 Every culture has what Sumner calls mores. Mores are the beliefs in a society or in a culture about what is right or wrong. There are plenty of other beliefs to be sure in different cultures. Sumner just kind of groups them all under folk ways. There are beliefs about history, about science, politics, law, morality, so the mores for morality, even history. There are cultural beliefs that dictate all of these things. So the mores, like I said, the mores are these beliefs about how you are to live your life, about what is moral, about what is right or wrong. In our own culture we have particular values for instance, we value democracy, we value liberty, we value equality, self-sufficiency. These are things that our culture says is good. So these are examples of mores in our culture. Sumner will argue that mores, these beliefs about what is right or wrong, given by culture, are all you need to know about morality. There is no further justification for the mores other than what the culture says. And this is cultural relativism, the belief that what is right or wrong is dictated by culture, is dictated by when and where you are. We'll look at the Sumner's argument here in these excerpts and maybe have a few comments to offer along the way. Before we get into the details of Sumner's argument, it's worth noting what kind of argument he gives. Now in class we looked at several different kinds of arguments, modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism, and so on. However, those are all deductive forms of inference. A deductively valid argument is an argument such that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Or another way of saying this is that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Sumner is not offering a deductively valid argument. Rather, he's offering an inductive argument. Now inductive is different from deductive. Inductive arguments are arguments where the truth of the premises or the evidence makes the conclusion more likely to be true, but does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Now inductive reasoning is not bad. It's a very... Inductive reasoning are really good forms of reasoning. Pretty much all those physical sciences, they're all inductive reasoning. With scientific reasoning, we form a hypothesis, we construct an experiment to test the hypothesis, we observe the results of the experiment, and we figure out whether the hypothesis is confirmed or disconfirmed by the experiment. Well, the argument that Sumner is offering is different from even scientific... from the scientific method. He's offering what's called abductive reasoning. Now, abductive does not mean he kidnaps the conclusion. Abductive inference is an inference to the best explanation. It's the one that's used most often. So it's a phrase used most often for that. So the idea is that a person makes a series of observations or collects some evidence, looks at several competing explanations for the evidence, and then figures out which explanation is most likely to be true, and then, given the evidence, and then infers that that explanation is what's true. All right. Now, there is some abductive reasoning used in science, but sciences use observation experiment very, very heavily. So examples of abductive reasoning would be something like this. You know, right now I'm standing out here, and the sky is cloudy, and I'm feeling the occasional drop of moisture. So there are several competing hypotheses for this. There are hidden people in the background, and they're all shooting water guns at me occasionally. That's possible, given the evidence. Another possibility is that there's a giant chunk of ice being suspended by a helicopter way high in the sky, and as the ice is melting, the drops are falling on me. That's another possible explanation. Another possible explanation is that it's trying to rain. Rain is struggling to fall in the current conditions. Now, since rain falling is more likely to be true than hidden water gun pistoliers and giant floating, melting ice cubes, I am going to conclude that it is raining. That's an abductive inference. Abductive inference is not bad. It's a well-used form of inference. If you've ever heard of Occam's razor, this is an instance of abductive reasoning. Occam's razor is given two competing hypotheses of equal explanatory power. You choose the hypothesis that has the fewer assumptions or presumes the fewer number of entities involved. And it was this form of inference that was used when we're dealing with different models of the universe, going from a solar-centered, I'm sorry, going from a Terra-centered or Earth-centered view of the universe to a solar-centered view of the universe. So Sumner is offering his own abductive argument. And the conclusion of his abductive argument is that the mores are justified by the culture, or in other words, that the moral beliefs are made true by the culture. And he offers a series of observations to justify this claim. So let's take a look at those observations one by one. Well, the first observation that Sumner offers is the claim that the moral beliefs are limited, the mores are limited by tradition. And by limited, what he means is something like this, that the moral beliefs, if there are any new ones, are going to be either consistent with the tradition, or they're going to be logical implications of the tradition. So for instance, we have in our own culture, we value liberty. So we've had several different beliefs about liberty. And as new ideas or new kinds of technologies come along, we expand our beliefs about what includes liberty given new technologies. So this video camera, I am free, because we appeal to liberty, I am free to record myself in my own environment. I am free to record myself really any way I