Jewelry has been a really unstructuredsomewhat chaotic with resp.docx

Jewelry has been a really unstructuredsomewhat chaotic with
respect to in innovation. and also had sSome advancements in
technology have been leverage throughout these past years, but
innovative new technologies are not leverage nearly as regularly
as in other industries. In the past, it was thejewelry businesses
were used to passed on and run through the generations and
family properties or entities. However, with the But now when
emergence of technological advancesy emerged and introduce
itself with different numerous businesseswithin the parallel
industries, the jewelry business is finally incorporating
innovations to boost production, sales, and profitability. it also
develop some new surprising technologies for the jewelry
business too, which really changed this stereotype in this
business. This technological stigma has slese restrictions slowly
but surely has worn off, and allowing jewelry firms showing
the versatility of having an independence not seen in the days of
the t nature of business with the unrestricted family run and
bound and heritage business culture. The latest inventions in
this business industry, such aslike the solution for the
identification all items in the supply chain leveraging radio
frequency identification (of RRFID) solution for the jewelry
makes the better logistics management system and also the
nearly effortless in the tracking system of valuable items.
Another mature innovation invention for the for jewelry
business areis the highly successful upcoming E-business
through the ecommerce websites and applications for mobile
devices. These applications are the fastest and most efficient
way of selling the items to the customer. They increase profits
through both accessibility of inventory for purchase online as
well as reducing or eliminating the need for brick and mortar
stores.It refrains the security threat and also the idea of
touching the jewelry makes it dark or something like these
dilemma. These are the real tides turning changes in this

industry.Comment by Tim Stewart: Nusrat, the beginning of this
sentence needs some clarity. If you are talking about the
production of fine jewelry, then start your sentence, “The
mining and manufacturing of fine jewels and jewelry…”
If you mean the selling, then you can just say, “The Jewelry
business…”
There are several data analytic products which helps the user to
verify the cut, quality, and clarity of the items they desire. One
the data for the jewelry specific area of expertise exploitation
which includes IRYS trinity. This tool do performsthe data
analytics on the jewelry business in the area of the product
viewership, staff performance analysis, inventory stock audit,
and many more (Business Analytics for Jewellery - Irys Pte.
Ltd.: Jewellery Analytics Software, Jewelry Business
Intelligence Tool, n.d.).Comment by Tim Stewart: Best practice
is to spell out the acronym and then put it in parentheses as I
did above with RFID.
Over the couple of yearsRecently, the changes in technology
have made the importance of data importance very high and
taken both product and data accuracy to another level. Like the
jewelry, many other industries are trying to optimize their use
of data to for accurate and just in time inventory control;
compact level because they have the data about and tools to
performthe big data analysis, they are now challenged with
storage and network throughput issues. For instance, in many
cases it takes too much space and time to retrieve and story
needed data due to the network limitationssensors in the
business development now. The Simply focusing on changes in
data base behavior would only optimize the storage space, but
the requirement of infrastructure and handling the structured
and unstructured data with almost the same resources and
expertise to process it is something different and needs
improvement as well of the time. Right now the main issue for
the IT teams is how to handle such big data from Peta and Exa-
bytes to some extent of conversion into gigabytes (Mahajan,

2018).
My startup for this business model is to provide the analysis of
the jewelry products and provide the predictive analysis of the
customer purchasinge behavior for the retail jewelry industryin
upcoming time. It should be the My main course of the product
which will beshould be the accuracy of the data analysis of the
business and predictions for retail outlets regarding customer
behavior and how best to take advantage of this information. the
outcome of the customer analysis based on the purchase of any
product. We will It could also use our unique the predictive
analysis algorithms for across a company’s the various product
line s on itsto identify trends and predictive outcomes of within
their current fiscal reigning year. But In order to perform the
analysis it would be needingwe will incorporate a data
warehouse for the system which is capable of producing storing
and analyzing a big enough data enough for the accurate
predictive analysis.
The area of growth shows the predictability of any kind of
software or the data itself and it defines the various points
which should be including:
1. KPI analysis
2. Inventory optimization
3. Sales analysis
4. Branding performances
5. Product analysis
These are the features which makes the dataare worthy of
making qualitythe customer analysis on the basis of its past
purchases and market trends. theseOur analytical features
defines many unspoken and unheard questions which could exist
and are not incorporated into our competitors’ products. This is
the results of making thein taking businesses that were family
owned, literally “mom and pop” store and leveragin data
warehousing, machine learning and other intelligent tools to
create a modern, profitable, growth oriented for even the
business. Never to be considered which was thought of being a
proper family prosperity and passed on to generations without

even having a mom and pop shop without the talent to run theat
business only on old techniques (Day, 1983).
Here is an example of data analytics exposure to the community
and customer predictive analysis can be:
Network Diagram Forfor Jewelry Business
Work Flow Diagram
It describes the data flow model for the jewelry predictive
analysis of customer purchase.
First step needs to collect the data from the POS operating on
your business and then create the databases for them, if already
made then import those databases to the data ware house
operation to perform the ETL procedure which means to extract,
transform and then load. Then after that procedure you will
have your data ware house for the data analysis is ready to
perform some productive results for you. Now you can make the
analysis for the specific customer purchase queries to the data
and extract out the results for them. Those queries will provide
you the results which you need to examine the state of customer
purchase and on that basis you can apply conditional analysis
for the customers and performing this conditional analysis
would make you enable to have a predictive analysis on that.
References
Business Analytics for Jewellery - Irys Pte. Ltd.: Jewellery
Analytics Software, Jewelry Business Intelligence Tool. (n.d.).
Retrieved from irysgroup: https://www.irysgroup.com/trinity-
jewellery-data-analytics/
Day, G. (1983). Gaining Insights Through Strategy Analysis.

Journal of Business Strategy, 51-58.
Mahajan, R. (2018). The rise of analytics in the jewellery
industry. 15-16.
LOUIS P. POJMAN
Late of the United States Military Academy, West Point
JAMES FIESER
University of Tennessee, Martin
Australia • Brazil • Mexico • Singapore • United Kingdom •
United States
Ethics
Discovering Right and Wrong
E I G H T H E D I T I O N
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About the Authors
Louis P. Pojman (1935–2005) was professor of philosophy,
emeritus at the
United States Military Academy and a life member of Clare
Hall, Cambridge
University. He received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Union
Theological Seminary/
Columbia University and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He
wrote in the areas
of philosophy of religion, epistemology, ethics, and political
philosophy and is the
author or editor of more than 30 books and 100 articles. Among
these are Ethics:

Discovering Right and Wrong (8/e 2017), Environmental Ethics
(7/e 2017), Who Are
We? (2005), and Global Political Philosophy (2003).
James Fieser is professor of philosophy at the University of
Tennessee at Martin.
He received his B.A. from Berea College, and his M.A. and
Ph.D. in philosophy
from Purdue University. He is author, coauthor, or editor of 10
text books,
including Socrates to Sartre and Beyond (9/e 2011), Ethical
Theory: Classical and Con-
temporary Readings (6/e 2010), A Historical Introduction to
Philosophy (2003), and
Moral Philosophy Through the Ages (2001). He has edited and
annotated the ten-
volume Early Responses to Hume (2/e 2005) and the five-
volume Scottish Common
Sense Philosophy (2000). He is founder and general editor of
the Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy Web site (www.iep.utm.edu).
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Contents
PREFACE viii
1 What Is Ethics? 1
Ethics and Its Subdivisions 1
Morality as Compared with Other Normative Subjects 3
Traits of Moral Principles 6

Domains of Ethical Assessment 7
Conclusion 10
For Further Reflection 11
2 Ethical Relativism 13
Subjective Ethical Relativism 15
Conventional Ethical Relativism 17
Criticisms of Conventional Ethical Relativism 20
Conclusion 25
3 Moral Objectivism 28
Aquinas’s Objectivism and Absolutism 30
Moderate Objectivism 36

Ethical Situationalism 40
Conclusion 41
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4 Value and the Quest for the Good 44

