Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

For Benedict, the values of any one culture are neither superior nor inferior to those of another meaning; they are all on the same moral plane. In Benedict’s essay titled Anthropology and the Abnormal , it is her perspective that every culture uses its own unique cultural recipe to create its social structure and maintain its community. Moral beliefs are an essential ingredient in the recipe, as are customs, rituals, political structures, religious views, and other core beliefs. It is not possible to say that one recipe is better than another; they simply represent different ways people use to organize themselves into social groups. Benedict’s point is that we may assume to be a universal part of our divine or human natures are actually merely the consequence of the social adaptation of particular cultures. Benedict concludes that because one’s moral and religious beliefs are contingent on one’s specific cultural experience, there can be no universal moral values that apply to all cultures. What we think of as moral values are simply the customs, the approved ways of thinking and behaving that each culture has determined to be right. Cultural relativism holds that each culture has its own inherent moral and ethical beliefs and that people who do not belong to that culture have no right to judge or evaluate those beliefs. Although some cultural relativists, including Benedict, worked from the perspective of post-colonialist critics seeking to undo the civilizing damage brought on non- Western colonized societies, as cultural relativism can be damaging if it simplistically overlooks injustice. 8.5 Ethical Absolutism: Some Moral Values are Universal Ethical absolutism is the view that at least somemoral values are universal and apply to all individuals and cultures. W.T. Stace was a philosopher who sought to reconcile naturalism with religious experience and his theories acknowledged the necessity of incorporating mystical and spiritual interpretations. In Stace’s writing, The Concept of Morals, he states that ethical absolutists believe that at least some moral values are independent of human belief and practice. Stace believes that the motivation behind ethical relativism is a reaction against ethical absolutism and he emphasizes a crucial dimension to ethical relativism—that it is not simply providing a descriptive account of the diverse moral values of various cultures, but also provides a normative endorsement of these values. In essence, ethical relativism is stating that each culture’s moral values, whatever they may be, are morally right. William James, another philosopher with a viewpoint similar to Stace’s, states that humans use their intellectual abilities to create concepts and develop theories to help them understand and give meaning to their lived experience. James believed that we should endorse those theories that provide the most rational, complete, and persuasive understanding of our lived experience. Stace argued that we live our lives based on the assumption that there are no absolute moral standards that are independent of individual or group preferences and it is our belief in absolute moral standards that we believe we are justified in making moral judgments. If ethical relativismwere true, they argue that we would not be able to make these judgments of moral evaluation. They both argue that because we believe that we are justified in making moral evaluations and comparisons of other cultures, a belief in ethical absolutism is going to provide us with more subjective satisfaction and will provide a more rational explanation of the world. Although ethical absolutism acknowledges through descriptive ethics that different moral and ethical principles exist, the ethical absolutist does not then hold those beliefs as normative (meaning applicable to all people everywhere). There is no universal code

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