Taylor Vs Rachel

1868 Words8 Pages
Using two articles “On the Origin of Good and Evil” by Richard Taylor and “Why Morality Is Not Relative” by James Rachels from the book Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, authors Louis P. Pojman and Lewis Vaughn, this essay will first try to identify what each of the two articles says about the nature of good and evil, and the relativity of morality. The main points of scholars Taylor and Rachels are that good and evil happens naturally in us, and we should not judge another culture if we don’t know their history. Taylor states that morality is not inspirational, but a natural reality which means that we are conative beings, and if there are no desires, there are no values and no good or evil. His arguments take place…show more content…
Rachels states out problems that lie with the ideas of cultural relativism that people's moral judgments do differ from culture to culture. Therefore, if people's moral judgments differ from culture to culture, moral norms are relative to culture. The six topics he discussed in the article are: the cultural differences argument, which he explained that there is a certain form of argument of cultural relativism that cultural relativism may be evaluated by subjecting to rational analysis; the consequences of taking cultural relativism seriously, which it mean that we have to stop judging other societies; why there is less disagreement than it seems, this section illustrated about cultural relativism comes from the observation that cultures differ dramatically in their views of right and wrong, but if we examine what seems to be a affected difference, we might find that the cultures do not differ nearly as much as it appear; how all cultures have some values in common, stated that cultural groups are similar on caring, loving, and life style; judging a cultural practice to be undesirable, which the section talked about judging other culture is not professional, that other culture should interfering in the social customs of other peoples to be able to understand them; and what can be learned from cultural relativism, which if we keep an open mind, we would have learned to accept others and discovering about the truth of other…show more content…
The main problem with the argument for cultural relativism was from the fact that cultures have different moral beliefs on an issue, it does not locally follow that there is no objective moral truth. James believes that we should keep an open mind when making ethical judgments and not be too quick to attribute all of our preferences to an absolute standard. To begin his analysis of the plausibility of Cultural Relativism which he calls the "Cultural Difference Argument". This is a primary argument that the cultural relativists use or imply when trying to justify their position. In the article, he summarizes the argument

More about Taylor Vs Rachel

Open Document