To what extent does culture influence ethical decision making? Does ethics fall more in the domain of shared knowledge or personal knowledge?
Culture plays a huge role in ethical decision making. Among the things that people consider when confronted with an ethical dilemma are their surroundings and what they believe is 'right.' Although there is somewhat a standard definition of good vs evil and right vs wrong in the world, culture brings upon different variations of that, which would skew someone's ethical decision making. Someone I know (sounds sketchy its not) was once telling me how she hates driving in Mexico because they generally believe in a "whatever happens happens" attitude because they believe things are meant to be. I have no idea if this is true because I've never been to Mexico but it illustrates a cultural difference about ethics. One might believe there is no problem with driving like that but others from a different culture might argue that that is ethically wrong because it injures others. Ethics is under the domain of personal knowledge because it is relatively individual and can depend on experiences. There can also be ties with the other areas of knowledge, such as emotion which can influence ethics. Someone might react differently to the trolley dilemma if they have experiences or read something
No comments:
Post a Comment