 Well, some of you reason like cultural relatives tell relatives already sometimes you'll say things like well That's what that culture does. It's not what we do. So but since it's that culture It's okay that they're doing it that way On the other hand, sometimes you reason completely opposite of a cultural relative is sometimes you just say look It doesn't matter if the culture is doing that. It's simply wrong and Yeah, there there are cases I mean lots of cases of oppression for example So cultural relativism is kind of be kind of a mixed bag and sometimes it seems helpful to us and sometimes it doesn't so in this chapter Rachel's takes a pretty hard look at cultural relativism And he ultimately he's going to say that cultural relativism fails Overall, but he wants to say there are also just a couple of things that we can learn from cultural relativism So to begin this examination of cultural relativism We're gonna look at the Rachel's takes a look at the five main claims that cultural relativists tend to make now the first claim When you see this what it's kind of obvious, right? You just need to look out into the world to see if it's true And yeah, there is a lot of differences between cultures the second claim of culture relativism is pretty much the crux of it and this is this idea that That the culture is what determines what is right or wrong If you want to know what's right or wrong just simply look to what the culture says and if the culture If you try to say something contrary to the culture within you butters or you or try to act contradicted culture then you are doing something wrong Another claim about the cultural relativists is that you that there is no objective standard then for all of morality Since what is moral just depends upon what the culture says what there's you know There's no culture that encompasses all cultures. Okay, so there's just so there is no objective standard by which to By which to make any moral judgments. You just have to rely on the culture Kind of a similar to that then is that there's no way to judge a moral culture. Okay All right, there's no way to judge a culture especially within one's own context, right? It would be at best arrogant for say, I don't know the United States to criticize, you know American culture to criticize You know the practice in Japan of bowing we're greeting somebody that that's kind of a motivating idea behind it The next claim is kind of curious you might wonder about this It's a it's the claim for tolerance So so the cultural relativists is saying look, you know, since we can't judge all the cultures We ought to be tolerant of other cultures. We ought not to you know, it's kind of the opposite of arrogance All right, now you wonder might wonder whether that claim is supposed to be made within the American culture or With it or whether it's supposed to be made outside of all cultures and a lot turns on that depending on how you do it So these are the five main claims of cultural relativism So one very interesting project That we can do is to look at how these five claims of cultural relativism are supposed to be related to each other Because so far what we have and I'm not saying it's impossible What we what we have is not really an argument for all five claims, right? This is kind of stated Well one wonders, you know, is one supposed to prove the other is You know one supposed are all the other four supposed to come from the other from one Stuff like this So one way to go about looking at this is to see a lot of cultural relativists It is are going to argue that the first claim implies the second All right, this is what's called the cultural differences argument. Okay, so the idea is well Look, there's there's a great variety of differences in moral cultures. Okay You don't have to look very far to see where this is true anywhere from manners to some of the extreme cases of life and death That Rachel's mentions in the book So one way to One way to argue there say look since there's this difference in the cultures It follows that whatever is whatever the culture says is moral just is what's moral That difference in culture means different moral codes, right? Sorry differences in more moral Differences in cultures and moral codes means that there's different moralities. There's actual different Claims to morality depending upon when and where you are so to take kind of a look at this we're gonna put it again into a numbered propositional form and The first premise is the obvious one is the ones you don't have to look very far to find out whether It's true, and that's the that's the claim that there are that there are cultural differences Now it's the second premise that's really doing most of the work It's the conditional if there's a difference in cultures, then there's Then there's no then whatever is more just depends upon the culture and this conclusion follows Once again using our good friend modus ponens So like I said the first premise probably isn't the one you want to go after it's just pretty obvious It's the second premise that Rachel's disagrees with and he does this in a kind of an interesting way, and it's a very Real observation here the observations look cultures differ on a lot of different topics. Yeah And you know today culture at least in the West cultures are really consistent as far as mathematics But that didn't used to be the case That for a while there was a really heated argument about whether there's the number zero And different cultures had different points of view Cultures have taken different stances and approaches to making scientific claims. Okay History right depending upon which culture you're looking at you're going to get a very different account of history Now since there's this difference Amongst cultures in these other fields You know we might say well why isn't Why don't we make the claim that well history just depends upon when and where you are or the math just depends upon when Where you are our science. We're not at all tempted to do that So why is it that we're now all of a sudden