 Alright, so what question is Sumner trying to answer? He's given us this article, and we've read it, and we've even talked about it some. But what's the question he's trying to answer? Now you might say that he's trying to answer the question, how should one live one's life. Well yeah, sort of, that's true, but he's going to be doing something much more immediate in the meantime. Just like all the philosophers this semester, and just like him last time, they are all trying to answer the question, how should one live one's life? Well by asking a second question, a different question, and the answer to that second question is going to give us an answer to this first one. So what's he trying to ask? Is he asking, or trying to answer, what are the mores? Well no, if he was trying to answer this question, he'd give us kind of an exposition to different moral beliefs across different customs. He does a little bit of that, but that's not his primary purpose, and anything that he does do as far as that's concerned is to serve to answer this second question. Okay, well then how about what is culture? Well again, he doesn't give us an answer to this question. He doesn't provide a definition for culture and explain how the different practices of people across different times and places are instances of that definition. So no, he's not doing that. And answering this question, by the way, doesn't really tell us anything about morality necessarily, and he's going to have something to say about morality. Well how about how do the mores change? He does this a little bit. He gives us something of an answer, at least why the mores change. But that's not his primary purpose, and anything that he says regarding this is going to have an impact on his point, his main overall point. Well then what's he trying to answer? Believe it or not, he's doing the same thing Hume is doing. He's trying to answer the question, what justifies moral beliefs? He's trying to answer the question, what justifies moral beliefs? So both Hume and Sumner are trying to answer the same question, but by the way, they come up with different answers. Hume thought that what justifies moral beliefs is one's own desires, their passions. Well Sumner says the culture justifies moral beliefs. What the culture determines to be moral is what's moral. What the culture determines to be immoral is what's immoral. There's nothing more or less to figure out what morality is, other than investigating what the culture says it is.