Abstract
“Values and Cultures” argues against cultural relativism (which denies objective values and holds that good and bad are relative to culture) and argues for cultural objectivism (which holds that cultures tend to share a common core of objective values). I begin by trying to make a plausible case for cultural relativism; then I point out problems with this view. I argue for three objective values that are widely shared across cultures. Consistency claims that we ought to be consistent in thought and action; this includes things like consistency in beliefs, ends and means, living in harmony with our moral beliefs, evaluating similar cases similarly, and treating others only as we’re willing to be treated in the same situation (the golden rule). Knowledge claims that we need to be informed and that false beliefs are to be avoided. Imagination claims that we need a vivid and accurate awareness of what it would be like to be in the place of those affected by our actions. Further sections deal with our evolutionary origins, various metaethical justifications, religion and ethics, and my experience of teaching ethics in the United States and China.
Harry J. Gensler died before publication of this work was completed.
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Notes
- 1.
“Cultural objectivism” is a strange term (I just invented it), but it’s useful to have this named alternative to cultural relativism. While cultural relativism is a specific metaethical view (about the meaning and objective status of ethical terms), cultural objectivism is compatible with various metaethical views (which may see the common core of objective values as based on things like self-evident intuitive truths, divine commands, what an ideal thinker would favor, universalizable prescriptions, and so on). We’ll discuss this later.
- 2.
My treatment of cultural relativism is an expanded version of Chapter 1 of my Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018); I’ll later refer to this book as “Ethics.” I’ll refer just by title to these further books of mine: Formal Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1996), Ethics and the Golden Rule (New York: Routledge, 2013), Ethics and Religion (New York: Cambridge, 2016), and Introduction to Logic, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017).
- 3.
Wonder Woman is a fictional comic book superhero created in the 1940s; see John Sazaklis and Luciano Vecchio (2015). See also two recent movies: Wonder Woman (2017) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020).
- 4.
In the United States, the 19th amendment to the Constitution (ratified on August 18, 1920) granted women the legal right to vote. The related 15th amendment (ratified on February 3, 1870) granted men (male adults) of every race the right to vote. Both amendments took much time to be put into practice in some areas.
- 5.
It grounds tolerance better if we hold that it’s objectively true that, in general, we ought to respect and allow actions, beliefs, and attitudes of other individuals and cultures, and dissenting views in our own culture, even when these differ from our own views. “In general” permits exceptions. We shouldn’t respect or allow hateful Nazi racist actions. And we should correct our children when they say “I hate people of such and such a group—because they’re all …” (giving a false stereotype). But in general, tolerance should rule.
- 6.
Cultural relativists often tend to think like moral realists when they evaluate the norms of their own society. Here’s an example. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict defended CR (“A defense of cultural relativism,” Journal of General Psychology 10 (1934), pp. 59–82): “We recognize that morality differs in every society and is a convenient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always preferred to say, ‘It is morally good,’ rather than ‘It is habitual’ …. But historically the two phrases are synonymous.” But when writing about racism later (Mead, 1959: 367–8, 359–60), she ignored her CR and saw racism as both socially approved and bad (like a sickness). She used anthropology to counter ideas about racial inferiority, claiming that the top third of the human race (physically, intellectually, or morally) includes all races. She urged America to “treat people on their merits, without reference to any label of race or religion or country of origin” and “ensure human dignity to all Americans”—even though these ideas clashed with her view that good = socially approved. While CR may seem sophisticated when we study other cultures, CR gives a crude way to actually reason about moral issues.
- 7.
What I’ve called “cultural objectivism” accepts moral realism but adds a factual claim, which most moral realists would accept, that cultures tend to share a common core of objective values.
- 8.
“Letter from the Birmingham jail,” available in many places on the Web (search for the title), for example https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/letterfrombirmingham_wwcw_0.pdf
- 9.
For a summary of scientific research about ethical universals, see Kinnier et al. (2000: 4–16).
- 10.
This is NOT going to be my view about ethics, but the possibility of this view raises problems for premise 1.
- 11.
On CR, the idea of moral progress makes no sense. Suppose that a society moves from A (racism) to B (equality for all); then A is better relative to earlier cultural norms, and B is better relative to later cultural norms—but neither is better in an unqualified (objective) sense.
- 12.
How the value is held (on the basis of factual errors) is flawed. In rare cases, there may be another argument, one with true premises and a valid form, that can establish the value; I don’t deny this.
- 13.
The old cultural norm was universal that no women ought to vote or hold office. Logically, a universal conclusion requires a universal premise, like that no women are capable of sophisticated political thinking—which is absolutely silly.
- 14.
We could have equally motivated randomly chosen males and females in a political science course and see how well each group does. Both groups would do about the same (as males and females do about the same in my logic courses, despite the stereotype that males are much more logical than females).
- 15.
When arguing ethical issues with those of a very different perspective, it’s often useful, instead of arguing from your premises, to try to understand the other person’s perspective and look for inconsistencies.
- 16.
My “We ought to be consistent in thought and action” is compatible with a range of metaethical views. An “inconsistency” might be based on logic and the meaning of terms, or it might be a disharmony that violates a moral truth or is forbidden by God or socially disapproved. Details will follow. As in math and logic, the rough ideas here are mostly agreed upon, but the foundations are disputed. My treatment of moral consistency and the golden rule here is a shorter version of Chapter 7 of my Ethics. See also my Formal Ethics, Ethics and the Golden Rule, and Introduction to Logic; the last of these puts my consistency norms into a precise formal system, using much logical machinery.
