Comparing Cultures

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Comparing Cultures

• CHAPTER FIVE

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Comparing CulturesChapter Five

• Before continuing our search for a dependable
  standard of ethical judgment, it will be useful
  to consider the issue of whether moral judgments
  are ever appropriate outside ones own culture.
• Contemporary scholarly discussion of cultures and
  subcultures is significantly affected by the
  social movement known as multiculturism.

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Comparing Cultures.

• Among the central tenets of this movement are
  that every race or ethnic group has its own
  values and characteristic behaviors, that no
  groups values are any better or worse than any
  others and that criticism of another cultures
  ideas and actions is wrong.

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Comparing Cultures.

• Cultures differ in their ideas about right and
  wrong, and the differences are not always slight.
• Sex before marriage has been generally viewed as
  immoral in the West.
• Yet in some island cultures, it is encouraged.

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Interpreting the Differences

• Cultural relativity, derives from observation of
  cultural differences and two important
  realizations
• 1) that a cultures values, rituals, and customs
  reflect its geography, history, and socioeconomic
  circumstances and
• 2) that hasty or facile comparison of other
  cultures with ones own culture tends to thwart
  scholarly analysis and produce shallow or
  erroneous conclusions.

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Interpreting the Differences.

• In themselves these realizations are truisms
  (undoubted or self-evident truths) no reasonable
  person would deny that a peoples experience
  influences its beliefs and behaviors or that
  careful, objective thinking is preferable to
  careless, biased thinking.

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Interpreting the Differences

• Cultural relativity means, that the
  appropriateness of any positive or negative
  custom must be evaluated with regard to how this
  habit fits with other groups habits.

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The question?

• Is it possible for a custom or habit within a
  culture to be long-standing and completely
  consistent with other behaviors of the group
  yet at the same time be immoral?
• Remember, the differing values among cultures
  with consideration of similarities.

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The Similarity or Values

• Christianity is not unique in affirming the
  importance of keeping a pure and honest mind
  early Buddhism (Dhammapada), begins with these
  words

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The Similarity or Values

• Those who harbor resentful thoughts toward
  others, believing they were insulted, hurt,
  defeated or cheated, will suffer from hatred,
  because hate never
• conquers hatred. Yet hate is conquered by love,
  which is an eternal law.

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The Similarity or Values

• The Bible
• Thou shalt not use Gods name in vain.
• Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father.
• Thou shalt not kill.
• The Koran
• Make not Gods name an excuse for your oaths.
• Be kind to your parents if one or both of them
  attain old age in thy life, say not a word of
  contempt nor repel them but address them in terms
  of honor.
• If anyone has killed one person it is as if he
  had killed the whole
• mankind.

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The Similarity or Values

• The Hindus refusal to use cattle to feed
  starving people shows a wanton disregard for
  human life.
• Yet the real explanation for the refusal is that
  their religion prevents them from butchering
  cattle for any purpose

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Mortimer Adler

• Alder rejects the illusion that there is a
  Western mind and an Eastern mind, a European mind
  and an African mind or a civilized mind and a
  primitive mind.
• There is only a human mind and it is one and the
  same in all human beings.
• In other words, all people have the same basic
  physiological, psychological and intellectual
  equipment.

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Is Judgment Appropriate?

• People who accept an extreme interpretation of
  cultural relativism say that moral judgment of
  other cultures is never appropriate.
• In other words, multiculturalism implies one
  culture should not criticize another.

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Three Important Cautions

• Understanding is no substitute for moral
  judgment.
• The time and place of an act have no bearing on
  its moral quality.
• Culpability for immoral acts may vary widely.

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1. Understanding is no substitute for moral
judgment.

• Because speaking from ignorance is irresponsible,
  we should refrain from judging any act until we
  understand the context in which it occurred.

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2. The time and place of an act have no bearing
on its moral quality

• Actions we have unhesitatingly denounced in our
  own time and place have a way of sounding morally
  acceptable for other times and places.

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3.Culpability for immoral acts may vary widely.

• Culpability applies in ethics as well as in the
  law the responsibility of the perpetrators
  varies according to the circumstances.
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