Telos
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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[quote1219196575=fourfold]
Diotima.
Yes, FGM is clearly a case where the instrumental value in helping a culture to flourish (say, by leaving it alone) is outweighed by the damage done. It would be better if that culture changed or died than if it continued. (By died I mean as a set of practices or norms or collective representations, not in the sense of the death of people.)
[/quote1219196575]
What sense is there to "helping a culture flourish" when half the people are clearly not flourishing?!
There are a few key considerations in this thread that need to be looked at more carefully:
1. The value of culture pluralism. A cultural practice or belief or set of beliefs is only valuable insofar as it sustains the quality of the lives of the majority of the people living within that culture.
2. The necessary conditions of a having a civilization, or culture, or something which permits the common ascription of value is worth maintaining, if anything is worth maintaining, as doing so is a necessary condition of valuation itself.
3. There are culture-sustaining, culture sustenance-neutral, and culture-pathological institutions in any given society. The denigration of women is an example of the latter, as it deprives half the population of a voice in culture, and FGM is a symptom of that, given 1 and 2.
This shows there can be pluralism without relativism, and that FGM is wrong.
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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I think Telos puts the nail in the wall for our starting to hang the picture correctly. We can have a pluralism as long as we have one chief good to which all "pluralities" conform. In this case, he suggests that there is a value in a culture that lends itself to flourishing. This seems prima facie plausible in my head. However, I want to raise a concern.
What scares me about too much pluralism is the range such plurality engenders. The moral price can be one of incommensurability, especially when we think of how often non-moral conceptions of flourishing are. Flourishing is a thick moral concept with a descriptive and normative component. These senses of the term become problematic in incommensurable pluralisms. Take a kid growing up in Harlem, NY. His flourishing is actually dependent on cultivating streetwise virtues that are not moral by any means. Now, compare a kid the same way in the Upper West-side of New York City. One fortunate, the other not. Both can be flourishing in their own way, and if too much pluralism abounds, we could say that either flourishing at this point is problematically silent when various conceptions/pluralism is entertained, or that flourishing in both respects is justified. Either way, I find commensurability a much more theoretically useful insistence for moral theory and reject pluralism.
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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Jedi, that's just a good reason to be an anti-realist.
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The kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon what kind of person one is. ~ J.G. Fichte
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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I'm not so sure about a commitment to anti-realism either.
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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[quote1219279855=JediKnightTage]
I'm not so sure about a commitment to anti-realism either.
[/quote1219279855]
Well, it would let you stipulate naturalistic grounds for "objectifying" (in a very weird sense of that word) subjective statements... you can say things like "In such and such case, a, behaviour z is non-moral because it's pragmatically necessitated by the circumstances, but if z were practiced in another case, b, we would be justified in a disapproving attitude towards x insofar as the circumstances which mitigate this disapproval are removed."
And you can consider which circumstances entail which approvals and disapprovals on the basis of natural facts like prosperity, wealth, poverty, hunger, religion, etcetera.
We can, say, condemn FGM (that is to say, if it is forced or coerced tacitly by culture and ignorance), rightfully, that is to say, have an attitude of disapproval towards it, while simultaneously regarding it as probably pragmatically necessary in many circumstances.
The issues you bring up seem to slip away quite easily...
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The kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon what kind of person one is. ~ J.G. Fichte
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Re: Cultural Relativism Vs. Human Rights 3 Years, 9 Months ago
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Telos, did you read my whole post? What are you disagreeing with, exactly?
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Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again. -- O.V. de Milosz
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