Cultural And Ethical Subjectivism
[Relevant for Public Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude]
Cultural And Ethical Subjectivism
There is quite understandable objection that any kind of ethical system based on human nature i.e. however adequately considered has to face and that stems from the undeniable fact of cultural relativism.
In one culture, polygamy is viewed as right and moral. In another, it is roundly condemned.
Not too long ago, certain tribes in the South Sea Islands considered the painless killing of one’s parents a filial duty. Most of us would be horrified at the very idea.
People across the globe are radically divided on the morality of birth control and divorce.
How do we explain these wide divergences, even contradictions?
Furthermore, studies in anthropology and sociology have led us to accept cultural relativism.
There is no one culture which can be seen as superior to others, we are told. Each culture makes sense, is sufficient unto itself and within its own religious and philosophical presuppositions.
And even if one were to claim that he-she is not critiquing an alien culture from his or her cultural standpoint, but from the fancied “neutral ground” of ‘common human nature’, isn’t that to say that least rather naive?
For he-she would be in effect advocating an understanding of human nature mediated by the “pre-understanding” of his or her own culture, however, subjectively convinced, he-she may be that strict detachment is being observed. And in any case, in the practical order of things, it would end up by the economically and politically dominant culture foisting itself upon the weaker ones.
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What is Cultural Relativism?
– Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation. |
In fact, isn’t this what globalization amounts to and haven’t we all been most vocal in finding fault with it?
Let us begin our response to these very pertinent questions with one important introductory remark. Many of the people who are up in arms at any mention of a common natural law confuse it with the rigid formalism of the Kantian “categorical imperative”.
Nothing could be more wrong.
The categorical imperative of Kantian morality could not but enjoin strict and absolute submission without any possibility of the least exception.
To make matters worse, they had to be motivated by a purely internal drive, not out of love for anyone or anything external to the agent, not even love for one’s country, God, family or friends. It had to be nothing but duty for duty’s sake. All this is enough to make any self-respecting antinomian, see red, to say the least.
Kant was determined that his system of ethics have an autonomous source. Basing mortal conduct on external grounds, the will of God, i.e. (Occam) or of positive law (Durkheim), would be to ask for trouble.
An atheist would be deprived of any moral foundation and positive law would scarcely help matters. It is susceptible to so many variants, often on the basis of vested interest and corruption, that it would afford, at best, a very shaky moral setup.
On the other hand, Kant’s agnostic epistemology, influenced by Hume, rendered it quite impossible to take the natural law based on human nature as the norm of morality.
As the first Critique of Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) had argued, we cannot know the “thing in itself”, the noumenon, and human nature is one of those things precisely. And this also leads to what behavioural economics is all about.
The only solution was for him to ground it among those a prior practical principle built into our very mental make-up, parallel to those speculative principles that the Critique Of Pure Reason has uncovered. These a priori, synthetic judgements were endowed with the qualities of strict universality and absolute necessity. One could as much expect exceptions to moral laws as one could require, say, the principle of Identity or Contradiction to allow for contraventions on the basis of special circumstances.
But if one were not to go along with humankind and accept that not only is there a common human nature in which we all participate but can discern what basically constitutes it; the problem is dispersed at once.
In the first place, this does not open the door to all manner of cultural exploitation and foisting questionable pre-understandings and perceptions onto recalcitrant people and their cultures.
The basic makeup of all humans or common human nature would comprise of the following data:
We are embodied beings with a capacity to transcendent space and time, are social by nature, rooted in a world and have some sort of relatedness to the ultimate, only that and nothing more.
No host of uncritical “commonness” are being smuggled in as a kind of packaged deal, forcing people to accept certain attitudes to people, places, things and even God as constituting our “common human nature”.
Furthermore, since perception is a necessary constituent of human nature, and this in itself opens the door to certain relativism -perceptual relativism – now this opens the door to a whole range of divergences within and between cultures, for if all people are seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting the same objects, they are not necessarily apprehending them in the same way, there is the possibility of acquitted tastes, and some people acquire them while others don’t.
Accepting a common human nature does not oblige us to subscribe to a single common view of things as rigid and unchanging as the Kantian categorical imperatives.
In as much as much of the culture is built on sense perception, there is plenty of scope for a certain cultural relativism.
However, not all cultural differences can be reduced to the mere relativeness of our perception of things.
Sometimes it stems from a broader and wider interpretation of the whole complexes of interrelated experiences. A particular local, regional or even national customs or rite may imply a judgement that people of a particular gender, ethnic or religious background are either non-persons or rather inferior versions of the species. As a result, they are disqualified from enjoying certain privileges and rites that another dominant group claims exclusively for it.
In cases such as these, where a clear ethical bias is manifest, one has every right to challenge and critique the culture concerned. Cultural divergence based on unquestionable hermeneutics and implying ardent discrimination against certain people cannot justify itself on the grounds of cultural difference.
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