Types of Values 45
Foundational Nature of Values 50
The Good Life 55
Conclusion 58
5 Social Contract Theory and the Motive to Be Moral 61
Why Does Society Need Moral Rules? 63
Why Should I Be Moral? 67
Morality, Self-Interest, and Game Theory 69
The Motive to Always Be Moral 72
Conclusion 75
6 Egoism, Self-Interest, and Altruism 77

Psychological Egoism 78
Ethical Egoism 82
Arguments Against Ethical Egoism 87
Conclusion 91
7 Utilitarianism 93
Classic Utilitarianism 95
Act- and Rule-Utilitarianism 98
Criticism of Utilitarianism 101
Criticism of the Ends Justifying Immoral Means 106
Conclusion 110

8 Kant and Deontological Theories 113
Kant’s Influences 114
The Categorical Imperative 117
Counterexamples to the Principle of the Law of Nature 123
Other Formulations of the Categorical Imperative 125
The Problem of Exceptionless Rules 129
Conclusion: A Reconciliation Project 132
C O N TE N T S v
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9 Virtue Theory 135
The Nature of Virtue Ethics 136
Criticisms of Action-Based Ethics 140
Connections Between Virtue-Based and Action-Based
Ethics 146
Conclusion 153
10 Biology and Ethics 155
Moral Behavior in Animals 156
Morality and Human Evolution 161

What Is Left for Traditional Morality? 167
Conclusion 172
11 Gender and Ethics 175
Classic Views 177
Female Care Ethics 181
Four Options Regarding Gender and Ethics 186
Conclusion 190
12 Religion and Ethics 194
Does Morality Depend on Religion? 195
Is Religion Irrelevant or Even Contrary to Morality? 200
Does Religion Enhance the Moral Life? 205

Conclusion 210
13 The Fact–Value Problem 212
Hume and Moore: The Problem Classically Stated 213
Ayer and Emotivism 216
Hare and Prescriptivism 220
Naturalism and the Fact–Value Problem 227
Conclusion 230
14 Moral Realism and the Challenge of Skepticism 232
Mackie’s Moral Skepticism 234
Harman’s Moral Nihilism 238

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A Defense of Moral Realism 242
Conclusion 245
APPENDIX 247
GLOSSARY 251

INDEX 255
For more information on an alternate version of this book which
contains classic
and contemporary philosophical reading selections in the back
of the book, please
contact your Cengage Learning representative.
C O N TE N T S vii
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Preface

In 1977, Australian philosopher John L. Mackie published his
famous book Ethics:Inventing Right and Wrong, in which he
argues that the moral values we hold are
inventions of society: “we have to decide what moral views to
adopt, what moral
stands to take.” The title of the present book Ethics:
Discovering Right and Wrong, is
both an acknowledgement of the importance of Mackie’s view
and a response to it.
Morality is not purely an invention, as Mackie suggests, but it
also involves a
discovery. We may compare morality to the development of the
wheel. Both are
creations based on discoverable features. The wheel was
invented to facilitate the
transportation of objects with minimal friction. The
construction of a wheel
adheres to the laws of physics to bring about efficient motion.
Not just anything
could function as a good wheel. A rectangular or triangular
wheel would be
inefficient, as would one made out of sand or bird feathers or
heavy stones. Ana-
logously, morality has been constructed to serve human needs

and desires, for
example, the need to survive and the desires to prosper and be
happy. The
ideal morality should serve as the blueprint for individual
happiness and social
harmony. Human beings have used their best minds over
millennia to discover
those principles that best serve to promote individual and social
well-being. Just
as the construction of the wheel is dependent on the laws of
physics, so the con-
struction of morality has been dependent on human nature, on
discoverable fea-
tures of our being. It is in this spirit of moral discovery that
Ethics: Discovering
Right and Wrong surveys the main theories of moral philosophy
today.
The philosophical community experienced a great loss in 2005
with the
death of Louis Pojman, the original author of this book, who
succumbed to his
battle with cancer. His voluminous writings—over 30 books and
100 articles—
have been uniformly praised for their high level of scholarship

and insight, and
countless philosophy students and teachers have benefited from
them (see www.
louispojman.com for biographical and bibliographical details).
Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong was first published in
1990 and quickly
established itself as an authoritative, yet reader-friendly,
introduction to ethics.
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In an earlier preface, Louis expresses his enthusiasm for his
subject and his com-
mitment to his reader:
I have written this book in the spirit of a quest for truth and
under-
standing, hoping to excite you about the value of ethics. It is a
subject
that I love, for it is about how we are to live, about the best
kind of life.
I hope that you will come to share my enthusiasm for the
subject and
develop your own ideas in the process.
Over the years, new editions of this book have appeared in
response to the con-
tinually evolving needs of college instructors and students.
Throughout these
changes, however, the book has focused on the central issues of
ethical theory,
which in this edition include chapters on the following 14
subjects, beginning
with the more theoretical issues of (1) what ethics is most

generally, (2) ethical
relativism, (3) moral objectivism, (4) moral value, (5) social
contract theory and
the motive to be moral, and (6) egoism and altruism. The book
next focuses on
the influential normative theories of (7) utilitarianism, (8)
Kantianism and deon-
tology, and (9) virtue theory. Building on these concepts, the
last portion of
the book explores the more contemporary theoretical debates
surrounding
(10) biology and ethics, (11) gender and ethics, (12) religion
and ethics,
(13) the fact–value problem, and (14) moral realism and
skepticism.
This newly revised eighth edition attempts to reflect the spirit
of change that
governed previous editions. As with most textbook revisions,
the inclusion of
new material in this edition required the deletion of a
comparable amount of
previously existing material. Many of the changes in this
edition were suggested
by previous book users, both faculty and students, for which I

am very grateful.
The most noticeable change is a new chapter on biology and
ethics. Many minor
changes have been made throughout for clarification and ease of
reading.
MI NDTA P
MindTap® for Pojman Fieser, Ethics, eighth edition provides
you with the tools
you need to better manage your limited time—you can complete
assign-
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course material spe-
cially customized for you by your instructor and streamlined in
one proven,
easy-to-use interface. With an array of tools and apps—from
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flashcards—you’ll get a true understanding of course concepts,
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achieve better grades and setting the groundwork for your future
courses.
ACK NOWLED GEMENTS

The preface to the fifth edition of this book lists the following
acknowledge-
ments, which I present here verbatim:
Michael Beaty, Sterling Harwood, Stephen Kershnar, Bill
Lawhead,
Michael Levin, Robert Louden, Laura Purdy, Roger Rigterink,
Bruce
PRE FA CE ix
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Russell, Walter Schaller, Bob Westmoreland, and Mark Discher

were
very helpful in offering trenchant criticisms on several chapters
of this
book. The students in my ethical theory classes at the
University of
Mississippi and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for the
past
20 years have served as a challenging sounding board for many
of my
arguments. Ronald F. Duska, Rosemont College; Stephen
Griffith,
Lycoming College; Arthur Kuflik, University of Vermont;
James
Lindemann Nelson, Michigan State University; Peter List,
Oregon
State University; Ann A. Pang-White, University of Scranton;
Fred
Schueler, University of New Mexico; Nancy A. Stanlick,
University
of Central Florida; R. Duane Thompson, Indiana Wesleyan
University;
Peter Vallentyne, Virginia Commonwealth University; and
David A.
White, Marquette University reviewed the manuscript for an
earlier

edition and provided guidance in revising this latest edition.
I thank Debra Matteson, Liz Fraser, and the rest of the talented
editorial staff at
Cengage for their expertise and good nature throughout the
production of this
new edition. Thanks also to the dozens of ethics instructors who
completed an
online survey about the text and made valuable suggestions for
improvement.
Finally, I thank Louis’s wife, Trudy Pojman, for her gracious
encouragement
with this project.
James Fieser
August 1, 2015
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1
What Is Ethics?
Some years ago, the nation was stunned by a report from New
York City.A young woman, Kitty Genovese, was brutally
stabbed in her own neighbor-
hood late at night during three separate attacks while 38
respectable, law-abiding
citizens watched or listened. During the 35-minute struggle, her
assailant beat her,
stabbed her, left her, and then returned to attack her two more
times until she died.
No one lifted a phone to call the police; no one shouted at the
criminal, let alone
went to Genovese’s aid. Finally, a 70-year-old woman called the
police. It took
them just two minutes to arrive, but by that time Genovese was

