Cultural Relativism

First, let me specify that, when talking about cultural relativism, I am specifically referring to morality.

Now, it is difficult for me to argue against cultural relativism, since being an agnostic/atheist I do not have an easy way to apply some sort of cultural standard in it's place. I will, however, try to argue for my own personal standard shortly.

First, the simplest problem. This is the most obvious problem that pretty much everyone who thinks about such things seems to have thought about: if all cultural viewpoints are equally valid, what about those viewpoints that deny the validity of other viewpoints? What about the viewpoints that say that cultural relativism itself is incorrect? It seems to me that the very assertion of relativism is self-contradicting.

This is not the gravest problem I see with cultural relativism, though. A greater problem is: how do we define a culture? For instance, if we say that political repression in China should be accepted because it's their culture, why are we then excluding from our definition of that culture those citizens that argue against repression? Or that in some countries women are considered inferior, and we should accept that as a culural value, why do we exclude the women who try to break free? (These statements are hinting at my proposed cultural standard, by the way...) So far we've considered situations where the minority of a culture is ignored; we can also consider the opposite case, where a minority or slim majority is considered to represent a culture. For instance, does political repression in China, in fact, represent the majority culture, or is it the culture of those who rule? And where does one culture end and another begin? What about sub-cultures? And finally, what if one culture's values entail the destruction/repression of another culture, aka Nazi Germany, or the slave-owning South. Do we allow this to go on? These are important questions to consider if we are going to making judgements based on the concept of cultural relativism.

What, then, is the alternative? As I mentioned, one of the difficulties of cultural relativism is where one draws borders between cultures. Is there some level where a line can be clearly drawn? The clearest line that can be drawn is around individuals. I believe that the fundamental standard we can apply to cultures is the degree to which they respect individual rights (which I will enumerate my concept of in a future post). (Say hello to my civil libertarian tendencies!) Now, if an individual chooses to hand over their individual rights, that is their perogative, but one right must then still remain: the right of choice. Individuals must be able to freely choose to associate and follow a culture. If they choose to be a part of a repressive culture, that's fine, but they cannot be allowed to then insist that others also do so.
This also means that there must be one more standard: information and ideas must be freely available within the culture, since the right to choose is useless and pointless if there are no choices. And I personally believe, but this is getting into mcuh more difficult territory, that children in particular must be given as many choices and ideas as possible, since it's in childhood that one identifies with particular cultures and values.

Old Credo

This is something I wrote up for a church "Coming of Age" project about a year ago. Some of the stuff still holds, some of it doesn't, but I thought it would make a good intro to this adventure in blogging:

I believe that nothing can be known with absolute certainty. I am a skeptic and aknowlege that everything I know is known only through my senses and my opininions, which may be deceiving me.

I call myself an “Athgnostic”, sort of a cross between an agnostic and an atheist. I don’t, in my heart, believe in god and, more and more, I don’t feel a desire for god, which is how I am an Atheist. However, I intellectually acknowledge room, and quite a lot room, in fact, for doubt about gods non-existence, which is how I am an agnostic. But I don’t believe or want there to be one.

I’m doubting more and more the existence of an afterlife, not only because of evidence (which is ambiguous on both sides of the debate), but also because I am wondering whether there even needs to be one. As I believe Buddha said, and Hume definitely said (as long as I trust my philosophy textbook), and that I first came across in a book by Richard Dawkins, we are not the same person as we were, say, 10 years ago, especially someone like me who is 15 and ten years ago was 5. So then, in a way, who we were 10 years ago is dead, and our biological death is only the next step in that cycle of change.

I believe in a spirituality based science. Science can satisfy the spiritual need. Imagine: everything we know was once compressed into a dense point of matter; everything was once indistuingishable from everything else, was once all one and the same. The theory of evolution says that all creatured evolved from a common ancestor. We are attempting to find the “theory of everything”. That is what science continues, over and over, to discover: that everything, if one searches hard enough, eventually reduces to one substance, ancestor, principle. Everything is, in a sense, one, and in, to me, a much more majestic sense then having all been created by one Judeo-Christian god 6,000 years ago, or any other god. At any other time. I believe this furnishes a sense of empathy towards all other things and people, and a realization that we are no more important, ultimately, then anything else. The human race, if it wants to be important, has to make itself important, and the best and most reliable way that we can insure that we will have the opportunity to do so is by protecting our own existence, and, because of the SCIENTIFC laws of nature, in order to protect our own existence we must protect the existence of what is around us.

I believe the best way to do so that we know of so far is through Utilitarian ethics, the belief, as I interpret it for my own, that what is right is what causes the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of beings, what is wrong is what does the opposite. Sometimes we must cause imediate pain, sometimes great, in order to reach this goal. I believe in the golden rule.

I believe that this eliminates the need for blame or the concept of evil. I think what we consider evil (and also what we consider good) is only a combination of people’s disposition and upbringing. Instead of people being evil, they could be considered harmful in the Utilitarian sense of causing pain, and therefore not punished for being evil, but worked with (sometimes including punishment) to hopefully make them, not only less harmful, but hopefully beneficial.

I believe that it is my purpose in life to make and help people examine their won beliefs because I cannot prove that their beliefs are true or false, but I can show with certainty that they are self-contradictory. My hope, that I will never fulfill because I am human, is that I can learn not tto care what people believe as long as their beliefs are self-consistent and aren’t detrimental to an application of Utilitarianism.

I also think it is my purpose to be a UU evangelist. I mean evangelist in the literal sense of the word, in that I want to be someone who spreads the message of UU, and draws people to it. Actually, to be honest, my goal is to become rich and famous so everyone knows about me and, knowing I’m UU, become UU themselves. My hope is to do this though music, film, and other art, and possibly books explaining UU. I do believe that it is the religion that best suits me and that, at the risk of tootling UU’s horn, if more people were UU or followed its ideals (I say ideals instead of principles because the principles, in my opinion, are imperfect and secondary), the world would be a better place