food and clothing, so too they create different moral codes. I’ve learned about these in my anthropology class and experienced them as an exchange student in Mexico. Consider my belief that infanticide is wrong. I was taught this as if it were an objective standard. But it isn’t; it’s just what my society holds. When I say “Infanticide is wrong,” this just means that my society disapproves of it. For the ancient Romans, on the other hand, infanticide was all right. There’s no sense in asking which side here is “correct.” Their view is true relative to their culture, and our view is true relative to ours. There are no objective truths about right or wrong. When we claim otherwise, we’re just imposing our culturally taught attitudes as the “objective truth.” “Wrong” is a relative term, and thus needs a further reference to complete its sense. Let me explain what this means. Something isn’t “to the left” Page 8 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010.  Cultural Relativism 9 absolutely, but only “to the left ofx” this or that. So “to the left” is a relative term. Similarly, something isn’t “wrong” absolutely, but only “wrong in” this or that society. Infanticide might be wrong in one society but right in another. We can express CR most clearly as a definition: “X is good” means “The majority (of the society in question) approves of X.” Other moral terms, like “bad” and “right,” can be defined in a similar way. Note the reference to a specific society. Unless otherwise specified, the society in question is that of the person making the judgment. When I say “Hitler acted wrongly,” I mean “according to the standards of my society.” The myth of objectivity says that things can be good or bad “absolutely”— not relative to this or that culture. But how can we know what is good or bad absolutely? And how can we argue about this without just presupposing the standards of our own society? People who speak of good or bad absolutely are absolutizing the norms of their own society. They take the norms that they were taught to be objective facts. Such people need to study anthropology, or to live for a time in another culture. As I’ve come to believe in cultural relativism, I’ve grown in my acceptance of other cultures. Like many exchange students, I used to have this “we’re right and they’re wrong” attitude. I struggled against this. I came to realize that the other side isn’t “wrong” but just “different.” We have to see others from their point of view; if we criticize them, we’re just imposing the standards of our own society. We cultural relativists are more tolerant. Through cultural relativism I’ve also come to be more accepting of the norms of my own society. CR gives a basis for a common morality within a culture—a democratic basis that pools everyone’s ideas and insures that the norms have wide support. So I can feel solidarity with my own people, even though other groups have different values. Before going on, reflect on your reaction to cultural relativism. What do you like or dislike about it? Do you have objections? 1.2 Objections to CR Ima has given us a clear formulation of an approach that many find attractive. She’s beginning to think about morality, and we can learn from her. Yet I’m convinced that her basic perspective on morality is wrong. Ima will likely come to agree as she gets clearer in her thinking. Let me point out the biggest problem. CR forces us to conform to society’s norms—or else we contradict ourselves. If “good” and “socially approved” meant the same thing, then whatever was one would have to be the other. So this reasoning would be valid: Such and such is socially approved. Á Such and such is good. Page 9 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010. 10 Ethics If CR were true, then we couldn’t consistently disagree with our society’s values. But this is an absurd result. We surely can consistently disagree with our society’s values. We can consistently affirm that something is “socially ap- proved” but deny that it is “good.” This would be impossible if CR were true. Ima could bite the bullet (accept the implausible consequence), and say that it is self-contradictory to disagree morally with the majority. But this would be a difficult bullet for her to bite. She’d have to hold that civil rights leaders contradicted themselves when they disagreed with accepted views on segrega- tion. And she’d have to accept the majority view on all moral issues—even if she sees that the majority is ignorant. Suppose Ima learned that most people in her society approve of displaying intolerance and ridicule toward people of other cultures. She’d then have to conclude that such intolerance is good (even though this goes against her new insights): Intolerance is socially approved. Á Intolerance is good. She’d have to either accept the conclusion (that intolerance is good) or reject cultural relativism. Consistency would require that she change at least one of her views. Here’s a bigger bullet for Ima to bite. Imagine that Ima meets a figure skater named Lika Rebel, who is on tour from a Nazi country. In Lika’s homeland, Jews and critics of the government are put in concentration camps. The major- ity of the people, since they are kept misinformed, support these policies. Lika dissents; she says these policies are supported by the majority but are wrong. If Ima applied CR to this case, she’d have to say something like this to Lika: Lika, your word “good” refers to what is approved in your culture. Since your culture approves of racism and oppression, you must accept that these are good. You can’t think otherwise. The minority view is