Cultural Relativism

• “Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason—that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s action”
• “Cultural relativism says … that there is no such thing as universal truth in ethics; there are only the various cultural codes.
• CR GA: Different cultures have different moral codes.
• Different societies have different moral codes.
• The moral code of a society determines what is right within that society; that is, if the moral code of a society says that a certain action is right, then that action is right, at least within that society.
• There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one society’s code as better than another’s.
• There are no moral truths that hold for all people at all times.
• The moral code of our own society has no special status; it is but one among many.
• It is arrogant for us to judge other cultures.
• We should always be tolerant of them.
• The premise concerns what people believe
• The conclusion concerns

  what really is the case
• In morality value means “what is intrinsically desirable, and thus what should be desirable for all men and all groups”
• Normative Chauvinism:

  “The evaluator judges that her own culture is best,

  and that in so far as the other culture is unlike it, it is

  inferior”
• Normative Arcadianism

  “The vice opposed to normative chauvinism” which “consists in imagining the other as untouched by the vices of one’s own culture”
• Normative Skepticism

  “Because it is so difficult to get the balance right”…”the inquirer simply narrates the way things are, suspending all normative judgment about its goodness and badness”
• As Resil Mojares puts it, “culture is not what we were in the beginning but what we have become and, most important, what, according to our desire, we can become”