Running Head: Utilitarianism and the Challenge of Cultural Relativism

PHYLOSOPHY
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Utilitarianism is a moral theory which is considered to have been founded by an English

philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham in the early 20's. Utilitarianism is a moral
theory whose concept is happiness and looks forward to promoting happiness. Hence, the
primary goal of Utilitarianism is seeking happiness in people. The ultimate goal of every
person is looking for happiness in everything they do and engage in. Therefore, according to
Utilitarianism whenever a person acts in any ethical and sound manner he should strive to
bring the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number of individuals possible. This can
be referred to as the theory of greatest happiness. According to Utilitarianism if a person is
also unable to bring happiness he or she should then try to reduce unhappiness in people.
Utilitarianism can, therefore, be classified as a consequentialist theory since it focuses on the
outcome of a person's actions. (Smart & Williams, 1993)
Utilitarianism can, however, be viewed as a mathematical theorem. Utilitarianism looks
at the sum of units' of happiness that a particular action undertaken by a person can give rise
to. For instance, you might have two choices. One choice would be to take a child for a walk
and this could lead to an increase in fifteen units of happiness to the total stock in the world
however in this case you will only involve one person who is the child while the other choice
would involve taking your friends out for a walk and this would give rise to a rise in only nine
units of happiness in the total units of happiness in the world but it will benefit a large number
of individuals. However, according to utilitarianism, the total number of units of happiness
should be first considered rather than the number of people it will involve. Hence according to
Utilitarianism, it would be better for a person to engage himself in an activity that would yield
the highest number of happiness units regardless of the number of individuals involved.

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However, according to Bentham his view on happiness was that he thought that
happiness is based on pleasure. He further considered unhappiness as something that would
consist to pain. In his theory, however Bentham did not classify into classes types of pleasure.
According to him anything that led to a rise in happiness be it use of drugs, involvement in
sexual immorality and engaging in crime was right since he did not distinguish between the
different types of pleasures.
However, over the years other philosophers have striven to develop Bentham theory.
Among these philosophers, the one who made notable changes in developing the Bentham's
theory on happiness was a philosopher named John Stuart Mill. Mill disagreed with Bentham
on his all-inclusive view on pleasures. He felt that there was fundamental between the varying
forms of pleasure which was available to people. He felt that some had finer quality as
compared to other forms of pleasure. Mill came up with a philosophy which stated that "It is
better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool."
John Stuart ideas were better than Bentham's ideas since he classified types of pleasure.
He classified pleasures according to their quality. Mill argued that the pleasures which had the
great quality of human like listening to classical music were the ones to be considered as the
most important ones while those which did not have any human quality were considered to be
least important. Utilitarianism, however, does not care about the personal agenda, aim or the
actions undertaken by any person but what matters are the eventual results of the actions. If
the actions bring more pleasure than pain, then you are considered right.
Cultural relativism is the ability of someone to view the beliefs and customs of other
people within the context of their culture relatively than one's own. Hence cultural relativism
is arbitrary, and therefore values of one culture should not be used as standards for evaluating

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a person's behavior outside his or her culture. The theory was first proposed by Roman
Skeptic named as Sextus Empericus. The argument in short states that there might be no
standard objective for a right thing or a wrong thing in regard to the diverse cultures.
Different cultures have different moral codes according to the theory of cultural
relativism. Therefore there lacks objective truth in morality.( Phillips, 2011) This is one of the
challenges of cultural relativism. Since right and wrong only matters with opinions which are
subject to vary from one culture to another. For instance, some communities believe that the
act of cannibalism is correct while other cultures condemn the act of cannibalism in their
culture. From this example, the act of cannibalism is either wrong or right depending on one's
opinion.
Hence, one of the challenges of cultural relativism is the lack of universal final opinion
on some issues which affect all people regardless of their cultural background. Hence the
cultural differences argument is invalid and incorrect since the conclusion will always be
incorrect even if the premises are true. A premise is a concern on what people believe.
Premise deals with the moral epistemology whereas conclusion deals with the moral ontology.
The moral ontology and the moral epistemology are supposed to have the same truth value in
all cases, but it's not the case with cultural relativism. The premise or moral epistemology is
what people think about a certain morality by their cultural beliefs. Moral ontology or the
conclusion is the nature of morality. For instance, some societies believe that the earth is
spherical while others believe that the earth is flat. However, geographers proofed that the
earth is spherical hence it will be impossible to convince people who believe that the earth is
flat that the earth is spherical.

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Another challenge of cultural relativism is that we cannot decide whether some actions
are right or wrong through consulting the standards of society. This is because a relativist in
any culture beliefs that any action whether right or wrong factually is right if the standards of
the society state so. Also, the same relativist believes that an action is also wrong even if it's
right by the standards of the community states otherwise. Hence if the society reports that
apartheid is right, then it is true whether the people in that culture agree or disagree. (Rachels,
1995).
Another challenge of cultural relativism is that there lacks an objective standard which
can be used to judge between cultures. Especially, this is not possible even when one culture
is a result of another culture.
The last challenge of cultural relativism is if it would have been true then the saying
"customs of other societies are morally inferior or stronger than the customs of our society."
However, this proposition might be plausible if the issues to be compared have little
significance but it becomes a great challenge when comparing issues which are more
complex. For example, if cultural relativism is taken seriously we are not supposed to
condemn the Antebellum South for their moral atrocities since that's what they believe.
However, these atrocities which are among one of the bad practices carried out in many
cultures are wrong no matter in which culture they happened or took place. Hence there is
room for criticizing other religions practices which are also a challenge.

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References
Rachels, J. (1995). The elements of moral philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Smart, J. J. C., & Williams, B. A. O. (1993). Utilitarianism: For and against. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press.
Phillips, P. J. J. (2011). The challenge of relativism: Its nature and limits. New York:
Continuum International Pub. Group.