Whether consciously or unconsciously, people utilize ethics in their every day basis. We often struggle to determine whether a situation is right or wrong. We judge people’s actions and different situations using standards or codes we take as right or wrong. More often than we debate our moral standards with those who hold different ones. In fact, society is full of these controversial situations as we can see in magazines, news, and books
There is nothing wrong with debating, but the problem comes when we think that we are right and others are wrong. This happens because people ignore the nature of their moral claims. For this reason, I will start this paper differentiating two kinds of ethical claims, and then I will analyze how Ayer uses …show more content…
Therefore, moral norms differ from one group to another. What this argument states that social approval determine what is good and what is bad, a kind of social construction. Since those moral standards are going to vary from culture to culture, they cannot be objective. For instance, if I kill someone and killing is allowed in my group then this is not wrong. However, if my group disapprove killing, then I am doing something wrong. This is something that happens frequently in today’s world. Glensler, points out significant problems for cultural relativism. The first one is that cultural relativism ignores that one person can belongs to many different groups, which can differ on moral views. If the moral views differ, what would be the right thing to do? Cultural relativist fail to offer a consistent answer. Secondly, cultural relativism forces us to conformity. Since just majority groups are right, minority groups are wrong. Where are we leaving our individual reason and critical thinking to improve ourselves? And the ability to criticize society norms and provoke changes for the good. Glensler also states that not because a norm is product of the culture, it is necessarily subjective. He also says that disagreement does not imply the absence of universal ethical norms. Finally, being tolerant regarding cultural differences does not mean that you are a cultural relativism. In those cases, culture relativism fails to provide satisfactory
There is nothing wrong with debating, but the problem comes when we think that we are right and others are wrong. This happens because people ignore the nature of their moral claims. For this reason, I will start this paper differentiating two kinds of ethical claims, and then I will analyze how Ayer uses …show more content…
Therefore, moral norms differ from one group to another. What this argument states that social approval determine what is good and what is bad, a kind of social construction. Since those moral standards are going to vary from culture to culture, they cannot be objective. For instance, if I kill someone and killing is allowed in my group then this is not wrong. However, if my group disapprove killing, then I am doing something wrong. This is something that happens frequently in today’s world. Glensler, points out significant problems for cultural relativism. The first one is that cultural relativism ignores that one person can belongs to many different groups, which can differ on moral views. If the moral views differ, what would be the right thing to do? Cultural relativist fail to offer a consistent answer. Secondly, cultural relativism forces us to conformity. Since just majority groups are right, minority groups are wrong. Where are we leaving our individual reason and critical thinking to improve ourselves? And the ability to criticize society norms and provoke changes for the good. Glensler also states that not because a norm is product of the culture, it is necessarily subjective. He also says that disagreement does not imply the absence of universal ethical norms. Finally, being tolerant regarding cultural differences does not mean that you are a cultural relativism. In those cases, culture relativism fails to provide satisfactory