choose. So long as I don't interfere with other people's liberties. And what I do with that recording is also going to be a function of liberty. As long as, for instance, I don't impinge upon anybody else's liberties by showing the recordings or anything like that, then I'm free to use the recordings as I see fit. So that's one notion and that's one way that beliefs are going to be influenced or are going to be guided by what the tradition says. The other way that moral beliefs are guided by tradition is that any belief that is contrary to the tradition, to the values, to the mores of the culture, is going to be rejected. So again, we appeal to liberty. This means that we reject ideas about say, you know, there are some ways in which we say that the government can interfere with our actions, but not always. Because we value liberty, our government, our society cannot dictate to us what career we should take. So any belief or any kind of action that is contrary to these notions of liberty are ones that are going to be rejected. And in fact, a lot of our values held in our culture are also enforced by law. No one person can interfere with another person's liberty and do so legally. You always have to at best not interfere with somebody else's liberty if not enable their liberty. So this is the first observation. And you know, some of that carries us over not just to mores, but to the other culture beliefs. So history, science, mathematics, sociology, art, these will all be, some of them say these will all be limited by the tradition. So we have the observation Sumner offers that the mores beliefs are limited by tradition. He offers another claim about why we have the mores we have. So the idea that Sumner gives us is that the mores that are dictated by culture are those things that promote our interests or promote the interests of the people. And specifically by interest, seeming something like that which produces happiness with the people and that which limits or prevents unhappiness or misery or pain. So just looking again at our own culture when we're thinking about liberty, the reason why our culture promotes liberty is because at the very least it's a belief in our culture that liberty promotes happiness, that liberty produces happiness. That when we are free to make decisions about our own life, we're better off. That's in our own best interests. So there's this idea, this observation that Sumner offers. When we look at the mores of a culture, there's at the very least the idea that these mores are what produces happiness. You might wonder whether, I mean Sumner's not real clear here whether the mores actually produce happiness or whether it's just what we believe to produce happiness. There's some room for, there's some wiggle room there regarding that, but at the very least there's this idea that the mores are going to be dictated or the reason why the culture dictates the mores is because these are what produces happiness. Well even Sumner has to acknowledge that mores change in a culture. Now he thinks or he believes that mores do change, but the mores change due to external influences to the culture, not internal ones. So remember he's making this claim that the mores are limited by the tradition. They're limited by the tradition so only those mores that are consistent with or are logically implied by the tradition can happen and not any that are contrary to it. But the mores do change. So Sumner believes that the mores change due to external influences with the culture and the external influences will have an impact on whether or not the mores can effectively promote interest or promote this happiness. So the idea is something like this, in our own city we've had a lot of decreased waterfall and decreased rainfall in our own area. So we have a greater scarcity of water in this city. And you go back 30 years and there really wasn't a problem with watering your lawn every week. No I'm sorry every day of the week. Or three to four times a week. There really wasn't a problem with this. And people didn't get up in arms about sprinklers, sprinklers missing the grass and hitting the sidewalk all the time. This really wasn't an issue. You didn't have days of the week where you didn't have water restricted days that we have now. Well the reason why we have these changes now in the mores is because water is more scarce. We've had a lot less rainfall. The aquifer level is a lot lower. Now since there's this external change, there are changes in the mores or changes within the tradition as to what is morally acceptable. A scarcity is going to have a big influence. I mentioned weather as an example. You might even think about other cultures. So if another culture is impeding upon our culture's ability to promote happiness, our culture might have originally said something like live and let live. But if the other culture's interference is great enough, well we might not just live and let live. We might decide to oppose another culture with violence. So there are going to be, for some, he acknowledges there are going to be changes in the mores. But he thinks that the changes happen only because of external influences. Only because of changes in the environment or changes by other cultures or other people. There's not going to be because of a change of attitudes or beliefs within the culture. So we had the observation that mores are limited by tradition. That the mores, if there is a change in the mores, then it's due to external influences. And that the mores, the reason why we had the mores that we have, the reason why the culture gives us the mores that we have, is because these mores promote our own interests. So Sumner believes that the best explanation for this is that the culture, what the culture says is moral, makes