PHL277Y5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Relativism, Cultural Relativism, Friedrich Nietzsche
Document Summary
Below are the questions scratched out for the second class meeting. The cultural differences argument, we said, went something like this: Therefore, there is no standard of right and wrong, good and bad, independent of the prevailing attitudes of a culture; cultural attitudes create the truths about right and wrong. It is one thing to question whether the argument is a good one, and another thing to question whether the conclusion is true. There can be bad arguments for true conclusions. I speculated that our authors would all take this to be a bad argument. They would think the premise shows only that different cultures have different beliefs about how it is right to act in one situation or another. America the prevailing attitude is that we are doing nothing wrong in allowing females to be educated in the same establishments as males, to attend the same classes and so on.
