[Wellsy]

I vaguely remember listening to how in the process of conquering nations, the conquerers often end up assimilating into the conquered because they adopt the superior culture.
However where the invader has a superior culture it firmly establishes itself over the other.

This is interesting on the surface but how has this process actually played out and can one judge which culture would win out overall?

[Political Interest]

All cultures have pluses and minuses.

There are not immutable traits within cultures and civilisations but rather trends that are more predominant depending on the particular society in question.

One could even say that all cultures are equally terrible.

[Wellsy]

All cultures have pluses and minuses.

There are not immutable traits within cultures and civilisations but rather trends that are more predominant depending on the particular society in question.

One could even say that all cultures are equally terrible.

I take it that there must be a means of evaluating different ways of life, that we are able to have moral judgements which have some basis and that one can argue that one way of life is right because of some particular things about it. Like saying that having affordable healthcare is clearly superior rather than a matter of indifference because we can't judge.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf

MacIntyre shows convincingly that neither position can be sustained in respect to the traditions of enquiry described in his book. All traditions of life and therefore of philosophy have standards by which they are able to judge the adequacy of their own account; under the impact of criticism from outside or by the disclosure of new problems from within, all traditions of enquiry, all communities, are continually changing, frequently finding that former beliefs have become obsolete and sometimes undergoing ‘epistemological crisis’, perhaps merging with other currents or collapsing. While no tradition can exclude the possibility that its current beliefs and practices may become outmoded, within its own terms; conversely, all traditions have the capacity to subject others to criticism and frequently such criticisms succeed and rival traditions change under the impact of such challenges.

https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2009-10/10100/LECTURES/21-relativism-nihilism.pdf

When we look at the moral views of various cultures, MacIntyre says, one thing we do not find is the view that these views are only binding on members of the relevant culture. Rather, the moral views of cultures are typically views about how it is best for human beings in general to live, and not just members of that culture. This, MacIntyre, says,
...
The other side of the same coin is that moral relativism seems to make some kinds of intolerance immune from criticism -- how is the relativist to explain why intolerance in a culture which promotes it is wrong, not only for us, but also for members of that culture?

This is related to a general worry about moral relativism. Quite often, we want to make claims to the effect that certain actions were wrong, even though the actions were not wrong from the point of view of the society of the people performing the actions. Consider, for example:

"It was wrong for property owners in the antebellum South to own slaves."

The relativist might explain the fact that sentences like this seem true to us by saying that, when we make claims like this, we are really saying that this was wrong, according to our moral code. But in a way, this only postpones the problem. We also want to say that our moral code is superior, in this respect, to that operative among property owners in the antebellum South. And we do not mean just to be making the trivially true claim that our moral code is superior to theirs by the standards of our moral code. But, if moral relativism is true, there does not seem to be any other true claim that we could be making.

This raises the question: if moral relativism is false, what does it mean to say that, for example, capital punishment is wrong for me? Aside from the claim that it is wrong for me to engage in capital punishment -- which is not what is meant -- it is hard to see what this sort of claim could mean -- other than the claim that capital punishment is (absolutely) wrong, or the claim that I (absolutely) believe that it is.

My best speculation for the basis of such judgments has to relate to human beings and arguments for what is best to our nature and well-being. I feel a possible grounding for such judgments in Marx's conception of human beings as makers of themselves based on the changing of the material world to satisfy our needs.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf

The first objection I will address here is whether Marx now owes us a further justification of the claim that human existence ought to be preserved and promoted. I think that he would regard such a question as already proceeding from a highly alienated and un-human perspective, and therefore would deny that he owes any answer to the question on its own terms. Marx writes that "man is the highest being for man," but aside from this he does not have any special answer to give to the question, Why should we promote the continuation and further development of human existence? I share Marx's diagnosis of such a question. Because value itself is a human product whose content derives, at bottom, from an assessment of how human needs can be satisfied, there is something deeply misguided about adopting any other standard for morality aside from its suitability as an aid to satisfying human needs. Morality can only be derived from a human standpoint and on the basis of a scientific worldview, assuming human beings and their needs as our standard of value.
...
The question that may be asked here, of course, is whether human flourishing—the development of “rich individuality”—really is the highest aim for human beings and whether it really can play the role of a supreme moral principle in any moral theory worth the name.
...
I will do my best to motivate the first question, which more bluntly stated, is this: What is so good, anyway, about satisfying human needs and developing human capacities? Why should that be the basis of our moral theory? Why not maximizing happiness? Or instantiating the virtues? Or following divine commands, for that matter?

The answer, though some will find it unsatisfying, is that we should care about the full flourishing of human beings because they're us. And we are more than just happinessexperiencing blobs; we are capable of a vast array of activities and experiences and it is only through the full exploration of these that we can realize our human essence as social individuals in a productive engagement with the world around us.

I think Marx would argue that the question, Why promote human flourishing?, doesn't arise unless a person already has such an alienated and un-human perspective on her own species and on the world that for her, knowing that some path of action is most likely to preserve the continued existence of human beings and to further their full development in the natural world is not enough to answer the question, Ought this path to be taken? And of course, there are people like these. The religious-minded, for instance, may think that the this-worldly orientation of rich individuality is misguided, and that the existence of man as an essentially spiritual being is to be realized through the glorification of God and an eventual assumption into Heaven. Or, in a more mundane spin on skepticism about human flourishing in the natural world as a moral end, there is the tendency among members of the animal rights movement to regard human beings as just another type of animal among many animals, all of (at least) relatively equal moral worth. Marx, after all, is the consummate “speciesist,” insisting that value of any kind only comes onto the scene once human beings start producing in order to satisfy their needs. And this, I believe provides a significant part of Marx's answer to these types of criticisms. The mistake that these sorts of critics make is similar to the mistake made by the person who wants to know the answer to the theological question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” to whom Marx replies:

since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man--a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man--has become impossible in practice. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW 3:305-306)

This line of thought can be applied to the question of whether or not “man is the highest being for man,” as Marx says, which expresses the same idea as the statement that the development of rich individuality is the highest moral aim. It is incoherent, and incommensurate with our scientific knowledge, to talk about value in a way that does not assume human beings and their productive activity as the source and ontological basis of all value in the world.

This of course leaves things vague still but I think is one possible way of beginning to chew on the issue of how I can say that I find one way of life superior as I do think against some of the woke anti-colonialist types, the idea of moral and cultural progress such that some are superior to others.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/malik/not-equal.htm

ndeed, Western liberals were often shocked by the extent to which anti-colonial movements adopted what they considered to be tainted notions. The Enlightenment concepts of universalism and social progress, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, found ‘unexpected support from peoples who desire nothing more than to share in the benefits of industrialisation; peoples who prefer to look upon themselves as temporarily backward rather than permanently different’. Elsewhere he noted that the doctrine of cultural relativism ‘was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists had established it in the first place’ [6].

How things have changed. ‘Permanently different’ is exactly how we tend to see different, groups, societies and cultures today. Why? Largely because contemporary society has lost faith in social transformation, in the possibility of progress, in the beliefs that animated anti-imperialists like James and Fanon.

To regard people as ‘temporarily backward’ rather than ‘permanently different’ is to accept that while people are potentially equal, cultures definitely are not; it is to accept the idea of social and moral progress; that it would be far better if everybody had the chance to live in the type of society or culture that best promoted human advancement.

But it’s just these ideas — and the very act of making judgements about beliefs, values, lifestyles, and cultures — that are now viewed as politically uncouth. In place of the progressive universalism of James and Fanon, contemporary Western societies have embraced a form of nihilistic multiculturalism. We’ve come to see the world as divided into cultures and groups defined largely by their difference with each other. And every group has come to see itself as composed not of active agents attempting to overcome disadvantages by striving for equality and progress, but of passive victims with irresolvable grievances. For if differences are permanent, how can grievances ever be resolved?