already dead.
Only one other woman came out to testify before the ambulance
showed up
an hour later. Then residents from the whole neighborhood
poured out of their
apartments. When asked why they hadn’t done anything, they
gave answers
ranging from “I don’t know” and “I was tired” to “Frankly, we
were afraid.”1
This tragic event raises many questions about our moral
responsibility to
others. What should these respectable citizens have done? Are
such acts of omis-
sion morally blameworthy? Is the Genovese murder an atypical
situation, or does
it represent a disturbing trend? This story also raises important
questions about
the general notion of morality. What is the nature of morality,
and why do we
need it? What is the Good, and how will we know it? Is it in our
interest to be
moral? What is the relationship between morality and religion?
What is the rela-

tionship between morality and law? What is the relationship
between morality
and etiquette? These are some of the questions that we explore
in this book.
ETHICS AN D ITS SU BDIV ISIO NS
Ethics is that branch of philosophy that deals with how we
ought to live, with the
idea of the Good, and with concepts such as “right” and
“wrong.” But what is
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philosophy? It is an enterprise that begins with wonder at the
marvels and mysteries
of the world; that pursues a rational investigation of those
marvels and mysteries,
seeking wisdom and truth; and that results in a life lived in
passionate moral and
intellectual integrity. Taking as its motto Socrates’ famous
statement “The unex-
amined life is not worth living,” philosophy leaves no aspect of
life untouched by
its inquiry. It aims at a clear, critical, comprehensive
conception of reality.
The main characteristic of philosophy is rational argument.
Philosophers clarify
concepts and analyze and test propositions and beliefs, but their
major task is to con-
struct and analyze arguments. Philosophical reasoning is closely
allied with scientific
reasoning, in that both build hypotheses and look for evidence
to test those hypoth-

eses with the hope of coming closer to the truth. However,
scientific experiments
take place in laboratories and have testing procedures to record
objective or empiri-
cally verifiable results. The laboratory of the philosopher is the
domain of ideas.
It takes place in the mind, where imaginative thought
experiments occur. It takes
place in the study room, where ideas are written down and
examined. It also takes
place wherever conversation or debate about the perennial
questions arises, where
thesis and counterexample and counterthesis are considered.
A word must be said about the specific terms moral and ethical
and the asso-
ciated notions of morals and ethics. Often these terms are used
interchangeably—as
will be the case in this book. Both terms derive their meaning
from the idea of
“custom”—that is, normal behavior. Specifically, “moral”
comes from the Latin
word mores and “ethical” from the Greek ethos.
The study of ethics within philosophy contains its own

subdivisions, and
dividing up the territory of ethics is tricky. The key divisions
are (1) descriptive
morality, (2) moral philosophy (ethical theory), and (3) applied
ethics. First,
descriptive morality refers to actual beliefs, customs, principles,
and practices
of people and cultures. Sociologists in particular pay special
attention to the con-
crete moral practices of social groups around the world, and
they view them as
cultural “facts,” much like facts about what people in those
countries eat or how
they dress. Second, moral philosophy—also called ethical
theory—refers to
the systematic effort to understand moral concepts and justify
moral principles
and theories. It analyzes key ethical concepts such as “right,”
“wrong,” and
“permissible.” It explores possible sources of moral obligation
such as God,
human reason, or the desire to be happy. It seeks to establish
principles of right
behavior that may serve as action guides for individuals and
groups. Third,

applied ethics deals with controversial moral problems such as
abortion, pre-
marital sex, capital punishment, euthanasia, and civil
disobedience.
The larger study of ethics, then, draws on all three of these
subdivisions,
connecting them in important ways. For example, moral
philosophy is very
much interrelated with applied ethics, and here will be a
difference in the quality
of debates about abortion and other such issues when those
discussions are
informed by ethical theories. More light and less heat will be
the likely outcome.
With the onset of multiculturalism and the deep differences in
worldviews
around the globe today, the need to use reason, rather than
violence, to settle
our disputes and resolve conflicts of interest has become
obvious. Ethical aware-
ness is the necessary condition for human survival and
flourishing.
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The study of ethics is not only of instrumental value but also
valuable in its
own right. It is satisfying to have knowledge of important
matters for its own
sake, and it is important to understand the nature and scope of
moral theory
for its own sake. We are rational beings who cannot help but
want to understand
the nature of the good life and all that it implies. The study of
ethics is some-
times a bit off-putting because so many differing theories often

appear to contra-
dict each other and thus produce confusion rather than
guidance. But an
appreciation of the complexity of ethics is valuable in
counteracting our natural
tendency toward inflexibility and tribalism where we stubbornly
adhere to the
values of our specific peer groups.
M O R A L I T Y A S C O M P A R E D W I T H O T H E R
NO RMATIVE S UBJECTS
Moral principles concern standards of behavior; roughly
speaking, they involve
not what is but what ought to be. How should I live my life?
What is the right
thing to do in this situation? Is premarital sex morally
permissible? Ought a
woman ever to have an abortion? Morality has a distinct action-
guiding, or nor-
mative, aspect, which it shares with other practices such as
religion, law, and eti-
quette. Let’s see how morality differs from each of these.

Religion
Consider first the relation between morality and religion. Moral
behavior, as
defined by a given religion, is usually believed to be essential
to that religion’s
practice. But neither the practices nor principles of morality
should be identified
with religion. The practice of morality need not be motivated by
religious con-
siderations, and moral principles need not be grounded in
revelation or divine
authority—as religious teachings invariably are. The most
important characteristic
of ethics is its grounding in reason and human experience.
To use a spatial metaphor, secular ethics is horizontal, lacking a
vertical or higher
dimension; as such it does not receive its authority from “on
high.” But religious
ethics, being grounded in revelation or divine authority, has that
vertical dimension
although religious ethics generally uses reason to supplement or
complement revela-
tion. These two differing orientations often generate different

moral principles and
standards of evaluation, but they need not do so. Some versions
of religious ethics,
which posit God’s revelation of the moral law in nature or
conscience, hold that rea-
son can discover what is right or wrong even apart from divine
revelation.
Law
Consider next the close relationship between morality and law.
Many laws are
instituted in order to promote well-being, resolve conflicts of
interest, and pro-
mote social harmony, just as morality does. However, ethics
may judge that
W HA T I S E TH I CS? 3
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some laws are immoral without denying that they have legal
authority. For
example, laws may permit slavery, spousal abuse, racial
discrimination, or sexual
discrimination, but these are immoral practices.
In a PBS television series, Ethics in America, a trial lawyer was
asked what he
would do if he discovered that his client had committed a
murder some years
earlier for which another man had been wrongly convicted and
would soon be
executed.2 The lawyer said that he had a legal obligation to
keep this informa-
tion confidential and that, if he divulged it, he would be
disbarred. It is arguable
that he has a moral obligation that overrides his legal obligation
and demands

that he act to save the innocent man from execution.
Furthermore, some aspects of morality are not covered by law.
For example,
although it is generally agreed that lying is usually immoral,
there is no general
law against it—except under such special conditions as
committing perjury or
falsifying income tax returns. Sometimes college newspapers
publish advertise-
ments by vendors who offer “research assistance,” despite
knowing in advance
that these vendors will aid and abet plagiarism. Publishing such
ads is legal, but
its moral correctness is doubtful.
Similarly, the 38 people who watched the attacks on Kitty
Genovese and
did nothing to intervene broke no New York law, but they were
very likely
morally responsible for their inaction. In our legal tradition,
there is no general
duty to rescue a person in need. In 1908, the dean of Harvard
Law School pro-
posed that a person should be required to “save another from

