CHAPTER FIVE
Comparing Cultures
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.
• Contemporary scholarly discussion of
cultures and subcultures is significantly
affected by the social movement known as
multiculturism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
Three Important Cautions
1. Understanding is no substitute for moral
judgment.
2. The time and place of an act have no
bearing on its moral quality.
3. Culpability for immoral acts may vary
widely.
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.
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.
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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