Assignment: Moral Rules and Cultures Philosophy Essay

Essay Topics
1) Do you think that any moral rules are binding on all people of all cultures and time periods, whether most people of a given culture and time period would agree or not?  If so, give an example and say why it is so binding.  If not, give an example that might seem like it is so binding and say why it is not.

2) Is the solution to the Euthyphro dilemma to give up on Divine Command Theory?  To accept one of the horns of the dilemma (and if so, which one)?  Something else?  Whatever you decide, defend your view.

3) Do we have an obligation as a society to support people with extreme disabilities that render them unable to work?  Why or why not?

4) Are there any natural rights that people have that should never be violated, regardless of how much more happiness could be produced by violating a person’s natural rights than by not doing so?  Why or why not?

In the last chapter, we examined a variety of arguments in support of different positions on various ethical matters of life and death.  These arguments invoked competing ethical principles and led to conflicting conclusions, but they all had one thing in common:  all of them assumed that there was just one right answer to the ethical question at issue.  In other words, they all assumed that there was objective moral truth.  Now we will consider some challenges to this notion.  The first of these is Cultural Relativism.

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Cultures differ with respect to what is deemed morally acceptable.   Rachels illustrates this with the story of the ancient King Darius, the Callations and the Greeks. (The Callations were an Indian tribe who had a custom of eating their dead fathers, while the Greeks cremated their dead; according to the story, each regarded the others’ practice as abhorrent).  Other examples:  Most people in America consider polygamy to be a moral outrage, but it is common and accepted for men to have more than one wife in some cultures, including Islamic countries.  In America, no legal or moral distinction is made between killing infants, the elderly, or anyone in between (all are condemned, of course).  But among Eskimos, infanticide is permitted at the discretion of the parents.  Killing of the elderly (by abandoning them in the snow) has been practiced by Eskimos and the native peoples of northern Greenland.  Lending money for interest was considered sinful in medieval Europe, and it is still regarded as such in some parts of the world.  In America, male circumcision has been the norm since the late 19^th century, and parents who opt against it are often roundly criticized or condemned; it is quite the opposite in Europe and most of the rest of the world.  Female circumcision, on the other hand, is condemned in America and Europe but widely practiced in many African countries.  There is no shortage of such examples.

There is no doubt that cultures exhibit differences –often radical differences– in their ethical stances on food, sex, punishment, political expression, human rights, and matters of life and death.  The existence of differing ethical norms in different cultures has convinced many people of Cultural Relativism,  the doctrine that ethics is culturally relative and that there are no objective moral standards.

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