Cultural Relativism

• Darius, a king of ancient Persia, was intrigued by the variety of cultures he met in his travels.
• Callatians, who lived in India, ate the bodies of their dead fathers.
• Greeks practiced cremation and regarded the funeral pyre as the fitting way to dispose of the dead.
• Herodotus in his History, has a literary theme of:

  Different cultures have different moral codes.
• The Eskimos men often had more than one wife, and they would share their wives with guests, lending them out for the night as a sign of hospitality.
• The Eskimo custom of marriage was a volatile practice very unlike our own custom.
• What unusual practice that Eskimos also seemed to care less about human life?

  Infanticide
• Knud Rasmussen, found that female babies were killed more often than males.
• Eskimos tend elderly family members left out in the snow to die when they became too feeble.
• According to anthropologists, the Eskimos practices did not seem unusual.
• No universal moral truths, the customs of different societies are all that exist.
• No independent standard exists; every standard is culture-bound.
• According to William Graham Sumner, the notion of right is in the folkways.
• Cultural Relativism challenges our belief in the objectivity and legitimacy of moral truth.
• Given that cultural relativists take pride in their tolerance, it would be ironic if their theory actually supported the intolerance of warlike societies.
• Cultural Relativism holds that the norms of a culture reign supreme within the bounds of the culture itself.
• According to Rachels, Cultural Differences Argument is invalid and not sound.
• The Cultural Differences Argument might be some moral truths that are not universally known.
• Rachels said that the conclusion of the Cultural Differences Argument is false; for all we have said, Cultural Relativism could still be true.
• Even if the Cultural Differences Argument is unsound, Cultural Relativism might still be true.
• Consequences of Cultural Relativism

  1. We could no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own
  2. We could no longer criticize the code of our own society.
  3. The idea of moral progress is called into doubt.
• There are some moral rules that all societies must embrace, because those rules are necessary for society to exist
• Excision is a permanently disfiguring procedure. It is sometimes called “female circumcision,” but it bears little resemblance to male circumcision.
• She is a 17-year old from Togo, Africa who escaped excision.

  Fauziya Kassindja
• Cultural Relativism provides an antidote for this kind of dogmatism.