always wrong—since what is “good” is by definition what the majority approves. CR is intolerant toward minority views (which are automatically wrong) and would force Lika to accept racism and oppression as good. These results follow from CR’s definition of “good” as “socially approved.” Once Ima sees these results, she’ll likely give up CR. Racism is a good test case for ethical views. A satisfying view should give some way to attack racist actions. CR fails at this, since it holds that racist actions are good in a society if they’re socially approved. If Lika followed CR, she’d have to agree with a racist majority, even if they’re misinformed and ignorant. CR is very unsatisfying here. Moral education gives another test case for ethical views. If we accepted CR, how would we bring up our children to think about morality? We’d teach them to think and live by the norms of their society—whatever these were. We’d teach conformity. We’d teach that these are examples of correct reasoning: Page 10 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010.  Cultural Relativism 11 “My society approves of A, so A is good.” “My peer-group society approves of getting drunk on Friday night and then driving home, so this is good.” “My Nazi society approves of racism, so racism is good.” CR would make us uncritical about the norms of our society. These norms can’t be in error—even if they come from stupidity and ignorance. Likewise, the norms of another society (even Lika’s Nazi homeland) can’t be in error or be criticized. CR goes against the critical spirit that characterizes philosophy. 1.3 Moral diversity CR sees the world as neatly divided into distinct societies. Each one has little or no moral disagreement, since the majority view determines what is right or wrong in that society. But the world isn’t like that. Instead, the world is a confusing mixture of overlapping societies and groups; and individuals don’t necessarily follow the majority view. CR ignores the subgroup problem. We all belong to overlapping groups. I’m part of a specific nation, state, city, and neighborhood. And I’m also part of various family, professional, religious, and peer groups. These groups often have conflicting values. According to CR, when I say “Racism is wrong” I mean “My society disapproves of racism.” But which society does this refer to? Maybe most in my national and religious societies disapprove of racism, while most in my professional and family societies approve of it. CR could give us clear guidance only if we belonged to just one society. But the world is more complicated than that. We’re all multicultural to some extent. And CR doesn’t try to establish common norms between societies. As technology shrinks the planet, moral disputes between societies become more important. Nation A approves of equal rights for women (or for other races or religions), but nation B disapproves. What is a multinational corporation that works in both societies to do? Or societies A and B have value conflicts that lead to war. Since CR helps very little with such problems, it gives a poor basis for life in the twenty-first century. How do we respond to moral diversity between societies? Ima rejects the dogmatic “we’re right and they’re wrong” attitude. And she stresses the need to understand the other side from their point of view. These are positive ideas. But Ima then says that neither side can be wrong. This limits our ability to learn. If our society can’t be wrong, then it can’t learn from its mistakes. Understanding the norms of another culture can’t then help us to correct errors in our own norms. Those who believe in objective values see the matter differently. They might say something like this: There’s a truth to be found in moral matters, but no culture has a monopoly on this truth. Different cultures need to learn from each other. To see the errors and blind spots in our own values, we need to see how other cultures do things, and how they react to what we Page 11 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010. 12 Ethics do. Learning about other cultures can help us to correct our cultur- al biases and move closer to the truth about how we ought to live. 1.4 Objective values We need to talk more about the objectivity of values. This is a large and important topic, and we’ll often return to it in later chapters. The objective view (also called moral realism) claims that some things are objectively right or wrong, independently of what anyone may think or feel. Dr. Martin Luther King, for example, claimed that racist actions were objectively wrong. The wrongness of racism was a fact. Any person or culture that approved of racism was mistaken. In saying this, King wasn’t absolutizing the norms of his society; instead, he disagreed with accepted norms. He appealed to a higher truth about right and wrong, one that didn’t depend on human thinking or feeling. He appealed to objective values. Ima rejects this belief in objective values and calls it “the myth of objectivi- ty.” On her view, things are good or bad only relative to this or that culture. Things aren’t good or bad objectively, as King thought. But are objective values really a “myth”? Let’s examine Ima’s reasoning. Ima had three arguments against objective values. There can’t be objective moral truths, she thought, because 1. morality is a product of culture, 2. cultures disagree widely about morality, and 3. there’s no clear way to resolve moral differences. But these arguments fall apart if we examine them carefully. (1) “Since morality is a product of culture, there can’t be objective moral truths.” The problem with this