>[Bernard Walker, instructor] Now in the last PowerPoint,
I asked you to answer two questions on your own.
And I'm really concerned about the first question:
What makes an action be right or wrong?
I'm not really interested in the second question,
but when students answer the first question,
they often give an answer that is adequate or appropriate
for the second question,
which is: Where do you get your beliefs from?
The focus of this PowerPoint
will look at mainly the first question,
but look at the second question as well
and point out or to reiterate
that ethics is basically based on what you do to someone
or how you affect someone,
and it's not based on a mere belief that you may have.
And the position or the view that holds that latter claim
is called cultural relativism.
I will discuss it in this PowerPoint,
but critique it in the third PowerPoint after this one.
Let's take a look at four examples
that will illustrate the distinction between
what makes something be right or wrong
and the mere belief where you get your beliefs from.
To make the point again,
let's look at the two questions from the previous PowerPoint:
What makes a belief true, or what makes an action be true?
And where do you get beliefs from?
You see these two questions on the far left.
Let's consider four examples.
The first one: “Oatmeal reduces your overall cholesterol level.”
We can ask: Where did you get the belief that that's true?
There are many answers you can give. (You could perhaps say your doctor.)
But what makes the belief true
is that oatmeal actually does reduce cholesterol in your body.
The truth of that belief, what makes it be true,
is what oatmeal does in the world,
not your belief but what oatmeal does to your body.
The second example, suppose it's true:
"Sometimes Hmong patients refuse surgery and blood draws."
If we were to ask the question: Where did you get this belief from?
supposing it is true, you can give many answers,
and one would be that you have a Hmong friend who told you this.
What makes the belief true
is simply that this is what Hmong people sometimes do.
The belief is made true by what Hmong people do or do not do
in a hospital or medical clinic.
The third example says: "The best way to lose weight is diet, not exercise."
Let's suppose that statement is true.
We can ask: Where did you get this particular belief from?
Why do you believe it?
Basically, that's the question.
Again, many answers could be given.
You could say you came to this belief from what you read in the magazine
or from what a dietitian told you about certain diets.
But what makes the belief true
is what a diet does to you in terms of you losing weight.
So the truth of the belief is not based on you
or based on your dietitian or a magazine.
What makes the belief true is simply the effect the diet has on your body,
something that is happening in the world.
In this case, it's not something you're doing;
it's something that the food that you're digesting does to your body.
So these first three examples are definitely evidence-based,
meaning that they are true and you discover they are true
by evidence of things that they do in the world.
Now the fourth example is quite different.
It says that it's true that you cannot run with a basketball
when you play basketball.
If the question were posed: Where did you get this belief from?
Again, any number of answers could be given.
You can say your high school or middle school gym teacher told you this
or your neighborhood friends at the park or your parents.
All kinds of answers could be given as to where you got this belief from.
But to the question, "What makes it be true?" would be a simple answer.
The inventor of basketball, who is Dr. James Naismith.
So the reason why it's true that you cannot run with a basketball,
what makes that belief true,
unlike the other three examples on this slide here,
are not events in the world, but internal to Dr. Naismith,
his beliefs about how the game of basketball should be played.
So this last example actually is not evidence-based
because it's stating something true about a person's belief,
namely what this man, Dr. James Naismith believes
about how his game that he invented should be played.
However, oatmeal is not in a person's mind and neither is cholesterol.
The interaction between those two things are outside of your mind;
and whether or not oatmeal reduces cholesterol has everything to do
with the interaction between oatmeal and cholesterol.
The same thing would be true about Hmong patients.
What makes it true that they refuse surgery
is, in fact, that they refuse surgery.
What makes a diet-- what causes a diet to make you lose weight
is simply the effect a diet has on your body.
But with basketball, what makes it wrong to run with a basketball
is not something about the world,
because before Dr. James Naismith was born or invented the game,
there was nothing called basketball.
What makes it wrong to run with the ball is simply he said so
because the truth of that statement
is based in his mind, Dr. James Naismith.
The truth of what oatmeal does to cholesterol
is not in a person's mind but in its effect on your body.
Again, the same thing with blood draws with Hmong patients
and diets and losing weight.
The point overall that I want to make here
is that with ethics, it is evidence-based like the first three examples here,
not like the last example with basketball.
What makes murder be wrong or what makes rape be wrong
is not your belief, not my belief, not the beliefs of a culture or a society.