impending death
or great bodily harm, when he might do so with little or no
inconvenience to
himself.” The proposal was defeated, and one of its opponents
posed the ques-
tion of whether a rich person, to whom $20 meant very little, be
legally obliged
to save the life of a hungry child in a foreign land? Currently,
only Vermont and
Minnesota have “Good Samaritan” laws, requiring that one
come to the aid of a
person in grave physical harm but only to the extent that the aid
“can be ren-
dered without danger or peril to himself or without interference
with important
duties owed to others.”
There is another major difference between law and morality. In
1351, King
Edward of England instituted a law against treason that made it
a crime merely
to think homicidal thoughts about the king. But, alas, the law
could not be
enforced, for no tribunal can search the heart and discover the
intentions of the

mind. It is true that intention, such as malice aforethought,
plays a role in deter-
mining the legal character of an act once the act has been
committed. But, pre-
emptive punishment for people who are presumed to have bad
intentions is
illegal. If malicious intentions by themselves were illegal,
wouldn’t we all deserve
imprisonment? Even if one could detect others’ intentions, when
should the
punishment be administered? As soon as the offender has the
intention? How
do we know that the offender won’t change his or her mind?
Although it is impractical to have laws against bad intentions,
these inten-
tions are still morally wrong. Suppose I buy a gun with the
intention of killing
Uncle Charlie to inherit his wealth, but I never get a chance to
fire it (for exam-
ple, suppose Uncle Charlie moves to Australia). Although I
have not committed
a crime, I have committed a moral wrong.
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Etiquette
Lastly, consider the relation between morality and etiquette.
Etiquette concerns
form and style rather than the essence of social existence; it
determines what is
polite behavior rather than what is right behavior in a deeper
sense. It represents
society’s decision as to how we are to dress, greet one another,
eat, celebrate
festivals, dispose of the dead, express gratitude and

appreciation, and, in general,
carry out social transactions. Whether people greet each other
with a handshake,
a bow, a hug, or a kiss on the cheek depends on their social
system. Russians
wear their wedding rings on the third finger of their right hands,
whereas Amer-
icans wear them on their left hands. The English hold their
forks in their left
hands, whereas people in other countries are more likely to hold
them in their
right hands. People in India typically eat without a fork at all,
using the fingers of
their right hands to deliver food from their plate to their mouth.
In and of them-
selves, none of these rituals has any moral superiority. Polite
manners grace our
social existence, but they are not what social existence is about.
They help social
transactions to flow smoothly but are not the substance of those
transactions.
At the same time, it can be immoral to disregard or defy
etiquette. Whether
to shake hands when greeting a person for the first time or put

one’s hands
together in front as one bows, as people in India do, is a matter
of cultural deci-
sion. But, once the custom is adopted, the practice takes on the
importance of a
moral rule, subsumed under the wider principle of showing
respect to people.
Similarly, there is no moral necessity to wear clothes, but we
have adopted
the custom partly to keep warm in colder climates and partly to
be modest.
Accordingly, there may be nothing wrong with nudists who
decide to live
together in nudist colonies. However, for people to go nude
outside of nudist
colonies—say, in classrooms, stores, and along the road—may
well be so offen-
sive that it is morally insensitive. There was a scandal on the
beaches of South
India where American tourists swam in bikinis, shocking the
more modest
Indians. There was nothing immoral in itself about wearing
bikinis, but given
the cultural context, the Americans willfully violated etiquette

and were guilty
of moral impropriety.
Although Americans pride themselves on tolerance, pluralism,
and awareness
of other cultures, custom and etiquette can be—even among
people from similar
backgrounds—a bone of contention. A Unitarian minister tells
of an experience
early in his marriage. He and his wife were hosting their first
Thanksgiving meal.
He had been used to small celebrations with his immediate
family, whereas his
wife had been used to grand celebrations. He writes, “I had been
asked to carve,
something I had never done before, but I was willing. I put on
an apron, entered
the kitchen, and attacked the bird with as much artistry as I
could muster. And
what reward did I get? [My wife] burst into tears. In her family
the turkey is
brought to the table, laid before the [father], grace is said, and
then he carves!
‘So I fail patriarchy,’ I hollered later. ‘What do you expect?’ ”3

Law, etiquette, and religion are all important institutions, but
each has lim-
itations. A limitation of religious commands is that they rest on
authority, and we
may lack certainty or agreement about the authority’s
credentials or how the
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authority would rule in ambiguous or new cases. Because
religion is founded not
on reason but on revelation, you cannot use reason to convince

someone from
another religion that your view is the right one. A limitation of
law is that you
can’t have a law against every social problem, nor can you
enforce every desir-
able rule. A limitation of etiquette is that it doesn’t get to the
heart of what is
vitally important for personal and social existence. Whether or
not one eats with
one’s fingers pales in significance with the importance of being
honest, trustwor-
thy, or just. Etiquette is a cultural invention, but morality is
more like a
discovery.
In summary, morality differs from law and etiquette by going
deeper into
the essence of our social existence. It differs from religion by
seeking reasons,
rather than authority, to justify its principles. The central
purpose of moral phi-
losophy is to secure valid principles of conduct and values that
can guide human
actions and produce good character. As such, it is the most
important activity we

know, for it concerns how we are to live.
T R A I T S O F M O R A L PR I N C I P L E S
A central feature of morality is the moral principle. We have
already noted that
moral principles are guides for action, but we must say more
about the traits of
such principles. Although there is no universal agreement on the
characteristics a
moral principle must have, there is a wide consensus about five
features: (1) pre-
scriptivity, (2) universalizability, (3) overridingness, (4)
publicity, and (5) practica-
bility. Several of these will be examined in chapters throughout
this book, but
let’s briefly consider them here.
First is prescriptivity, which is the commanding aspect of
morality. Moral
principles are generally put forth as commands or imperatives,
such as “Do not
kill,” “Do no unnecessary harm,” and “Love your neighbor.”
They are intended
for use: to advise people and influence action. Prescriptivity

shares this trait with
all normative discourse and is used to appraise behavior, assign
praise and blame,
and produce feelings of satisfaction or guilt.
Second is universalizability. Moral principles must apply to all
people who
are in a relevantly similar situation. If I judge that an act is
right for a certain
person, then that act is right for any other relevantly similar
person. This trait is
exemplified in the Golden Rule, “Do to others what you would
want them to
do to you.” We also see it in the formal principle of justice: It
cannot be right for
you to treat me in a manner in which it would be wrong for me
to treat you,
merely on the ground that we are two different individuals.4
Universalizability applies to all evaluative judgments. If I say
that X is a good
thing, then I am logically committed to judge that anything
relevantly similar to
X is a good thing. This trait is an extension of the principle of
consistency: we

ought to be consistent about our value judgments, including
one’s moral judg-
ments. Take any act that you are contemplating doing and ask,
“Could I will
that everyone act according to this principle?”
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Third is overridingness. Moral principles have predominant
authority and
override other kinds of principles. They are not the only
principles, but they take

precedence over other considerations, including aesthetic,
prudential, and legal
ones. The artist Paul Gauguin may have been aesthetically
justified in abandon-
ing his family to devote his life to painting beautiful Pacific
Island pictures, but
morally he probably was not justified, and so he probably
should not have done
it. It may be prudent to lie to save my reputation, but it
probably is morally
wrong to do so. When the law becomes egregiously immoral, it
may be my
moral duty to exercise civil disobedience. There is a general
moral duty to
obey the law because the law serves an overall moral purpose,
and this overall
purpose may give us moral reasons to obey laws that may not be
moral or ideal.
There may come a time, however, when the injustice of a bad
law is intolerable
and hence calls for illegal but moral defiance. A good example
would be laws in
the South prior to the Civil War requiring citizens to return
runaway slaves to
their owners.

Fourth is publicity. Moral principles must be made public in
order to guide
our actions. Publicity is necessary because we use principles to
prescribe behav-
ior, give advice, and assign praise and blame. It would be self-
defeating to keep
them a secret.
Fifth is practicability. A moral principle must have
practicability, which
means that it must be workable and its rules must not lay a
heavy burden on us
when we follow them. The philosopher John Rawls speaks of
the “strains of
commitment” that overly idealistic principles may cause in
average moral
agents.5 It might be desirable for morality to require more
selfless behavior
from us, but the result of such principles could be moral
despair, deep or
undue moral guilt, and ineffective action. Accordingly, most
ethical systems
take human limitations into consideration.

