moral standards
Ethics are moral principles or values that specify acceptable conduct, and determine how an institution will be governed. According to Shanahan and Wang, in their book Reason and Insight, the subject of ethics is morality, which is concerned with the practices, judgments, principles, and beliefs that guide people's actions. It attempts to address the issue of how we ought to live. Many people have different values that guide their lives, but some of these values are better supported than others. Since people have different morals and values, it is important to distinguish between cultural and moral relativism. First, I will explain the difference between moral and cultural relativism. Next, I will indicate the claims that are supposed to follow from cultural relativism. Then I will explain one of the claims and show Shanahan and Wang's argument against this claim. Lastly, I will show why Shanahan and Wang's argument for this claim are true, and why I accept it. We grow up in a social atmosphere that tells us what is right and wrong. If our own personal morality is different from another culture's, we tend to believe that they are wrong, and our cultural views of morality hold more
Shanahan and Wang's argument against the first claim The first argument assumes the fact that there are no universally agreed upon moral truths. According to Shanahan and Wang, there are, however, many universal moral truths that all cultures value to be important. They believe that there is the presence of diversity among different cultures' moral codes, but it doesn't mean that there are no moral principles common across most cultures. Shanahan and Wang state, "The ethical diversity among cultures may be at a fairly high level and may be grounded on more basic moral principles that cultures have in common." The variance in moral belief in a society is often portrayed to be greater than it actually is. For example, leaving a newborn baby in the snow to die, as the Eskimos often do, is entirely unacceptable in our society. However, it is not that they believe that murder is morally acceptable, but instead that they value the importance of the tribe over the individual. This varies little from ones held in this country. America sending its troops to foreign land is an example. America is willing to sacrifice some to save the whole. The Eskimo tribe would be in danger of starvation at times if they kept every baby girl. The young boys are not sacrificed because they are needed to hunt and provide for the rest of the tribe when they grow older. In this way, the perceived differences in culture may not be as different as they seem on the surface. Just because cultures have different practices, it doesn't mean that they don't have common ethical principles. Moral relativism allows
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Approximate Word count = 1091
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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