What makes murder or rape be wrong
is what you do to someone that describes rape or murder.
It's what you do to another person that makes those actions wrong.
Rape is wrong because you are causing harm
(physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual) to another person.
So you may say that rape is wrong, and that would be true,
but what makes it be wrong is not your belief about rape,
but what rape actually does to another person.
Again, ethics is about what you do,
and you could discover the evidence for what people do to other persons
by looking at events in the world.
Like science, medicine, in general, ethics is evidence-based.
So when we say ethics is evidence-based,
we're looking for evidence of events,
of things you do to other persons or things.
So back to Question 1 in the previous PowerPoint,
if you said society, culture, family, personal perspective, feelings, religion,
these would not be good coherent answers to Question 1,
and the rest of this PowerPoint will attempt to show you that that's the case.
Let me give one example with family and religion.
How did your family make an action be right or wrong?
I'm not sure what answer could be given.
Your family could tell you or inform you that an action is right or wrong,
but it couldn't make an action be right or wrong.
Or consider religion.
A religion can inform you (say, through the Bible)
that an action is wrong,
say that it's wrong to murder someone.
But surely the Bible does not make murder be wrong;
it simply informs you that it is the case that murder is wrong.
The most popular answer people give to Question 1
is the top of this list here: culture or society,
which I will use interchangeably.
And it also is like religion.
Cultures and society cannot make murder be right or wrong.
Those are just not good answers to Question number 1.
Among those answers that I just talked about,
culture turns out to be the most popular answer
that people give to Question 1.
Let's focus our attention on culture
as we try to figure out what makes ethics be what it is, what it's about.
And I don't want to beat this into the ground with you,
but it's important that you really get this point.
Going back to Questions 1 and 2,
there is a big difference between, if we're talking culture,
saying a culture makes an action right or wrong
and saying that a culture informs you that an action is right or wrong.
So let's look at another example of this distinction between 1 and 2
as we focus on the issue of culture.
On this slide here, Statement number I
is answering Question number 2 from the previous PowerPoint.
That is, it’s answering the question:
Where do you get your ethical beliefs from?
How do you come to believe what you believe about murder, rape, so forth?
And Statement number 2 below
is answering Question 1 from the PowerPoint:
What makes an action right or wrong?
Let's take a look here.
Here, number 1, it says:
"My cultural upbringing taught that murder and rape are wrong,
and that people should be treated fairly."
This is a very good answer
to the question of “Where do you get your beliefs from?”
In this case, since we're talking about culture,
you can say culture informed you that murder and rape are wrong.
But now let's look at the second statement here.
“My cultural upbringing makes murder and rape be wrong.”
It makes treating people fairly, right."
Now, the second statement is rather incoherent.
It's quite problematic.
What would it mean to say that your culture
makes murder be right or wrong?
It's just not informative.
The first statement here is that culture teaches you what's right or wrong,
but it would not make any sense to say that your culture has a magic ability
to make murder be right or wrong or [rape] be right or wrong.
Another example about culture:
When the Rosebud Sioux Tribe says it is ethically wrong to build
the Keystone XL pipeline on its reservation,
it is not saying Number 1 here,
namely, “it is ethically wrong for the Keystone XL pipeline
to be built on the Rosebud [Sioux] Tribe’s reservation
because we believe it's ethically wrong.”
That statement is simply saying it's wrong, merely because that's what they believe.
Again, that's sort of like the example of basketball.
What makes it wrong to run with the ball
is simply what Dr. James Naismith believed about how the game should be played.
We don't want to say that about ethics.
Rather, the second statement is more likely
what a representative of the Sioux Tribe would say,
namely that it's ethically wrong
for the pipeline to be built on the reservation
because doing so will cause harm to the people there,
and they could even add “to cause problems with sacred ground.”
Despite all of this, some of you might be getting a little irritated
and say something like the following:
Why is culture not a good answer for making actions be right or wrong?
Who are we to say culture is wrong?
That is, isn't it a bit arrogant to say that another culture is wrong
if they disagree with us?
The short answer here is not about disagreeing with you or anyone else
as it is that no one makes any action right or wrong.
It's again, what you do in the world.
So even if your belief is correct about murder being wrong,
your belief is not what makes murder wrong;
it's what someone is doing to another person
when an act like murder occurs.
