Ethics: The Essential Writings (Modern Library Classics) by Gordon Marino

Author:Gordon Marino [Marino, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781588368010
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

THE MODERNS

CHAPTER 13

RUTH BENEDICT

The renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) waged a war against ethnocentricism, that is, the tendency to think that our values are somehow objective and universal and then to judge other cultures according to those values. In this classic essay from the 1930s, Benedict unpacks her notebooks on a number of different societies to establish the fact that what is regarded as a virtue in one community may well be treated as a vice in another. Benedict maintains that moral values are simply the norms of a society and these norms vary from culture to culture. In her own nonphilosophical terms, she reasons that ethical evaluations can only be justified relative to the norms of a given culture. For this reason she is classified as an exemplar of the philosophical position known as ethical relativism.

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