Ethics and Morality in Context
Perhaps the first human beings had a sense of right and wrong. Maybe cavemen would even hold barbaric trials when one caveman killed another. Even if this were so, which is possible, by today’s standards, their sense of justice and morality would be completely foreign to us now. It does not seem likely that the human brain of 1000 years ago has any of the complexity that our brains have today, it’s a different context. So, our sense of good and evil could be opposite to that of a caveman. While it is impossible to judge morality between cavemen and modern humans, it is much more feasible to judge morality in the context of different cultures in today’s society. But, like the caveman vs. human thought experiment, it is just as likely that humans in different cultures have a different sense of morality than one another. Because of this, a moral situation in different contexts cannot be generalized as purely good of purely evil—it’s too black and white. Each event needs to be examined for its unique attributes in order to understand where that occurrence lies on the moral spectrum.
Before I come to specifics in regards to morality in context, I want to clarify a few of the different possible positions one might hold. If one believes that morality can be relative, one could call his or herself an ethical relativist, who believes that there are moral rights and wrongs, but relative to different conditions (Taliaferro 191). In other words, there are different situations in which a certain action is not seen as morally wrong because of the events surrounding that action. A cultural relativist believes that if ‘X’ is wrong than ‘X’ is disapprove ...