Week 3
Elements of Ethical Reasoning - An Anthropologist's Approach
Week's
Assigned Readings
Slides
of Week 3 Lectures
Videos
of Week 3 Lectures
Supplementary Material for Week 2
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"We
had fed the heart on fantasies; The heart's grown brutal from the fare." W. B. Yates, Meditations in Time of Civil War |
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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.
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.[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: 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:
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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.]