PARAMETERS ON RELATIVISM

When I was a freshman in college, I had a course in social science that introduced me to the concept of cultural relativism. I was assigned the classic anthropology book, Patterns of Culture, by Ruth Benedict. That's quite a fact given that Benedict died in 1948 (the book was published in 1934) and, despite how old some people think I am, I started college in 1966. For a book to be used as a basic text so many years after its published date says something for the work. The book and the course had quite an impact on me. Given my long Catholic school background with its and my definite views of good and evil highly lodged in Western thought, the idea was jarring that much of what I held as solid truth was now being described, by implication, as just our culture's way of viewing things. As a young man very interested in his freedom and his attempts at establishing himself as his own person, the force of a concept such as cultural relativism affected me greatly.

While I still hold much stock in the importance of understanding that a lot of what we hold as valuable is determined by the varieties of our culture, when it comes to ideas and practices, I have mellowed in my attachment to all that cultural relativism implies. In no area have I been more reticent to accept all of its implications than in the more specific notion of moral relativism. The idea that all we hold as moral is just a matter of the particular developments of our culture seems shortsighted. And I believe that there is evidence to demonstrate this conclusion.

George Lakoff writes about the relationship between moral experience and moral imagination.¹ But before explaining his analysis, let's play a word game. I would like you to look over the following list of words and suppose there is a chart following the list. Your job is to fill in the imaginary chart by mentally picking one of the terms in the list for each cell of the chart. The chart is a 2 by 12 chart; that is, it has two columns and twelve rows. I would produce the chart but my experience in trying to do such a thing on this blog tells me that the resulting chart will not look like one single chart but a succession of smaller charts. Hence, I am counting on your imagination.

The words/terms are filthy, rich, poor, beautiful, sick, hostile/isolated, strong, upright, weak, free, healthy, uncared for, imprisoned, sad, whole, cared for, lacking, clean, ugly, light, dark, fallen, communal, and happy. And the two columns of the chart are entitled good (the left column) and evil (the right column). So go ahead; see what you can do with this “challenge.” I'll wait.

Okay, time's up. You probably noticed after a little reflection that the terms can be matched up as opposites. So, for example, there is happy – sad. I would bet that your chart would match the following pairs with the first term under the title good and the second under the title evil:

rich – poor

beautiful – ugly

strong – weak

upright – fallen

free – imprisoned

healthy – sick

whole – lacking

cared for – uncared for

clean – filthy

light – dark

communal – hostile/isolated

happy – sad

Of course the order makes no difference. Now suppose we did this silly challenge with subjects from around the world. I don't know for sure, but I believe that by and large the chart would be filled in exactly the same way. It is this belief that leads Lakoff to make the observation that our moral experiences are mostly universal. Sure, there are qualifications to associating each of the terms in these pairings or as being norms of goodness and evil. For example, “[a] wealthy child may not get the necessary attention of its parents ...”.² But in a general sense each of the terms is linked, either positively or negatively, to the notion of “well-being.” And it is this universal desire or, perhaps, need, to seek “well-being” that sets the experiential realities that motivate how our moral perspectives develop and make them parallel in their projections around the world. It explains how there is so much overlap between the moral tenets of the world's major religions. For example, honesty seems to be universally prized as moral among these religions. It can very well be that particular practices and processes have evolved within the moral imaginations of various cultures and have manifested themselves in very distinctive ways. One of the things I learned in that course so many years ago was that there are five major institutions that are universal: family, religion, economy, government, and education. This fact says a lot about the human condition and indicates that certain values are morally held among all cultures; for example, the value of obeying legitimate authority.

Lakoff points out that to make sense of these needs, moral experiences are thought of as metaphors or as metaphorical morality, such as the stories that illustrate moral claims to which people can relate. This is what he concludes:

What we learn from this is that metaphorical morality is grounded in nonmetaphorical morality, that is, in forms of well-being, and that the system of metaphors for morality as a whole is far from arbitrary. Because the same forms of well-being are widespread around the world, we expect many of the same metaphors for morality to show up in culture after culture – and they do.³

And if all this is accurate, we have the basis to think of morality in secular terms. This is good, since it opens up the whole topic for instruction in our public schools.

1Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

2Ibid., p. 42.

3Ibid., p. 43. Emphasis added.