Pojman Morality And Ethics Summary

Morality and ethics create the bridge between the savage and rational side of each human being. With the intent of explaining morality, Pojman displays three different types of ethical backgrounds. The first being ethical relativism which states that an individual’s beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of the person’s own culture. This idea explains whether or not morality is only a fragment of a person’s cultural norm instead of anything truly universal. For example, in some countries, torture, racism and sexism is part of the cultural norm compared to some others countries, those behaviors are intolerable. The second and the most reasonable one is ethical relativism, it explains that morality is relative to the norms of one’s culture. It is quite similar
Universally, all humans have a moral code previously engraved internally that reminds them that some actions such as murdering or any other violent act are immoral. In order for all cultures to become synchronized in their moral codes, a certain level of education must be reached by the participants of that culture. The more people know, the more they tend not to act in barbaric ways. Clearly all the cultures that still practice controversial rituals, they all lack being fully educated. In order words, the longer a society takes to shift from an ignorant mindset towards an educated one, the longer it is described as barbaric. Ethical relativism is not convincing at all because once a person or culture is introduced to more educated ideas, they will dismiss the old one that they were practicing. The term ethical relativism according to Pojman is described as the norm of one’s culture. Overall, so far ethical relativism is the most suitable idea to define how ethics and morality gets explained, but truthfully, morality is within each person and as Hobbs stated, laws were created in order to remind those moral