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Comparing Cultures

Comparing Cultures. CHAPTER FIVE. Comparing Cultures Chapter 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 one’s own culture.

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Comparing Cultures

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  1. Comparing Cultures CHAPTER FIVE

  2. 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 one’s own culture. • Contemporary scholarly discussion of cultures and subcultures is significantly affected by the social movement known as multiculturism.

  3. 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 group’s values are any better or worse than any other’s and that criticism of another culture’s ideas and actions is wrong.

  4. 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.

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

  6. Interpreting the Differences…. • In themselves these realizations are truisms (undoubted or self-evident truths); no reasonable person would deny that a people’s experience influences its beliefs and behaviors or that careful, objective thinking is preferable to careless, biased thinking.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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:

  10. 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.

  11. The Similarity or Values • The Bible • Thou shalt not use God’s name in vain. • Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father. • Thou shalt not kill. The Koran • Make not God’s 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.

  12. 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

  13. 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.

  14. 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.”

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. 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. • -30-

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