Ethical Relativism, Epistemology, And Ethics Essay

Loretta Kopelman’s dissertation, Female Genital Circumcision and Conventionalists Ethical Relativism, takes a new approach in a global plight. Kopelman begins her thesis by elaborating on a particular tribe in southern Kenya. She describes how young girls are being mutilated for marriageability. Their fathers, eager for large dowries, perform the ritual on girls as young as nine. While some victims are able to escape and seek sanctuary, this obviously isn’t always possible and thus these girls must live with an inflicted deformity their whole life that doesn’t only cause serious health complications but sometimes even death.

Culture is the Backbone of a society, when something/someone tries to alter it or go against it everyone will notice. In this issue pointed out by Ruth Macklin, we look at the problems that can arise when an individual’s culture and autonomy clash. Every year there at least 30 million immigrants from all over the world that move to the United states of America, making America one of the most culturally diverse country in the world. Keeping this in mind, we will focus on Ruth Macklin’s issue of Multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the co-existence of diverse cultures, where culture includes racial, religious, or cultural groups and is manifested in customary behaviors, cultural assumptions and values, patterns of thinking, and communicative styles. Critics argue that we associate culture with a society, community and or family, but rarely with a single individual, thus placing it above the individual person. In this paper we are going to look at four different scenarios on from Ruth Macklin’s article.

“Ethics is about how we meet the challenge of doing the right thing when that will cost more than what we want to pay.” (The Josephson Institute of Ethics) When I think about everything that I have learned within the Business Ethics class, I think of one topic – Understanding Ethics. This teaches you many things like what ethics is, how to understand right and wrong, ethical reasoning and much more. “The field of ethics is the study of how we try to live our lives according to a standard of “right” or “wrong” behavior–in both how we think and behave toward others and how we would like them to think and behave towards us.” (Business Ethics Now, Ghillyer, 4) Some people consider ethics to be a conscious choice to follow a set of moral standards or ethical principles that supply direction on how they should perform in their daily lives; others, however, look to the behavior of others to decide what is an acceptable standard of right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Many factors including how they were raised, their religion, and the transitions and beliefs of their society drive their definition of the right or wrong. Judgments are made about good or bad behavior by moral standards, which are principles based on religious, cultural, or philosophical beliefs. These beliefs can come from many different sources such as family, friends, ethnic background, religion, school, the media–television, radio, newspapers magazines, the Internet, and personal role models and mentors.

The life of prisoners some may never know. There are those who care not to know what goes on behind that wired fence. We find that some people that are convicted of crimes that they did not commit. Some people would rather turn their heads to what actually happens in a prison institution, because they feel it is no concern of theirs. Innocent women and men face a disaster in life when they find their selves incarcerated in such facility as these. The treatment in prison facilities toward prisoners with health issues or those who develop health concerns that

Moral relativism, as Harman describes, denies “that there are universal basic moral demands, and says different people are subject to different basic moral demands depending on the social customs, practices, conventions, and principles that they accept” (Harman, p. 85). Many suppose that moral feelings derive from sympathy and concern for others, but Harman rather believes that morality derives from agreement among people of varying powers and resources provides a more plausible explanation (Harman, p. 12).The survival of these values and morals is based on Darwin’s natural selection survival of the fittest theory. Many philosophers have argued for and against what moral relativism would do for the world. In this essay, we will discuss

Ethical Relativism, Cultural Relativism, and Ethical Absolutism Ethical relativists argue that what is morally right or wrong may vary in fundamental way from person to person or from culture to culture. In other words, as Robert Arrington (1983) argues, we cannot simply say that a moral judgement is true for all purposes, persons, and cultures-we can assert only that it is true for a particular person or social group. Cultural relativism is a form of relativism that claims that moral beliefs and practices vary from culture to culture. It is important to understand, however that cultural relativists do not argue that certain acts or practices are right or wrong in a particular culture.

Ethics strives to determine what is best for the most people in order to enable them to live a happy, productive life. In our democratic society, we based our constitution on ethical, objectivistic principles. Ethics based on relativist views, cannot distinguish between what is good and evil. The ethical relativist believes that what is right for me, even if someone else finds it repulsive, is still fine because it is my moral belief.

