It is frequently said that different cultures shouldn't be expected to follow the same rules, have the same morals, or hold the same values.

But then you get stories like this. Stories like this just make me want to go out and strangle somebody.

The notion that anyone could see pimping out one's female relatives as compensation for a crime one has committed as an acceptable form of justice is completely repugnant to me, cultural or not. It is barbaric, and in my opinion it should be condemned as such.

'Course, there are others who would say I'm committing Moral Imperialism. What say you?

One of the purposes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was to supposedly establish a bunch of universal moral norms. The drafters were American, Russian, Chinese, Lebanese and one more country I forget. I think they provide a decent moral framework for judging crimes.

Of course, the problem is that they patently aren't moral universals. Is the right to marriage really an integral part of every moral code? I've heard sane Americans argue that education and health care aren't really rights. That 5 people from around the world agreed on them and plenty of others will accept it doesn't make it an inclusive list, nor does it mean they're all right. I accept that moral values are cultural products, and there are plenty of attitudes accepted in our culture I'd like to change - I'm sure we all have some revolutionaries and or reformers we respect for fighting to change what's acceptable.

Having said that, I'm still not willing to sit back and accept rape on cultural values.

There's a problem with trying to defend things on a cultural basis however. Not everyone in any given place or time accepts these values as fair. It's clear the woman in this case didn't accept cultural tradition as an excuse for her rape. There was another case I read about, though I forget which country it was in, where a bunch of school girls were left to burn to death so they weren't seen with uncovered faces by men who weren't their relatives. However, the girls tried to get out; and some passersby tried to fight their way in to save them. These people clearly didn't accept the cultural constraint, and I see no reason why they should be bound by it.

Saudi Arabia. One wonders if they would have been so quick to murder a school full of boys if cultural norms required it, though...

I don't think it makes sense to say that morals are a cultural thing. Yes, different cultures have different ideas about them. So do different people in our culture. That doesn't mean they're just personal preferences.

I'd say there are some fundamental notions, like human rights, that define morality. If you don't agree with those, what you have isn't really a system of morality, it's something else. Usually it doesn't matter, since people have a right to their own opinions, but when they step on someone else's rights, it's ok to object.

Why Kea, it's our cultural heritage to feel an urge to impose our 'enlightened' ways on others. ;-)

I really don't think that there's room for the 'Prime Directive' in this. Supporting the victims and agitating for change by the very most vigorous diplomatic means strikes me as imperative.

Say, if this had happened in the West, do you think a court in the land would convict them, if the rape-victims educated the rapists about the errors of their ways with the judicious use of pruning-shears?

The problem with this line of argument is that practically every single culture at all times and places have at least some dissenters. I very clearly remember reading an excerpt of an ancient Roman docucument written by someone who was opposed to the practice of gladiator fights. But the dominant culture continued to do it.

That's why there's a problem defending these things on a cultural basis. It means that without a concept of fundamental rights, you'd have to judge it on an individual basis.

But where did you get the concept of fundamental rights from? Who invented them, who wrote them, and who gets to decide what they are? Are they things that nobody in any time and place disagree with? That'd come down to just:
1. Not Stealing Unless Authorized to Do So and
2. Not Killing Unless Authorized to Do So.

Actually, there is a more universal law than either of them, seeing as the concept of stealing is meaningless in societies without property rights. There was a recent MORI poll in this country to pick the 'new 10 commandments' in order to make a rubbish Channel 4 programme about it. The winner, with more votes than all the other options combined, was 'Treat others the way you would like to be treated'. Given that some variation on this mantra crops up in a wide variety of philosophical and religious moral codes (Jesus said it, some senior Rabbi said it a while before that and Confucius said it before either of them, for example); it might be a good starting point for some kind of benchmark of justice.

They come out of philosophy (formal versions of what Caffeine said). I think they're just there, the same way logic and reality are, but I'm not sure. It doesn't really matter, because you run into the same problem with relativism.

After all, people might say that each cultural group gets to make up its own rules, enforce them on people in that group, and not on people outside. But really, that's a made-up rule too. If you don't have a notion of fundamental rights, how do you decide respecting cultural conventions is important? If I say not killing is more important, what grounds would you have to disagree?

There's theoretically an even more universal law that can be applied, and the utilitarians tend to feel it's the only one you need to worry about: Work towards the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

There is, of course, debate as to whether the law can hold up over every circumnstance, but if I recall, it's one of the leaders in Philosophy's search for a universal objective moral code. Really, most philosophers just ask whether it's necessary to add any more beyond the principle. Of course, in many people's minds, the utilitarian principle and "do unto others" equate to about the same thing...

Just playing Devil's Advocate here. :)

The idea of universal rights came from 18th century French philosophers who used the to justify political changes they wanted to see there. They might have been right, but what if history had gone another way and nobody ever found out about them?

Then things would probably be even worse than they are now. But if history had gone another way, and atoms were never discovered, would they still exist?

You can prove that an atom exists. I don't think you can prove that a moral principle exists independently of all human thought.

Then they'd have turned up somewhere else. History has, as Pratchett would put it, a great deal of momentum.