Let me try to finally summarize this point
by simply making a distinction
between what culture really addresses,
and it's not going to be ethics.
But what is the focus of culture?
This requires us to make some definition distinctions.
So if we were to focus only on culture now.
and in doing so, you will see
that it really would be unrelated to ethics,
but let's first define culture.
I'm looking here at the free dictionary.
Here's the definition found in a dictionary.
It says culture is the integrated system
of socially acquired values, beliefs, and rules of conduct
which delimit the range of accepted behaviors in any given society.
So if you want to know what culture you belong to,
there's a set of socially set values
(values being things that are important to a group of people),
a set of beliefs that those people identify with,
and a certain way of behaving.
If you value these things, believe these beliefs,
and act a certain way within a certain range that that group has decided,
then you're part of that group.
And that's basically what a culture is.
It includes things like what food is identified with a particular culture,
clothes, greetings, things of that sort.
If you don't adopt these values, these beliefs, and ways of behaving,
that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.
You're just not identified with that particular culture.
This is the definition of culture.
Let's take a look at some examples here.
Let's consider customs within cultures like weddings.
In the United States,
a typical wedding time-wise is about 45 minutes to an hour.
In India, it lasts several days.
Neither time the culture of India or the United States is right or wrong.
This is because customs and cultures are not true or false.
We just don't use words like true or false
or even correct or incorrect or wrong or right.
It's not wrong to have a wedding 45 minutes or several days.
These are just different ways that different cultures perform wedding ceremonies.
But what they do is not based on anything out there in the world.
They just simply made a decision
that a wedding will be (in the case of the United States)
45 minutes to an hour;
and in India, over several days.
Let's shift from weddings to clothing, another custom within cultures.
The clothes from the 1970s
is definitely not what most people on planet Earth wear in the 21st century,
but that's okay.
There's nothing wrong about wearing leisure suits,
which is what these models are wearing.
The culture of the 1970s had a preference for leisure suits,
but it was neither right nor wrong for them having this preference.
Leisure suits were simply the taste at that time.
Here's an important point.
Tastes of any sort are not true, they're not false;
they're not right, they're not wrong.
They do change over time, however.
We know this because more than likely,
none of you have a taste or preference for a leisure suit.
Here's another instance of clothing as a custom of a culture.
This is, of course, the 1980s.
The cheesy '80s clothes displayed above in these photos
is not better, more correct than the clothes of the 1970s.
The big hairdo and the pastel colors are the essence of the 1980s.
If you're from that time, you would recognize that.
With that said, they are simply different ways of wearing clothes,
the clothes you that you see these people are wearing,
these actors and actresses.
And these clothes simply express the various tastes
that people had at that time.
These tastes are not true, they're not false.
We could, if not use the word “taste,” we could say "preference."
But preferences and tastes are not true, they're not false.
They're not right, they're not wrong.
They're just what we had in the 1980s
and we no longer have a taste or a preference for these kinds of clothes.
The clothes haven't changed.
What has changed is our taste for them.
Here's a final example of clothing within various cultures.
What you see on the left
would be what's best described as hipster culture,
and what's on the right would be best described as hip-hop.
These are just different ways of wearing clothes,
reflecting different tastes in clothes.
Again, these clothes are neither right nor wrong, true or false.
They are simply expressing the taste that people living today
(as opposed in the 1980s and ‘70s)
have about what looks good to wear in the streets.
So it would be incorrect to say that the clothes that the hipsters wear
is more correct, better than what people wore in the ‘70s or ‘80s
or what hip-hop wears in distinction from what hipsters wear.
These are just two different ways of how people prefer to wear clothes.
There's nothing right or wrong about any of these examples.
That's because they simply are expressing tastes and preferences
that people have within a culture.
On a side note here,
if you do wear your pants as low as the hip hop culture does,
over a period of time, your spinal— your skeletal system,
I should say your backbone will be elongated as this illustration shows.
(That's a little comedy there for you.)
Our last example here is about greetings.
In some parts of the world (in Asia, in particular), people bow.
There's nothing right or wrong about bowing,
but that's just what people in Asia have decided to do
when they express greeting someone.
They have various levels of bowing
based on the respect they have for the other person.
Again, that's just what they do.
There's no right way about greeting,
but that's what they chose in their culture as a way of greeting people.
