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MODULE in ETHICS 3

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MODULE in ETHICS 3

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IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY

College of Education Ethics

Module 3: THE MORAL AGENT


Time: 6 Hours

ntroduction
This module aims to analyze the nature of mores and values in ethics. It discusses the in-
terplay between the individual as a free moral agent, and his/her society or environment,
as well as the process of value experience, including the difference between values and
moral values. In broad strokes, it gives a background on the nature of morality and the
mores which are the subject matter of ethics. It examines the nature of mores, including
the development of the notion of what is ‘right’ in our culture. The module also examines
the notion of freedom as it relates to morality, together with the wide range of values and
moral values, including the nature and basis of the choices that we make.
Introduction

This module aims to analyse the very nature and definition of culture as well as its
relationship with how human beings develop themselves their view on what is good or bad.
It discusses the interplay between cultural factors that influence human beings on
becoming moral agents. Also, this module discusses the nature and problems involving
cultural and moral relativism anchored from cultural diversity between and among cultural
communities. Further, comparison between Asian Moral understanding and Western
understanding is also presented to look into the origins, major philosophical and
theoretical frameworks by which morality is viewed upon.

Learning Outcomes

After studying this module, you should be able to:

1. Define and discuss the concept of Culture;


2. Elaborate the interplay between Culture and Morality;
3. Compare and contrast moral understanding between Asian and Western
context; and
4. Critique case and instances which involve cultural and moral relativism.

I. PROGRESSIVE-Learning

Key Content

1. Culture: Definition, Nature, and Characteristics

It is commonly said that culture is all around us. Practically, culture appears to be
an actual part of our social life as well as our personality. For some, culture is a
quality that some people have more than others: how ‘cultured' somebody is depends
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

on some factors like status, class, education, taste in music or film, and speech
habits. By attending symphonies, plays, operas, and poetry readings, some show that
they 'appreciate culture' more than others. Sometimes, people visit places like
museums or art galleries to increase their so-called 'cultural awareness.’ Probably,
you have heard somebody in the ‘cultural elite' bemoan the deplorable 'popular
culture' of TV, graphically violent computer games, mass-marketed movies, pierced
navels, tattoos, and rock or rap music.

The term ‘culture’ is so complex that it is not easy to define. In one sense, culture is
used to denote that which is related to the arts and humanities. But in a broader
sense, culture denotes the practices, beliefs, and perceptions of a given society. It is
in this sense that culture is often opposed. With ‘savagery,’ that is, being 'cultured’ is
seen as a product of a certain evolvement from a natural state.

The following are other definitions of the term culture ("Culture Definition,” n.d.):

a. Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values,


attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations,
concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a
group of people in the course of generations through individual and group
striving.

b. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired
and transmitted by symbols: constituting the distinctive achievement of human
groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture
consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems
may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as
conditioning influences upon further action.

c. Culture is the sum total the learned behavior of a group of people that are
generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from
generation to generation.

d. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality persons
learned accumulated experience which is socially transmitted or more briefly,
behavior through social learning.

e. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group’s skills,


knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are
learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.

Defined broadly therefore, culture includes all the things individuals learn while
growing up among particular group: attitudes, standards of morality, rules of
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

etiquette perceptions of reality, language, notions about the proper way to live beliefs
about how females and males should interact, ideas about how the world works and
so forth. We call this cultural knowledge.

2. Characteristics of Culture

a. Learned Behaviour. Not all behaviour is learned, but most of it is learned;


combing one’s hair, standing in line, telling jokes, criticising the President and
going to the movie, all constitute behaviours which had to be learned.

Sometimes the terms conscious learning and unconscious learning are used to
distinguish the learning.

Example: Ways in which a small child learns to handle a tyrannical father or a


rejecting mother often affect the ways in which that child, ten or fifteen
years later, handles his relationships with other people.

In addition, culture is not biological; we do not inherit it. Much of learning


culture is unconscious. We learn culture from families, peers, institutions, and
media. The process of learning culture is known as enculturation. While all humans
have basic biological needs such as food, sleep, and sex, the way we fulfil those needs
varies cross-culturally.

b. Culture is shared. Because we share culture with other members of our


group, we are able to act in socially appropriate ways as well as predict how
others will act. Despite the shared nature of culture, that doesn’t mean that
culture is homogenous (the same).

Example: Pinakbet for the Ilocanos; “Moma” for the Cordillerans; etc. Also, Ngilin
for the Cordillerans; Pasyon for all Filipino Catholics, and the like. The thing is,
culture cannot remain into isolation. It is always integrated into the common walks
of life of the people who practice such.
c. Culture is based on symbols (Symbolic). A symbol is something that stands
for something else. Symbols vary cross-culturally and are arbitrary. They only
have meaning when people in a culture agree on their use. Language, money
and art are all symbols. Language is the most important symbolic component
of culture.

