The Challenge of Cultural Relativism
JAMES
RACHELS Adapted from The Elements of
Moral Philosophy by James Rachels, Chapter 2, pp. 15-29. © 1999 by McGraw-Hill, Inc. Reprinted by
permission of the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Morality differs in
every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits. -- Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture, 1934) 2.1 How Different Cultures Have
Different Moral Codes
Darius, a king of ancient This story, recounted by Herodotus in
his History illustrates a recurring theme in the literature of social
science: Different cultures have different moral codes. What is thought right
within one group may be utterly abhorrent to the members of another group,
and vice versa. Should we eat the bodies of the dead or burn them? If you
were a Greek, one answer would seem obviously correct; but if you were a
Callatian, the opposite would seem equally certain. It is easy to give additional
examples of the same kind. Consider the Eskimos. They are a remote and
inaccessible people. Numbering only about 25,000, they live in small,
isolated settlements scattered mostly along the northern fringes of North
America and Eskimos customs turned out to be very
different from our own. The men often had more than one wife, and they would
share their wives with guests, lending them for the night as a sign of
hospitality. Moreover, within a community, a dominant male might demand and
get regular sexual access to other men's wives. The women, however, were free
to break these arrangements simply by leaving their husbands and taking up
with new partners—free, that is, so long as their former husbands chose not
to make trouble. All in all, the Eskimo practice was a volatile scheme that
bore little resemblance to what we call marriage. But it was not only their marriage
and sexual practices that were different. The Eskimos also seemed to have
less regard for human life. Infanticide, for example, was common. Knud
Rasmussen, one of the most famous early explorers, reported that be met one
woman who bad borne 20 children but had killed 10 of them at birth. Female
babies, he found, were especially liable to be destroyed, and this was
permitted simply at the parents' discretion, with no social stigma attached
to it. Old people also, when they became too feeble to contribute to the
family, were left out in the snow .to die. So there seemed to be, in this
society, remarkably little respect for life. To the general public, these were
disturbing revelations. Our own way of living seems so natural and right that
for many of us it is hard to conceive of others living so differently. And
when we do hear of such things, we tend immediately to categorize those other
peoples as "backward" or "primitive." But to anthropologists
and sociologists, there was nothing particularly surprising about the
Eskimos. Since the time of Herodotus, enlightened observers have been
accustomed to the idea that conceptions of right and wrong differ from
culture to culture. If we assume that our ideas of right and wrong will be
shared by all peoples as all times, we are merely naive. 2.2 Cultural Relativism
To many thinkers, this
observation—"Different cultures have different moral codes"— has
seemed to be the key to understanding morality. The idea of universal truth
in ethics, they say, is a myth. The customs of different societies are all
that exist. These customs cannot be said to be "correct" or
"incorrect," for that implies we have an independent standard of
right and wrong by which they may be judged. But there is no such independent
standard; every standard is culture-bound. The great pioneering sociologist
William Graham Sumner, writing in 1906, put the point like this: The "right" way is the way
which the ancestors used and which has been handed down. The tradition is its
own warrant. It is not held subject to verification by experience. The notion
of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of them, of independent
origin, and brought to test them. In the folkways, whatever is, is right.