what is moral moral. This is cultural relativism. The belief that the culture tells us what is moral. And because the culture tells us that such and such things are moral, that's what makes it moral. So you put all this together. You have the three observations. You have the claim that cultural relativism is the best explanation for these observations. So Sumner concludes, therefore, that cultural relativism is true, that what the culture tells us is moral just is what is moral. You might wonder about this conclusion, especially if you've seen the other video. The conclusion itself is certainly not without its problems. You'll probably have to give up a lot if you accept cultural relativism. But on top of that, there are some issues with Sumner's argument. It's not nearly as easy to conclude what he's concluded in the first place. So I'm going to take a look at each of the observations, and the claim that cultural relativism is the best explanation, and see what happens. So the first claim that Sumner makes is that the beliefs within a culture are limited by the culture. Well, he cites more than just mores. He cites philosophy, science, mathematics as beliefs made within a culture that are going to be limited by the culture. But this just looks really false. He even mentions the Greeks explicitly as kind of deciding this tradition. But Greek philosophy was counter-cultural. Yeah, it was counter-cultural. Up until the rise of the philosophers in Greek culture, most of the cultural beliefs were given by poets. And philosophy took a very different route instead of relying upon poetry or any kind of knowledge or wisdom given by the gods. Philosophy relied upon human reason, at least the ancient Greek philosophers did. And that's very counter-cultural to the Greek tradition. Socrates is one of the, you know, as heralded as the father of all of Western philosophy. He's the one that really brought it into place. He was executed by the people of the time for teaching beliefs that were counter to the culture. It's hard to see how that cultural belief is limited by the culture. And, you know, this belief of Socrates just kind of spread like wildfire. What he taught spread like wildfire, especially through his best student Plato. Aristotle, you know, and it's not even as if a single teaching of philosophy then dictates the rest of philosophy. Socrates was Plato's teacher and Plato sure adhered to his teacher's teachings. But Aristotle was Plato's teacher and he deviated from Plato. Even just the pre-Socratics, we have Thales and Annexamander. Annexamander was Thales' student. Annexamander deviated from Thales. Annexamandus was Annexamander's student. And Annexamandus deviated from Annexamander. You know, actually philosophy would tend to be more like the Dark Lords of the Sith, where the apprentice betrays the master more than anything else. So, I mean, that belief, even just doing a philosophy looks like that first claim is just really false. Same thing with history. History makes counter-cultural claims. It doesn't take long looking history where history starts a critique. A lot of the common core beliefs held by what's taught in, you know, taught by the culture, taught by the American people. Science, right? Science is very counter-cultural in a lot of really important ways. You know, we have some beliefs in our society about what constitutes material objects. And here comes along science and science says, well, guess what? You know, you think that all these things around you are solid. Well, they're solid in the sense that the forces are working together with the matter such that you can't pass your hand through them. But these objects are also, and by the way, you too, are also mostly empty space. Overwhelmingly empty space. Like 99.9% of you is empty space. That's counter-cultural. So this first claim of Sumners, it runs into some problems real fast, because there are plenty of beliefs that take hold within a culture that are contrary to the culture. And I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I just thought of something else where there's a kind of a big problem with Sumners' observation that cultural beliefs are limited by the tradition. The more it's limited by tradition, limited by the culture. You know, he, again, Sumners is going to claim that religion is also a product of the culture. But religions really counter-cultural in a lot of important ways. And it really doesn't matter which religion you're dealing with. So the United States is fond of saying that many of its roots, or all of its roots, are found with Christianity. But the United States is also really fond of self-sufficiency. She's really fond of the idea that if you make your way in the world, if you earn your living, well, then you have a right to that, and you don't have an obligation to help other people. What you earn is what you earn, and you don't owe it to anybody else. Well, lots of Christians say who are interpreting Scripture, who are interpreting the tradition within Christianity, are going to say that, well, that's false. You ought to help people who are less fortunate than yourselves. Same thing pops up in Judaism. Judaism is going to say you need to help other people. You need to help widows and orphans. Same thing happens in Islam. Same thing happens in Islam. I forget the name of the month, but there's an entire holiday or month within Islam where one of the practices of that month is donating to those who are less fortunate. I think I have that right. I might have my knowledge of Islam a little backwards. Buddhism, our culture very much values its stuff, clothes, cars, houses, cameras. Our culture very much values its stuff, and Buddhism teaches us that we need to be dispassionate, that we need to be disconnected