Example:

= Cross for Christianity (Christian Faith)


IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

= Crescent and Star for Islam (Islamic Faith)

= Lingling-o (Ifugao Symbol for Fertility)

= Hagabi of Ifugao (Symbol of Wealth)

d. Culture is integrated. This is known as holism, or the various parts of a


culture being interconnected. All aspects of a culture are related to one another
and to truly understand a culture, one must learn about all of its parts, not
only a few.

Example: Our Muslim friends are benevolent. In fact, their religion-Islam, advocates
peace and brotherhood. This is because their social philosophy is
fundamentally grounded in Qur’an. Every tenet and principles in Qur’an is
embodied into the moral understanding, social dealings, and their political
philosophy as well.

Another example is the Dance culture of Ilocanos. In the dynamics of their


dance, their hands are typically closed which symbolizes their becoming
thrifty.

e. Culture is dynamic. This simply means that cultures interact and change.
Because most cultures are in contact with other cultures, they exchange ideas
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

and symbols. All cultures change, otherwise, they would have problems
adapting to changing environments. And because cultures are integrated, if
one component in the system changes, it is likely that the entire system must
adjust.

Example:

2. Culture’s Role in Moral Behavior

Based on the definitions of culture above, it is not hard to pinpoint the role of the
culture in one's moral behavior. A culture is a way of life’ of a group of people and this so-
called ‘way of life’ actually includes moral values and behaviours, along with knowledge,
beliefs, symbols that they accept, “generally without thinking about them and that are
passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next” (“Culture
Definition," n.d.).

Culture is learned as children grow up in society and discover how their parents and
others around them interpret the world. In our society, we learn to distinguish objects such
as cars, windows, houses, children, and food; recognize attributes like sharp, hot,
beautiful, and humid; classify and perform different kinds of acts; and even “evaluate what
is [morally] good and bad and to judge when an unusual action is appropriate or
inappropriate” (Maňebog & Peňa. 2016).
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

Many aspects of morality are taught. People learn moral and aspects of right or
wrong from transmitters of culture: respective parents, teachers, novels, films and
television. Observing or watching them, people develop a set idea of what is right and
wrong, and what is acceptable and what is not.
Even experientially, it is improbable, if not impossible, to live in a society without
being affected by its culture. It follows too that it is hard to grow up in a particular culture
without being impacted by how it views morality or what is ethically right or wrong.
Anthropologically speaking, culture-including moral values, beliefs, and behavior-is learned
from other people while growing up in a particular society or group; is widely shared by the
members of that society or group; and so profoundly affects the thoughts, actions, and
feelings of people in that group that “individuals are a product of their culture” and
“learning a culture is an essential part of human development" (De Guzman E: Peňa, 2016).
'
Social learning is the process by which individuals acquire knowledge from others in
the groups to which they belong, as a normal part of childhood. The process by which
infants and children socially learn the culture, including morality, of those around them is
called enculturation or Socialization.

3. Relativism: All human views are acceptable, depending on the context.

Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards
of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and
frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving
rise to them. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high
level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g.,
beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a
given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and
correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once
the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists
characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then
there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of
whether the thing in question is so can be established.

Example:
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

3.1 Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is the ability to understand a culture on its own terms


and not to make judgments using the standards of one’s own culture. The goal
of this is promote understanding of cultural practices that are not typically
part of one’s own culture. Using the perspective of cultural relativism leads to
the view that no one culture is superior than another culture when compared
to systems of morality, law, politics, etc. It is a concept that cultural norms and
values derive their meaning within a specific social context. This is also based
on the idea that there is no absolute standard of good or evil, therefore every
decision and judgment of what is right and wrong is individually decided in
each society. The concept of cultural relativism also means that any opinion on
ethics is subject to the perspective of each person within their particular
culture. Overall, there is no right or wrong ethical system. In a holistic
understanding of the term cultural relativism, it tries to promote the
understanding of cultural practices that are unfamiliar to other cultures such
as eating insects, genocides or genital cutting.
Note: Context is important to interpret one’s belief, values, and behavior.

Two Types of Cultural Relativism


a. Absolute: Everything that happens within a culture must and should not be
questioned by outsiders. The extreme example of absolute cultural relativism would
be the Nazi party’s point of view justifying the Holocaust.

