Class Research Resources and Assignments

Week 3

Elements of Ethical Reasoning - An Anthropologist's Approach

Week's Assigned Readings
Full Lecture - Week 3

 

"We had fed the heart on fantasies;
The heart's grown brutal from the fare." 

W. B. Yates, Meditations in Time of Civil War

    All societies possess at least some form of ethical reasoning, and often many conflicting systems. Ethical systems -- like linguistic systems -- are a "built in" feature of human cultural life. Ethics have to do with what people think "ought to be done," and all societies struggle with the tension between the way things are and the way they think they ought to be. 

    Yet although the existence of ethical systems is universal, individual ethical systems themselves-- like languages -- are far from universal. We are presented with several questions to resolve: Where do societies get their sense of what "ought to be?" How is it possible to compare different ethical systems? If there is no such thing as a single "universal" ethic, are there nevertheless common elements in all ethical reasoning? 

    Ethical systems emerge within cultures that have themselves been situated in specific continuums of ecological and historical experience. Therefore, if we are to understand different ethical systems and the nature of moral reasoning across all cultures or in any particular culture we must learn to appreciate the categories of each culture in terms of the ecological circumstance it has experienced over time. We should learn to ask the question: how has the historical and ecological experience of any given culture shaped its perception of how things are and how they ought to be? 

    Assigned Article (PDF Format) for background to Class Session 3.
            Please read the following article:
 

Timothy C. Weiskel
1983 "Rubbish and Racism: The Problem of Boundary in an Ecosystem," The Yale Review, (Winter, 1983), pp. 225-244.
[NB. this article is in .PDF format. That is, it requires a the Adobe Acrobat Reader to be read online. This reader is a free downloadable program from Adobe, and it can be obtained by clicking on the following icon: Once you have downloaded the reader to your computer, click on the ".EXE" file and follow the instructions for installing the Acrobat Reader on your computer.]
Once you have read the article, reflect upon the importance of lived, historical experience for the way in which different cultures perceive their environment and form their understanding of the "moral community." The article argues that the shared experience of a collective eco-niche over time works powerfully to shape both the categories of perceived experience and the categories of moral reasoning in any culture. 

Since cultures emerge in time and evolve through specific ecological experiences over time, it is to be expected that aspects of time, place and ecological circumstance are deeply embedded in the categories of cultural experience. To analyze the elements of ethical reasoning, therefore, we must look at what might be called the "ecology of culture."

Related Bibliography:
 

Timothy C. Weiskel
1997 "Reference List of Core Sources on Environmental Ethics (Background Bibliography and References)," Class Bibliography Series, Vol. 1, No. 1. [Last updated: Sept. 3, 1997]. 

Supplementary Material

With the above article, 'Rubbish and Racism..." in mind consider the following
(click the "Play" button on the audio control panel to listen):

"The Return of the Lone Ranger"
NPR - WBUR
The Connection
(1 October 2003).

The ancient Greeks had Hercules and Aphrodite, the Egyptians Isis and Osiris, and early Americans -- well, they worshipped The Durango Kid and Jesse James.

In 1903, the first Western hit the screen in the United States. The French had invented cinema, and American entrepreneurs were determined to beat them at their own game, and make movies that would appeal to people in the USA. Someone at Edison studios in New York City came up with the idea of pulling together some bandits, horses, and one train, and the rest is history.

Today, 100 years after the first showing of "The Great Train Robbery," the western is making a comeback on and off the screen. Wanted lists and smoking guns -- American mythology is still in the saddle and riding high.

Ask yourselves: how does the "cowboy image" that Americans have internalized -- from the movie images presented to them over the last 100 years -- function in relation to how Americans perceive and value the environment? Are these kind of "Western values" an asset or a liability in formulating an effective environmental ethic in the 21st century?

As for the importance and persistence of "frontier imagery" in American ideology, consider the following:

The X Prize

NPR - WBUR - On Point
4 October 2004

click to start, pause, stop

The snub-nosed, star-spangled SpaceShipOne took off from Mojave, California today, streaking into space at Mach Three, and into the record books. The half hour flight took the rocket ship more than 62 miles high to the edge of earth orbit. When it landed, SpaceShipOne came home the winner of the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

· Peter Pae, aerospace writer for the Los Angeles Times
· Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Group, which includes Virgin Atlantic and now, Virgin Galactic
· Jeff Johnson, director of aviation at Vulcan Inc.
· Greg Klerkx, science journalist, former senior manager of the SETI Institute, and author of "Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age"
· Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, author of "Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel"
· Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.


In addition, for class, consider the following:

Currently, in Bangkok the international community is meeting to discuss the International Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, known as CITES. Listen to the following world-wide discussion of these issues and ask yourself:

What are the unstated and embedded assumptions of each of the participants? Upon what grounds do they derive their sense of moral "right" and "wrong?"

BBC - Talking Point
2004
"International trade in animals," BBC News Online - Talking Point, (3 October 2004).
Richard Black
2005
"'Human activities' causing global decline," BBC News Online, (30 March 2005).