Vice and virtue in everyday life pdf

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2 IS IT ALL RELATIVE?

Noting that what one society deems morally wrong, another deems right, ethical relativists conclude that morals are like manners or style of dress. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, quoting the poet Pindar, long ago announced the rela- tivist principle when he said, “Custom is king.”

Ethical relativism became popular in the nineteenth century when European social scientists traveled the world and discovered a bewildering variety of moral norms and practices. Anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and sociologists like Wil- liam Graham Sumner embraced ethical relativism and gave it the cachet of science.

Ethical relativism is a tempting doctrine because it appeals to our desire to be tolerant of other societies. However, it has not found much favor among profes- sional philosophers, who point out that while tolerance is a virtue, indifference to suffering is a vice. Several of the philosophers and moralists included in this chapter—Loretta M. Kopelman, Louis Pojman, R. M. MacIver, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—believe that while much morality is indeed a matter of local custom, some objectively valid moral principles apply to everyone. For them, tolerance ends when a practice or custom violates a universal human right. Lawrence Lengbeyer tries to work out a compromise between relativism and absolutism.

Recently a number of anthropologists have joined philosophers and theologians in rejecting relativism. They challenge the idea that social scientists must always be neutral bystanders. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban struggles with the problem of whether to condemn or to refrain from condemning the societies she studies. In the end she finds herself unable to retain the neutral “scientific” stance. Thomas Nagel argues that the Golden Rule in its negative form—not to do unto others what you would not have them do unto you—provides an objective nonrelativistic basis for morality.

Finally, when a relativist like Benedict or Sumner points to the diversity of vil- lages, and thus of norms, those who believe in universal moral standards can point to the newly emerging “global village.” Universal ethical principles are already fully

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codified for the “global village” in such documents as the United Nations Declara- tion of Human Rights, the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Children, and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Women. These declarations firmly assert that all people, regardless of cultural background, regardless of gender or social status, should enjoy certain basic moral rights. While it is certainly true that the United Nations declarations are not universally enforced, their very exis- tence suggests there may be far more moral consensus in the world than the relati- vists allow.

IS IT ALL RELATIVE? 77

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Morality As Custom

Herodotus

Herodotus (c. 485–425 B.C.) was the first Western historian. Much of what we know about the ancient world in and around Greece derives from him.

Following is one of the fragments of text by Herodotus available to us today. Although brief, it clearly shows that Herodotus may well be the first thinker in Western intellectual history to espouse a version of what today we call ethical relativism.

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in 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; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evi- dence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one’s country. One might recall, in particular, an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the pres- ence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it “king of all.”

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Herodotus says that people prefer the customs of their own country over those of all other countries. That may have been true in his day. Is it true in ours?

2. Herodotus’s example of what the ancient Greeks and Indians did with the bodies of their dead parents clearly shows that cultures have different customs. But does that make the case for ethical relativism? Though the two societies did it in very different ways, both seem to be engaged in honoring their deceased parents.

MORALITY AS CUSTOM From Herodotus’s The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by A. R. Burn (Penguin Classics 1954, revised edition 1972), copyright © the Estate of Aubrey de Sélincourt, 1954, copyright © A. R. Burn, 1972.

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A Defense of Moral Relativism

Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was one of America’s foremost anthropolo- gists. Her Patterns of Culture (1935) is considered a classic of comparative anthropology.

Morality, says Ruth Benedict, is a convenient term for socially approved customs (that is, mores). What one society approves may be disgraceful and unacceptable to another. Moral rules, like rules of etiquette or styles of dress, vary from society to society. Morality is culturally relative. Values are shaped by culture. As Benedict points out, trances are highly regarded in India, so in India many people have trances. Some ancient societies praised homosexual love, so there homosexuality was a norm. Where material possessions are highly valued, people amass property. “Most indi- viduals are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born.”

Modern social anthropology has become more and more a study of the varieties and common elements of cultural environment and the consequences of these in human behavior. For such a study of diverse social orders primitive peoples fortu- nately provide a laboratory not yet entirely vitiated by the spread of a standardized worldwide civilization. Dyaks and Hopis, Fijians and Yakuts are significant for psy- chological and sociological study because only among these simpler peoples has there been sufficient isolation to give opportunity for the development of localized social forms. In the higher cultures the standardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given a false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that have gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider survey in order to check the conclusions we hastily base upon this near-universality of familiar cus- toms. Most of the simpler cultures did not gain the wide currency of the one which, out of our experience, we identify with human nature, but this was for various his- torical reasons, and certainly not for any that gives us as its carriers a monopoly of social good or of social sanity. Modern civilization, from this point of view, becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achievement but one entry in a long series of possible adjustments.

These adjustments, whether they are in mannerisms like the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief in any society, or in major human drives like those of sex, prove to be far more variable than experience in any one culture would suggest. In certain fields, such as that of religion or of formal marriage arrangements, these

A DEFENSE OF MORAL RELATIVISM From “Anthropology and the Abnormal” by Ruth Benedict, in The Journal of General Psychology 10 (1934): 59–82. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth St., N.W., Washington, DC, 20036-1802. Copyright © 1934.

