ETHICS | Chapter 2: Moral Agents
Lesson 1
Moral Behavior of the Moral Agent
and Culture
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Learning Outcomes
Students should be able to:
a. Articulate what culture means;
b. Attribute facets of personal behavior to culture; and
c. Discuss their moral behavior vis-à-vis community influences
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Culture: Some Definitions
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 on some factors like status, class, education, taste in music or film, and
speech habits. Some people visit places like museums or art galleries to increase their so-called ‘cultural
awareness’.
The term ‘culture’ is so complex that it is not easy to define. 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:
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 is the sum total of 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;
c. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person’s learned,
accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
Defined broadly therefore, culture includes all the things individuals learn while growing up among
particular group: attitudes, standards of morality, rules of 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.
Culture’s Role in 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 behaviors, along with knowledge, beliefs, symbols that they accept that are passed along by
communication and imitation from one generation to the next.”
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ETHICS | Chapter 2: Moral Agents
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, recognize attributes, 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 (Mañebog & Peña, 2016).”
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 of 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. 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.
Enculturation, Inculturation, and Acculturation
Cultures change or evolve. There are various ways by which cultures change – by enculturation,
inculturation, and by acculturation.
a. Enculturation. It is a process of learning from infancy until death, the components of life in
one’s culture.
b. Inculturation. It refers to the missiological process in which the Gospel is rooted in a
particular culture and the latter is transformed by its introduction to Christianity.
c. Acculturation. It is the cultural modification of an individual group, or people by adapting
to or borrowing traits from another culture.
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Prepared by:
JASPER KENNETH V. CARREON
Instructor
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