Ethics: Contemporary Readings

Harry Gensler, Earl Spurgin, James Swindal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134518524
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Ethics: Contemporary Readings is designed to lead any student into the subject, through carefully selected classic and contemporary articles. The book includes articles by the leading figures in the field and provides an excellent entry to the topic. The book complements Harry Gensler's Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 1998).

PART I

INITIAL APPROACHES TO MORALITY: CULTURAL RELATIVISM, SUBJECTIVISM, AND SUPERNATURALISM

RUTH BENEDICT

Defending Cultural Relativism

Ruth Benedict, an influential American anthropologist who lived from 1887 to 1948, specialized in the study of native American cultures.

Benedict claimed that what is considered “normal” varies greatly between societies. For example, trances and homosexuality, while considered “abnormal” in many cultures, are tolerated and have important social functions in some other cultures. What a culture considers “normal” is encouraged to continue; in time, it becomes a cultural “good.”

Benedict claims that ethics is relative to culture and that “morally good” is synonymous with “socially approved.” As you read the selection, ask yourself how plausible you find this view. How would you think about racism or other ethical issues if you followed it? Does Benedict herself completely endorse this relativism?

Abnormality in a culture

Social anthropology has become a study of the varieties and common elements of cultural environment and the consequences of these in human behavior. In the higher cultures the standardization of custom and belief has given a false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider survey to check the conclusions we hastily base upon this near-universality of familiar customs. 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 in mannerisms like ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief, or in human drives like sex, prove to be far more variable than experience in any one culture would suggest. In certain fields, such as religion or marriage, these wide limits of variability are well known and can be fairly described. In others it is not yet possible to give a generalized account.

One problem relates to the normal-abnormal categories. How far are such categories culturally determined, or how far can we with assurance regard them as absolute?

One of the most striking facts is the ease with which our abnormals function in other cultures. It does not matter what kind of “abnormality” we choose for illustration – those which indicate extreme instability, or those 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 Kwakiutl people

An extreme example is that of the North Pacific Coast of North America. The civilization of the Kwakiutl, at the time when it was first recorded in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was one of the most vigorous in North America. It was built up on an ample economic supply of goods, the fish which furnished their food staple being practically inexhaustible and obtainable with comparatively small labor, and the wood which furnished the material for their houses, their furnishings, and their arts being always procurable. They lived in coastal villages that compared favorably in size with those of any other American Indians and they kept up communication by means of sea-going canoes.

It was one of the most vigorous and zestful of the aboriginal cultures of North America, with complex crafts and ceremonials, and elaborate and striking arts. It certainly had none of the earmarks of a sick civilization. The tribes of the Northwest Coast had wealth in our terms. That is, they had not only a surplus of economic goods, but they made a game of the manipulation of wealth.

The details of this manipulation of wealth are in many ways a parody on our own economic arrangements, but it is with the motivations that were recognized in this contest that we are concerned. The drives were those which in our own culture we should call megalomaniac. There was an uncensored self-glorification and ridicule of the opponent that it is hard to equal in other cultures.

All of existence was seen in terms of insult. Not only derogatory acts performed by a neighbor or an enemy, but all untoward events, like a ducking when one’s canoe overturned, were insults. All threatened one’s ego security, and the first thought was how to get even, how to wipe out the insult. Until he had resolved upon a course of action by which to save his face after any misfortune, an Indian of the Northwest Coast retired with his face to the wall and neither ate nor spoke. He rose from it to follow out some course which according to the traditional rules should reinstate him in his own eyes and those of the community: to distribute property enough to wipe out the stain, or to go head-hunting in order that somebody else should be made to mourn. His activities in neither case were specific responses to the bereavement he had just passed through, but were elaborately directed toward getting even. If he had not the money to distribute and did not succeed in killing someone to humiliate another, he might take his own life. He had staked everything, in his view of life, upon a certain picture of the self, and, when the bubble of his self-esteem was pricked, he had no interest, no occupation to fall back on, and the collapse of his inflated ego left him prostrate.

Behavior honored upon the Northwest Coast is one which is recognized as abnormal in our civilization, and yet it is sufficiently close to the attitudes of our own culture to be intelligible to us. The megalomaniac paranoid trend is a definite danger in our society. It is encouraged by some of our major preoccupations, and it confronts us with a choice of two possible attitudes. One is to brand it as abnormal and reprehensible, and is the attitude we have chosen in our civilization. The other is to make it an essential attribute of ideal man, and this is the solution in the culture of the Northwest Coast.

Normality is defined by culture

Normality is culturally defined. An adult shaped to the drives and standards of these cultures, if he were transported into our civilization, would fall into our categories of abnormality. In his own culture, he is the pillar of society, the end result of socially inculcated mores.

No one civilization can utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior. Just as there are great numbers of possible phonetic articulations, and the possibility of language depends on a selection and standardization of a few of these, so the possibility of organized behavior of every sort, from the fashions of local dress and houses to a people’s ethics and religion, depends upon a similar selection among the possible behavior traits. In the field of economic obligations or sex taboos this selection is as nonrational and subconscious a process as it is in the field of phonetics. It is a process which goes on in the group for long periods of time and is historically conditioned by accidents of isolation or of contact of peoples.

Most organizations of personality that seem to us abnormal have been used by civilizations in the foundations of their institutional life. Conversely the most valued traits of our normal individuals have been looked on in differently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined.

Normality and the good

It is a point that has been made more often in relation to ethics. We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. 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 a morally good,” rather than “It is habitual,” and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the two phrases are synonymous.

The concept of the normal is a variant of the concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior for a particular society.

