Strong Evaluation Without Sources. On Charles Taylor's Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Moral Realism (original) (raw)
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Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning
International Journal of Psychology, 2011
T he importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg's model of moral development which relies heavily on people's justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision-making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand crosscultural variability in moral values and the processes that underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Although the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.
Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources: On Charles Taylor's Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics.
2008
Charles Taylor is one of the leading living philosophers. In this book Arto Laitinen studies and develops further Taylor's philosophical views on human agency, personhood, selfhood and identity. He defends Taylor's view that our ethical understandings of values (so called "strong evaluations") play a central role. The book also develops and defends Taylor's form of value realism as a view on the nature of ethical values, or values in general. The book criticizes Taylor's view that God, Nature or Human Reason are possible constitutive sources of value – Laitinen argues that we should drop the whole notion of a constitutive source.
The peculiar (social) objectivity of moral values
Even within the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition of moral philosophy, fertile ground for many subjectivist, “non-cognitivist,” and “emotionalist” accounts on moral phenomena, some philosophers, including Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and John McDowell have adopted various forms of realism in their theories. The subjectivism vs objectivism debate in moral philosophy turns out to be so acute since moral values and norms have a dual character —they are objective realities in the sense that do not depend on our will and consciousness, but also subjective realities in the sense that are products of our activity as social subjects, unable to exist independently of this activity. In other words, they possess a peculiar form of objectivity that differs from the strictly natural form of objectivity. From a Marxist point of view, this essay tries to uncover the nature of this particular form of objectivity, while showing, through a critique of some ideas advanced by John McDowell on the subject, the resultant mistakes of not taking its peculiarity into account.
Moral Relativism and the Concept of Culture
This paper criticises the concept of culture as deployed within debates on moral relativism, arguing for a greater appreciation of the role of power in the production of a society’s purportedly ‘moral’ norms. The argument is developed in three stages: (1) analysis of the relation between ideology and morality, noting that the concept of morality excludes self-serving moral claims and justifications; (2) analysis of the concept of culture, drawing attention to an ambiguity in its usage and to the hierarchical social structures within which the actual bodies of cultures are produced and reproduced; and (3) contention that (1) and (2) provide the basis for a radical and socially effective species of immanent critique: the exposure of existing norms and institutions purported to be morally justified as masks for the self-interest of elite groups.
Moral psychology: an anthropological perspective
Moral psychology: a multidisciplinary guide, 2018
It is in many ways the traditional task of anthropology to point out exceptions to rules. Provide us with a generalisation about human behaviour and we will describe to you a far corner of the world in which it does not hold. This has to a large extent been true of our dealings with moral psychology, as I detail below, and it will come as no surprise to many readers that relativism, or at least rhetorical invocations of it, has long been a staple of anthropological approaches to morality. But as this chapter will describe, recent developments in the anthropological study of ethics have led many anthropologists interested in the subject to reconfigure their understandings of the universal and the particular in relation to morality. It remains a matter of empirical fact that people across the world think differently about what constitutes right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, and anthropologists continue to document that variety. But it is equally a matter of empirical fact that people across the world do indeed think about such things -that they exercise judgement and reflection about courses of action, ways of attributing responsibility, consequences, behavioural norms, and the like. As I outline below, for us to be able to account seriously and scrupulously for the differences between how people think about ethics, many anthropologists have come to believe that we must possess a coherent vision of what ethics actually means, and an explanation for how it is that people do all seem to think about how they ought to live, even though they do so differently.
2009
Valores compartilhados são tipicamente vistos como um dos aspectos centrais da cultura. O procedimento comum para derivar valores culturais compartilhados é feito por meio da análise das prioridades dos valores individuais no nível cultural. Este artigo delineia os problemas conceituais e metodológicos associados com esse procedimento. Descobertas feitas por meio de estudos empíricos selecionados são apresentadas para corroborar essa crítica. Meios alternativos para medir valores culturais no nível individual são apresentados e classificados em uma taxonomia de valores. Nessa taxonomia, estudos anteriores têm até agora focalizado a medição de valores por meio da importância atribuída, refletindo o que os indivíduos ou grupos sociais desejam. Contudo, argumenta-se que, se valores culturais são supostamente compartilhados, eles deveriam refletir o que é desejável, isto é, o que o indivíduo deve valorizar ou empenhar-se para alcançar como um objetivo de vida em uma determinada sociedade. Isso constitui uma nova abordagem para a mensuração de valores culturais que propõe que sejam medidos no nível individual, utilizando-se perguntas que envolvam moralidade. Sugestões são feitas sobre como os valores culturais poderiam ser operacionalizados, referindo-se aos valores morais individuais ou àqueles de um grupo social. Os benefícios da utilização de taxionomia de valores para pesquisas futuras são eventualmente descritos.
Culture and Hermeneutic Moral Realism
Hermeneutic Moral Realism in Psychology: Theory and Practice, 2019
This chapter develops an approach to understanding moral realism that can account for culturally diverse moral realities and incommensurability without devolving into relativism. The chapter begins by outlining the nature of the problem that cultural diversity presents to moral realism, considering ethnographic evidence that moral realism is fundamental to human nature. The ‘ordinary ethics’ position is then considered and critiqued in order to frame an approach to moral realism that is both hermeneutic and ethnographically grounded. This chapter provides an ethnographic example of ‘ancestral personhood’ from Hmong in Thailand, which is used to demonstrate simultaneously what is ‘real’ about moral realism, but also how these realities can only be fully grasped through the cultural ontologies that frame them. Juxtaposing objectivist accounts of morality against relativism, this chapter then develops a pluralist approach, building on the insights of Nicholas Rescher, Isaiah Berlin, and Richard Shweder. This pluralist approach can reconcile the apparently competing demands of moral realism and ethnographic evidence of incommensurability in what culturally distinct moral realities actually look like. This chapter concludes with a summary of how this approach can influence both psychological and anthropological understandings of morality and ethics through the lens of hermeneutic moral realism.
The universal moral: A Western perspective Subject: HIA-Week-07
Within globalization efforts, the three fundamental categorization aspects that drive Western universal-stigmata are ignorance (knowledge), prejudice (attitudes) and discrimination (behavior); these behavior-drives are largely activated through identity-attributes (overt-cultural-norm-enforcement), unconscious (overt-intuitive-cultural-enforcement) or unexposed (covert-cultural/ intuitive-enforcement); in turn, these cultural identity-attributes are seemingly driven by Western passion-for-the-moral and therefore considered as mandatory shared reality in cultural ambivalence (social), univalence (egocentric) and neutrality of societies