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The Means End Relation and its Significance for Cross-Cultural Ethical Agreement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
Radical ethical relativism as presented in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture not only denies absolute values, its thesis of the incommensurability of cultural configurations precludes possibility of any agreement on values by individuals of different cultures. This fact provides the proper perspective from which to judge the current controversy between radical and “modified” ethical relativists. A double error is committed, therefore, by those who contend that there has been no reduction of the “area of indeterminacy” existing between the ethical principles of different cultures since, despite the newer developments in the social sciences, there are still no absolutely valid ethical values. Not only is the term “validity” vague and in need of reinterpretation, but, in assuming the denial of absolute values to be the distinguishing characteristic of radical relativism, they actually identify this theory with modified relativism. This brief paper attempts to prove the untenability of the denial of cross cultural agreement on ends and means by treating the question first, from the point of view of C. L. Stevenson's Dewey-inspired notion of the derivation of ends from means, and, second, from that of Stevenson's more original idea, complex ethical agreement.
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- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1958
References
1 See The Journal of Philosophy, Volume LII, 23; November 10, 1955, papers by Clyde Kluckholm and F. S. C. Northrop. Also The Journal of Philosophy Vol. LV, No. 1: January 2, 1958, paper by Paul W. Taylor.
1a Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, New York, 1949. pp. 20, 40 and 42.
2 “They are travelling along different roads in pursuit of different ends and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because essentially they are incommensurable.” p. 206.
3 Benedict, op. cit.
4 Benedict, op. cit. p. 240. The problem of the disoriented is often “most successfully solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and accepting the role the culture honors.” The other alternative suggested is cultivation of an objective interest in his own preferences and learning to manage with equanimity his deviation from type. p. 251.
5 Benedict, op. cit. p. 208, 223.
6 The following passage is Stevenson's statement concerning the “relativity argument:”
“The same point can be made in a more general way by a variant of the ‘relativity argument.’ People with different racial or temperamental characteristics, or from different generations, or from widely separated communities, are likely to disagree more sharply on ethical matters than on factual ones. This is easily accounted for if ethics involves disagreement in attitude; for different temperaments, social needs, and group pressures would more directly and urgently lead these people to have opposed attitudes than it would lead them to have opposed factual beliefs. The contention that ethics involves disagreement in attitude thereby gains in probability. It finds confirmation from what it explains, like any other hypothesis. Used alone, the relativity argument cannot pretend to be final; but used in conjunction with other observations, it has an important and legitimate place.” C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Languages, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1945.
7 Op. cit., Ch. VIII.
8 Ibid. p. 50.
9 Ibid. p. 139.
10 Ibid., p. 83.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 197.
14 Ibid., p. 177.
15 Ibid., p. 178.
16 Ibid., p. 177.
17 Ibid., p. 178. Also following Stevenson's terminology it will be convenient to interchange “intrinsically” and “extrinsically” with “as an end” and “as a means.”
18 Ibid., p. 195.
19 Ibid., p. 196.
20 Ibid., p. 197.
21 Ibid., pp. 180–182.
22 Two individuals, A and B, may be said to have “divergent” interests when, e.g., both agree upon X as a means to their respective ends although each is indifferent to the “end” of the other. X is a means to Y in which A has no interest, and X is also a means to Z in which B has no interest. A's interest is Y, and B's interest is Z. See p. 12 of this paper.
23 Ibid., p. 187.
24 For the role of value judgments in the validation of scientific theories see the illuminating chapter by Richard Rudner in The Validation of Scientific Theories, edited by Philipp Frank, Boston, 1954.
25 Op. cit. pp. 21, 22, 205, 209, 234, 238.