Do Right and Wrong Depend Upon Culture?
January 23rd, 2006 by MarkI’ve been actively participating in some discussions about the Japanese whaling issue over on Darin’s blog. I don’t want to discuss the ethics of hunting endangered species, nor do I want to get into the complex legal background of the issue. What I’m more interested in is this question: Do right and wrong depend upon culture?
In other words, could hunting endangered species be “wrong” in western countries, but “right” in Japan? Could inflicting pain on dogs to cause them to release chemicals that make them taste better be “right” in Korea, but “wrong” in Australia? Could creating absurd quantities of greenhouse gasses be “wrong” in Europe, but “right” in America? My feeling is that if something is “wrong”, it’s wrong regardless of culture. Maybe the things I listed above are all “wrong”, but only a little bit so.
Think about slavery. Would anybody actually defend slavery as just part of the “culture” in the southern states of the US 150 years ago? Could anybody defend the concentration camps and gas chambers in Nazi Germany, or the chemical and biological toxins experiments the Japanese performed on the Chinese during World War II as “culture”? Obviously, some things that large numbers of people think are ok, or at one point thought were ok, are still wrong. It’s my contention that relative ethics are no ethics at all. Still, boundary cases, such as cases in which one thing is good for an individual’s rights and another is good for society in general, require that conflicting values are weighed against each other. Obviously not all people and cultures will put the same weight on the same values. What are your views? Should you ignore what happens outside of your own culture and let other cultures decide what is right for themselves, or should you stand up for what you think is right?
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January 23rd, 2006 at 11:45 am
What does Santa Claus, God and Moral Absolutism have in common?
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Uh… Christmas?
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:57 pm
@panda: Nietzsche doesn’t like them?
Moral absolutism gets one a lot further than moral relativism. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were able to develop complex codes of right and wrong while the Sophists (the relativists) basically couldn’t get anywhere because nothing was “true”. Really, what good are morals if they don’t apply to people who don’t follow them? How could you have any justice system at all? Murderers could simply claim to be an oppressed segment of the population that doesn’t “subscribe to the view” that killing people is wrong. Countries could justify anything.
No, I’ll take my absolutism, thank you much.
January 23rd, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I agree that culture doesn’t always make anything acceptable, however in this situation I think that this is clearly a culture battle. You can’t eat whale because they are smart? But cows are okay because they are stupid? That’s pure culture, and I don’t like the idea of forcing one’s culture on anyone else.
The only thing that should matter in the issue of whaling is the number of whales currently out there. That is the only thing that should matter, however, westerns do as westerns do and force their beliefs (be they cultural or religions) on the world, and people say to Japan they can’t hunt whale because whales are smart cure animals. That is why I included the culture aspects in my argument.
I think of it like Taiwanese independence. China can bring forth all this data that they say ‘proves’ Taiwan is part of China, but as long as the people of Taiwan say they don’t want to be China, they never will be. We can talk about culture all we want, but all that matters is the number of whales that there truly are.
Absolutisms are fine in theory, but who decides what’s right and wrong? Absolutisms are not to be decided by America putting a gun to someone’s head and saying ’sign it or die’, but that’s the way this issue was decided. That is complete horse-crap.
January 23rd, 2006 at 3:15 pm
You don’t seem to understand what culture is as you continually refer to history and claim it to be culture and then say, “look, culture sucks!”
I agree that hunting of endangered species of whale is wrong, but not every whale is endangered. Buffalo are endangered, that means pigs are off limits too I guess. That’s how broad of a statement you are making.
January 23rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Oh hey, thanks for the link BTW.. and my own tag
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Answer to my question: None of them exist, even though we might really want them to.
I think Darin got it right when he said “Absolutisms are fine in theory, but who decides what’s right and wrong?” Many of the founding fathers owned slaves, an immoral act in our eyes. Are we more moral than they are? And one day what we do (perhaps the eating of animals) would be considered terribly immoral too. Does that negate the moral worth of our lives?
Moral absolutism gets one a lot further than moral relativism.
That seems like an awfully utilitarian way of justifying moral absolutism. I admit that in a rhetorical situation, it is helpful to state your argument in terms of absolutes. But truth is almost always preferable to lies, no matter how convenient and benign (like Santa Claus).
We like to think of morality as something concrete and unchangeable. This is understandable — we live our lives by this compass, how frightening to think that it is inexact! But the truth is, there is no morality in planets, there is no morality in rocks and water. There is even no morality among animals. Morality is a human construct which came into being to help us extend recipriocal relationships beyond kinship groups, so it seems natural to me that there are many commonalities across groups (killing those within your group outside of self defense is bad) and many differences (whether sex is OK before marriage, whether eating pork is OK, whether women are the equals to men).