from these material things. All these four big ones, and there's more to look at. I haven't even talked about Baha'i or universalism or even Wiccan beliefs. All these religions, all these different faith systems, or beliefs about the divine or about the supernatural, not only do they disagree with each other, and it's all happening within this culture, but they disagree with the culture itself. So Sumner's observation here is really difficult to reconcile, or at least his claim here, is really difficult to reconcile with what we see today. The second issue, I think with Sumner's argument, deals with the second observation. Remember, this observation is that the culture dictates the kind of mores it does, because these mores are what produces what's in people's best interests. And again, this is where that tension occurs. Is it because these are the mores that actually produce the best interests? Or is it because this is what the culture believes to produce the best interests? Well, if it's the first one, then it looks like it's really contrary to the conclusion, because now what justifies the mores is that they promote the interest, they produce happiness, they avoid pain. It doesn't matter what the culture says. A culture might think that some mores actually promote interest, but they can just simply be mistaken. So for instance, in our own culture, it's a big part of our culture that we work really hard and we don't stop working until we don't stop working. We put in 110% effort to produce the best results. Well, it really looks like that's not in our best interests. We should put in a full work week. Okay, that's true. And the full work week used to be considered 40 hours, but now people who are working 60, 70 hours a week on their jobs, and they're not able to have any rest, any kind of relaxation, not being able to spend time with their families. And this has a really disastrous result in our own culture. If it's the second option that the culture gives us the mores because the culture thinks whether they're accurate or not that these mores promote happiness, well then we have a lot of these same problems with whether or not the mores actually produce the happiness. I mean, if the idea is that the culture, if the idea behind cultural relativism is that what the culture dictates just is true, then it looks like what the culture dictates about what promotes happiness can be true or false. And we wonder, well, wait, why should we listen to the culture if the culture can be an error about what actually promotes interests? So this poses a second problem for Summoner's argument for cultural relativism. It looks like the second observation is actually contrary to the conclusion. And there's a problem with Summoner's third observation as well. Remember this third observation is that there are changes in the mores given and dictated by the culture, but the reason why there are these changes is that there's external changes to the environment that necessitate changes in the more ways to promote interests. So increased drought means stricter water usage or more restrictions on water usage. Increased food would mean, I don't know, less concern about food waste, this sort of thing. But it looks like there are plenty of events within our own culture, plenty of changes within our culture that are not relevant to any kind of significant climate change or environmental change because there really hasn't been that much. It, you know, the civil rights movement. It's not as if there was some great climate change or great environmental change such that it became necessary to include people of color as equal citizens in our society. There was no significant change of weather. There was not a real significant change in the amount of food that we had. We weren't invaded by any other country, right? This was a change that happened within the culture, within the beliefs of the people. And it was really hard work. There was a lot of struggle. There was a lot of fight within the culture. In fact, you know, people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, just to name two people off the top of my head in the civil rights movement, these people were revolutionaries in the culture. They were trying to change the culture. They weren't promoting the status quo in the culture. And that, their ideas, what they had to say, their example, changed the minds of people within the culture. It wasn't an environmental change. We could look to other examples, women's suffrage. A lot of the struggles we're having today regarding, oh gosh, we got lots of struggles today, the increasing class gap, pro-life versus pro-choice. The place of religion within our culture. The place of reason within our culture. The place of a humanity's education in our culture. All these things are in turmoil right now. Now, there have been some environmental changes. Sure, we've had increasing heat, things like this, but none of the environmental changes, and we haven't been invaded by another country, none of these environmental changes mean that we have to take one moray over another. If there is going to be a change in these morays, it's going to be a change in the ideas that we have already. So finally, we're going to look at Sumner's last claim. And this is the claim that culture relativism best explains the observations he's offered. So at this point, let's just assume there's no problem with the observations that Sumner has offered. Let's assume that there's no worries there. Is culture relativism in fact the best explanation for these observations? Well, some of that depends upon how we use the term justifies. So Sumner's really clear that the tradition within the culture justifies the morays. He even appeals to them as facts. This is a fact of what the