Ethics are Relative – Ruth Benedict

Overview of the question of ethical relativism
•	Two positions:  ethical relativism and ethical absolutism.
•	What are the merits/weaknesses of each?
•	Ethical absolutism seems to capture what we want from ethics – the position that there really is some particular thing that we ought to do.  That there is some kind of standard.  However, it’s an open question whether there’s any metaphysical/epistemological justification for thinking that there is such a standard.
o	If there is a “Good”, where/in virtue of what does it exist?  God?  Platonic realm of the Forms?  Some kind of naturalistic account?  
o	On what evidence do we think that such a “Good” exists?  
o	What would give us epistemological access to such a “Good”?
•	Ethical relativism doesn’t have to take recourse to fishy metaphysical entities/epistemological methods.  
o	But, if ethics are truly relative then what grounds our normative behaviour?  
o	Can ethical relativism offer any better than a laissez faire “whatever works for you is ok” attitude?  Ought it?  
o	If we are ethical relativists, then is torture ok at Abu Ghraib?  Is the majority always right?  What are the political consequences of such a view?
o	The “cheesy response” to relativism:  relativists must relativize even their own relativism, or they risk inconsistency.  That is, no relativist has a right to say that one absolutely ought to be a relativist.  Responses to this:  (1) no relativist would say that one absolutely ought to be a relativist.  Relativists derive their consistency from their fallibilism.  (2) The criticism rests on a category confusion.  Relativism is a meta-ethical position, not a normative one.  Thus, any criticism should criticize relativism as a meta-ethical position, not (as this criticism does) as a normative one.

Some preliminary notes:
•	Caveat re: such phrases as “primitive”, “advanced”, “higher cultures”.  This was first published 1934.
•	Also, I take issue with the editors’ claim that homosexuality is “considered abnormal in our society, but was praised in some ancient ones” (303).  It’s odd for academics in 1995 (and, ultimately, 2004) to claim that our society considers homosexuality abnormal.  This is very outdated.  They’re mistaken if they regard their society as the very same one in which (60 years earlier) Benedict was writing.  (Of course, they’re both from the south, and maybe that society hasn’t changed that much!)  
•	A further, philosophical point about this:  in this phrase, the editors juxtapose abnormality with praiseworthiness, as though these were opposites.  But, the first is descriptive, the second normative.  Even if homosexuality were regarded as abnormal, that wouldn’t mean that it is necessarily regarded as immoral.  Eating dill pickle ice cream is regarded as abnormal, but nobody thinks it’s immoral.  Important to keep description and prescription separate.
•	Problem:  does Benedict adequately do this?  Her article falls into the category of descriptive ethics.  Ought we to take any normative message from it?  (Hume’s guillotine:  don’t derive ought from is.)
•	Benedict doesn’t intend to do philosophy here.  She’s an anthropologist.  She’s concerned with cultural mores, not the Good.
•	Difference between morality and ethics.

Benedict’s argument
•	“the standardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given rise to a false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that have gained currency” (304).
•	“Modern civilization” has become the standard not because it’s ethically superior to other societies, but because of a confluence of historical, sociological, etc. factors.  One culture more successfully than others disseminated its values.
•	What’s popular isn’t necessarily what intrinsically has the most merit.
•	“It does not matter what kind of ‘abnormality’ we choose for illustration… there are well-described cultures in which these abnormals function at ease and with honor, and apparently without difficulty to the society” (304).  Is this really plausible?  Does she mean this, or is this rhetoric?
•	Some ethicists argue that, in fact, certain principles are universal, but that various “corollaries” from these differ between cultures.
•	“No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior” (307).  Phonetic analogy.  Selection of mores just as the selection of phonemes is a “nonrational and subconscious process” (307).
•	“The small proportion of the number of the deviants in any culture is not a function of the sure instinct with which that society has built itself upon the fundamental sanities, but of the universal fact that, happily, the majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them…” (309)