So, does my lack of a belief in moral absolutism make my values weaker and my actions less consistent? I don’t think so. I have enough trust in the sturdiness of my values not to have to bolster them with the false support of moral absolutism even when they are challenged every day by people who think differently. In fact, I think so level of either moral relativism or defacto moral relativism is required for people of different backgrounds to come to an understanding, to seek common ground instead of falling back on their different ideologies and insisting furiously that they are right and their opponents are wrong.
January 24th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
@Battlepanda: This is an interesting argument, but it doesn’t quite address what I was asking about. Would you try to impose something you believe is right (i.e. women’s rights) on other cultures, or would you generally say, “Well, I think that XXX culture treats women like livestock, but that’s their culture and I have to accept it.”?
also @Battlepanda: If you believe there is no such thing as right and wrong, that would certainly affect your view of this issue. The existence of God though, is an entirely different issue and I don’t see how it’s relevant. Also simply saying there is no God is no more useful than an unsupported statement that there is a God. Much of philosophy is devoted to that one question, and it’s completely unresolved.
@Darin: I don’t think culture is bad. I’m arguing that aspects of a culture can be bad. Slavery makes a good example because it was a well established part of cultures all over the world for centuries, and yet nearly any culture in the world would say that it is “wrong” now. Unlike many, I feel that human society has made progress. However, that doesn’t mean that everything that current cultures accept or embrace is good.
A side point about whaling: I am much more sympathetic to groups which actually have been whaling from generation to generation as many indigenous peoples around the world have. Most Japanese people don’t hunt whales, neither did their parents, their grandparents, or their great-grandparents. This issue is very much like hunting buffalo in the US. For Americans in general to claim it as their culture is absurd, but for certain American Indians it’s more reasonable. I think the greenpeace volunteers confronting the whalers truly believe they are doing the right thing. I can’t say the same for the pro-whaling block.
January 24th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Japan has a whaling history at least as long as written history goes back in Japan. How is it not part of Japans culture exactly?
January 24th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
“Slavery makes a good example because it was a well established part of cultures all over the world for centuries, and yet nearly any culture in the world would say that it is “wrong” now.”
That’s why absolutisms are bad. Slavery was absolutely okay a few short years ago, but now it’s bad. Eating cows is absolutely bad in India, but I do it nearly every other day. As I’ve said before, whaling is part of Japans culture. You can’t tell them it’s wrong because it’s not part of your culture. The current IWC rules say it’s okay to whale if it’s part of your culture but have a special clause that says, “not you Japan, you’re special and we pretend you don’t exist”. That’s a problem.
January 24th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Mark,
There’s nothing wrong with thinking your way is better on X, Y, and Z and strongly promulgating those things based on your values. But this “knowledge” that your values are the right ones and others have the wrong ones lead to hubris. The refusal to accept that there could be a valid reason for people to hold different values depending on their circumstance, societal structure or history is a failure of empathy. Yet empathy is essential if we are to go beyond spreading our values at the barrel of a gun.
I have no problems with going to bat for women’s rights, or human rights. I believe that many societies are clinging to outmoded and counterproductive beliefs in these areas. But quite apart from my philosophical stance, seeking to “impose” one’s values on others is often counterproductive. For instance, lets accept the Bush administration’s line that this war is about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqis. I think freedom and democracy are damned fine values. But imposing them by force in a contry riven with sectarian conflict with no proper institutions is just a disaster waiting to happen.
My point about god was not that the existance or lack thereof of a god has anything directly to do with morality. It is that people often use their need for something to justify why they think it exists. With God, the example is usually, “but if there is no god, where do we go when we die?” We have an a priori desire for immortality, and god springs up to fill that gap. With morality, it is our need to know we’re right, for now and all time.
If you want to decrease the incidence of whaling in Japan, don’t attack japanese traditions. Appeal to the fact that there are less and less whales in the world and if we hunt them all down, there will be no whale hunts ever again. If there are plenty of whales, I don’t think we have much of a position to attack whale hunting in Japan while animals are raised under such cruel circumstances in factory farms in the U.S.