RUTH BENEDICT: A DEFENSE OF MORAL RELATIVISM 79

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wide limits of variability are well known and can be fairly described. In others it is not yet possible to give a generalized account, but that does not absolve us of the task of indicating the significance of the work that has been done and of the pro- blems that have arisen.

One of these problems relates to the customary modern normal-abnormal cate- gories and our conclusions regarding them. In how far are such categories culturally determined, or in how far can we with assurance regard them as absolute? In how far can we regard inability to function socially as diagnostic of abnormality, or in how far is it necessary to regard this as a function of the culture?

As a matter of fact, one of the most striking facts that emerge from a study of widely varying cultures is the ease with which our abnormals function in other cul- tures. It does not matter what kind of “abnormality” we choose for illustration, those which indicate extreme instability, or those which are more in the nature of character traits like sadism or delusions of grandeur or of persecution, there are well-described cultures in which these abnormals function at ease and with honor, and apparently without danger or difficulty to the society.

The most notorious of these is trance and catalepsy. Even a very mild mystic is aberrant in our culture. But most peoples have regarded even extreme psychic man- ifestations not only as normal and desirable, but even as characteristic of highly val- ued and gifted individuals. This was true even in our own cultural background in that period when Catholicism made the ecstatic experience the mark of sainthood. It is hard for us, born and brought up in a culture that makes no use of the experi- ence, to realize how important a role it may play and how many individuals are capable of it, once it has been given an honorable place in any society.…

Cataleptic and trance phenomena are, of course, only one illustration of the fact that those whom we regard as abnormals may function adequately in other cul- tures. Many of our culturally discarded traits are selected for elaboration in differ- ent societies. Homosexuality is an excellent example, for in this case our attention is not constantly diverted, as in the consideration of trance, to the interruption of rou- tine activity which it implies. Homosexuality poses the problem very simply. A ten- dency toward this trait in our culture exposes an individual to all the conflicts to which all aberrants are always exposed, and we tend to identify the consequences of this conflict with homosexuality. But these consequences are obviously local and cultural. Homosexuals in many societies are not incompetent, but they may be such if the culture asks adjustments of them that would strain any man’s vitality. Wherever homosexuality has been given an honorable place in any society, those to whom it is congenial have filled adequately the honorable roles society assigns to them. Plato’s Republic is, of course, the most convincing statement of such a read- ing of homosexuality. It is presented as one of the major means to the good life, and it was generally so regarded in Greece at that time.

The cultural attitude toward homosexuals has not always been on such a high ethical plane, but it has been very varied. Among many American Indian tribes there exists the institution of the berdache, as the French called them. These men- women were men who at puberty or thereafter took the dress and the occupations of women. Sometimes they married other men and lived with them. Sometimes they were men with no inversion, persons of weak sexual endowment who chose this rôle to avoid the jeers of the women. The berdaches were never regarded as of

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first-rate super-natural power, as similar men-women were in Siberia, but rather as leaders in women’s occupations, good healers in certain diseases, or, among certain tribes, as the genial organizers of social affairs. In any case, they were socially placed. They were not left exposed to the conflicts that visit the deviant who is excluded from participation in the recognized patterns of his society.

The most spectacular illustrations of the extent to which normality may be cul- turally defined are those cultures where an abnormality of our culture is the corner- stone of their social structure. It is not possible to do justice to these possibilities in a short discussion. A recent study of an island of northwest Melanesia by Fortune describes a society built upon traits which we regard as beyond the border of para- noia. In this tribe the exogamic groups look upon each other as prime manipulators of black magic, so that one marries always into an enemy group which remains for life one’s deadly and unappeasable foes. They look upon a good garden crop as a confession of theft, for everyone is engaged in making magic to induce into his gar- den the productiveness of his neighbors’; therefore no secrecy in the island is so rig- idly insisted upon as the secrecy of a man’s harvesting of his yams. Their polite phrase at the acceptance of a gift is, “And if you now poison me, how shall I repay you this present?” Their preoccupation with poisoning is constant; no woman ever leaves her cooking pot for a moment untended. Even the great affinal economic exchanges that are characteristic of this Melanesian culture area are quite altered in Dobu since they are incompatible with this fear and distrust that pervades the culture. They go farther and people the whole world outside their own quarters with such malignant spirits that all-night feasts and ceremonials simply do not occur here. They have even rigorous religiously enforced customs that forbid the sharing of seed even in one family group. Anyone else’s food is deadly poison to you, so that communality of stores is out of the question. For some months before harvest the whole society is on the verge of starvation, but if one falls to the temp- tation and eats up one’s seed yams, one is an outcast and a beachcomber for life. There is no coming back. It involves, as a matter of course, divorce and the break- ing of all social ties.