This is because they are traditional, and therefore contain in themselves the
authority of the ancestral ghosts. When we come to the folkways we are at the
end of our analysis. This line of thought has probably
persuaded more people to be skeptical about ethics than any other single
thing. Cultural Relativism, as it has been called, challenges our ordinary
belief in the objectivity and universality of moral truth. It says, in
effect, that there is not such thing as universal truth in ethics; there are
only the various cultural codes, and nothing more. Moreover, our own code has
no special status; it is merely one among many. As we shall see, this basic idea is
really a compound of several different thoughts. It is important to separate
the various elements of the theory because, on analysis, some parts turn out
to be correct, while others seem to be mistaken. As a beginning, we may
distinguish the following claims, all of which have been made by cultural
relativists:
Although it may seem that these six
propositions go naturally together, they are independent of one another, in
the sense that some of them might be false even if others are true. In what
follows, we will try to identify what is correct in Cultural Relativism, but
we will also be concerned to expose what is mistaken about it. 2.3 The Cultural Differences Argument
Cultural Relativism is a theory about
the nature of morality. At first blush it seems quite plausible. However,
like all such theories, it may be evaluated by subjecting it to rational
analysis; and when we analyze Cultural Relativism we find that it is not so
plausible as it first appears to be. The first thing we need to notice is
that at the heart of Cultural Relativism there is a certain form of
argument. The strategy used by cultural relativists is to argue from
facts about the differences between cultural outlooks to a conclusion about
the status of morality. Thus we are invited to accept this reasoning:
Or, alternatively:
Clearly, these arguments are
variations of one fundamental idea They are both special cases of a more
general argument, which says:
We may call this the Cultural
Differences Argument. To many people, it is persuasive. But from a logical
point of view, is it sound? It is not sound. The trouble is that
the conclusion does not follow from the premise— that is, even if the premise
is true, the conclusion still might be false. The premise concerns what
people believe. In some societies, people believe one thing; in other
societies, people believe differently. The conclusion, however, concerns what
really is the case. The trouble is that this sort conclusion does not
follow logically from this sort of premise. Consider again the example of the
Greeks and Callatians. The Greeks believed it was wrong to eat the dead; the
Callatians believed it was right. Does it follow, from the mere fact that
they disagreed, that there is no objective truth in the matter? No, it does
not follow; for it could be that the practice was objectively right (or
wrong) and that one or the other of them was simply mistaken. To make the point clearer, consider a
different matter In some societies, people believe the earth is flat In other
societies, such as our own, people believe the earth is (roughly) spherical.
Does it follow, from the mere fact that people disagree, that there is
no "objective truth" in geography? Of course not; we would never
draw such a conclusion because we realize that, in their beliefs about the
world, the members of some societies might simply be wrong. There is no
reason to think that if the world is round everyone must know it. Similarly,
there is no reason to think that if there is moral truth everyone must know
it. The fundamental mistake in the Cultural Differences Argument is that it
attempts to derive a substantive conclusion about a subject from the mere
fact that people disagree about it. This is a simple point of logic, and
it is important not to misunderstand it. We are not saying (not yet, anyway)
that the conclusion of the argument is false. It is still an open question
whether the conclusion is true or false. The logical point is just that the
conclusion does not follow from the premise. This is important,
because in order to determine whether the conclusion is true, we need
arguments in its support. Cultural Relativism proposes this argument, but
unfortunately the argument turns out to be fallacious. So it proves nothing. 2.4 The Consequences of Taking
Cultural Relativism Seriously
Even if the Cultural Differences
Argument is invalid, Cultural Relativism might still be true. What would it
be like if it were true? In the passage quoted above, William
Graham Sumner summarizes the essence of Cultural Relativism. He says that
there is no measure of right and wrong other than the standards of one's
society: "The notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of
them, of independent origin, and brought to test them. In the folkways,
whatever is, is right." Suppose we took this seriously. What
would be some of the consequences? 1. We could no longer say that the
customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own. This, of
course, is one of the main points stressed by Cultural Relativism. We would
have to stop condemning other societies merely because they are
"different:' So long as we concentrate on certain examples, such as the
funerary practices of the Greeks and Callatians, this may seem to be a
sophisticated, enlightened attitude. However, we would also be stopped
from criticizing other, less benign practices. Suppose a society waged war on
its neighbors for the purpose of taking slaves. Or suppose a society was
violently anti-Semitic and its leaders set out to destroy the Jews. Cultural
Relativism would preclude us from saying that either of these practices was
wrong. We would not even be able to say that a society tolerant of Jews is better
than the anti- Semitic society, for that would imply some sort of
transcultural standard of comparison. The failure to condemn these
practices does not seem enlightened; on the contrary, slavery and
anti-Semitism seem wrong wherever they occur. Nevertheless, if we took
Cultural Relativism seriously, we would have to regard these social practices
as also immune from criticism. 2. We could decide whether actions
are right or wrong just by consulting the standards of our society.
