Relativism: Are There Cultural Absolutes?

 Many times philosophy seems like an unending number of words that all have to be carefully defined so that people talking about complex ideas with each other can understand what the other is saying.  Our decision to re-examine relativism at our last meeting, possibly applying it to cultural practices and cultural ethics sent me back to my personal library of books, searching for definitions and lists of examples where philosophers have and have not adopted certain foms of relativism in various fields of thought, and have proposed arguments in support of their perspectives on the subject.

One of these is The Philosophy Gym, by Steven Law.  The book does not appear in a Libby search in the SnoIsle Library system, but it can be purchased on Kindle and Amazon, if you are interested.  In this book the author discusses topics in philosophy using lay language and by using examples of short conversations between people to illustrate the principles involved.  I have always liked his disucssion of this particular topic, but most of his topic/chapters are a very good reference for BQ meetings.

I also consulted the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.  In that encyclopedic tome Cultural Relativism is only represented as a variant of the larger topic of Relativism in general, and it goes on to lay out the several forms and layers of philosophic relativism, which I found both helpful and confusing owing to the intrinsically circular thinking that crops up when the absolutes surrounding an un-stated "truth" are teased out of any discussion of cross-cultural comparisons.  Are there universal truths to which all societies should adhere?  Refrain from harming others, for example?  This dictionary draws sources from literature in general, as well as from known philosophers, and some of these are very interesting.

So, on to our topic.  Stated simply, is one culture in any position to judge another culture using its own cultural values and mores?  By what authority can the outside culture apply its standards of human behavior on the other?  History is filled with examples where ths has been done, by colonial visitors to new places and peoples in Africa and the New World of the west as one with which we are familiar.  You might say that we could go country by country in North and South Ameica rcounting the many ways military and religious envoys condemned native practices and imposed European cultural ethics, disregarding the impacts they were having on the overall native societies. 

Come prepared to provide examples of how past native cultures have been judged by outsiders, and how this cross-cultural judgement could be understood and supported, or condemned, and why each viewpoint could possibly be validated.