Duska introduces one way to defend ethics in business, namely, to claim that good ethics is good business. Then he points out one diffic

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Phil 163, Summer 2022 (1) Grading Rubric for Weekly assignment

• Basic requirements for weekly assignments

1. Hand your assignments in on time. Points will be deducted for late work as described on

the syllabus.

2. Format your assignments reasonably: use 12pt Times New Roman font. Double space with normal margin width.

3. Please do not put your name on your assignment; this is to make sure that I grade your assignment anonymously to ensure fair grading.

4. Weekly assignments should be written with your own words about your own thoughts. If you have “borrowed” some points or sentences from other sources, then you should cite it. Failing to properly cite the original sources would count as a case of plagiarism, which will be handled according to the UMass Academic Honesty policy.

• Grading Rubric for weekly assignments

Each weekly assignment will be worth 10 points. I will be looking for two positive features in a weekly assignment, accuracy and clarity.

1. Accuracy (5 points)

You will be asked to discuss certain arguments or views that are found in the readings. It is expected that you correctly summarize the argument or the view you will discuss.

– Excellent (5pt): Excellent understanding of the argument/view you are summarizing.

Uses appropriate textual evidence to back up your summarization of the argument/view.

– Good (4pt): Mostly correct understanding of the argument with some details omitted or misstated. Uses appropriate textual evidence to back up your summarization of the argument/view.

– Fair (3 pt): Insufficient understanding of the argument and lacks important details. Uses insufficient textual evidence to back up the views you are attributing to authors.

– Needs work (2pt): Significant misunderstandings. Important pieces of the argument are omitted or misstated. Little to no textual evidence.

– Poor (1pt): Very substantial misunderstandings. Textual evidence is missing or irrelevant.

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2. Clarity (5 points)

When you are asked to discuss certain arguments or views, it is very important to clearly state the argument and your ideas. One way to do this is to think whether one of your friend who does not attend the class or read the material would be able to understand the argument and your ideas just by reading your weekly assignment.

– Excellent (5pt): Reads well. Would clearly convey the argument to someone who had

not attend the class or read the material. Few spelling or grammatical errors. – Good (4pt): Reads well but has some unclear details. Few spelling or grammatical

errors. – Fair (3pt): Mostly readable but includes some confusing passages. Some spelling or

grammatical errors. – Needs work (2pt): Very confusing to understand. Includes significant spelling or

grammatical errors and/or focuses on irrelevant tangents. – Poor (1pt): Very difficult to understand. Many errors.

3. If the assignment is too long (over 2 pages) or short (about or less than half a page), 1

point will be deducted; if the assignment fails to include all of the required parts of the assignment question, 1 point will be deducted.

4. Read and follow Academic Honesty Guide for students! Plagiarism will be

punished according to Umass policy.

• You can e-mail me if you have any questions/comments/concerns. But please do not send

me your draft for weekly assignment and ask for comments. If you want to talk about your weekly assignment, you should make an appointment for a Zoom meeting.

Business Ethics Summer 2022 (1) Week 1, Lecture 1

Chaeyoung Paek

Business Ethics Summer 2022 (1) Week 1, Lecture 3

Chaeyoung Paek

Business Ethics Summer 2022 (1) Week 1, Lecture 2

Chaeyoung Paek

THE CHAI.LENGE OF CULIURAT. RELATIVISM 13

Tiw Challenge of Cultural Relativism

CHAPTER2

Morality dillers in every societY, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.

Rum BENEDIcT PATTERNS OF CuLTURE (1934)

2.1. How Different Cultures Have Different Moral Codes

Darius, a king of ancient Persia, was intrigued by the variety of cultures he encountered in his travels. He had found, for example, that the Callatians (a tribe of Indians) customarily ate the bodies of their dead fathers. The Greeks, of course, did not do that—the Greeks practiced cremation and regarded the funeral pyre as the natural and fitting way to dispose of the dead. Darius thought that a sophisticated understanding of the world must include an appre ciation of such differences between cultures. One day, to teach this lesson, he summoned some Greeks who happened to be present at his court and asked them what they would take to eat the bodies of their dead fathers. They were shocked, as Darius knew they would be, and replied that no amount of money could persuade them to do such a thing. Then Darius called in some Callatians, and while the Greeks listened asked them what they would take to burn their dead fathers’ bodies, The Callatians were horrified and told Darius not even to mention such a dreadful thing.