Although moral philosophers disagree somewhat about these
five traits, the
above discussion offers at least an idea of the general features
of moral principles.
DOMAINS OF ETH ICAL ASSESSMENT
At this point, it might seem that ethics concerns itself entirely
with rules of con-
duct that are based solely on evaluating acts. However, it is
more complicated
than that. Most ethical analysis falls into one or more of the
following domains:
(1) action, (2) consequences, (3) character traits, and (4)
motive. Again, all these
domains will be examined in detail in later chapters, but an
overview here will
be helpful.
Let’s examine these domains using an altered version of the
Kitty Genovese
story. Suppose a man attacks a woman in front of her apartment
and is about to
kill her. A responsible neighbor hears the struggle, calls the
police, and shouts

from the window, “Hey you, get out of here!” Startled by the
neighbor’s repri-
mand, the attacker lets go of the woman and runs down the
street where he is
caught by the police.
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Action
One way of ethically assessing this situation is to examine the
actions of both the

attacker and the good neighbor: The attacker’s actions were
wrong whereas the
neighbor’s actions were right. The term right has two meanings.
Sometimes, it
means “obligatory” (as in “the right act”), but it also can mean
“permissible”
(as in “a right act” or “It’s all right to do that”). Usually,
philosophers define
right as permissible, including in that category what is
obligatory:
1. A right act is an act that is permissible for you to do. It may
be either
(a) obligatory or (b) optional.
a. An obligatory act is one that morality requires you to do; it is
not
permissible for you to refrain from doing it.
b. An optional act is one that is neither obligatory nor wrong to
do. It is
not your duty to do it, nor is it your duty not to do it. Neither
doing it
nor not doing it would be wrong.

2. A wrong act is one you have an obligation, or a duty, to
refrain from doing: It
is an act you ought not to do; it is not permissible to do it.
In our example, the attacker’s assault on the woman was clearly
a wrong
action (prohibited); by contrast, the neighbor’s act of calling the
police was
clearly a right action—and an obligatory one at that.
But, some acts do not seem either obligatory or wrong. Whether
you take a
course in art history or English literature or whether you write a
letter with a
pencil or pen seems morally neutral. Either is permissible.
Whether you listen
to rock music or classical music is not usually considered
morally significant. Lis-
tening to both is allowed, and neither is obligatory. Whether
you marry or
remain single is an important decision about how to live your
life. The decision
you reach, however, is usually considered morally neutral or
optional. Under
most circumstances, to marry (or not to marry) is considered

neither obligatory
nor wrong but permissible.
Within the range of permissible acts is the notion of
supererogatory acts,
or highly altruistic acts. These acts are neither required nor
obligatory, but they
exceed what morality requires, going “beyond the call of duty.”
For example,
suppose the responsible neighbor ran outside to actually
confront the attacker
rather than simply shout at him from the window. Thus, the
neighbor would
assume an extra risk that would not be morally required.
Similarly, while you
may be obligated to give a donation to help people in dire need,
you would
not be obligated to sell your car, let alone become impoverished
yourself, to
help them. The complete scheme of acts, then, is this:
1. Right act (permissible)
a. Obligatory act
b. Optional act

(1) Neutral act
(2) Supererogatory act
2. Wrong act (not permissible)
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One important kind of ethical theory that emphasizes the nature
of the act is
called deontological (from the Greek word deon, meaning
“duty”). These theories
hold that something is inherently right or good about such acts

as truth telling and
promise keeping and inherently wrong or bad about such acts as
lying and promise
breaking. Classical deontological ethical principles include the
Ten Command-
ments and the Golden Rule. The leading proponent of
deontological ethics in
recent centuries is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who defended a
principle of
moral duty that he calls the categorical imperative: “Act only on
that maxim
whereby you can at the same time will that it would become a
universal law.”
Examples for Kant are “Never break your promise” and “Never
commit suicide.”
What all of these deontological theories and principles have in
common is the view
that we have an inherent duty to perform right actions and avoid
bad actions.
Consequences
Another way of ethically assessing situations is to examine the
consequences of an
action: If the consequences are on balance positive, then the

action is right; if
negative, then wrong. In our example, take the consequences of
the attacker’s
actions. At minimum he physically harms the woman and
psychologically trau-
matizes both her and her neighbors; if he succeeds in killing
her, then he emo-
tionally devastates her family and friends, perhaps for life. And
what does he gain
from this? Just a temporary experience of sadistic pleasure. On
balance, his action
has overwhelmingly negative consequences and thus is wrong.
Examine next the
consequences of the responsible neighbor who calls the police
and shouts down
from the window “Hey you, get out of here!” This scares off the
attacker, thus
limiting the harm of his assault. What does the neighbor lose by
doing this? Just a
temporary experience of fear, which the neighbor might have
experienced any-
way. On balance, then, the neighbor’s action has
overwhelmingly positive con-
sequences, which makes it the right thing to do.

Ethical theories that focus primarily on consequences in
determining moral
rightness and wrongness are sometimes called teleological
ethics (from the
Greek telos, meaning “goal directed”). The most famous of
these theories is utili-
tarianism, set forth by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John
Stuart Mill (1806–
1873), which requires us to do what is likeliest to have the best
consequences. In
Mill’s words, “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to
promote happiness;
wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
Character Traits
Whereas some ethical theories emphasize the nature of actions
in themselves and
some emphasize principles involving the consequences of
actions, other theories
emphasize a person’s character trait, or virtue. In our example,
the attacker has an
especially bad character trait—namely, malevolence—which
taints his entire out-
look on life and predisposes him to act in harmful ways. The

attacker is a bad
person principally for having this bad character trait of
malevolence. The respon-
sible neighbor, on the other hand, has a good character trait,
which directs his
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outlook on life—namely, benevolence, which is the tendency to
treat people
with kindness and assist those in need. Accordingly, the
neighbor is a good per-

son largely for possessing this good trait.
Moral philosophers call such good character traits virtues and
bad traits
vices. Entire theories of morality have been developed from
these notions and
are called virtue theories. The classic proponent of virtue theory
was Aristotle
(384–322 BCE), who maintained that the development of
virtuous character
traits is needed to ensure that we habitually act rightly.
Although it may be help-
ful to have action-guiding rules, it is vital to empower our
character with the
tendency to do good. Many people know that cheating,
gossiping, or overindul-
ging in food or alcohol is wrong, but they are incapable of
doing what is right.
Virtuous people spontaneously do the right thing and may not
even consciously
follow moral rules when doing so.
Motive
Finally, we can ethically assess situations by examining the

motive of the people
involved. The attacker intended to brutalize and kill the woman;
the neighbor
intended to thwart the attacker and thereby help the woman.
Virtually all ethical
systems recognize the importance of motives. For a full
assessment of any action,
it is important to take the agent’s motive into account. Two acts
may appear
identical on the surface, but one may be judged morally
blameworthy and the
other excusable. Consider John’s pushing Mary off a ledge,
causing her to break
her leg. In situation (A), he is angry and intends to harm her,
but in situation (B)
he sees a knife flying in her direction and intends to save her
life. In (A) he
clearly did the wrong thing, whereas in (B) he did the right
thing. A full moral
description of any act will take motive into account as a
relevant factor.
CONC LU SION
The study of ethics has enormous practical benefits. It can free

us from prejudice
and dogmatism. It sets forth comprehensive systems from which
to orient our indi-
vidual judgments. It carves up the moral landscape so that we
can sort out the issues
to think more clearly and confidently about moral problems. It
helps us clarify in
our minds just how our principles and values relate to one
another, and, most of all,
it gives us some guidance in how to live. Let’s return to
questions posed at the
beginning of this chapter, some of which we should now be able
to better answer.
What is the nature of morality, and why do we need it? Morality
concerns
discovering the rules that promote the human good, as
elaborated in the five
traits of moral principles: prescriptivity, universalizability,
overridingness, public-
ity, and practicability. Without morality, we cannot promote
that good.
What is the good, and how will I know it? The good in question
is the