Cultural Relativism suggests a simple test for determining what is right and
what is wrong: All one need do is ask whether the action is in accordance
with the code of one's society. Suppose in 1975, a resident of This implication of Cultural
Relativism is disturbing because few of us think that our society's code is
perfect; we can think of ways it might be improved. Yet Cultural Relativism
would not only forbid us from criticizing the codes of other societies; it
would stop us from criticizing our own. After all, if right and wrong are
relative to culture, this must be true for our own culture just as much as
for other cultures. 3. The idea of moral progress is
called into doubt. Usually, we think that at least some social changes
are for the better. (Although, of course, other changes may be for the
worse.) Throughout most of Western history the place of women in society was
narrowly circumscribed. They could not own property; they could not vote or
hold political office; and generally they were under the almost absolute control
of their husbands. Recently much of this has changed, and most people think
of it as progress. If Cultural Relativism is correct,
can we legitimately think of this as progress? Progress means replacing a way
of doing things with a better way. But by what standard do we judge the new
ways as better? If the old ways were in accordance with the social standards
of their time, then Cultural Relativism would say it is a mistake to judge
them by the standards of a different time. Eighteenth-century society was, in
effect, a different society from the one we have now. To say that we have
made progress implies a judgment that present-day society is better, and that
is just the sort of transcultural judgment that, according to Cultural
Relativism, is impermissible. Our idea of social reform will
also have to be reconsidered. Reformers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., have
sought to change their societies for the better. Within the constraints
imposed by Cultural Relativism, there is one way this might be done. If a society
is not living up to its own ideals, the reformer may be regarded as acting
for the best: The ideals of the society are the standard by which we judge
his or her proposals as worthwhile. But the "reformer" may not
challenge the ideals themselves, for those ideals are by definition correct.
According to Cultural Relativism, then, the idea of social reform makes sense
only in this limited way. These three consequences of Cultural
Relativism have led many thinkers to reject it as implausible on its face. It
does make sense, they say, to condemn some practices, such as slavery and
anti-Semitism, wherever they occur. It makes sense to think that our own
society has made some moral progress, while admitting that it is still
imperfect and in need of reform. Because Cultural Relativism says that these
judgments make no sense, the argument goes, it cannot be right. 2.5 Why There Is Less Disagreement
Than It Seems
The original impetus for Cultural
Relativism comes from the observation that cultures differ dramatically in
their views of right and wrong. But just how much do they differ? It is true
that there are differences. However, it is easy to overestimate the extent of
those differences, Often, when we examine what seems to be a dramatic
difference, we find that the cultures do not differ nearly as much as it
appears. Consider a culture in which people
believe it is wrong to eat cows. This may even be a poor culture, in which
there is not enough food; still, the cows are not to be touched. Such a
society would appear to have values very different from our own. But does it?
We have not yet asked why these people will not eat cows. Suppose it is
because they believe that after death the souls of humans inhabit the bodies
of animals, especially cows, so that a cow may be someone's grandmother. Now
do we want to say that their values are different from ours? No; the
difference lies elsewhere. The difference is in our belief systems, not in
our values. We agree that we shouldn't eat Grandma; we simply disagree about whether
the cow is (or could be) Grandma The point is that many factors work
together to produce the customs of a society. The society's values are only
one of them. Other matters, such as the religions and factual beliefs held by
its members, and the physical circumstances in which they must live, are also
important. We cannot conclude, then, merely because customs differ, that
there is a disagreement about values. The difference in customs may be
attributable to some other aspects of social life. Thus there may be less
disagreement about values than there appears to be. Consider again the Eskimos, who often
kill perfectly normal infants, especially girls. We do not approve of such
things; a parent who killed a baby in our society would be locked up. Thus there
appears to be a great difference in the values of our two cultures. But
suppose we ask why the Eskimos do this. The explanation is not that they have
less affection for their children or less respect for human life. An Eskimo
family will always protect its babies if conditions permit. But they live in
a harsh environment, where food is in short supply. A fundamental postulate
of Eskimos thought is: "Life is hard, and the margin of safety small:' A
family may want to nourish its babies but be unable to do so. As in many "primitive"
societies, Eskimo mothers will nurse their infants over a much longer period
of time than mothers in our culture. The child will take nourishment from its
mother's breast for four years, perhaps even longer. So even in the best of
times there are limits to the number of infants that one mother can sustain.