January 25th, 2006 at 12:01 am
Most Japanese people aren’t whalers, neither were most of their parents or grandparents. Whaling really was part of the culture in the western Wakayama at one point, but you’ll have to give me some evidence if you want me to believe that whaling is an important part the culture all over Japan’s. This situation is completely different from certain groups of Inuit who actually do have a whaling practice that goes back generations. The average Japanese has no direct ancestors for the past 3 or even 6 generations who was a whaler. And even for those small groups in Japan who actually do have a history culture and history of whaling, you can still be sure that their cultural history did NOT include going all the way to the Antarctic to hunt whales. At this point Japanese wanting to whale is more similar to Americans wanting to eat buffalo meat, than to Arapahoe natives hunting buffalo for survival. The IWC rules are consistent and do not have any special “Japan” clauses.
This is why relativisms are bad. Slavery never was right. The fact that most socienties accepted it, did NOT make it so. Some philosophers, even in though surrounded by people who believed otherwise realized this thousands of years ago. Likewise, there are sure to be certain things our societies do now that future generations will (rightly) condemn us for.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:59 am
Congratulations funkymonkey, you’re the first reader who actually registered for my blog. It doesn’t really do much for you, but if you want to submit a book review, movie review, or investment analysis, you can do so from the wordpress interface instead of waiting for me to check me email. One thing though, you ented “http://” as your homepage. If you don’t have a homepage it’s better if you leave that field blank so that other readers don’t waste their time clicking on a dead link.
I mostly agree with your arguments both about the intersection of culture and ethics and about the whaling specifically. I don’t think that the Arapahoe make a very good example, though. I grew up in the same part of the US which used to be theirs, and there did used to be a lot of buffalo here before Americans like “Buffalo Bill” started wiping them out. But the thing is, by the time buffalo were considered protected, the Arapahoe had already lost their way of life. To the best of my knowledge there aren’t any Arapahoe still living off of buffalo. Back in the days that there were, buffalo weren’t considered protected, anyway. If there were Arapahoe decendants who claimed “cultural rights” to hunt buffalo outside of hunting season now, I would be pretty skeptical.
For people who hunt an endangered species for survival, it’s much more understandable. However, I would be very, very surprised if that were the case with any American Indians in the continental US. I have quite a bit of American Indian ancestry (but not enough to qualify for special scholarships :P), and I’ve visited several reservations. Deer hunting might be an issue for a small number, but in general, the old way of life and the old languages are almost completely gone.
January 25th, 2006 at 3:19 am
@Battlepanda: It’s true that animals aren’t treated well at all in the farming industry in the US (or Japan), and that issue used to bother me quite a bit. For me though, I guess the more advanced life is, the more it bothers me to hurt it. I could never be a “fruitarian” who won’t even eat vegetables in which the stalks must be broken. I care a little bit about what happens to fish and chicken, but not too much. I care a bit more about cows, sheep and pigs. I find it fairly repulsive to kill chimps, dolphins and whales. Cannibalism (despite its wide spread practice in many central American Indian cultures), disturbs me a great deal. Is it reasonable to value sentience? Maybe, maybe not. But I do, and I have no problems saying that I disagree with cultures who don’t. I would much rather argue that whaling is bad because whales have nearly the same level of sentience that we do, than because we need to keep up a sizable stock for future hunting.
As for the existence of God, there is no way to prove or disprove it. However, I think that the majority of evidence suggests that there is a god. Though there’s no way of telling who’s idea of God is closest to being correct, there have been so many recordings of divine works and prophesy that it would take a certain closed mindedness to conclude that we are the highest form of life in existance and that there is definitely no God.
About flexibility: I don’t think that right and wrong change, however it’s vital that our own ideas of what is right and wrong do change. Just as scientific theories change with new experimental data, so should philisophical ones. Anytime there’s a clash in ideologies, both sides have a chance to learn from each other and improve… just as scientific theories do.
January 25th, 2006 at 11:39 am
This conversation hardly ever changes any minds. But it’s always interesting nevertheless…
Funky: The reason the slavery example is bad is because it is an extreme case that strongly goes against some of our most deeply held (and by this time, quite widely held) values. Do you similarly think there is an absolute right and wrong on meateating, pre-marital sex or abortion for all time regardless of context?
For instance, meateating. It might well be considered quite immoral one day once we perfect tissue culture. But then to go back and consider hunter-gatherer societies immoral seems a stretch. If you do take their situation into account when deciding the morality of their actions, that’s moral relativism.
Mark:
“Is it reasonable to value sentience? Maybe, maybe not. But I do, and I have no problems saying that I disagree with cultures who don’t.” That’s a big part of the problem. Different people value different things. What is more OK to kill? An octopus or a dog? I would be horrified at eating a dog, but find octopus delicious, despite the fact that they are very smart.