African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity

Chapter 2. The Moral Weight of Culture in Ethics

CHAPTER 2 The Moral Weight of Culture in Ethics Segun Gbadegesin S O C I A L anthropology once had to nurse the self-inflicted wound of its characterization as a discipline that is insensitive to the values and identities of other cultures. Seeing non-Western cultures through the prism of a chauvinistic Western male, and judging the modes of life of others by Western standards, earned some pioneer social anthropologists and their political associates (who assumed the “burden of the White Man”) the unenviable title of cultural imperialists.1 With a new orientation, however, anthropology has corrected the mistakes of its pioneers. This new orientation , roundly commended across non-Western cultures, especially in Africa by the apostles of Negritude, was the harbinger of cultural pluralism.2 Stepping away from an arrogant ethnocentrism, anthropologists started to sing the praises of cultural diversity. They pointed to the distinctiveness of African cultural forms and the need to preserve them. They accepted the idea that each culture has something to offer to the “civilization of the universal ,” as Senghor would later put it.3 But the matter became more complex. For there soon began a shift from “cultures differ, and each culture deserves respect” to “morality differs from culture to culture, and no one culture has the right to impose its own moral views on others.” Recent anthropology thus gave birth to ethical relativism.4 With this new development, many of those who had welcomed the discipline’s recognition of the plurality of 25 cultures began to worry about the relativistic inference drawn from its thesis. Does morality differ from culture to culture? And what exactly does this mean? The central claim of relativism is that morality differs across cultures. This is ambiguous. It could mean that moral beliefs differ, in which case it is true. The moral belief of a traditional Yoruba about premarital sex between a prospective husband and wife is influenced by Yoruba customs and tradition. It may or may not differ from that of a tradition-oriented American about the same practice, depending on the similarities between the customs and traditions of the two peoples. Moral beliefs arise from various sources: custom, parents, peers, religion, school, and so on. Therefore, if what“morality differs across cultures”means is that moral beliefs differ, then there is some truth to the matter. It is equally true that moral rules that arise from the application of those moral beliefs differ. Thus a society that holds the moral belief that “lying under pressure is all right” would have no moral rule against the practice. For its part, universalism insists that to make sense of these so-called differences we need to address our minds to a deeper question: What is the rationale for these moral beliefs? How do the indigenes justify them? One response might be that this thinking is what we inherited from our forebears, which raises the further question, “What could have been the rationale our forebears had for these moral beliefs?” Pressed further, it may soon become clear that we are looking for moral principles that serve as rationale and justification for the moral beliefs. Surely the masses may not have addressed this question before. But it is more than likely that at least some of the thinkers among them would come up with an answer to the question of the rationale or justification for the moral beliefs they hold. Such answers, to our surprise, may coincide with the answers provided by those with different or opposing moral beliefs. The universalist suggests that if we focus on the circumstances that give rise to different moral beliefs, we may have a better understanding of what is going on. Thus the group that believes in the rightness of killing aged parents may see it as a pious obligation that must be discharged in their old age, in view of the “miseries” associated with advanced age and the perceived need to relieve their aged ones of those miseries . Before we see this as an irreconcilable difference in the morality of different cultures, we ought to at least explore the reason for the “differences .” Ethical relativism fails to engage in such an exploration. Segun Gbadegesin 26 The Moral Weight of Culture in Ethics Of course, universalism is conscious of the possibility that, after we have explored the basis of the various moral beliefs in the principles, there are still...