reasoning is that a product of culture can express objective truths. Every book is a product of culture; and yet many books express some objective truths. So too, a moral code could be a product of culture and yet still express some objective truths about how people ought to live. (2) “Since cultures disagree widely about morality, there can’t be objective moral truths.” But the mere fact of disagreement doesn’t show that there’s no truth of the matter, that neither side is right or wrong. Cultures disagree widely about anthropology or religion or even physics. Yet there may still be a truth of the matter about these subjects. So a wide disagreement on moral issues wouldn’t show that there’s no truth of the matter on moral issues. We might also question whether cultures differ so deeply about morality. Most cultures have fairly similar norms against killing, stealing, and lying. Many moral differences can be explained as the application of similar basic values to differing situations. The golden rule, “Treat others as you want to be treated,” is almost universally accepted across the world. And the diverse cultures that make up the United Nations have agreed to an extensive statement on basic human rights. Page 12 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010.  Cultural Relativism 13 (3) “Since there’s no clear way to resolve moral differences, there can’t be objective moral truths.” But there may be clear ways to resolve at least many moral differences. We need a way to reason about ethics that would appeal to intelligent and open-minded people of all cultures and that does for ethics what scientific method does for science. We’ll work on this later, in Chapters 7 to 9. Even if there were no solid way to know moral truths, it wouldn’t follow that there are no such truths. There may be truths that we have no solid way of knowing about. Did it rain on this spot 500 years ago today? There’s some truth about this, but we’ll never know it. Only a small percentage of all truths are knowable. So there could be objective moral truths, even if we had no solid way to know them. So Ima’s attack on objective values fails. But this isn’t the end of the matter, for there are further arguments on the issue. The dispute over objective values is important, and we’ll talk more about it later. But before leaving this section, let me clarify some related points. The objective view says that some things are objectively right or wrong, independently of what anyone may think or feel; but it still could accept much relativity in other areas. Many social rules clearly are determined by local standards: Local law: “Right turns on a red light are forbidden.” Local rule of etiquette: “Use the fork only in your left hand.” We need to respect such local rules; otherwise, we may hurt people, either by crashing their cars or by hurting their feelings. On the objective view, the demand that we not hurt people is a rule of a different sort—a moral rule—and not determined by local customs. Moral rules are seen as more authoritative and objective than government laws or rules of etiquette; they are rules that any society must follow if it is to survive and prosper. If we go to a place where local standards permit hurting people for trivial reasons, then the local stan- dards are mistaken. Cultural relativists would dispute this. They insist that local standards determine even basic moral principles; so hurting others for trivial reasons would be good if it were socially approved. Respecting a range of cultural differences doesn’t make you a cultural rela- tivist. What makes you a cultural relativist is the claim that anything that is socially approved must thereby be good. 1.5 Social science A popular stereotype says that all social scientists are cultural relativists. This is a false stereotype. Social scientists in fact hold a wide range of views on the foundations of ethics. Many reject CR. For example, the moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg saw CR as a relatively immature approach to morality, typical of teenagers and young adults. Kohlberg claimed that we all, regardless of our culture, develop in our moral thinking through a series of stages. The first four go as follows: Page 13 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010. 14 Ethics 1. Punishment/obedience: “bad” is what brings punishment. 2. Rewards: “good” is what brings you what you want. 3. Parental approval: “good” is what pleases Mommy and Daddy. 4. Social approval: “good” is what is socially approved. Young children first think of morality in terms of punishment and obedience. Later they think more of rewards, and then parental approval. Still later, often in the teenage or early adult years, comes the CR stage. Here “good” is what is socially approved, first by the peer group, and then later by the larger society. Here it’s important to wear the right kind of clothes and listen to the right kind of music—where the “right kind” is whatever is socially approved. Many beginning college students struggle with these issues. This may be why they take CR so seriously—even though the view is implausible when we study it carefully. What comes after cultural relativism, according to Kohlberg? Sometimes confusion and skepticism follow; indeed, an ethics course may promote these. Then we may move into stage 5 (which resembles the rule utilitarian view of Chapter 10) or stage 6 (which resembles the golden-rule consistency view of Chapters 7 to 9). Both stages try to evaluate conventional norms rationally. I don’t bring up Kohlberg to argue that, since his descriptive account is correct, hence CR