Absolute cultural relativism is displayed in many cultures, especially Africa, that


practice female genital cutting. This procedure refers to the partial or total removal of
the external female genitalia or any other trauma to the female reproductive/genital
organs. By allowing this procedure to happen, females are considered women and
then are able to be married. FGC is practiced mainly because of culture, religion and
tradition. Outside cultures such as the United States look down upon FGC, but are
unable to stop this practice from happening because it is protected by its culture.
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=Genital+Mutilation&sxsrf=ALeKk00K4GJ61B3a-
iDKZTcV1j574c_0jg:1599024361332&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwio56z43cnrAhWHwZQKHZpr
AdYQ_AUoAXoECAsQAw&biw=1242&bih=597#imgrc=EdvDIyuSob5Z1M

b. Critical: Creates questions about cultural practices in terms of who is accepting


them and why. Critical cultural relativism also recognizes power relationships.
Cultural relativism can be seen with the Chinese culture and their process of feet
binding. Foot binding was to stop the growth of the foot and make them smaller. The
process often began between four and seven years old. A ten foot bandage would be
wrapped around the foot forcing the toes to go under the foot. It caused the big toe to
be closer to the heel causing the foot to bow. In China, small feet were seen as
beautiful and a symbol of status. The women wanted their feet to be “three-inch
golden lotuses”. It was also the only way to marry into money. Because men only
wanted women with small feet, even after this practice was banned in 1912, women
still continued to do it. To Western cultures the idea of feet binding might seems
torturous, but for the Chinese culture it was a symbol of beauty that has been
ingrained the culture for hundreds of years. The idea of beauty differs from culture to
culture.

Source: https://www.google.com/search?
q=foot+binding+china&sxsrf=ALeKk03O57NCfW3xEnPCb_IxbQME9viTgQ:1599024466402&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X
&ved=2ahUKEwj3ibqq3snrAhVRNKYKHV3YBTEQ_AUoAXoECBUQAw&biw=1242&bih=597#imgrc=FI8Tkp_RVljPlM

Cultural relativists base their moral theory on the observation that societies
fundamentally disagree about ethical issues. What is deemed moral within one group may
be totally despicable to the members of another group, and vice versa. It is thus concluded
that morality differs m every society as concepts of right and wrong vary from culture to
culture.
Advocates moreover believe that "we cannot resolve the ethical differences among cultures
using some independent standard of evaluation. According to the theory, there is no
“universal truth" in ethics; that is, there are no moral truths that hold for all peoples at all
times. Various cultural codes or customs are all that exist, and nothing more. Allegedly,
there is no unconventional yardstick in ethics because every standard is culture-bound. '
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

Defining morality as a product of culture, the theory submits that there are no objective
values and ethics is merely a matter of societal convention. Advocates see themselves as
open-minded as they consider other cultures, not as ‘wrong’, but simply as 'different.’ For
them; the moral code of our own society has no special status; it is merely one among
many. For instance, concerning fixed marriage, male circumcision and excision, cultural
relativism. would say that it is mere arrogance for us to try to judge the conduct of the
peoples practicing them. Relativists thus suggest that we should adopt instead an attitude
of tolerance toward any of the practices of other cultures.
Example:
a. Eskimos see nothing wrong with infanticide, whereas we, Christians believe
infanticide is immoral. Therefore, infanticide is neither objectively right nor
objectively wrong. It is merely a matter of opinion, which varies from culture to
culture.

b. Judaism and Islam regard eating pork as a sin, whereas Roman Catholics and
some Protestant sects regard as no less than as health issue and does not bear
moral question.

c.

This Japanese schoolgirl might think that


eating with a fork or spoon is quite strange.
She has been well socialized to know that
polite eating involves competent use of
chopsticks.

d.
In the Philippines, dogs are family members
and highly cherished, and is becoming a
growth industry. In Nanking, China, dogs are
valued more as culinary delicacy and a good
source of protein.
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

4. Asian Moral Understanding VS Western Ethics

As indicated in the table, the basis of Asian or Eastern Ethics is religion, specifically
Eastern religions or philosophies. Confucianism, for instance, focuses on the cultivation of
virtue and maintenance of morality, the most basic of which are rén (an obligation of
altruism and humaneness for other individuals), yi (the upholding of righteousness and the
moral disposition to good), and li (a system of norms and propriety that determines how a
person 'should properly act in everyday life).
On the other hand, Western Ethics is claimed to have more of a stress on self and
what is rationally or logically true. Moreover, Western Ethics is seen to place more
emphasis on law and justice while Eastern Ethics seems to hold that one must do what is
right and expected of him and the universe (or a metaphysical force) will take care of the
rest.

II. POST-Learning

A. Individual Essay

1. Why can’t all cultural practices be always correct? Expound your answer.

III. PUSH-Learning

1. Give two (2) concrete examples/instances of cultural relativism you know.


Meaning, what are your traditions and cultural practices deemed as wrong or
unbecoming by/for others.
IFUGAO STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Education Ethics

_________________________________________________________________________________________
References
De Guzman J.M. et.al, 2018. Ethics: Principles of Ethical Behavior in Modern Society.
MUTYA Publishing House, Inc., Portrero, Malabon City.

Roberts, K.A. & Ballantine J.H., 2013. Sociology: Our Social World. Sage Publications,
London United Kigndom

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