This story, recounted by Herodotus in his History illustrates a recurring theme in the literature of social science: diflèrent cul tures have different moral codes. What is thought right within one group may be utterly abhorrent to the members of another group,

and vice versa. Should we eat the bodies of the dead or burn them? If you were a Greek, one answer would seem obviously cerrect; but if you were a Callatian, the opposite would seem equally certain,

It is easy to give additional examples of the same kind, Con sider the Eskimos. They are a remote and inaccessible people. Numbering only about 25.000, they live in small, isolated settle ments scattered mostly along the northern fringes of North Amer ica and Greenland. Until the beginning of this century, the outside world knew little about them. Then explorers began to bring back strange tales.

Eskimo customs turned out to be very different from our own. The men often had more than one wife, and they would share their wives with guests, lending them fbr the night as a sign of hospi tality. Moreover, within a community, a dominant male might demand — and get — regular sexual access to other men’s wives. The women, however, were free to break these arrangements sim ply by leaving their husbands and taking up with new partners— free, that is, so long as their former husbands chose not to make trouble. All in all, the Eskimo practice was a volatile scheme that bore little resemblance to what we call marriage.

But it was not only their marriage and sexual practices that were different. The Eskimos also seemed to have less regard for human life. Inlhnticide, for example, was common. Knud Rasmussen, one of the most famous early explorers, reported that he met one woman who had borne twenty children but had killed ten of them at birth. Female babies, he found, were especially liable to be destroyed, and this was permitted simply at the parents’ discretion, with no social stigma attached to it. Old people also, when they became too feeble to con tribute to the family, were left out in the snow to die. So there seemed to be, in this society; remarkably little respect for life.

To the general public, these were disturbing revelations. Our own way of living seems so natural and right that for many of us it is hard to conceive of others living so differently. And when we do hear of such things, we tend immediately to categorize those other peoples as “backward” or “primitive.” But to anthropologists and sociologists, there was nothing particularly surprising about the Eskimos. Since the time of Herodotus, enlightened observers have been accustomed to the idea that conceptions of right and wrong differ from culture to culture. If we assume that our ideas of right and wrong will be shared by all peoples at all times, we are merely naive.

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14 THE EI.EMEc[s ( )F MOR.•I. l’HIIOSOPHY ‘[HE (:[-IALLEN(;E OF ( :uI:FURAL REI.A1’IVISM 15

2.2. Cultural Relativism To many thinkers, this observation — “Different cultures have dif ferent moral codes”—has seemed to be the key to understanding morality. The idea of universal truth in ethics, they say, is a myth. The customs of different societies are all that exist. These customs cannot he said to be “correct” or “incorrect,” for that implies we have an independent standard of right and wrong by which they may be judged. But there is no such independent standard; every standard is culture-bound. The great pioneering sociologist William Graham Sumner, vriting in 1906, put the point like this:

The rigfit” way is the sav which the ancestors used and wha. h has heen handed down. The tradition is its own war rant. It is not held subject to verification by experience. The notion of right is in the lnlkways. It is not outside of them, of independent origin, and brought to test them. In the folk— ways, whatever is, is right. This is because they are tradi tional, and therefore contain in themselves the authority of the ancestral ghosts. When we come to the folkways we are at the end of our analysis.

This line of thought has probably persuaded more people to he skeptical about ethics than any other single thing. Cultural Bilativism, as it has been called, challenges our ordinary belief in the objectiv ity and universality of moral truth. It says, in effect, that there is no such thing as universal truth in ethics; there are only the vari ous cultural codes, and nothing more. Moreover, our own code has no special status; it is merely one among many

As we shall see, this basic idea is really a compound of several different thoughts. It is important to separate the various elements of the theory because, on analysis, some parts of the theory turn out to be correct, whereas others seem to be mistaken

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