Saturday, January 2, 2010

On cultural difference

Okay, so only decisions made by informed consent can be evaluated for moral content. All decisions, if made with informed consent, are guided by reason. Reason is intrinsically evenly distributed between men. Provided informed consent, all men would make the same decisions because they share the same reasoning capacities. Ceteris paribus this leads to a John Rawls-style society. Therefore all not-same decisions are due to arbitrary factors, such as circumstance and change. In anthropology this leads to the rise of separate cultures. Differences in cultures are arbitrary and therefore not subject to moral evaluation. However, these differences--deviations from the norm induced by the presence of an outside factor--can be used to deduce underlying truths about that norm, which we do not know. We know it is 2 now and that 1 has been added to it; therefore it is naturally 1. We know that it is A now and that it is so if and only if B is present; therefore A is not the natural state of man.

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