Moreover, the Eskimos are a nomadic people—unable to farm, they must move
about in search of food. Infants must be carried, and a mother can carry only
one baby in her parka as she travels and goes about her outdoor work. Other
family members help whenever they can. Infant girls are more readily
disposed of because, first, in this society the males are the primary food
providers—they are the hunters, according to the traditional division of
labor—and it is obviously important to maintain a sufficient number of food
providers. But there is an important second reason as well. Because the
hunters suffer a high casualty rate, the adult men who die prematurely far
outnumber the women who die early. Thus if male and female infants survived
in equal numbers, the female adult population would greatly outnumber the
male adult population. Examining the available statistics, one writer
concluded that "were it not for female infanticide…there would be
approximately one-and-a-half times as many females in the average Eskimo
local group as there are food-producing males." |
|
So among the Eskimos, infanticide
does not signal a fundamentally different attitude toward children. Instead,
it is a recognition that drastic measures are sometimes needed to ensure the
family's survival. Even then, however, killing the baby is not the first
option considered. Adoption is common; childless couples are especially happy
to take a more fertile couple's "surplus." Killing is only the last
resort. I emphasize this in order to show that the raw data of the
anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values
between cultures appear greater than they are. The Eskimos' values are not
all that different from our values. It is only that life forces upon them
choices that we do not have to make. |
2.6 How AU Cultures Have Some Values
in Common
|
|
It should not be surprising that,
despite appearances, the Eskimos are protective of their children. How could
it be otherwise? How could a group survive that did not value its
young? It is easy to see that, in fact, all cultural groups must protect
their infants: |
|
1.
Human
infants are helpless and cannot survive if they are not given extensive care
for a period of years. |
|
2.
Therefore,
if a group did not care for its young, the young would not survive, and the
older members of the group would not be replaced. After a while the group
would die out. |
|
3.
Therefore,
any cultural group that continues to exist must care for its young. infants
that are not cared for must be the exception rather than the rule. |
|
Similar reasoning shows that other
values must be more or less universal. Imagine what it would be like for a
society to place no value at all on truth telling. When one person spoke to
another, there would be no presumption at all that he was telling the truth
for he could just as easily be speaking falsely. Within that society, there
would be no reason to pay attention to what anyone says. (I ask you what time
it is, and you say "Four o'clock:' But there is no presumption that you
are speaking truly; you could just as easily have said the first thing that
came into your head. So I have no reason to pay attention to your answer; in
fact, there was no point in my asking you in the first place.) Communication
would then be extremely difficult, if not impossible. And because complex
societies cannot exist without communication among their members, society
would become impossible. It follows that in any complex society there must be
a presumption in favor of truthfulness. There may of course be exceptions to
this rule: There may be situations in which it is thought to be permissible
to lie. Nevertheless, there will be exceptions to a rule that is in
force in the society. Here is one further example of the
same type. Could a society exist in which there was no prohibition on murder?
What would this be like? Suppose people were free to kill other people at
will, and no one thought there was anything wrong with it. In such a
"society," no one could feel secure. Everyone would have to be
constantly on guard. People who wanted to survive would have to avoid other
people as much as possible. This would inevitably result in individuals
trying to become as self-sufficient as possible— after all, associating with
others would be dangerous. Society on any large scale would collapse. Of
course, people might band together in smaller groups with others that they could
trust not to harm them. But notice what this means: They would be forming
smaller societies that did acknowledge a rule against murder: The prohibition
of murder, then, is a necessary feature of all societies. There is a general theoretical point
here, namely, that there are some moral rules that all societies will have
in common, because those rules are necessary for society to exist. The
rules against lying and murder are two examples. And in fact, we do find
these rules in force in all viable cultures. Cultures may differ in what they
regard as legitimate exceptions to the rules, but this disagreement exists
against a background of agreement on the larger issues. Therefore, it is a
mistake to overestimate the amount of difference between cultures. Not every
moral rule can vary from society to society. 2.7 Judging a Cultural Practice to Be
Undesirable
In 1996, a 17-year-old girl named
Fauziya Kassindja arrived at Excision is a permanently disfiguring
procedure that is sometimes called "female circumcision," although
it bears little resemblance to the Jewish ritual. More commonly, at least in
Western newspapers, it is referred to as "genital mutilation."