[Tainari88]

@Wellsy I like this piece by lumen. I think many people tend to take very cut and dried or black and white approaches to what is wrong or right. One should read what is stated in this piece. It is about culture shock and having to be open-minded and be incredibly flexible when working in foreign cultures.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/alamo ... entricism/

[Wellsy]

@Wellsy I like this piece by lumen. I think many people tend to take very cut and dried or black and white approaches to what is wrong or right. One should read what is stated in this piece. It is about culture shock and having to be open-minded and be incredibly flexible when working in foreign cultures.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/alamo ... entricism/

I see the sense of 'When in Rome do as the Romans do' and that many do come from an ethnocentric perspective as they simply react to things that they do not understand or are unfamiliar with. However, I do think there is the ability to deliberate and come up with reasons why something may still be wrong and that can judge an aspect of culture as problematic.

And I think that this can be approached without necessarily resorting to cultural imperialism which is indeed the case of forcing change rather than the approach of solidarity of subjecting yourself to the aims of another to support their goals.
I think of Henry Rollins own experience where he went to Haiti and simply gave out some goods to some Haitians in a kind of slum and it created a lot of conflicts as people fought over soccer balls and soap. Then some men from the community stepped in and were kind of leaders in the community who then handed out the supplies and they told Henry not to simply step into their community trying to help, that he should go through them instead.
Basically, he shows up wanting to do good and almost started massive fights among people instead of properly establishing himself in relation to people within the community and following their terms.
THis of course is relatively benign to the actual colonization of nations but it is the same dynamic of doing things on the terms of yourself or of the person you're helping. See social workers are sensitive to this where they may want to do what they feel is best for a client but in respecting their autonomy, they must always seek to persuade and convince the person and never paternalistically do something against their wishes. They must build rapport and trust and persuade them to make what they feel are the right decisions.

But back to the example of judging cultures, I think through such a process of subjecting ourselves to the terms of those we wish to help, we can establish a relationship in which we influence one another and may introduce them to things that can help them be critical of their circumstance. That one can help people not be subject only to the dominant hegemonic ideals, otherwise you only help perpetuate the problems you hope are resolved.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf

In India: Development as Participation (2002), Sen goes one step further as a result of his study of ‘son preference’. Son preference is the tendency of people in certain cultures to prefer a son to a daughter, resorting to abortion of female foetuses or simply neglecting the health of young girls. As a result of these practices, India and China are each ‘missing’ about 40 million women in their current populations. Sen observed that this tendency not only increases with industrialisation and rising real incomes, but increased even in those societies where women had a voice. Even educated women and women who have full control over the decision whether or not to abort a female foetus, may be active participants in exercising son-preference because they share their husband’s preference for a son.

This type of gender inequality [son preference] cannot be removed, at least in the short run, by the enhancement of women’s empowerment and agency, since that agency is itself an integral part of the cause of natality inequality. This recognition demands an important modification ‒ and indeed an extension ‒ of our understanding of the role of women’s agency in eliminating gender inequality in India. The enhancement of women’s agency which does so much to eliminate sex differentials in mortality rates (and also in reducing fertility and mortality rates in general) cannot be expected, on its own, to produce a similar elimination of sex differentials at birth and abortion, and correspondingly in the population of children. What is needed is not merely freedom and power to act, but also freedom and power to question and reassess the prevailing norms and values. The pivotal issue is critical agency. Strengthening women’s agency will not, by itself, solve the problem of ‘son preference’ when that works through the desires of the mothers themselves. (Sen 2002, p. 258.)

