· Norbert Bilbeny · A prospect for an Intercultural Ethics

An intercultural ethics is still a minority project from some very few and isolated scholars. Such issue is not yet an accepted topic in the worldly academic arena, in spite of its very stressing necessity, practical (planet sustainability, fight for peace and rights, fair distribution of economic resources) as much as theoretical: openness to shared patterns of universality, enlargement of a concept of rationality, implementation of value diversity into the understanding of practical norms, and improvement of the transnational availability of practical philosophy.

Still, reaching those philosophical issues represents at least three orders of obstacles. All they are denying in fact and theoretically the existence of any kind of cross-cultural moral pattern. The first of these obstructions is, of course, the hard reality of social misunderstanding all around the world. Moreover, worse than hate and prejudice is perhaps the extended and false-naïve following question: “Why should I respect other cultures, other people?” More tragically: “What does it mind to me?”

The second main obstacle usually emerges from the academic circle and sometimes looks like an unquestionable scientific theory. That is the strong relativism, which argues that there is no possible comparison between cultures and no commensuration between their patterns. Thus, it could be neither interchange nor, in fact, available confrontation from one moral culture to another. Like the strong relativism, soft relativism believes in such a cultural discontinuity, but it admits, on the contrary, some commensuration among cultural patterns. In other words, real confrontation as well as real convergence should be possible between cultures and their respective moral values. Then, a soft or strict descriptive relativism is not an obstacle for an intercultural ethics and the common cultural valuation. Obstacles are conversely the strong relativism and its very opposed extreme, essentialism claiming for cultural unity. However, mixed relativistic arguments still perform as an academic pretext for the “politics of difference” and even also for racism.

The third main force that opposes the way for an intercultural ethics is ethnocentrism, the explicit or implicit parochial speech also followed by a large number of scholars whenever they speak about other cultures and especially about their own culture. Too much easily we still talk about the “Asian”, “African” or “Western” values. These patterns obviously exist, but not as quite independent kingdoms of values. No civilization, no culture, even no individual moral identity have existed in the world as closed, unchanged substances, always equal to themselves. However, the ethnocentric scope conceives both domestic and foreign cultures in the sense of subsistent and self-centered based realities. A direct consequence of this point of view is the fact of seeing other realities, and the whole reality, under one only eye-sight: ours.

Hence, we could find within almost all Western discourses a large number of such ethnocentric features. Westernization also works in Western ethics. So many Western cultural categories are still alive into the so-called “universalistic” Western ethics. Much of them clearly include a biased way of cultural representation. Thus, they contribute to moral prejudice. Let me check. We have a soul/body antithetical culture, a speech-centered communication, an abstract cognition, a rationalist self, a logic-centered or quantitative rationalism, a theoretical knowledge, a self-interested economy, an individualistic liberalism, a secularist toleration, a male humanism, an European-centered Enlightenment, a theistic and missionary religion, a white Christianity, a puritan morality, a self-sustaining, formalistic citizenship, a technocratic idea of progress, and the well known Western-liberal parameters of modernity. Then, we Europeans and North-Americans have a very Westernized science and thought. To be Western is surely good, but to confuse the West and the World is wrong, and maybe bad.

In conclusion, a pretty large number of Western scholars still continue the idealization of their own culture, making it more uniform than it is, so giving to other cultures a standardized, ethnocentric vision of themselves. For example, in the 19th century we romanticized Orient and the South, while we are stereotyping now African values, Islamic world, and Islamic fundamentalism as well. Ethnocentrism still works. Therefore, the search for an intercultural ethics must detect and remove this barrier continuously.
The Copernican revolution in ethics as moral philosophy was the Kantian one. After it, we can assume that moral objects turn around moral knowledge, instead of seeing the practical reason as turning around an established moral world. But the time is coming for a second ethical revolution, which is to make individual reason turn around the cross-cultural universal patterns of reasoning, not the universal moral knowledge around any particular assumption of reason.

Despite of all kind of obstacles for such universal ethics (remember social misunderstanding, theoretical strong relativism, and both scholar and folk ethnocentrism) there are at least two basic empirical sources for sustaining the intercultural research in ethics and making sense for this project.

Actually, I am not a naturalist in ethics, even not a transcendentalist. I am a cognitivist, so a universalist who criticizes the narrow “rationalist” meaning of the present-day cognitivism. But as cognitivist I acknowledge the empirical description no less than the critical scrutiny.

The first empirical source that keeps up my interest on an intercultural ethics is human nature; the second one is human culture. On the one hand, Biological Anthropology, especially Edward Wilson and other sociobiologists, teaches us that cooperation is a characteristic of the human species. On the other hand, Social Anthropology, and functionalist scholars as Donald Brown, describe a set of cross-cultural patterns of morality, as balanced reciprocity, commitment to truth, and incest prohibition.
However, human culture and human nature are not my only arguments in support of an intercultural ethics. I think that the ethical universals sink their roots into nature of mind, more than into merely “nature” or, conversely, into “culture”. In fact, we do not have one separate nature besides one independent culture. Nature and culture interacts within our mind and they develop together in a co-evolutionary way. Mind lodges our natural culture and our cultural nature at the same time. The ethical universals could have found their empirical ground into the human mind and its cognitive processes, further than in the so-called “human nature” and “human culture” by themselves.