human good, specified as happiness, reaching one’s potential,
and so forth.
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Whatever we decide on that fulfills human needs and helps us
develop our dee-
pest potential is the good that morality promotes.
Is it in my interest to be moral? Yes, in general and in the long
run, for
morality is exactly the set of rules most likely to help (nearly)

all of us, if nearly
all of us follow them nearly all of the time. The good is good
for you—at least
most of the time. Furthermore, if we believe in the superior
importance of
morality, then we will bring children up so that they will be
unhappy when
they break the moral code. They will feel guilt. In this sense,
the commitment
to morality and its internalization nearly guarantee that if you
break the moral
rules you will suffer.
What is the relationship between morality and religion?
Religion relies more
on revelation, and morality relies more on reason, on rational
reflection. But,
religion can provide added incentive for the moral life for those
who believe
that God sees and will judge all our actions.
What is the relationship between morality and law? Morality
and law should
be very close, and morality should be the basis of the law, but
there can be both

unjust laws and immoral acts that cannot be legally enforced.
The law is shal-
lower than morality and has a harder time judging human
motives and inten-
tions. You can be morally evil, intending to do evil things, but
as long as you
don’t do them, you are legally innocent.
What is the relationship between morality and etiquette?
Etiquette consists in
the customs of a culture, but they are typically morally neutral
in that the culture
could flourish with a different code of etiquette. In our culture,
we eat with knives
and forks, but a culture that eats with chopsticks or fingers is no
less moral.
N OT E S
1. Martin Gansberg, “38 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police,”
New York Times,
March 27, 1964.
2. Ethics in America, PBS, 1989, produced by Fred Friendly.

3. John Buehrens and Forrester Church, Our Chosen Faith
(Boston: Beacon Press,
1989), p. 140.
4. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1907), p. 380.
5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971),
pp. 176, 423.
F O R F U R T H E R R E F LE C T I O N
1. Consider the Kitty Genovese story and what you think a
responsible
neighbor should have done. Are there any situations in which
the neighbors
might be morally justified in doing nothing?
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2. The study of philosophy involves three main divisions:
descriptive morality,
moral philosophy, and applied ethics. Explain how these three
divisions
interrelate with a moral issue such as abortion, euthanasia, or
capital
punishment.
3. Illustrate the difference between a moral principle, a
religious principle, a
legal rule, a principle of etiquette. Are these sometimes related?
4. Take a moral principle such as “Don’t steal” and analyze it
according to the

five traits of moral principles.
5. French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) gave up his job as
a banker and
abandoned his wife and children to pursue a career as an artist.
He moved to
Martinique and later to Tahiti, eventually becoming one of the
most famous
postimpressionist artists in the world. Did Gauguin do what was
morally
permissible? Discuss this from the perspective of the four
domains of ethical
assessment.
6. Siddhartha Gautama (560–480 BCE), appalled by the
tremendous and per-
vasive suffering in the world, abandoned his wife and child to
seek enlight-
enment. He eventually attained enlightenment and became
known as the
Buddha. Is there a moral difference between Gauguin and the
Buddha?
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2
Ethical Relativism
In the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries sometimes
used coercion tochange the customs of pagan tribal people in
parts of Africa and the Pacific
Islands. Appalled by the customs of public nakedness,
polygamy, working on
the Sabbath, and infanticide, they went about reforming the
“poor pagans.”
They clothed them, separated wives from their husbands to

create monogamous
households, made the Sabbath a day of rest, and ended
infanticide. In the pro-
cess, they sometimes created social disruption, causing the
women to despair and
their children to be orphaned. The natives often did not
understand the new
religion but accepted it because of the white man’s power of
guns and
medicine.
Since the nineteenth century, we’ve made progress in
understanding cultural
diversity and now realize that the social conflict caused by such
“do-gooders”
was a bad thing. In the last century or so, anthropology has
exposed our fondness
for ethnocentrism, the prejudicial view that interprets all of
reality through the
eyes of one’s own cultural beliefs and values. We have come to
see enormous
variety in social practices throughout the world. Here are a few
examples.
Eskimos allow their elderly to die by starvation, whereas we

believe that this
is morally wrong. The Spartans of ancient Greece and the Dobu
of New Guinea
believe that stealing is morally right, but we believe that it is
wrong. Many cul-
tures, past and present, have practiced or still practice
infanticide.
A tribe in East Africa once threw deformed infants to the
hippopotamus, but
our society condemns such acts. Sexual practices vary over time
and from place
to place. Some cultures permit homosexual behavior, whereas
others condemn
it. Some cultures practice polygamy, whereas Christian cultures
view it as
immoral. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes a tribe in
Melanesia that
views cooperation and kindness as vices, and anthropologist
Colin Turnbull has
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documented that a tribe in northern Uganda has no sense of duty
toward its
children or parents. There are societies that make it a duty for
children to kill
their aging parents, sometimes by strangling.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (485–430 BCE) told the
story of how
Darius, the king of Persia, once brought together some
Callatians (Asian tribal
people) and some Greeks. He asked the Callatians how they
disposed of their

deceased parents. They explained that they ate the bodies. The
Greeks, who cre-
mated their parents, were horrified at such barbarous behavior
and begged Darius
to cease from such irreverent discussion. Herodotus concluded
that “Custom is
the king over all.”1
Today, we condemn ethnocentrism as a form of prejudice
equivalent to rac-
ism and sexism. What is right in one culture may be wrong in
another, what is
good east of the river may be bad west of the same river, what
is virtue in one
nation may be seen as a vice in another, so it is fitting for us not
to judge others
but to be tolerant of diversity.
This rejection of ethnocentrism in the West has contributed to a
general
shift in public opinion about morality so that for a growing
number of
Westerners consciousness raising about the validity of other
ways of life has led
to a gradual erosion of belief in moral objectivism, the view

that there are
universal and objective moral principles valid for all people and
social environ-
ments. For example, in polls taken in my philosophy classes
over the past several
years, students affirmed by a two-to-one ratio a version of
moral relativism over
moral objectivism, with barely 3 percent seeing something in
between these two
polar opposites. A few students claim to hold the doctrine of
ethical nihilism;
the doctrine that no valid moral principles exist, that morality is
a complete fic-
tion. Of course, I am not suggesting that all these students have
a clear under-
standing of what relativism entails, for many of those who say
they are ethical
relativists also state on the same questionnaire that “abortion,
except to save a
woman’s life, is always wrong,” that “capital punishment is
always morally
wrong,” or that “suicide is never morally permissible.” The
apparent contradic-
tions signal some confusion on the matter.

In this chapter, we examine the central notions of ethical
relativism and
look at the implications that seem to follow from it. There are
two main forms
of ethical relativism as defined here:
Subjective ethical relativism (subjectivism): All moral
principles are
justified by virtue of their acceptance by an individual agent
him- or
herself.
Conventional ethical relativism (conventionalism): All moral
princi-
ples are justified by virtue of their cultural acceptance.
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Both versions hold that there are no objective moral principles
but that such
principles are human inventions. Where they differ, though, is
with the issue of
whether they are inventions of individual agents themselves or
of larger social
groups. We begin with the first of these, which is the more
radical of the two
positions.
SUBJECTIVE E T H IC A L R EL A T IVISM
Some people think that morality depends directly on the
individual—not on
one’s culture and certainly not on an objective value. As my
students sometimes
maintain, “Morality is in the eye of the beholder.” They treat
morality like taste
or aesthetic judgments, which are person relative. Ernest