The thesis of meta-ethical cultural relativism is the philosophical viewpoint that there are no absolute moral truths, only truths relative to the cultural context in which they exist. From this it is therefore presumed that what one society considers to be morally right, another society may consider to be morally wrong, therefore, moral right's and wrongs are only relative to a particular society. Thus cultural relativism implies that what is 'good' is what is 'socially approved' in a given culture. Two arguments in favour of cultural relativism are the 'Cultural Differences argument' and the 'Argument from the virtue of tolerance', the following essay will look at and evaluate both of these

Newsstands proclaim it. Talk shows trumpet it. Scandal, murder, and deception! People share a common disdain for these evils, scorning those who commit the dirty deeds. Laws are upheld to prevent people from doing “bad” things, but how do people come to an agreement on what is truly wrong? Even as society moves away from traditional teachings and perspectives, many acts are still universally looked down upon. Throughout history, the majority of civilizations have held surprisingly similar moral ideals regarding acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Although moral relativists believe that morality is individually determined, there is, in fact, an objective moral standard that governs all humanity, because a sense of right and wrong is universal, transcends time and culture, and is evident in the majority of people.

Ethical Relativism What is right and wrong is a widely opinionated discrepancy among the human race. It varies between cultures, societies, religion, traditions, and endless influential factors. Ethical relativism is described by John Ladd as the “doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions varies from society and that there are no absolute universal moral standards binding on all men at all times. Accordingly, it holds that whether or not it is right for an individual to act in a certain way depends on or is relative to the society to which he belongs”(Pojman, 24).

To compare Ethical Egoism with Ethical Subjectivism, we could use the abortion example. If it is in the mother’s best interest to do abortion, then it is right to do it. Along with Ethical subjectivism, when people say, abortion is “murder,” they are expressing their feelings towards this case, and when other people say abortion is an optional and it’s up to the women to decide, they’re also stating their feelings. The decision would be based on how you feel abortion not weather its right or wrong. Ethical subjectivism opposes with the concepts of good and bad or right and wrong, and it believes that these concepts do not exist. For this reason, ethical subjectivism was more developed afterwards and has divided into many other theories such as relativism which advocates that good

The word “ethics” comes from Greek ethikas meaning character. Today, we use ethics to describe the normative standard of behavior. The history of philosophical ethics has been broken up into five rational methods: Virtue, Traditional, Modern, and Post-Modern Ethics. Within these periods, the philosophy of ethics changed along with the changes being made within society.

No two people are the same, and they will never be the same. Even twins have different ways of viewing things. This is the same for people ethical views, according the The Merriam-Websters Dictionary (2015) the definitions for ethics is “The rules of behavior based on ideas about what is morally good and bad.” Knowing what is morally right or wrong especially in the business world can help prevent scandals or corrupt business practices. But in today society, ethics can be blurred through situations and personal views, now it seems as though people aren’t even thinking about what is ethical but more so what can benefit them. Within recent months, news of FIFA allowing bribes to be accepted from certain people has managed to corrupted a billion dollar business and affected their corporation along with allowing the world to see their ethical views. In this paper I will be talking about whether or not this a topical of ethical views, is this a common situation with management and if it affected international business.

In the beginning of the semester, we were given an ethical inventory and I felt fairly confident with my results. I 've never taken an ethics class before, so I was very interested in learning about different philosophies. I came to class with an opened mind and eager with curiosity and was intrigued by the many different philosophical theories. This newfound information influenced my current stance when re-taking the inventory. There were a few questions which I had a change of heart in, most of these questions circled around the philosophy of moral relativism and moral absolutism.

This is a doctrine that bases its arguments in the fact that there are no universal absolute truths in ethics and that what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person or from society to society. Ethical relativism is a similar concept, based specifically on the ethics of a culture and how they are related to those of other cultures (Kluckhohn, 2011). Herodotus, the Greek historian advanced this view when he observed that different societies have different customs and that each person thinks that his customs are