“Moral Dispute or Cultural Difference?”
“In a disagreement, two parties affirm and deny the same thing; because the parties contradict each other, they cannot both be right; because they cannot both be right, there is something to be resolved between them by figuring out which of them is mistaken; a disagreement remains unresolved so long as both parties continue to think the other is mistaken; it is irresolvable when there is no method by which to resolve it…
In her actual cultural circumstances, it isn’t an option for Anjali to set off to seek her fortune on her own, apart from her family network, any more than it is an option for me to take up the various traditional duties that befall females in extended families in rural Punjab. Owing to these differences in our cultural circumstances, Anjali and I need very different moral truths to live by, in order to navigate the specific moral options that we face…
What we really confront here, then, is a kind of difference which is not a disagreement. We come to see that we are each right to live by our respective moral beliefs, due to the way in which they speak to our respective circumstances, and the specific moral issues that arise within them. Yet although we each come to regard the other’s moral beliefs as true, neither of us adopts the other’s moral beliefs for herself, as truths to live by…
While the relativist does want to say, in a general way, that people with moral differences probably are responding to very different cultural circumstances, she does not have to say that those who participate in the specific practices of sati, female genital mutilation and honor killing are right to do so. She may also say that they are wrong by their own standards. For there may be local moral truths, which hold in the very cultural conditions in which those practices have arisen, in the light of which they are wrong. If that is so, then the participants in these practices misunderstand what their own moral principles entail. This is one perfectly plausible way of understanding how American society came to realize that it was wrong to give only white males full civil rights. And it would be a particularly parochial form of self-congratulation to say that what was true of America is not feasible for other societies.”
Note: I read this almost a year ago and I schedule posts months and months ahead of time; the timing of this post is happenstance but lucky. I would not have the energy to read this and have big perspectives or empathy today, it is good to communicate with me of the past who did not have to live in a reality where Trump had truly been elected President. Reminding myself, today: We are all doing the best that we can.
This is a calming thing to read and think about, explaining these moments where it seems that resolution is impossible and the only solution is for one side to gain enough power to overrule the other. This model is routed not in violence but in care — caring enough to see and consider the other’s moral world.
We can validate someone else’s experiences without having to share those experiences.
