Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What right has your friend to expect you to protect him?
.
My friend has a definite right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower
speed.
.
He has some right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower speed.
.
He has no right as a friend to expect me to testify to the lower speed.
What do you think you would do in view of the obligations of a sworn witness
and the obligation to your friend?
.
Testify that he was going 20 miles per hour.
.
Not testify that he was going 20 miles per hour.
1
About 90 percent of Norwegians would not testify to the lower speed and do not
believe that the person's friend has a definite right to expect help. In contrast, only about
10 percent of Yugoslavians feel the same way. About three-quarters of Americans and
Canadians agree with the dominant Norwegian view, but Mexicans are fairly evenly
divided [8]. Cultural relativists say we ought to pay attention to these differences.
1.
Different social contexts demand different moral guidelines.
It's unrealistic to assume that the same set of moral guidelines can be expected
to work for all human societies in every part of the world for all ages. Just think
about how our relationship with our environment has changed. For most of the past
10,000 years, human beings have spent most of their time trying to produce enough
food to survive. Thanks to science and technology, the human population of the
Earth has increased exponentially in the past century. The struggle for survival has
shifted away from people to the rest of Nature. Overpopulation has created a host
of environmental problems, such as the extinction of many species, the destruction
of fisheries in the world's oceans, and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. People
must change their ideas about what is acceptable conduct and what is not, or they
will destroy the planet.
2.
It is arrogant for one society to judge another.
Anthropologists have documented many important differences among societies
with respect to what they consider proper and improper moral conduct. We may
have more technology than people in other societies, but we are no more intelligent
than they are. It is arrogant for a person living in twenty-first-century Italy to judge
the actions of another person who lived in the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century.
1. From
Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values,
by Charles
Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars, and David Lewis (ill.). Copyright © 2000 by Yale University Press.
Reprinted with permission [8].
