Moral Relativism by Levy Neil;

Author:Levy, Neil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2014-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

But this general rule is clearly false. Consider the practice of capital punishment. Surely it is plausible to claim that many cultures have accepted this practice. But from the fact that a culture accepts this practice, it most certainly does not follow that any particular member of that culture would consent to being executed.35 Thus a natural defence of tsujigiri against Moody-Adams suggests itself. Though her implicit suggestion, that if we asked each individual victim of the practice whether he or she were willing to be sacrificed in the ritual the answer would emphatically deny willingness, is plausible, this does not suffice to show that the practice was not in fact accepted by medieval Japanese culture. The victim of capital punishment would similarly reject the practice, at the moment he or she is strapped into the chair, yet it is surely plausible to claim that many cultures do in fact accept capital punishment.

Perhaps, however, this counter-example does not show that Moody-Adams’s general line is flawed, but merely that she needs to be more careful in stating it. For it seems that she can point to a crucial difference between capital punishment and tsujigiri. It is (in principle, at least) up to each of us whether we shall be the victims of capital punishment. So long as we are law-abiding, we are safe from it. Since it is true that some cultures accept capital punishment, but capital punishment does not pass the test of the general rule we suggested, the general rule must be altered. Perhaps it should read something like this:

A culture can be said to accept a practice or a principle that potentially reduces the well-being of individual members if and only if all or most of its members would consent now to being the object of that practice or principle if in the future they act in certain specified ways.

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