According to the World Health Organization, the practice is widespread in 26
African nations, and two million girls each year are "excised." In
some instances, excision is part of an elaborate tribal ritual, performed in
small traditional villages, and girls look forward to it because it signals
their acceptance into the adult world. In other instances, the practice is
carried out by families living in cities on young women who desperately
resist. Fauziya Kassindja was the youngest of
five daughters in a devoutly Muslim family. Her father, who owned a
successful trucking business, was opposed to excision, and he was able to
defy the tradition because of his wealth. His first four daughters were
married without being mutilated. But when Fauziya was 16, he suddenly died.
Fauziya then came under the authority of his father, who arranged a marriage
for her and prepared to have her excised. Fauziya was terrified, and her
mother and oldest sister helped her to escape. Her mother, left without
resources, eventually had to formally apologize and submit to the authority
of the patriarch she had offended. Meanwhile, in Suppose we are inclined to say that
excision is bad. Would we merely be applying the standards of our own
culture? If Cultural Relativism is correct, that is all we can do, for there
is no cultural-neutral moral standard to which we may appeal. Is that true? Is There a Culture-Neutral
Standard of Right and Wrong?
There is, of course, a lot that can be said against the practice of excision.
Excision is painful and it results in the permanent loss of sexual pleasure.
Its short-term effects include hemorrhage, tetanus, and septicemia. Sometimes
the woman dies. Long term effects include chronic infection, scars that
hinder walking, and continuing pain. Why, then, has it become a widespread
social practice? It is not easy to say. Excision has no obvious social
benefits. Unlike Eskimo infanticide, it is not necessary for the group's
survival. Nor is it a matter of religion. Excision is practiced by groups
with various religions, including Islam and Christianity, neither of which
commend it. Nevertheless, a number of reasons are
given in its defense. Women who are incapable of sexual pleasure are said to
be less likely to be promiscuous; thus there will be fewer unwanted
pregnancies in unmarried women. Moreover, wives for whom sex is only a duty
are less likely to be unfaithful to their husbands; and because they will not
be thinking about sex, they will be more attentive to the needs of their
husbands and children. Husbands, for their part, are said to enjoy sex more
with wives who have been excised. (The women's own lack of enjoyment is said
to be unimportant.) Men will not want unexcised women, as they are unclean
and immature. And above all, it has been done since antiquity, and we may not
change the ancient ways. It would be easy, and perhaps a bit
arrogant, to ridicule these arguments. But we may notice an important feature
of this whole line of reasoning: it attempts to justify excision by showing
that excision is beneficial— men, women, and their families are all said to
be better off when women are excised. Thus we might approach this reasoning,
and excision itself, by asking which is true: Is excision, on the whole,
helpful or harmful? Here, then, is the standard that
might most reasonably be used in thinking about excision: We may ask whether
the practice promotes or hinders the welfare of the people whose lives are
affected by it. And, as a corollary, we may ask if there is an
alternative set of social arrangements that would do a better job of
promoting their welfare. If so, we may conclude that the existing practice is
deficient. But this looks like just the sort of
independent moral standard that Cultural Relativism says cannot exist. It is
a single standard that may be brought to bear in judging the practices of any
culture, at any time, including our own. Of course, people will not usually
see this principle as being "brought in from the outside" to judge
them, because, like the rules against lying and homicide, the welfare of its
members is a value internal to all viable cultures. Why Thoughtful People May
Nevertheless Be Reluctant to Criticize Other Cultures. Although they are personally
horrified by excision, many thoughtful people are reluctant to say it is
wrong, for at least three reasons. First, there is an understandable
nervousness about "interfering in the social customs of other
peoples." Europeans and their cultural descendents in People also feel, rightly enough,
that they should be tolerant of other cultures. Tolerance is, no doubt, a
virtue—a tolerant person is willing to live in peaceful cooperation with
those who see things differently. But there is nothing in the nature of
tolerance that requires you to say that all beliefs, all religions, and all
social practices are equally admirable. On the contrary, if you did not think
that some were better than others, there would be nothing for you to tolerate. Finally, people may be reluctant to
judge because they do not want to express contempt for the society being
criticized. But again, this is misguided: To condemn a particular practice is
not to say that the culture is on the whole contemptible or that it is
generally inferior to any other culture, including one's own. It could have
many admirable features. In fact, we should expect this to be true of most
human societies— they are mixes of good and bad practices. Excision happens
to be one of the bad ones. 2.8 What Can Be Learned from Cultural
Relativism
At the outset, I said that we were
going to identify both what is right and what is wrong in Cultural
Relativism. Thus far I have mentioned only its mistakes: I have said that it
rests on an invalid argument, that it has consequences that make it
implausible on its face, and that the extent of moral disagreement is far
less than it implies. This all adds up to a pretty thorough repudiation of
the theory. Nevertheless, it is still a very appealing idea, and the reader
may have the feeling that all this is a little unfair. The theory must have
something going for it, or else why has it been so influential? In fact, I
think there is something right about Cultural Relativism, and now I want to
say what that is. There are two lessons we should learn from the theory, even
if we ultimately reject it. Cultural Relativism warns us, quite
rightly, about the danger of assuming that all our preferences are based on
some absolute rational standard. They are not. Many (but not all) of our
practices are merely peculiar to our society, and it is easy to lose sight of
that fact. In reminding us of it, the theory does a service. Funerary practices are one example.