... the agency of women is effective in promoting those goals which women tend to value. When those values are distorted by centuries of inequality, for example yielding the perception that boys are to be welcomed more than girls, then the empowerment of women can go hand in hand with persistent inequality and discrimination in some fields, in particular ‘boy preference’ in births (with possibly brutal results in the form of sex-specific abortions). Indeed, the agency of women can never be adequately free if traditionally discriminatory values remain unexamined and unscrutinised. While values may be culturally influenced (we have provided some evidence corroborating this presumption), it is possible to overcome the barriers of inequality imposed by tradition through greater freedom to question, doubt, and ‒ if convinced ‒ reject. An adequate realisation of women’s agency relates not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess. Critical agency is a great ally of development. (Sen, 2002, p. 274.)


To reflect the fact that recognition as an equal participant in the social and political life of a society still leaves the person trapped within dominant customs, beliefs and modes of living, which for example, may include misrecognition of their personality or unjust constraints on their activity, Sen introduced the term ‘critical voice’. This concept of critical voice is thus the fifth in a series of determinations of advantage: wealth, functioning, capability, voice and finally, critical voice. Critical voice is the capacity of a person living ‘inside’ a society to form views available from a position ‘outside’ that society:

... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society. (Sen, 2002a, p. 476-77.)

Critical agency refers “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.”

That when it comes to criticizing a culture it must come internally in the sense that one begins from an acceptance of the premises of the dominant culture but is able to show its inadequacy and limitations. In the same way that the most damning criticisms often come from those who are well acquainted with a way of life and its ideology, those who are able to present a perspective beyond it though informed by it.
In this perspective, one does not force change but is not indifferent to the problems that face people. There is an effort to support from the position as an equal rather than paternalistically make people do what you want, which of course does not create real change except through extremely violent means where an old way of life is simply destroyed.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/chap01.htm

Politically, Ireland has been under the control of England for the past 700 years, during the greater part of which time the country has been the scene of constant wars against her rule upon the part of the native Irish. Until the year 1649, these wars were complicated by the fact the fact that they were directed against both the political and social order recognised by the English invader. It may surprise many readers to learn that up to the date above-mentioned the basis of society in Ireland except within the Pale (a small strip of territory around the Capital city, Dublin), rested upon communal or tribal ownership of land. The Irish chief, although recognised in the courts of France, Spain, and Rome, as the peer of the reigning princes of Europe, in reality held his position upon the sufferance of his people, and as an administrator of the tribal affairs of his people, while the land or territory of the clan was entirely removed from his private jurisdiction. In the parts of Ireland where for 400 years after the first conquest (so-called) the English governors could not penetrate except at the head of a powerful army, the social order which prevailed in England – feudalism – was unknown, and as this comprised the greater portion of the country, it gradually came to be understood that the war against the foreign oppressor was also a war against private property in land. But with the forcible break up of the clan system in 1649, the social aspect of the Irish struggle sank out of sight, its place being usurped by the mere political expressions of the fight for freedom. Such an event was, of course, inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenure – now organically impossible. The dispersion of the clans, of course, put an end to the leadership of the chiefs, and in consequence, the Irish aristocracy being all of foreign or traitor origin, Irish patriotic movements fell entirely into the hands of the middle class, and became, for the most part, simply idealised expressions of middle-class interest.

[Wellsy]

Found a useful point of distinction for the methodological cultural relativism in anthropology as distinct from ethical rrletivity.

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/of-headhunters-and-soldiers/

The caveat in all this is: To understand is not to forgive. Just because you come to terms with how something works in another culture doesn't mean you have to agree with it; it means you have to engage it.

That's the sense in which I'd separate cultural and ethical relativism. I don't think that in order for me to hold a position as ethical, it needs to be universal. In this way, the relativist position becomes emancipating. It means I'm free to think what I think because I'm not going to wait for a consensus of the whole world, of every form of life, every language, every culture. But I want to be challenged by what other people are doing, saying, thinking—by their ethical systems.

I can empathize with the reasoning of others to have insight into why they think what they do and believe is right.