Hemingway wrote,
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you
feel
good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and
judged by
these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is
very moral
to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a
feeling of
life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over
I feel
very sad but very fine.2
This extreme form of moral subjectivism has the consequence
that it weak-
ens morality’s practical applications: On its premises, little or
no interpersonal
criticism or judgment is possible. Hemingway may feel good
about killing bulls
in a bullfight, whereas Saint Francis or Mother Teresa would no
doubt feel the
opposite. No argument about the matter is possible. Suppose
you are repulsed by
observing a man torturing a child. You cannot condemn him if

one of his prin-
ciples is “Torture little children for the fun of it.” The only
basis for judging him
wrong might be that he was a hypocrite who condemned others
for torturing.
However, one of his or Hemingway’s principles could be that
hypocrisy is mor-
ally permissible (he “feels very fine” about it), so it would be
impossible for him
to do wrong. For Hemingway, hypocrisy and nonhypocrisy are
both morally
permissible (except, perhaps, when he doesn’t feel very fine
about it).
On the basis of subjectivism, Adolf Hitler and the serial
murderer Ted
Bundy could be considered as moral as Gandhi, as long as each
lived by his
own standards whatever those might be. Witness the following
paraphrase of a
tape-recorded conversation between Ted Bundy and one of his
victims, in
which Bundy justifies his murder:
Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,”

that all
value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to
be
either “right” or “wrong.” I even read somewhere that the Chief
Justice
of the United States had written that the American Constitution
expressed nothing more than collective value judgments.
Believe it or
not, I figured out for myself—what apparently the Chief Justice
couldn’t figure out for himself—that if the rationality of one
value
E TH I C A L RE L A T I V I S M 15
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judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it
one
whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law
for any-
one, like myself, who has the boldness and daring—the strength
of
character—to throw off its shackles…. I discovered that to
become truly
free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I
quickly
discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest
block
and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value
judgment” that
I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who
were
these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is
it
more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig
or a
sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a
hog?
Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the

one than
for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific
enlight-
enment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures
as
“moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any
case, let
me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no
com-
parison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the
plea-
sure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest
conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most
consci-
entious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.3
Notions of good and bad or right and wrong cease to have
evaluative mean-
ing beyond the individual. We might be revulsed by Bundy’s
views, but that is
just a matter of taste.
In the opening days of my philosophy classes, I often find
students vehe-
mently defending subjective relativism: “Who are you to

judge?” they ask. I
then give them their first test. In the next class period, I return
all the tests,
marked “F,” even though my comments show that most of them
are of a very
high caliber. When the students express outrage at this (some
have never before
seen that letter on their papers and inquire about its meaning), I
answer that I
have accepted subjectivism for marking the exams. “But that’s
unjust!” they typ-
ically insist—and then they realize that they are no longer being
merely subjec-
tivist about ethics.
Absurd consequences follow from subjectivism. If it is correct,
then morality
reduces to something like aesthetic tastes about which there can
be neither argu-
ment nor interpersonal judgment. A contradiction seems to exist
between sub-
jectivism and the very concept of morality, which it is supposed
to characterize,
for morality has to do with proper resolution of interpersonal
conflict and the

improvement of the human predicament. Whatever else it does,
morality has a
minimal aim of preventing a Hobbesian state of nature in which
life is “soli-
tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But if so, then
subjectivism is no help at all,
for it rests neither on social agreement of principle (as the
conventionalist main-
tains) nor on an objectively independent set of norms that binds
all people for
the common good. If there were only one person on earth, then
there would be
no occasion for morality because there would not be any
interpersonal conflicts
to resolve or others whose suffering that he or she would have a
duty to
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improve. Subjectivism implicitly assumes moral solipsism, a
view that isolated
individuals make up separate universes.
Subjectivism treats individuals as billiard balls on a societal
pool table where
they meet only in radical collisions, each aimed at his or her
own goal and striv-
ing to do the others in before they do him or her in. This view
of personality is
contradicted by the facts that we develop in families and
mutually dependent
communities—in which we share a common language, common
institutions,
and similar rituals and habits—and that we often feel one
another’s joys and sor-
rows. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of
itself; every man is a

piece of the continent.”
Subjective ethical relativism, then, is incoherent, and it thus
seems that the
only plausible view of ethical relativism must be one that
grounds morality in the
group or culture. Thus, we turn now to conventional ethical
relativism.
CO NVEN TION AL ETHI CAL R ELATIV ISM
Again, conventional ethical relativism, also called
conventionalism, is the view
that all moral principles are justified by virtue of their cultural
acceptance.
There are no universally valid moral principles, but rather all
such principles are
valid relative to culture or individual choice. This view
recognizes the social
nature of morality, which is the theory’s key asset. It does not
seem subject to
the same absurd consequences that plague subjectivism.
Recognizing the impor-
tance of our social environment in generating customs and
beliefs, many people

suppose that ethical relativism is the correct theory.
Furthermore, they are drawn
to it for its liberal philosophical stance. It seems to be an
enlightened response to
the arrogance of ethnocentricity, and it seems to imply an
attitude of tolerance
toward other cultures.
The Diversity and Dependency Theses
John Ladd gives a typical characterization of the theory:
Ethical relativism is the doctrine that the moral rightness and
wrongness
of actions varies from society to society and that there are no
absolute
universal moral standards binding on all men at all times.
Accordingly, it
holds that whether or not it is right for an individual to act in a
certain
way depends on or is relative to the society to which he
belongs.4
If we analyze this passage, we find two distinct theses that are
central to con-

ventional ethical relativism:
Diversity thesis. What is considered morally right and wrong
varies from society
to society, so there are no universal moral standards held by all
societies.
Dependency thesis. All moral principles derive their validity
from cultural
acceptance.
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The diversity thesis is simply an anthropological thesis
acknowledging that
moral rules differ from society to society; it is sometimes
referred to as cultural
relativism. As we illustrated earlier in this chapter, there is
enormous variety in
what may count as a moral principle in a given society. The
human condition
is flexible in the extreme, allowing any number of folkways or
moral codes. As
Ruth Benedict has written,
The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain
segment of
the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations, just
as we
have seen ... that any culture makes use of certain selected
material
techniques or cultural traits. The great arc along which all the
possible
human behaviors are distributed is far too immense and too full
of
contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any
considerable por-

tion of it. Selection is the first requirement.5
It may or may not be the case that there is no single moral
principle held in
common by every society, but if there are any, they seem to be
few, at best.
Certainly, it would be very hard to derive one single “true”
morality on the
basis of observation of various societies’ moral standards.
The second element of conventional ethical relativism—the
dependency
thesis—asserts that individual acts are right or wrong depending
on the nature
of the society in which they occur. Morality does not exist in a
vacuum; rather,
what is considered morally right or wrong must be seen in a
context that
depends on the goals, wants, beliefs, history, and environment
of the society in
question. As William Graham Sumner says,
We learn the [morals] as unconsciously as we learn to walk and
hear and
breathe, and [we] never know any reason why the [morals] are

what
they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to
conscious-
ness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the
bonds of
tradition, custom, and habit.6
Trying to see things from an independent, noncultural point of
view would
be like taking out our eyes to examine their contours and
qualities. We are sim-
ply culturally determined beings.
In a sense, we all live in radically different worlds. Each person
has a differ-
ent set of beliefs and experiences, a particular perspective that
colors all of his or
her perceptions. Do the farmer, the real estate dealer, and the
artist looking at
the same spatiotemporal field actually see the same thing? Not
likely. Their dif-
ferent orientations, values, and expectations govern their
perceptions, so different
aspects of the field are highlighted and some features are
missed. Even as our

individual values arise from personal experience, so social
values are grounded
in the particular history of the community. Morality, then, is
just the set of com-
mon rules, habits, and customs that have won social approval
over time so that
they seem part of the nature of things, like facts. There is
nothing mysterious
about these codes of behavior. They are the outcomes of our
social history.
There is something conventional about any morality, so every
morality really
depends on a level of social acceptance. Not only do various
societies adhere to
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different moral systems, but the very same society could (and
often does) change its
moral views over time and place. For example, in the southern
United States, slavery
is now viewed as immoral, whereas just over one hundred fifty
years ago, it was not.
We have greatly altered our views on abortion, divorce, and
sexuality as well.
Conventional Ethical Relativism and Tolerance
Defenders of conventional ethical relativism often advertise
another benefit of
their theory: It supports the value of tolerance. As the
anthropologist Ruth
Benedict says, in recognizing ethical relativity, “We shall arrive
at a more realistic
social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for
tolerance the

coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has
created for itself
from the raw materials of existence.”7
Consider this example. In parts of northern Africa, many girls
undergo female
circumcision, cutting out their external genitalia. It has been
estimated that 80 mil-
lion living women have had this surgery and that 4–5 million
girls suffer it each
year. The mutilating surgery often leads to sickness or death
and encumbers their
sexual experience. Some African women accept such mutilation
as a just sacrifice
for marital stability, but many women and ethicists have
condemned it as a cruel
practice that causes women unjustified pain and mutilation and
robs them of plea-
sure and autonomy. Some anthropologists such as Nancy
Scheper-Hughes accept
relativism and argue that we Westerners have no basis for
condemning genital
mutilation.8 Scheper-Hughes advocates tolerance for other
cultural values. She
writes, “I don’t like the idea of clitoridectomy any better than

any other woman
I know. But I like even less the western ‘voices of reason’
[imposing their
judgments].” She argues that judging other cultures irrationally
supposes that we
know better than the people of that culture do what is right or
wrong.
The most famous proponent of this position is anthropologist
Melville
Herskovits,9 who argues even more explicitly than Benedict and
Scheper-
Hughes that ethical relativism entails intercultural tolerance:
(1) If morality is relative to its culture, then there is no
independent basis for
criticizing the morality of any other culture but one’s own.
(2) If there is no independent way of criticizing any other
culture, then we
ought to be tolerant of the moralities of other cultures.
(3) Morality is relative to its culture.
(4) Therefore, we ought to be tolerant of the moralities of other
cultures.

Tolerance is certainly a virtue, but is this a good argument for
it? No. If
morality simply is relative to each culture and if the culture in
question has no
principle of tolerance, its members have no obligation to be
tolerant. Herskovits
and Scheper-Hughes, as well, seem to be treating the principle
of tolerance as the
one exception. They are treating it as an absolute moral
principle.
But, from a relativistic point of view, there is no more reason to
be tolerant than
to be intolerant, and neither stance is objectively morally better
than the other. If
Westerners condemn clitoridectomies on the basis of their
cultural values, they are
no more to be condemned than those people are who, because of
their cultural

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values, perform clitoridectomies. One cannot consistently assert
that all morality is
relative and then treat the principle of tolerance as an absolute
principle.
C R I T I C I S M S OF CO N V E N TI O N A L ET H I C A L
R E L A T I V I S M
So far we’ve examined the main ingredients of conventional
ethical relativism
and considered its strengths. We now turn to the problems with
this view.

Conventional Ethical Relativism Undermines Important Values
One serious problem with conventional ethical relativism is that
it undermines
the basis of important values. If conventional ethical relativism
is true, then we
cannot legitimately criticize anyone who adopts what we might
regard as an
atrocious principle. If, as seems to be the case, valid criticism
supposes an objec-
tive or impartial standard, then relativists cannot morally
criticize anyone outside
their own culture. Hitler’s genocidal actions, as long as they are
culturally
accepted, are as morally legitimate as Mother Teresa’s works of
mercy. If con-
ventional relativism is accepted, then racism, genocide of
unpopular minorities,
oppression of the poor, slavery, and even the advocacy of war
for its own sake
are as moral as their opposites. And if a subculture decided that
starting a nuclear
war was somehow morally acceptable, we could not morally
criticize these peo-
ple. Any actual morality, whatever its content, is as valid as

every other and more
valid than ideal moralities—since no culture adheres to the
latter.
Another important value that we commonly hold is that
regarding moral
reformers: people of conscience like Mohandas Gandhi and
Martin Luther King
who go against the tide of cultural standards. However,
according to conventional
ethical relativism, by going against dominant cultural standards,
their actions are
technically wrong. For example, in the eighteenth century,
William Wilberforce
would have been wrong to oppose slavery. In the nineteenth
century, the British
would have been wrong for banning the practice of widows
committing suicide
by jumping into the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands.
Yet, we normally feel just the opposite, that the reformer is a
courageous
innovator who is right, has the truth, and stands against the
mindless majority.
Sometimes the individual must stand alone with the truth,

risking social censure
and persecution. In Henrik Ibsen’s novel An Enemy of the
People, a physician pro-
tests against the unsanitary conditions of the town’s profitable
bathhouse. When
he fails to rally public support, he denounces the power that the
majority has
over the town’s values:
The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom among us—
is the
compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact and liberal
majority. The
majority has might—unfortunately—but right it is not. Right—
are I and
a few others.
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We all can appreciate the physician’s conviction that might does
not make
right. Yet, that is precisely the message of relativism: Truth is
with the crowd and
error with the moral reformer.
A third important value that conventional ethical relativism
undermines is
the close connection between morality and the law. This might
occur in two
ways, first with civil disobedience. Our normal view is that we
have a duty to
obey the law because law, in general, promotes the human good.
Civil disobe-
dience involves breaking laws that seem to seriously conflict
with morality, such
as when activists protested against segregation laws in the
1950s by intentionally

violating those laws. However, if ethical relativism is true, then
civil disobedience
cannot be justified and the activist is in a situation that is
similar to that of the
moral reformer. That is, from the side of the society at large,
civil disobedience
will be morally wrong as long as the majority culture agrees
with the law in
question, such as segregation laws. A second problem occurs
with what we can
call misguided civil disobedience. Suppose that you belong to
racist subculture
such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) that does not recognize the
legitimacy of
laws regarding the equal treatment of races. Why should you
obey a law that
your group does not recognize as valid? In this case, then, your
civil disobedience
against those laws will be morally justified.
Thus, unless we have an independent moral basis for law, it is
hard to estab-
lish a moral foundation to laws. Unless we recognize the
priority of a universal
moral law, we have no firm basis for either justifying our acts

of civil disobedi-
ence against “unjust laws,” or grounding our duty to follow just
laws.
Conventional Ethical Relativism Leads to Subjectivism
An even more basic problem with conventional ethical
relativism is that the notion of
a culture or society is notoriously difficult to define. This is
especially so in a pluralistic
society like our own where one person can belong to several
societies or subcultures
that hold different conflicting values. There are values that we
have as U.S. citizens,
other values that we have to our religious institutions, and still
others to our social or
political organizations. Relativism would seem to tell us that if
a person belongs to
societies with conflicting moralities, then that person must be
judged both wrong and
not wrong whatever he or she does. For example, if Mary is a
U.S. citizen and a
member of the Roman Catholic Church, then she is wrong (as a
Catholic) if she
has an abortion, but not wrong (as a citizen of the United

States) if she acts against
the church’s teaching on abortion. If John is a college student
and member of a racist
organization, then he must accept the principle of equal rights
(as a U.S. citizen), yet
at the same time reject the principle of equal rights (as a
member of a racist organiza-
tion). What is the morally right thing for Mary or John to do?
The question no longer
makes much sense in this moral confusion. It has lost its action-
guiding function.
Perhaps the relativist would adhere to a principle that says in
such cases the
individual may choose which group to belong to as his or her
primary group. If
Mary has an abortion, she is choosing to belong to the general
society relative to
that principle. John must likewise choose among groups. The
trouble with this
option is that it seems to lead to counterintuitive results. If
Mike belongs to the

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company “Murder Incorporated” and wants to feel good about
killing a random
person, he can identify with the “Murder Incorporated” society
rather than the
general public morality. This, of course, in no way morally
justifies the killing.
Another problem is with determining how large a group must be
in order to be
a legitimate subculture or society. Perhaps 1,000 people, or
maybe just 10? Per-
haps my burglary partner and I found our own society with a
morality of its

own. If my partner then dies, I could still claim that I was
acting from an origi-
nally social set of norms. At this point, though, I can just
dispense with the inter-
personal agreements altogether and invent my own morality
because morality, in
this view, is only an invention anyway. Conventionalist
relativism seems to
reduce to subjectivism. And subjectivism leads, as we have
seen, to moral solip-
sism, to the demise of morality altogether.
The relativist may here object that this is an instance of the
slippery slope
fallacy—that is, the fallacy of objecting to a proposition on the
erroneous
grounds that, if accepted, it will lead to a chain of events that
are absurd or unac-
ceptable. In response to this objection, though, the burden rests
with the relativ-
ist to give an alternative analysis of what constitutes a viable
social basis for
generating valid (or true) moral principles. Perhaps we might
agree that the
very nature of morality entails two people who are making an

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