General Ethics 2021

Moral Relativism: Is Everything Relative?

I. Ruth Benedict: The Case for Moral Relativism
Source: Louis P. Pojman, The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 151-159.

About Ruth Benedict:

Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), an American anthropologist, taught at Columbia University
and is best known for her book Patterns of Culture (1934). Benedict sets forth a theory
of moral relativism in which moral principles are based on the common beliefs and
practices of social systems. Since these systems or cultures can vary, so can morality.
Like a work of art, the social system chooses which theme of its repertoire of basic tendencies to emphasize
and then goes about to create a more or less comprehensive system of mores to support those tendencies.
What is considered normal or abnormal behavior will depend on the choices of these social systems, or
what Benedict calls the "ideal practice pattern of the culture." In this selection Benedict assembles a varied
array of cultural data from her research of tribal behavior on an island in northwest Melanesia from which
she draws her conclusions that moral relativism is the correct view of morality.

A. Basis of the Concept Normal and Abnormal

In the time that there is not yet a standardized worldview of what is moral, primitive people’s way of life
and social structure became the basis of what is abnormal and normal. The most spectacular illustrations
of the extent to which normality may be culturally defined are those cultures where an abnormality of the
culture is the cornerstone of their social structure as presented by the three cases below.
a. The Case of Berdache (Homosexuals)
Among many American Indian tribes there exists the institution of the berdache, as the French called
them. These men-women were men who at puberty or thereafter took the dress and the occupations of
women. Sometimes they married other men and lived with them. Sometimes they were men with no
inversion, persons of weak sexual endowment who chose this role to avoid the jeers of the women. The
berdaches were never regarded as of first-rate supernatural power, as similar men-women were in Siberia,
but rather as leaders in women's occupations, good healers in certain diseases, or, among certain tribes, as
the genial organizers of social affairs. In any case, they were socially placed. They were not left exposed to
the conflicts that visit the deviant who is excluded from participation in the recognized patterns of his
society. The most spectacular illustrations of the extent to which normality may be culturally defined are
those cultures where an abnormality of our culture is the cornerstone of their social structure.
b. North-West Melanesian’ Social Structure Case
A recent study of an island of northwest Melanesia by Fortune describes a society built upon traits
which we regard as beyond the border of paranoia. In this tribe the exogamic groups look upon each other
as prime manipulators of black magic, so that one marries always an enemy group which remains for life
one's deadly and unappeasable foes. They look upon a good garden crop as a confession of theft, for
everyone is engaged in making magic to induce into his garden the productiveness of his neighbors;

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 General Ethics 2021

therefore no secrecy in the island is so rigidly insisted upon as the secrecy of a man's harvesting of his yams.
Their polite phrase at the acceptance of a gift is, "And if you now poison me, how shall I repay you this
present?" Their preoccupation with poisoning is constant; no woman ever leaves her cooking pot for a
moment untended. They have even rigorous religiously enforced customs that forbid the sharing of seed
even in one family group. Anyone else's food is deadly poison to you, so that communality of stores is out
of the question. For some months before harvest the whole society is on the verge of starvation, but if one
falls to the temptation and eats up one's seed yams, one is an outcast and a beachcomber for life. There is
no coming back. It involves, as a matter of course, divorce and the breaking of all social ties. Now in this
society where no one may work with another and no one may share with another, Fortune describes the
individual who was regarded by all his fellows as crazy: not one of those who periodically ran amok with
a knife. Such behavior they did not regard as crazy behavior and did not even put the individuals to be
liable to any attack, so they merely fled when they saw the attack coming on and kept out of the way saying
"He would be all right tomorrow." But a man with a kindly disposition who liked work and liked to be
helpful, they will regard as crazy. People of the tribes will never speak with him, they will rather laugh at
him and considered him silly and definitely crazy. But to the Christians such type of character is a model
of all virtue.
c. The Kwakiutl Normative Living
Among the Kwakiutl (Kwakiutl, self-name Kwakwaka'wakw, North American Indians who traditionally
lived in what is now British Columbia, Canada, along the shores of the waterways between Vancouver Island and the
mainland) it did not matter whether a relative had died in bed of disease, or by the hand of an enemy, in
either case death was an affront to be wiped out by the death of another person. A chief’s sister and her
daughter had gone up to Victoria, and either because they drank bad whiskey or because their boat
capsized they never came back. The chief called together his warriors, "Now I ask you, tribes, who shall
wail? Shall I do it or shall another?" The spokesman answered, of course, "Not you, Chief. Let some other
of the tribes." Immediately they set up the war pole to announce their intention of wiping out the injury,
and gathered a war party. They set out, and found seven men and two children asleep and killed them.
"Then they felt good when they arrived at Sebaa in the evening." This head-hunting that takes place on the
Northwest Coast after a death is no matter of blood revenge or of organized vengeance. There is no effort
to tie up the subsequent killing with any responsibility on the part of the victim for the death of the person
who is being mourned. A chief whose son has died goes visiting wherever his fancy dictates, and he says
to his host, "My prince has died today, and you go with him." Then he kills him. In this, according to their
interpretation, he acts nobly because he has not been downed.