However, one need not identify with that position either and can have reasons for disagreeing.
We can argue why different views and values are wrong and challenge one another.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf

By relativism, MacIntyre means the view that the ethics and rationality of any tradition is valid within a given tradition and cannot be devalidated from outside that tradition; thus one tradition is as good as another, and no tradition can make any greater claim on our allegiance than another. By perspectivism, MacIntyre means the converse view that the ethics and rationality of any given tradition of enquiry is valid, but only from the perspective of that tradition; its adherents cannot perceive the failure of their standpoint as a result of the criticism from any other standpoint; truth can only be the sum of infinitely many

complementary standpoints. Both viewpoints deny the possibility of truth and validity as such in any tradition of thought, and equally, deny the possibility of a tradition failing by its own standards.

MacIntyre shows convincingly that neither position can be sustained in respect to the traditions of enquiry described in his book. All traditions of life and therefore of philosophy have standards by which they are able to judge the adequacy of their own account; under the impact of criticism from outside or by the disclosure of new problems from within, all traditions of enquiry, all communities, are continually changing, frequently finding that former beliefs have become obsolete and sometimes undergoing ‘epistemological crisis’, perhaps merging with other currents or collapsing. While no tradition can exclude the possibility that its current beliefs and practices may become outmoded, within its own terms; conversely, all traditions have the capacity to subject others to criticism and frequently such criticisms succeed and rival traditions change under the impact of such challenges.

https://www.al-islam.org/al-tawhid/vol14-n2/book-review-whose-justice-which-rationality-alasdair-macintyre-muhammad/book

MacIntyre's solution is that common standards are to be sought, even where none exist, by dialectical interchange between the rival viewpoints. One tradition of inquiry will be in a position to uphold the truth of its claims against rivals in which those claims are not recognized when it develops the intellectual apparatus to explain the rival viewpoint, and why the disagreement has arisen, and why the rival is incorrect.

In other words, through intellectual conflict between traditions, a tradition can vindicate itself only when it can enrich its own conceptual resources sufficiently to explain the errors of its rivals. This kind of conflict and progress is only possible when there is a commitment to finding the truth.

With relativism there can be no intellectual advancement, because there is no attempt made to adjudicate among different theoretical viewpoints, and without the attempt to reach a more comprehensive position in which truth and falsity can be distinguished, traditions cannot evolve rationally, nor can they maintain their previous truth claims.

MacIntyre sees relativism as tempting those who despair of intellectual advancement, and for the sake of intellectual advancement, he sees it as a temptation that must be avoided.

MacIntyre dismisses the perspectivist position with the rebuff, “theirs is not so much a conclusion about truth as exclusion from it and thereby from rational debate.”12 The perspectivalist, like the reductive religious pluralist, states that rival traditions provide different views of the same reality, and none can be considered absolutely true or false.

MacIntyre objects that the traditions really do conflict with one another, and the fact that they are rivals itself bears testimony to their substantive disagreements over what is true and false. The claim that there is no ultimate truth of the matter is really just a way of avoiding the work that needs to be done in order to determine exactly where and in what respects in each of the rival traditions.

The truth lies, and when the differences in the rivals is so deep that the very principles of rationality are called into question, the rivalry produces an epistemological crisis, but even here, the need and duty to provide a rational evaluation of the rivals remains.

MacIntyre contends that epistemological crisis occurs when different traditions with different languages confront one another. Those who learn to think in both languages come to the understanding that there are things in one language for which the other does not have the expressive resources, and thereby they discover a flaw in the deficient tradition.

In this way he shows how rational evaluation of different traditions is possible, although this evaluation itself must begin from within a specific tradition. His emphasis on the fact that the starting point of our inquiry is tradition‑bound is comparable to a common theme among writers in the hermeneutic tradition, such as Gadamer.

This website itself is where we see ideally rational and reasoned debate from different political views and points within the world. We listen and argue with one another with an open mind but also to out forth our understanding and in the clash, hope to come away with a deeper understanding than we started.

I’m not sure if one can evaluate entire cultures as they are a weave of many threaded norms and practices. But one can definitely criticize the standards and practices of others specifically and posit an argument for something better.