On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Why is it morally relevant that a mortal reaction to a
> practice likew FGM is learned? The point oi education
> is in part to instill the right reations and habits in
> our children. You write as if the fact that behavior
> was learned undermines its moral force.
I was responding to J and B's argument that these women have been "programmed" to accept FGM. I agree that whether or not the reaction is learned is irrelevant to the moral argument.
> You write as if "societies" were hermetically sealed
> entities with bright line boundaries marking them. In
> fact we jsut have rough divisions enforced by
> politically contingent and often contested lines.
That's true in principle, but it doesn't stop people from practically making distinctions between societies and who inhabits which societies. For instance, most people in the U. S. clearly delineate a citizen of the U. S. from citizen of an African nation.
Here's my moral point, I guess: I draw an analogy between biodiversity and cultural diversity. Biodiversity allows an ecosystem to survive in the face of many threats (extinctions, changes in local climate, disease): if one species dies off, there are plenty more that fulfill the same functions in the ecosystem. If you decrease biodiversity, you limit the ability of an ecosystem to adapt to new conditions.
And just so with cultural diversity. Thus anything that homogenizes human culture decreases the chance that human beings will survive conditions and threats we can't foresee.
Miles