tempted to do that with morality? And yeah, we could push the point even further. Okay, you know if we're gonna point to this difference in cultures As a reason to say well, then there's this difference in morality Well as a matter of fact cultures don't really agree upon cultural relativism Okay, sure some cultures do all right We saw some examples in the text, but most cultures are really sure that their morality applies to everybody else as well Okay, so it if we're going to say well since there's this difference in the cultures then others There's this different morality. Well, there's differences about whether the second premise of cultural relativism is true So that only depends upon winning where you are well if that's true that most of the cultures on the planet deny that premise and They really strongly believe in some kind of absolute moral truth that applies to everybody So that's perhaps one way to start looking at it Ultimately, you know Rachel's concludes is that the first premise does not imply the second premise sure There's differences of cultures, but that doesn't mean there's now a difference in truth You know you just of course we're we can further discuss this in class, but so far You know so far that this reasoning is pretty good, right if you're gonna say that since there's this difference in morality a Difference in moral beliefs across cultures. Therefore, this is difference of morality. You've got to explain why morality is a special case When we don't have that when we don't we don't apply it to science, math, and history another way to look at cultural relativism is to see how it's related to You know how it implies or how it impacts what you already believe So one thing about culture relativism is You know since we have this claim that what is moral just depends upon what the culture says Then it has kind of the odd conclusion that Whatever the culture says is right, but that means that there's nothing wrong ever in a culture There's nothing wrong ever in a culture and you don't think this is true You think there are cultures that have done some things that are really obviously wrong There are cultures that oppress people Okay, the third Reich is one of the most popular examples to point to it was a culture Okay, it was a very different set of beliefs that a group of people had they had practices the whole spiel But they did some really really horrible things now according to that culture It was just fine But that's wrong. It was really wrong the things that they did so if you If you say that there's if you subscribe to some version of culture relativism, right that whatever the culture does is Right, then there's absolutely nothing that the culture does that's wrong and Again that you know this has this impact regarding Whether you can judge that culture. I hope you say you can judge the third Reich, right? I really really do and it was wrong so You already think that there's something that the cultures can improve right well if they can improve Then whatever the culture says that it's not it's not sure that whatever the culture says is right there's This next implication Consequence is really kind of related to the first right just as you know if we say that there's no way that We that you know Excuse me if we buy the claim that culture relativism says that whatever culture says is right Then not only is it the case that no in every culture is doing anything right anything what the culture says to do Well, that's right. Well, that also applies to our culture if we If we say as the culture, you know if we buy the culture relativist line then whatever our culture does is right That means that our culture should never change Okay, and you really think that's wrong. I guarantee you think that's wrong because that means for instance That anybody who tries to change the culture Is doing something wrong now that means that Martin Luther King Rosa Park These people were wrong Were mistaken and what they were doing they were acting contrary to the culture and if culture relativism is right Then they were not Not trying to advance progress. They were trying to be revolutionaries they're trying to overthrow what was right and We don't want to say that we quite obviously and rightfully believe that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were doing the right thing And I think yeah, I think that you agree with this. I think you agree with this So with with those claims of culture relativism well, you have a choice either you give a culture relativism Or you give it the idea of more progress And I really hope you give up culture relativism and you keep the idea of more progress So the last claim we're really going to look at here is this idea of tolerance now. I Think tolerance is a good thing. I hope you think tolerance is a good thing In fact, you know tolerance Is something that we should aspire to when you probably ought to learn how to apply more in our lives now a lot of people Want to be cultural relativists because they're inspired by tolerance and I get the motivation or really do but as we seen culture relativism doesn't really imply tolerance it implies this idea that we're right nobody else is and You know kind of on top of that Just as a matter of fact, I don't really know of many cultures that are especially tolerant Every Culture has it's kind of dark history as far as this is concerned And you know really no no cultures innocent as far as far as I mean just think of your most outrageous example of one Group oppressing another trust me. It's happened. Okay. It's happened So, you know, this is kind of an important claim. Remember I Said that, you know, we you know earlier when I was talking about this fifth claim you got to wonder if that Claim to tolerance is made within our culture or made outside the culture Well, if the claim to tolerance is made within our culture Then you know the idea trying to be a culture relativist then you shouldn't be tolerant because our culture in fact just isn't that tolerant we You know, we make some pretty harsh claims