The Callatians, according to Herodotus, were "men who eat their
fathers"—a shocking idea, to us at least. But eating the flesh of the
dead could be understood as a sign of respect. It could be taken as a
symbolic act that says: We wish this person's spirit to dwell within us.
Perhaps this was the understanding of the Callatians. On such a way of
thinking, burying the dead could be seen as an act of rejection, and burning
the corpse as positively scornful. If this is hard to imagine, then we may
need to have our imaginations stretched. Of course we may feel a visceral
repugnance at the idea of eating human flesh in any circumstances. But what
of it? This repugnance may be, as the relativists say, only a matter of what
is customary in our particular society. There are many other matters that we
tend to think of in terms of objective right and wrong that are really
nothing more than social conventions. Should women cover their breasts? A
publicly exposed breast is scandalous in our society, whereas in other
cultures it is unremarkable. Objectively speaking, it is neither right nor
wrong—there is not objective reason why either custom is better. Cultural
Relativism begins with the valuable insight that many of our practices are
like this; they are only cultural products. Then it goes wrong by inferring
that, because some practices are like this, all must be. The second lesson has to do with
keeping an open mind. In the course of growing up, each of us has acquired
some strong feelings: We have learned to think of some types of conduct as
acceptable, and others we have learned to reject. Occasionally, we may find
those feelings challenged. We may encounter someone who claims that our
feelings are mistaken. For example, we may have been taught that
homosexuality is immoral, and we may feel quite uncomfortable around gay people
and see them as alien and "different." Now someone suggests that
this may be a mere prejudice; that there is nothing evil about homosexuality;
that gay people are just people, like anyone else, who happen, through no
choice of their own, to be attracted to others of the same sex. But because
we feel so strongly about the matter, we may find it hard to take this
seriously. Even after we listen to the arguments, we may still have the
unshakable feeling that homosexuals must, somehow, be an unsavory lot. Cultural Relativism, by stressing
that our moral views can reflect the prejudices of our society, provides an
antidote for this kind of dogmatism. When he tells the story of the Greeks
and Callatians, Herodotus adds: For if anyone, no matter who, were
given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations of the world
the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful
consideration of their relative merits, choose that of his own country.
Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion
he was brought up in, to be the best. Realizing this can result in our
having more open minds. We can come to understand that our feelings are not
necessarily perceptions
of the truth—they may be nothing more than the result of cultural
conditioning. Thus when we hear it suggested that some elements of our social
code is not really the best, and we find ourselves instinctively
resisting the suggestion, we might stop and remember this. Then we may be
more open to discovering the truth, whatever that might be. We can understand the
appeal of Cultural Relativism, then, even though the theory has serious
shortcomings. It is an attractive theory because it is based on a genuine
insight that many of the practices and attitudes we think so natural are
really only cultural products. Moreover, keeping this insight firmly in view
is important if we want to avoid arrogance and have open minds. These are
important points, not to be taken lightly. But we can accept these points
without going on to accept the whole theory. |