Culture and responsibility: A reply to Moody-Adams

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 610-620

  Benson, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959980440     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0047-2786.00117     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Michele M. Moody-Adams, "Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance", Ethics 104(1994):291-309;
2. and Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 2.
3. Moody-Adams", Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance", 293.
4. Moody-Adams considers this example because Michael Slote has argued that this is a case in which cultural limitations made the Greeks unable to know that slavery was wrong. See Slote, "Is Virtue Possible?" Analysis 42(1982):70-76.
5. See Williams, Shame and Necessity, 110-17.
6. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics 1253b20-23, 1255a7-10.
7. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places, 102 (emphasis added).
8. For a more thorough defense of the claim that slavery can require some degree of internalization on slaves' parts in order for the practice to survive, see Laurence M. Thomas's work on American slavery: "American Slavery and the Holocaust", Public Affairs Quarterly 5(April 1991):191-210;
9. Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), esp. 125-38;
10. and "Power, Trust, and Evil", in Overcoming Racism and Sexism, ed. Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 153-71.
11. See Cohen, "The Arc of the Moral Universe", Philosophy and Public Affairs 26(Spring 1997):91-134, 107.
12. Neither Cohen nor Thomas, however, claims that slaves ever completely internalized conventional justifications for slavery. On this point they concur with Orlando Patterson. See his Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 97.
13. Cf. Moody-Adams's statement that the Greeks, simply in virtue of having learned a language, could imagine a world in which there were no slaves because they could form the negation of the statement "There are slaves" ("Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance", 296, n. 14). In Fieldwork in Familiar Places, Moody-Adams reiterates the claim that learning a language suffices for "the capacity to question existing practices, and to imagine that one's social world might be other than it is" (100).
14. (Politics, 1253b33-39).
15. ("Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance", 306).
16. See Moody-Adams's statement of the constraint (ibid., 297).
17. See Isaacs, "Cultural Context and Moral Responsibility", Ethics 107(July 1997):670-84, 673.
18. See Sabini and Silver, "On Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience", in Moralities of Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 55-87.