tradition dictates, and so that justifies the moray. It's hard to detect, but there might be, it probably is, two different ways that Sumner is using the word justifies. This is what's called equivocation. The equivocation is when you use one word with two different meanings, and you change between meanings in different places in the text. So one sense of justifies is how we've been discussing it in terms of logic, that the tradition makes true the morays. So it's in this sense, the traditions justify the morays because the traditions make them true. And this is just the crux of culture relativism, that what the culture says is moral is in fact moral. Another sense of justifies, and you see this in his argument, he starts to provide examples of justifying, of the tradition justifying the morays, is that the tradition is what is in fact used to argue for and try to persuade people of the morays. The tradition is in fact what people accept as justification for the morays. Now there's a difference between these two. There's a real big difference between these two. Arguments can be persuasive, but not at all make the conclusion true. A good chunk of advertising is like this. Commercials are really famous for giving you a lot of reasons to buy a product that are completely irrelevant to the product. Car commercials, trying to sell you on the idea that the car is sexy and that it provides social status. That's just irrelevant to transportation. What's another one? Food commercials. Food commercials will tell you it's really healthy, sorry it tastes really good to eat our food. And it's not as if taste is completely important, but a lot of the food advertised on TV has very little offending to attrition of value. It's in fact really unhealthy for you to eat it. So these commercials though they're really persuasive. It's in fact why people do buy the cars. It's in fact why people do eat this food. But the reasons given by the commercials don't make the claim true that you ought to buy this food or buy this car. Persuasion and truth come apart. They really do really, really fast. Now, Sumner suggests that it's the first sense of justification that best explains his observations. The observations that beliefs are limited by culture, that culture gives us these mores because this one promotes our interest and that changes in the mores happen only because of changes with the external environment. He says that that's the best explanation. But here's another explanation. The reason why these observations happen is because the traditions are in fact used to justify the mores. But that's a second claim. It's a weaker claim. It's the claim that traditions are in fact used to persuade people for the mores. And that works really well with the observations. When you look at cases where beliefs are restricted to the culture and when you look at how a culture would try to justify its mores because it promotes your own happiness, and you look at ideas about changes in the environment with changes with the mores, the some way that's still appealed to traditions say, well, given the values in our tradition, in this changing environment, we have to have changes in the mores. That in fact, that really looks like what happens. And this just does happen. A lot of the time, moral arguments will appeal to tradition in some way, shape, or form as a way to justify the actions. But that doesn't mean that the mores are in fact justified. In fact, if you look at the other video, there's lots of problems with accepting culture relativism that make that explanation, culture relativism, much weaker, much less likely to be true because the conclusion itself has its own internal difficulties without even trying to appeal to the observations. So, Sumner claims that culture relativism is the best explanation. I suggest that the appeal to the tradition is a better explanation, but this doesn't mean that this does not imply cultural relativism. So, I don't want to leave you with the impression that there's just absolutely nothing to Sumner's work. No, of course, there's something to Sumner's work. The man put a lot of effort into it, and he has some really good observations. It really is beyond a doubt that culture has an impact on the moral beliefs of the people. And there are even situations where we might say that the appeal to tradition is a good appeal. If we consider the idea that mores have something to do with promoting our own interests, and we're appealing to the idea that, well, this is the way we've always done in the past, just on a surface that doesn't really sound great, but if you add into the idea that this is the way we've already done in the past, and it works really, really well, and we tried a lot of other options that didn't work so well, well, then this appeal to tradition just isn't that bad a tradition. I mean, just isn't that bad an appeal, it's just not that bad a justification. If this appeal to what has, in fact, worked, right, it's kind of silly just to change it, because that's what tradition says. So, tradition says that this particular more is the one that's always worked and we ought to stick with it, and we say, I don't want to listen to tradition, I'm going to do something completely different. What's the sense in that? If that's what's worked, why change it? So, there's something to what Sumner has to say, but it doesn't get you cultural relativism, especially in light of all the problems that cultural relativism has, and even just the problems highlighted with Sumner's argument. But, we don't want to say there's nothing to what Sumner has to say. So, the challenge that we have to deal with is, how do we sift through Sumner's argument and pull some really solid claims out of it, and then what do we do with those claims?