Moral Codes: Good or Bad?

Clashes of cultures happen all around the world, at nearly any given time in history. Moral codes have violated each other since the crusades and earlier, and over recent events like the verdict in Ferguson. People will always have differing opinions. Sometimes these opinions can be right or wrong, but are often very subjective still. Subjective clashes of cultures were very apparent in Things Fall Apart. One example of these was Okonkwo's hanging at the end. The foreign soldiers didn't understand why they had to be the ones to take down the body; to them, it didn't matter who did it. They didn't understand the tribe's different moral code. To the tribe, it would violate their moral code for anyone in the town to touch the body. Would it actually matter who took it down in the end? As an outsider, its easy to say no, but we have no proof of this. Cultural Relativism is a theory that says since the tribe believes it does matter and outsides believe it doesn't, we can conclude that neither group is 'right'; it is simply a subjective matter and there are multiple answers.

In one chapter of our U.S. history textbook, The Pageant, the possibility that slavery was good for the slaves and was not a bad practice was mentioned in an excerpt. Many cultures' moral codes conflicted over the topic of slavery. Even within the United States, the North mostly believed slavery was bad, and the South mostly believed it was good. Who are we to say which one was right? This is a case where Cultural Relativism seems to fall apart. Cultural Relativism would suggest that both opinions must be considered, and therefore that neither are right, slavery is neither good nor bad. However, two groups thinking differently about it does not mean there is no true answer. Logically, since slavery violates basic human rights, it can be considered bad.

This means we can say that the South's moral code was not perfect. However, this was one flaw in it; every moral code that exists today will have flaws throughout it. This does not mean that moral codes in general are bad though. They are a collection of opinions, so they can have parts that are right or wrong. I think that if someone went through every part of every cultures moral code, they could combine the good parts to form a correct moral code. But I don't think that the other flawed moral codes are bad, since they do still contain many valuable correct parts most of the time.

The theory of Cultural Relativism does focus on this open-mindedness, which is beneficial to any culture. Rigidly staying with one moral code is bad; it will have flaws, and none of them will be fixed. By opening the moral code to suggestions from other cultures, a society allows these flaws to be fixed as times goes on. I think this is the most important thing to keep in mind when following a moral code. You may strongly believe one moral code over others, but you must also concede that it is not flawless, and therefore that it must be changed if some aspects of other moral codes are more accurate.