In other cultures (like in the United States),
people shake hands.
That's the way of greeting people in this country in particular.
There's nothing right or wrong about shaking hands.
But it's interesting here, whether you bow or shake hands,
you could do both and there's nothing ethically wrong or right about either one,
just different preferences or different conduct behavior, I should say,
that people adopted that identify them within a given culture.
And ethics is not that way.
It's not about what we believe we should do for some arbitrary reason
that we just made that decision,
like inventing a sport or a game like chess.
It's about what we do in the world
in terms of the consequences of our action and behavior toward others.
That's what ethics is going to be about in a large sense, in a broad sense.
It won't be based on our mere beliefs about the world,
but in fact, what we do out there in the world
toward others and other living beings.
Now I have tried in several ways to describe what culture is
and indirectly make the claim
that culture and ethics are not related in any significant way.
But with that said, there are those people in society
who believe that culture is the foundation of ethics,
and this view is called cultural or ethical relativism.
Okay, so I'm going to let you know now
that this is a view that I will be critiquing as we move along.
It really holds no place in ethics,
but it's very common, as I've been trying to point out.
Cultural relativism has two premises, I guess you could say.
One is that not only is it true
that ethical beliefs vary from culture to culture,
such that there's a set of ethical beliefs for each culture,
but each culture’s set of beliefs is normative and true.
Okay, so let's unpack that.
The first claim is not controversial.
That is, if you go to a given culture in some country somewhere,
that the ethical beliefs of that culture would be likely different
from the ethical beliefs of another culture
in another country somewhere.
So this is not radical.
This is not a mysterious or problematic claim.
In fact, we have a name for Number I,
and that's what we call descriptive relativism.
Descriptive relativism basically says that if you go to a culture or investigate a culture
as an anthropologist or as a sociologist,
you would discover that various cultures have different beliefs,
whether they be ethical beliefs or beliefs about any number of issues, okay?
So the person who proposes descriptive relativism
is simply, as the phrase is stated here,
simply describing the relativism that exists among different cultures.
Okay?
So if an anthropologist or a sociologist said something like this:
“In culture X, they believe in honor killing,
where the family could stone to death their daughter.
That's just what they believe in culture X.
But culture Y has a totally different view
that says people should not be killed because they dishonor the family.”
The person who reports this information
is not taking a side or a position.
They're simply describing two different viewpoints
about, say, marriage,
where one believes that the daughter should marry who the parents have selected;
and in another culture, they don't hold that same view.
So descriptive relativism does not favor a certain ethical position.
It simply describes the variation
that is out there in the world among different cultures.
So that's the first premise of cultural relativism,
which is that there are various beliefs in the world
that are held by various cultures.
Ethical beliefs vary from culture to culture.
That is, again, not problematic.
Premise number 2 is where we have problems.
Here, cultural relativism says that each culture's ethical beliefs
are normative and true,
meaning [that] this is how things out to be done
and these beliefs are true within the context of that culture.
That's like saying that if Hitler believed that Aryans were the superior race,
that would be true within his culture,
meaning, not because they just believe it,
but it's actually true that Aryans are the superior race within that culture.
Okay?
So Premise number 2 is what's problematic.
It is making a claim that not only do beliefs vary from culture to culture,
but these beliefs are actually true and they have a normative status,
meaning that you should honor and be bounded to them or obey them.
Okay?
Descriptive relativism, again, does not make that claim.
It just simply says that ethical beliefs vary from place to place.
Cultural relativism says the mere belief of a claim
is what makes it be true.
It is not considered true;
it actually is true, within that particular culture.
Cultural relativism is problematic. Descriptive relativism isn't.
So in conclusion, what I've tried to do here
is point out that cultures consist of normative beliefs, values, and actions
that are neither true nor false,
meaning there's a certain expectation
of how you ought to believe within a culture,
how you ought to see things.
There's a certain way that you ought to value,
there are certain values you ought to have,
and there's certain things you ought to do within a culture
that are neither true nor false, via things like customs, for example.
Ethics, on the other hand,
consists of beliefs, values, and actions that are objective
and involve things about what we do to each other,
things we do in the real world,
and they are true,
regardless of the culture that they are expressed in.
The culture does not determine ethics.
But there is a view that denies what I just said,
and this is called cultural relativism,
and we will destruct and critique cultural relativism
in the next PowerPoint.