--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
Love that rhetoric. Strutting. Savages, etc.
But you know, Miles, relativism isn't a tolerant doctrine. If it is true for us but for them, it's true for us, so we take it as true. Ergo, since we agree -- you too! -- that it's a wicked thing to do to multimate women to deny them sexual pleasure, it is in fact true for us that it is a wicked thing.
Note also that you appeal to the idea that is true for us, but maybe not for them, or anyway that we accept and likely they don't, that consent is highly morally relavent. (Not decisive, of course -- that would be fatal to our leftist positions in a society (ours) where most workers consent to being exploited!) But since they don't regard this as morally relevant, isn't it cultural imperialism to impose our values on them even to justify their practices?
Now, maybe your idea is that the evil of their practices is not a reason to invade their society to make them stop. But we don't need relativism to get there. Most of us, when whipped into a frenzy of revenge by liars, already believe this. That is because we are a moderately tolerant society, or anyway, our values don't require us to attempt to stop every evil we see by force.
So why should we be relativists? Why not just say: this is an awful thing, but that's not a jsutification for imperialism? That way we avoid the irrelevant metadiscussion.
> It's pretty easy for us to rhetorically strut around
> assuming
> our moral superiority, but anybody's who has
> seriously
> studied FGM knows it's a convoluted tangle of
> ethical
> ambiguities.
>
> Consider:
> 1. The practices are accepted by, carried out by,
> and encouraged
> by the vast majority of women in these societies.
> It is not
> something men "do" to them; it is part of what these
> women identify
> as womanhood. Yes, it's hard to us to believe, but
> mothers
> do this to their daughters willingly: according to
> their cultural
> standards, this is what it means to be a good
> mother.
>
> 2. Our condemnation of this practice is, as a number
> of women in
> these societies have pointed out, yet another
> example of how Western
> values and beliefs are positioned as the standards
> by which all
> societies should be judged. It's more or less the
> kissing
> cousin of the "Africans don't really have
> civilization because
> they don't have cities like we do" argument. For a
> number of
> African activists, the major problem here is Western
> ethnocentrism,
> not FGM.
>
> I hesitate to post this because FGM provokes such
> visceral reactions
> in people; it creeps me out too. However, there's a
> little more
> to the issue than primitives with spears mutilating
> their women.
>
> Miles
>
>
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