B. The Case of Moral Relativism

These three cases force upon us the fact that normality is culturally defined. An adult shaped to the drives
and standards of either of these cultures, if he were transported into our civilization, would fall into our
categories of abnormality. In his own culture, he is the pillar of society, the end result of socially inculcated
mores. Most of those organizations of “questionable morality” seem to us most uncontrovertibly abnormal
have been used by different civilizations as the very foundations of their institutional life. Conversely the
most valued traits of our normal individuals have been looked on in differently organized cultures as
aberrant. Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined. It is primarily a term for the

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socially elaborated segment of human behavior in any culture; and abnormality, a term for the segment
that that particular civilization does not use. The very eyes with which we see the problem are conditioned
by the long traditional habits of our own society. The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the
concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. A normal action is one which falls well within
the limits of expected behavior for a particular society. From all that we know of contrasting cultures it
seems clear that differences of temperament occur in every society. The matter has never been made the
subject of investigation, but from the available material it would appear that these temperament types are
very likely of universal recurrence. That is, there is an ascertainable range of human behavior that is found
wherever a sufficiently large series of individuals is observed. But the proportion in which behavior types
stand to one another in different societies is not universal. The vast majority of individuals in any group
are shaped to the fashion of their own culture. In other words, most individuals are plastic to the molding
force of the society into which they are born. In conclusion, for Benedict, morality is simply whatever a
culture deems normal behavior.
Now if we agree with Benedict’s claim that we have to accept that every culture and social structure
create their own morality, then we could not but respect their differences and judge not the morality of
someone by using another’s standard morality. But is it always right to do so?

II. Judge Not?

By JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
Source: Louis P. Pojman, The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 186-196.

About JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN

Jean Bethke Elshtain, who was born in Germany, is Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor of
social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several works in social ethics,
including Democracy on Trial. In this essay she examines the banality that we should nut judge other people
and gives reasons for thinking that we are not only permitted to make moral judgments but have an obligation
to do so.

THE RIGHT TO JUDGE

The capacity to make judgments is an ethical issue of the gravest sort, and along with it, the
discernment of what it means to judge well. In other words, we need a clear sense of why judging is
important and what is involved in the activity of judging, and we need a way to distinguish between rash
judging—not judging well—and the kind of judging that lies at the heart of what it means to be a self-
respecting human subject in a community of other equally self-respecting subjects. Judging has been in bad
odor for quite some time as it is equated with being punitive, or with insensitivity, or with various
"racisms". It is the mark of “antiquated” ways of thinking, feeling, and willing that has no longer place in
today’s time. Now it is better to be called "open-minded," a trait thought to be characteristic of sensitive
and supportive persons as the saying says: “A mind is like a parachute that it works best when it is open.”
In fact, the bible even said through the mouth of Jesus: “Judge not and you will not be judge!” We were
also told to "walk around in the other guy's shoes" before we judged severely or before we judged at all.
These are all moral rules that enable us to understand the others instead of making pass judgment.

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 General Ethics 2021

Prejudice and judgment are two very different human possibilities. The more we proliferates
prejudices and not allowing them to undergo scrutiny that less we are capable of making right judgment.
Making judgment means that one can see error without making assumption that it is right. Judging calls
things by their real names, embracing the difficult recognition that what Hannah Arendt called "an
enormously enlarged empathy". Arendt had little use for those who treated adults as if they were children
by spoon feeding them palatable "truths" rather than the harder truths of life and politics. If we over-
assimilate our situation to that of others, and pretend that we are "at one" with them, we may lose our sense
of what is right and wrong and, as a consequence, in danger of losing the faculty of judgment. This, for
Elshtain, is perhaps due to the culture of victimization. An ideology of victimization, such as for instance
the feminist issue, casts women as victims of male oppression from the very beginning of time. A woman
in Nashville, Tennessee, starved her infant son to death. Turned into a robot, so it was claimed, she was
unable to feed the infant even though the husband was away at work all day. Her defense was based on
her having been abused by this husband even though when he 'got home from work, the two of them
would dress up and go out on the town, frequenting sleazy bars, looking for men and women for three-
way sex. Meanwhile, a baby is starving to death. Of this terrible story, victimization doctrine holds that as
a victim of abuse herself, the woman, by definition, could not in turn be victimizing another. We cannot
judge her actions because she is oppressed. According to her 'lawyers, who are now mounting an appeal,
the jury that found her guilty has victimized her twice. But one who looks at victimization as a concrete
and specific act would argue that, although it is terrible to be abused, for a twenty-three year old woman
with a range of options open to her (she might have given the infant to her mother to care for, as she had
done with an older child) to starve an infant to death is more terrible yet. Surely, to make that assessment
is not an act prompted by a harsh desire for revenge. It flows, rather, from a recognition that we are able to
distinguish real victims from rhetorical ones, evil acts and crimes from less serious misdeeds. As the
lawyers for this woman said, the woman cannot be "held accountable," and to do so is a "male deal...”Thus,
The female victim, construed as innocent, remains somehow free from sin. But what will happen now when
all our victims and no one is perpetrator of a crime? We will have a society in chaos. It seems that there’s a
mentality that if we are "powerful" we cannot judge others but can only be judged, and on the other hand
that if we are "powerless" we can judge totally but cannot be judged—since the "powerful" by definition
"don't get it"—we fall into an intellectual laziness that is itself ethically corrupt and corrupting.
Judging is a sign, a mark, of our respect for the dignity of others and ourselves. We are
surrounded by various strategies of exculpation or ways to evade responsibility for a situation in which
one happen to be a member of an "oppressed" or "victimized" group.
Stephen Carter says:
“We must never lose the capacity for judgment, especially the capacity to judge ourselves and our
people.... Standards of morality matter no less than standards of excellence. There are black people who
commit heinous crimes, and not all of them are driven by hunger and neglect. . . . We are not automatons.
To understand all may indeed be to forgive all, but no civilization can survive when the capacity for
understanding is allowed to supersede the capacity for judgment. Otherwise, at the end of the line lies
a pile of garbage: Hitler wasn't evil, just insane.”
We are not permitted to make anyone uncomfortable, to be "insensitive." Yet moral judgment of "some
kind," says Midgley, "is a necessary element to our thinking." Judging involves our whole nature—it isn't
just icing on the cake of self-identity.

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