Ruth Benedict Ethics Are Relative Summary

In Ruth Benedict’s “Ethics are Relative”, she argues that because morals and values change with time and across culture, there can be no solid judgment for any action to be consistently deemed “right” or “wrong”, since the same action will be viewed differently when considered from different points of view. Benedict’s primary assertion is that the ethics seen as good or bad by modern cultures are not better to those found in primitive cultures, but are the values we have developed over time. “Most of the simpler cultures did not gain the wide currency of the one which, out of our experience, we identify with human nature, but this was for various historical reasons, and certainly not for any that gives us as its carriers a monopoly of social

good or of social sanity. Modern civilization, from this point of view, becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achievement but one entry in a long series of possible adjustments”. She devotes most of her essay to examples from anthropology which show that what one culture considers normal another may consider aberrant, or barbaric, and that this means that these categories are determined culturally.
Benedict goes to work questioning the relativity of the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” across cultures.

Using the traits trance catalepsy, she investigates how their appearance in individuals affects ones potential for status in different cultures. She states that mystics who claim psychic abilities or spiritual powers are present in every culture, and in most cultures are highly valued and respected for their abilities. Yet in our culture, such people are considered insane, and are often placed in psychiatric institutions. As for our view on homosexuality, Benedict makes the point that because it’s looked down upon makes it difficult for someone with the trait to fit into society, whereas in other cultures, such as ancient Greece, people with such inclinations were perfectly capable of functioning ordinarily in society, even in positions of honor. Benedict says, “Plato’s republic is, of course, the most convincing statement of such regarding of homosexuality. It is presented as one of the major mean to the good life, and it was generally so regarded in Greece at the

time”
In her next example she tells of society on the island of Melanesia where suspicion and to not trust one’s neighbors is the norm.

“In this tribe the exogamic groups look upon each other as prime manipulators of black magic, so that one marries always into an enemy group which remains for life one’s deadly and unappeasable foes”. It is a strictly enforced custom to forbid the sharing of food, as they are so mistrustful that they receive any gift with suspicion, believing it to be poisoned. In this society, nobody works with or shares with one another, “but there was one man of sunny, kindly disposition who liked work and to be helpful…men and women never spoke of him without laughing; he was silly and simple and definitely crazy. Nevertheless, to the ethnologist used to a culture that has, in Christianity, made of his type the model of all virtue, he seemed a pleasant

fellow”.
Both of these examples show that normality is culturally defined. “An individual shaped by the cultural attitudes of a primitive society, suddenly transplanted into our own would be considered abnormal, whereas in his own country he would be considered a model citizen.” Benedict condemns the idea that our values are the right ones, and posits that culturally selected values have simply evolved along different lines. “Every society, beginning with some slight inclination in one direction or another, carries it preference farther and farther, integrating itself more and more completely upon its chosen basis, and discarding those types of behavior that are uncongenial”. Normality is therefore a term for the typical behavior of the majority in any society, and abnormality a term for the behaviors that are uncommon.
Benedict finally links her discussion of normality to the concept of morality. “The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior for a particular society. Its variability among different peoples is essentially a function of the variability of the behavior patterns that different societies have created for themselves, and can never be wholly divorced from a consideration of culturally institutionalized types of behavior”. Benedict concludes that morality is subservient to the conditions of society, and that both can take many forms, none if which can be said to be objectively better than the other.