- 17.
I prefer the brief imperative form “Don’t combine …” I’d also assert longer forms, like “You ought not to combine …” or “It’s bad to combine these inconsistent things: …”
- 18.
See his Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford, 1962). Hare had a big influence on my thinking.
- 19.
Grimm, Brothers (1812), “The old man and his grandson,” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2591. See also http://harryhiker.com/goldrule.htm (my GR page) and http://harryhiker.com/stories.htm (GR stories).
- 20.
- 21.
On my approach, believing that something is all right (permissible) commits us to consenting to the act being done, or being willing that the act be done (where I use these as equivalents). But what exactly do these two terms mean here? I propose that these express a kind of legislating in our minds in which we, as a minimum, don’t condemn, object to, disapprove of, forbid, protest, prohibit, or repudiate the action (and we thus permit, allow, agree to, condone, or tolerate the action—in some sense of these terms).
- 22.
- 23.
My Ethics and the Golden Rule answers 33 objections to GR. For example, 30 objects that GR appeals to selfish self-interest while 31 objects that GR appeals to an unrealistic pure altruism; both are wrong—GR says nothing about motivation and is compatible with either self-interest or altruistic motivation.
- 24.
GR applies nicely to practical areas like racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination; global warming; moral education; how to treat animals; immigration; medical ethics; and business ethics. See Ethics, pp. 124–9, and Ethics and the Golden Rule, pp. 108–62.
- 25.
We could, if we liked, build “vivid awareness of the relevant facts” (understood in such a way that it includes my imagination condition) into an expanded knowledge condition. Then we’d have only two parts: As rational beings, we ought, as far as practically possible in our decision making, to be consistent and to be vividly aware of the relevant facts.
- 26.
Human reasonableness (wisdom) is more or less, since we never have a complete understanding of the situation. Reasonableness isn’t the same as truth; on controversial issues, sometimes reasonable people can differ. Practical reason narrows the range of acceptable views (so not just anything goes), but it needn’t bring complete agreement. I often add a fourth “other things” condition of further factors needed for reasonable moral beliefs (e.g., we need to be free to think for ourselves, instead of just conforming), but these “other things” are ultimately derivative feelings and character traits that support consistency, knowledge, and imagination—and so I skip them here. See my Ethics, p. 126, and Formal Ethics, pp. 151–52.
- 27.
For a fuller treatment, see my Ethics, pp. 161–68, and Ethics and the Golden Rule, pp. 131–35.
- 28.
- 29.
Also (see http://harryhiker.com/chronology.htm), the golden rule and its close relatives are present across the world in an impressively large number of sources (and often given as a summary of morality).
- 30.
See Kinnier et al. (2000: 4–16). The GR quote is from p. 5.
- 31.
My framework, instead of just listing transcultural ethical universals, tries to give the basic, transcultural norms that we can use to rationally evaluate and criticize values. I don’t try to give a mechanism that will generate for all cultures the same answers to all concrete ethical questions (an impossible task). Consider the general imperative to protect life (which GR will endorse for humans, who very much want their own lives to be protected). Different cultures create different civil laws and moral rules to promote life—in areas like traffic laws and gun control, for example. Differences here are fine, if they accord with practical reason: consistent (include GR-consistent), informed, and imaginative; not all cultures need to work out the details the same way. But not just anything goes; we saw in sections “Logic, cultural values, and consistency”, “Logic, cultural values, and reasoning”, “A broader consistency norm”, “The golden rule” and “Three technical GR distinctions” how to sharply criticize some cultural values.
- 32.
I’m not sure that this modified cultural relativism would work (I just invented it), and I certainly don’t endorse it. I’m bringing it up to emphasize that the cultural objectivism that I’m defending in this chapter is compatible with a wide range of metaethical views (about the meaning and objective status of ethical terms). To decide between these views is another task, but, again, I’d cast my vote for intuitionism.
- 33.
See my Ethics, pp. 154–61, and Ethics and the Golden Rule, pp. 34–67 and 76–107.
- 34.
See also Peter Glynn, God: The Evidence (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1997, pp. 57–97), who mentions many further studies, and Lawrence Iannaccone (“Introduction to the economics of religion,” Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1998), 1465–95), who disputes the idea that religion is gradually disappearing as people become more educated and scientific.
- 35.
See my Ethics, pp. 165–70, and Ethics and Religion, Ch. 4–6.
- 36.
While believers and nonbelievers will mostly come to the same moral beliefs (for example, that stealing is wrong), there may be some differences. Believers will recognize a duty to worship God while nonbelievers won’t. And there may be differences about issues like mercy killing, based on different beliefs about the origin and destiny of our lives.
- 37.
See the previous remarks in this section about the work of Bruce Sheiman.
- 38.
- 39.
See https://www.zazzle.com/store/harrygensler. I’m now trying to bring out similar GR shirts for further languages and religions.
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Gensler, H.J. (2024). Values and Cultures. In: Chakraborty, S. (eds) Human Minds and Cultures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56448-2_3
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