is wrong. His account is controversial. Many psychologists propose a different sequence of moral stages or reject the idea of stages. And we’ve adequately demolished CR; we don’t need help from psychology. I mention Kohlberg, rather, because many people are pressured into accepting CR by the myth that all social scientists accept CR. But there’s no such consensus. Kohlberg and many other social scientists emphatically reject CR. They see it as an immature stage of moral thinking in which we just conform to society. Kohlberg’s approach raises a problem about the meaning of “good.” People may mean different things at different stages; a young child by “good” may mean “what pleases Mommy and Daddy.” So we should see our quest in terms of what morally mature people mean by “good.” If our objections to CR are correct, then morally mature people by “good” don’t mean “socially ap- proved.” 1.6 Chapter summary Cultural relativism holds that “good” means what is “socially approved” by the majority in a given culture. Infanticide, for example, isn’t good or bad objec- tively; rather it’s good in a society that approves of it but bad in one that disapproves of it. Cultural relativists see morality as a product of culture. They think that societies disagree widely about morality and that we have no clear way to resolve the differences. They conclude that there are no objective values. Cultural relativists view themselves as tolerant; they see other cultures not as “wrong,” but as “different.” Page 14 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010.  Cultural Relativism 15 Despite its initial plausibility, CR has many problems. For example, CR makes it impossible to disagree with the values of our society. We all at times want to say that something is socially approved but not good. But this is self- contradictory if CR is true. In addition, CR entails that intolerance and racism would be good if society approved of them. And it leads us to accept the norms of our society in an uncritical way. Cultural relativism attacks the idea of objective values. But these attacks fall apart if we examine them carefully. Many social scientists oppose CR. The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, for example, claimed that people of all cultures go through the same stages of moral thinking. CR represents a relatively low stage in which we simply conform to society. At more advanced stages, we reject CR; we become critical of accepted norms and think for ourselves about moral issues. How to do that is the topic of this book. 1.7 Study questions Write out the answers in your ethics folder. If you don’t know an answer, go back to the section that deals with it. 1. How does cultural relativism define “good”? What method does it follow for arriving at moral beliefs? 2. Ima grew up believing in objective values. What two experiences led her to embrace cultural relativism? (1.1) 3. When Ima rejected “objective values” or “the myth of objectivity,” what exactly did she reject? What does it mean to say that “good” is a relative term? 4. Why does cultural relativism supposedly make us more tolerant of other cultures? 5. What benefits does CR supposedly have for Ima’s society? 6. Write about a page sketching your initial reaction to cultural relativism. Does it seem plausible to you? What do you like and dislike about it? Can you think of any way to show that it’s false? 7. Why does CR make us conform to society’s values? Does CR seem plausible here? (1.2) 8. According to CR, what does “Tolerance is good” mean? Why doesn’t CR necessarily imply that tolerance is good? 9. Explain the story about “Lika Rebel”—and how it presents a problem for Ima’s approach. 10. How does CR apply to racism and to moral education? 11. Explain the subgroup problem. (1.3) 12. Can CR establish common norms between societies? 13. Sketch how a cultural relativist and a believer in objective values would answer this question: “Can learning about other cultures help us to cor- rect errors in the values of our own culture?” Page 15 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010. 16 Ethics 14. What was Dr. Martin Luther King’s view about objective values? How did it differ from Ima’s? (1.4) 15. Explain and criticize Ima’s three arguments for rejecting objective values. 16. On the objective view, how do basic moral rules differ from rules of law and etiquette? 17. Are all social scientists cultural relativists? How did the psychologist Kohlberg view cultural relativism? (1.5) 18. Sketch Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. 1.8 For further study To solidify your understanding, do the EthiCola exercise (see Preface) for “Ethics 01—Cultural Relativism.” What we call “cultural relativism” is sometimes called ethical relativism; the claim that different societies in fact disagree about basic moral norms is sometimes called descriptive relativism. To sort out the different types of “relativ- ism” in ethics, see Brandt’s “Ethical relativism.” For defenses of cultural relativism by prominent anthropologists, see Benedict’s brief “A defense of cultural relativism” or Sumner’s longer Folkways. Section 1.4 raised the problem of how to distinguish morality from other action guides, such as law and etiquette, which also say how we ought to live; Frankena’s “Two concepts of morality” discusses this further. For Kohlberg’s approach, see his brief “A cognitive-developmental approach to moral education” or his longer Essays on Moral Development. The Bibliography at the end of the book has information on how to find these works. Page 16 of Ethics, printed in Word by Harry Gensler on 9 Nov 2010.