Sometimes and I'm not even just talking about racial inequalities. Of course, that's there, right? We are definitely not at all Favorable towards any kind of socialism, right? We do not like socialism in any way shape or form Where there are plenty of cultures that either in the past or currently Prefer socialism. I think that's the way to go So as a matter of fact, we're just not that tolerant all right So so that claim to tolerance really can't be made within our culture So the question is what is it made regardless of what culture you're in and That's probably the way to go if you're claiming tolerance and you want to say That's you know tolerance is a value should have regardless what culture you're in well, then you are not a culture relativist Because now you're appealing to some kind of value independent of the culture So if you want to be tolerant if you want to argue for tolerance You probably want to argue from some sort of Objectivist moral viewer or some objective moral viewer absolute moral viewer. This is going to be true regardless of what a culture says So this is an interesting problem for cultural relativism They want to be tolerant, but it doesn't look like they can claim any way to be tolerant that doesn't disagree with cultural relativism Finally the last thing we're going to look at is Well the first claim of cultural relativism is that there's this difference among cultures and that's true Right, you don't have to look very long to find out That there's differences in moral codes. However There's also quite a lot of similarity What what is meant by this is that there are principles that are there saying there are values that are the same But they're expressed differently from culture to culture. So every culture In some way shape or form values family. All right, or it's a principle that family is very important and you look after family Okay You an American culture expresses this one way You see you see it expressed differently in other cultures. So other cultures for instance The family is very important and decisions about your future are made within that family Okay For the sake of the family because family is all you got families. How you you stick together Every culture has some notion of what's polite Okay, but what counts as polite differs from both culture to culture. Okay, and the states You know if I'm going to greet a friend, you know shaking hands is acceptable If there's a good friend giving a hug is acceptable Whereas in other cultures For instance Japan you bow. Okay, and there's even rules regarding that whether you make eye contact or not How low you bow depending upon who the other person is so there's there are differences in how values are expressed But the values themselves tend to be really consistent across cultures So the point that Rachel's is making here is there's not as much difference, right? It's not just really nearly It's not just you know completely dissimilar moral codes across the planet. No, there's a lot of similarity in moral codes So all in all cultural relativism Can't succeed it can't succeed according to its own reasons it disagrees with itself So that could be a significant problem for cultural relativism now Rachel's Wants to be careful here, right? He he's a little Unclear as to exactly what he means. I mean he wants to say something like there's still some good things about cultural relativism And he's right, right? So that this idea of Tolerance, okay, that's a very good thing and we should strive to keep that now as we said with with tolerance You're gonna probably have to point to some kind of objective moral theory in order to show the tolerance is moral Or maybe it's it's one of the values or principles There's got to be more of a story there Rachel says that there are two things that we could also learn from cultural relativism and the first is that the culture is not the definitive word on what is moral and Yeah, that's that's true I mean this is a lesson that we get from looking at cultural relativism and seeing how you know it kind of fails because Cultural relativism says no the culture is the definitive word well we've seen that You know this doesn't cohere with what we already think is true that there is such a thing as more progress so Then you know the cautionary tale here is when we're trying to figure out what is moral You know culture might be a source of evidence, but it's not going to be definitive It's not probably going to be the predominant. It's not going to be the decisive factor at least in most cases as to what's moral Another lesson to learn is to keep an open mind okay, so the idea here is That you yourself are in a culture Okay, you're a product of a culture and your culture has told you that some things are moral some things aren't moral And it's not to say that the your culture is automatically mistaken, right? We're not we're not saying that but on the other hand You ought to realize that Your culture is not impeccable or infallible Okay So when you're thinking about what's moral sure consult your culture But don't immediately disregard anything because it's contrary to your culture, especially when you're dealing with other cultures There are lots of things we can learn that cultures can learn from each other I'm a big fan of saying that Every culture has perfected something right? Japan perfected raw fish The Countries in the the southern part of North America Central America in the northern part of Southern America a lot of the Latin Latin America countries right there. They perfected the casual man's dresser. I'm a huge fan of Gua Vedas Yeah, so yeah, there's definitely something that each culture can learn from each other. Yes, specifically How more reasoning is going to apply in different cases, especially in cases of life and death So we learn these lessons from cultural relativism No, it's so much because they're consistent with cultural relativism But because we find that these things are more important than some of the claims that most that cultural relative cultural relativism makes