On the Northwest Coast the person who finds it difficult to read life in terms of an insult contest will be the person upon whom fall all the difficulties of the culturally unprovided for. The person who does not find it easy to humiliate a neighbor, who is genial and loving, may find some unstandardized way of achieving satisfactions, but not in the major patterned responses that his culture requires of him.

The vast majority of the individuals in any group are shaped to the fashion of that culture. In other words, most individuals are plastic to the molding force of the society into which they are born. In a society that values trance, as in India, they will have supernormal experience. In a society that institutionalizes homosexuality, they will be homosexual. In a society that sets the gathering of possessions as the chief human objective, they will amass property. The deviants, whatever the type of behavior the culture has institutionalized, will remain few in number. The majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them.

A hint of a non-relativist perspective

Western civilization allows and culturally honors gratifications of the ego which according to any absolute category would be regarded as abnormal. The portrayal of unbridled and arrogant egoists as family men, as officers of the law, and in business has been a favorite topic of novelists, and they are familiar in every community. Such individuals are probably mentally warped to a greater degree than many inmates of our institutions.

Our picture of our own civilization is no longer in terms of a changeless and divinely derived set of categorical imperatives. In this matter of mental ailments, we must face the fact that even our normality is man-made. Just as we have been handicapped in dealing with ethical problems so long as we held to an absolute definition of morality, so too in dealing with the problems of abnormality we are handicapped so long as we identify our local normalities with the universal sanities. No society has yet achieved self-conscious and critical analysis of its own normalities and attempted rationally to deal with its own social process. But the fact that it is unachieved is not therefore proof of its impossibility. It is a faint indication of how momentous it could be in human society.

Understanding abnormal human behavior in any absolute sense independent of cultural factors is still far in the future. The study of the neuroses and psychoses of our civilization give much information about the stresses of Western civilization, but no final picture of inevitable human behavior. Any conclusions about such behavior must await the collection by trained observers of psychiatric data from other cultures. Since no adequate work of the kind has been done at the present time, it is impossible to say what core of definition of abnormality may be found valid from the comparative material. It is as it is in ethics: all our local conventions of moral behavior and of immoral are without absolute validity, and yet it is quite possible that a modicum of what is considered right and what wrong could be disentangled that is shared by the whole human race.

Did Benedict follow her own theory?

After defining “good” as “socially approved,” what will Benedict do when she sees that racial discrimination is “socially approved”? Will she conclude that it is “good” – and come to favor it? Surprisingly, in this passage written ten years later, she saw racial discrimination as both socially approved and as bad (like a sickness).

As Americans of the 1940‘s we have important resources which we can use to reduce race prejudice. We shall be more successful the more realistically we use them and the less we hope for miracles. However much we hesitate to acknowledge it, race prejudice is deeply entrenched in our routine life and probably, measured by any objective standards, only South Africa goes further in segregation, discrimination, and humiliation. We do not seem, in the eyes of other nations, to be good exemplars of democratic equality. Our race prejudice is the great enemy within our gates. Our whole country is very sick.

Apparently against her own views, Benedict claimed that things that are socially approved, like racial discrimination, can still be bad (in some non-relative sense). In this next passage, she draws on her expertise as an anthropologist to argue against racist attitudes.

As an anthropologist, I know the studies on the superiority and inferiority of racial groups. No scientific study gives any basis for thinking that all the healthy people, the intelligent people, the imaginative people, are segregated in one race or born in certain countries and not in others. If you could choose the top third of the human race for their physical stamina, their brains and their decent human qualities, all races of the world would be represented in this top group.

We are always more complicated than we need to be when we explain race prejudice. We justify race prejudice by referring over and over to the poverty, illiteracy, and shiftlessness of the people we segregate – the bad effects of making anybody a second-class citizen. Why not try the experiment of offering every opportunity freely to all Americans, with no ifs and buts? We know from experience that people from every racial group in America and from every country of origin respond to education, become healthy when they have good food and good medical care, and can learn to perform the tasks our civilization offers.

When we succumb to race prejudice we don’t see the “man from outside” as a person in his own right, with eyes, ears, hands like ours. We classify him like a piece of merchandise by outward signs of color or face or gestures or language. We don’t judge him on his personal merits. The cure for race prejudice is as simple as that: to treat people on their merits, without reference to any label of race or religion or country of origin. There would he one effect: race prejudice would die of malnutrition.

America needs the help of all her citizens to ensure human dignity to all Americans.

Study questions

1 What motivates Benedict to study, in particular, cultures that are not “higher” cultures?

2 Which accepted practices of the Kwakiutl would be considered abnormal in most Western cultures?

3 What parallels does Benedict draw between social practices and language?

4 What problem does she raise regarding the “objectivity” of any observer of culture?

5 Does Benedict see the fact of cultural diversity as itself establishing that “good” means “socially approved”?

6 Explain the paragraph that mentions the possibility of universal values. Some think that Benedict here violates her own view. Do you agree?

7 When Benedict saw that racial discrimination was “socially approved,” did she conclude that it was therefore good?

8 On w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Harry J. Gensler: Moral Philosophy
• James C. Swindal and Earl W. Spurgin: The History of Ethics
• Part I: Initial Approaches to Morality: Cultural Relativism, Subjectivism, and Supernaturalism
• Part II: Further Approaches to Morality: Intuitionism, Emotivism, and Prescriptivism
• Part III: Ethical Methodology: Justifying Moral Claims, The Golden Rule, and Two Applications
• Part IV: Normative Theory: Consequentialism, Nonconsequentialism, Distributive Justice, and Virtue
• Part V: Applied Ethics: Abortion and other Issues
• Index