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Perspective Vs Relativism

Decent Essays

Intro
There is a wide variety of customs and traditions around the world and throughout history. From the historical practice of Sati, where the wife of a recently deceased man was expected to commit suicide on his funeral pyre, to the human sacrifice of the Aztecs. The dangers of jumping to stereotypes is a prevalent one as we naturally want to put ourselves into us and them groups. You can’t judge another culture based on solely your own culture, but must understand the fundamental differences. Perspective and relativism is an important tool to help us understand other cultures but it is not an absolute and we must consider other ways to judge the morals and actions of different groups of people.

What is Morality
Every culture is fundamentally …show more content…

Our world today it is often good and okay to be different, in general we have become more tolerant and accepting. We often withhold judgement on people from different cultures or times because it was acceptable in their culture or time. There are actions that were considered good, or morally acceptable, in their time and place, but that now we see as wrong. What happens then if we judge someone who we consider good, but at the time was bad? Such as someone who freed slaves during the 1700s, they were probably not seen as a good person by most people during the time, but today we consider them to be doing the moral act. The idea of relativism is not a bad one, it is important, vital in fact, to have cultural perspective and to consider things from another viewpoint. However, it is not helpful when considering what is right or wrong. If morality is purely subjective there is nothing that can be done if a group is committing genocide, because it would be considered just their customs and what they think is right and even the group at the receiving end could not do anything about it. One way to consider and make judgments about others morals would be to judge a person’s actions by the morals of the people whose lives that person’s actions impact. That is, if someone considers genocide okay and moral perhaps the best way to make a judgement on it is by looking at those who it affects and what their morals consider to be

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