If you judge it permissible, are you doing so because you are a cultural relativist?
Do you think that FGC is morally permissible? If you judge the practice wrong, are you appealing to some notion of objective morality? If you judge it permissible, are you doing so because you are a cultural relativist? In either case, explain your reasoning.
*Sarah Cannon and Daniel Berman, “Cut Off: The Female Genital-Cutting Controversy,” Yale Journal of Public Health 1, no. 2 (2004).
CRITICAL THOUGHT: “Female Circumcision” and Cultural Relativism
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disagreement does not prove that no view can be objectively correct—no more than people’s dis- agreements about the size of a house show that no one’s opinion about it can be objectively true. Suppose Culture A endorses infanticide, but Cul- ture B does not. Such a disagreement does not demonstrate that both cultures are equally correct or that there is no objectively correct answer. After all, it is possible that infanticide is objectively right (or wrong) and that the relevant moral beliefs of either Culture A or Culture B are false.
Another reason to doubt the truth of Premise 2 comes from questioning how deep the disagree- ments among cultures really are. Judgments about the rightness of actions obviously do vary across cultures. But people can differ in their moral judg- ments not just because they accept different moral principles, but also because they have divergent nonmoral beliefs. They may actually embrace the same moral principles, but their moral judgments conflict because their nonmoral beliefs lead them to apply those principles in very different ways. If so, the diversity of moral judgments across cul- tures does not necessarily indicate deep disagree- ments over fundamental moral principles or standards. Here is a classic example:
[T]he story is told of a culture in which a son is regarded as obligated to kill his father when the lat- ter reaches age sixty. Given just this much informa- tion about the culture and the practice in question it is tempting to conclude that the members of that culture differ radically from members of our culture in their moral beliefs and attitudes. We, after all, believe it is immoral to take a human life, and regard patricide as especially wrong. But suppose that in the culture we are considering, those who belong to it believe (a) that at the moment of death one enters heaven; (b) one’s physical and mental condition in the afterlife is exactly what it is at the moment of death; and (c) men are at the peak of their physical and mental powers when they are sixty. Then what appeared at first to be peculiarities in moral outlook on the part of the cultural group in question regard- ing the sanctity of life and respect for parents, turn
out to be located rather in a nonmoral outlook of the group. A man in that culture who kills his father is doing so out of concern for the latter’s well-being— to prevent him, for example, from spending eternity blind or senile. It is not at all clear that, if we shared the relevant nonmoral beliefs of this other culture, we would not believe with them that sons should kill their fathers at the appropriate time.2
To find similar examples, we need not search for the exotic. In Western cultures we have the familiar case of abortion, an issue hotly debated among those who at first glance appear to be disagreeing about moral principles. But in fact the disputants agree about the moral principle involved: that mur- der (unjustly killing a person) is morally wrong. What they do disagree about is a nonmoral factual matter—whether the fetus is an entity that can be murdered (that is, whether it is a person). Disagree- ment over the nonmoral facts masks substantial agreement on fundamental moral standards.
The work of several anthropologists provides some evidence for these kinds of disagreements as well as for the existence of cross-cultural moral agreement in general. The social psychologist Solomon Asch, for instance, maintains that differ- ing moral judgments among societies often arise when the same moral principles are operating but the particulars of cultural situations vary.3 Other observers claim that across numerous diverse cul- tures we can find many common moral elements such as prohibitions against murder, lying, incest, and adultery and obligations of fairness, reciprocity, and consideration toward parents and children.4
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2Phillip Montague, “Are There Objective and Absolute Moral Standards?” in Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems in Philosophy, ed. Joel Feinberg, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1978), 490–91. 3Solomon Asch, Social Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952), 378–79. 4See, for example, Clyde Kluckhohn, “Ethical Relativity: Sic et Non,” Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955): 663–77, and E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1979).
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Some philosophers argue that a core set of moral values—including, for example, truth telling and prohibitions against murder—must be universal, otherwise cultures would not survive.
These points demonstrate that Premise 2 of the argument for cultural relativism is false. The argu- ment therefore gives us no good reasons to believe that an action is right simply because one’s culture approves of it.
For many people, however, the failure of the argument for cultural relativism may be beside the point. They find the doctrine appealing mainly because it seems to promote the humane and enlightened attitude of tolerance toward other cul- tures. Broad expanses of history are drenched with blood and marked by cruelty because of the evil of intolerance—religious, racial, political, and social. Tolerance therefore seems a supreme virtue, and cultural relativism appears to provide a justifica- tion and vehicle for it.