My point is that there is a close relationship between the ethical cognitivism and the ethical universalism. It supposes that moral principles and values could be cognitively justified. This justification should depend on the cognitive processes of the human mind, so to speak, on our general faculties of knowledge and their skills for obtaining and rebuilding information. Meanwhile, contemporary neuroscience, like neurophysiology and cognitive sciences of behavior, shows increasingly to us that cognitive processes have an universal nature. I particularly value, among other cognitive theoreticians, the work of Stephan Kosslyn and Paul Churchland. Thus, moral patterns should be also universal. Probably, this is not valid for any features or any standards of behavior. But I think that this cognitive argument is especially suitable for those moral patterns that we call intercultural. Anyway I believe that learning about brain, mind, and cognitive behavior, with a very close interaction between them, allows us to reach the main empirical source of a non-transcendentalist and also a non-naturalist first approach to an intercultural ethics.

This empirical knowledge of nature and culture of our mind is perhaps the only one that could explain the statistical and implicational universals concluded by some natural and cultural scientists in their respective fields. At any rate, this is a knowledge that assumes: first, the brain works in the same way across all cultures, and, second, that it works as a single and integrated whole of neural networks, mental processes and connected subjective experiences. Those two assumptions are very stimulating in relation to an intercultural ethics, especially the second one. Since those brain-mind subsystems are considered into a narrow reciprocal interaction we then can avoid on the one hand the body-mind dualism, which cuts short the empirical investigation of the mind, and, on the other hand, the behaviorism which restrains intellectual theorizing. Both extremes obstruct, in my point of view, the search of an intercultural ethics, because a disconnected human mind subtly leads to a fragmented human culture.

On the contrary, the new picture of mind provided to us by cognitive neuroscience, supports the cross-cultural standards of human judgment and perception, those that are wanted for promoting any development of ethics in an intercultural way.

Let me go some further. According to these new sciences I suspect that we could also get a completely new philosophical concept of cognition, even a new picture of the human self.

If mind works connecting all the brain subsystems, then cognition should be integrative, not only a representational intellectual activity in a narrow sense. Hence, our self, that is, the reflection of mind on itself, which is one of the most specialized productions of human cognition, should also be understood as a kaleidoscopic image, where subjective experiences, both intellectual and sensitive, remain connected one to another.

This kind of cognition and of reflective activity of mind make easier, in a practical sense, our search of an intercultural ethics. I will try to tell something more about my standpoint on cognition. There is no reason for opposing one general pattern of human cognition to the other. The intellectual or representational operations interact with the sensitive or perceptual processes at every level and every function of cognition. Abstract thinking as well as tactile or visual perception, for example, shows us this relationship. Then, there would not be a pure rational mind in front of a mere emotional one. Of course, “emotional intelligence” and “intelligent emotion” are only a folk psychology´s way of speaking, because they are contradictory terms. Intelligence has to become intelligence, and emotion has to grow as emotion. However, every concept has a root into perception and every feeling has a touch of thought.

Intellectual and sensitive features are mutually related in our mind. Now I do not have space for describing them well. Thinking especially about ethics, remind for example the links between consciousness and subjective experience; or between verbal and non verbal behavior. We could say something similar for speech interaction in relation to sympathetic communication; for thought and memory, will and imagination, self reflection and empathy, acting and caring. Those couples of features are cognition or, in a broad sense, knowledge, and obviously, intelligence. The two manners are cognition, because there is in fact a connection between them, in the way of some common biological and psychological elements, an active reciprocity, and an evolutionary cogeneration. For example, where do we put categories like “interest”, “valuation” or “belief” between those two manners of cognition? Why to do that in the so-called rational mind and why not in the emotional one? And vice versa .

Similarly, most of ethical principles and values, and probably those cross-cultural, emerge at the same time from intellectual and sensitive mental processes. Reason is not a self-generating faculty of mind. It can certainly fix the field of its objects and methods, but not the conditions for both its generation and its applications. We do not have to forget that the human brain has not been above all created for its own understanding, but for human survival. Inclusively from a physical point of view, we scarcely know anything about it. Thus, we must not separate brain and mind, nor rational mind and sensitive mind. Especially if an intercultural ethics has to be founded, cognition must be acknowledged and improved as full cognition, it is to say, pushing both reason and sensitivity, intellect and perception. Otherwise we were still using an ethical discourse quite disconnected to the real human judgment and to the strong moral motivation.
Even though there is no other way for an intercultural ethics than the rational one, rational arguments, despite being accepted as priors, have in fact shared rules in moral judgment, and a weak power for moral motivation in the end. According to that, any moral culture needs reason and consciousness for learning and explaining its rules, but also necessarily enacts perception, and subjective experience, for interpreting and transmitting those rules. Then, we luckily have, for an intercultural ethics, the intellectual mind in order to know the cultural differences and keep in dialog. But we also have the emotional mind in order to appreciate these differences and for the willingness of dialog.

The full cognition hypothesis, based on the unified theory of mind, allows us, in my opinion, to clear up the way towards the recognition and development of the cross-cultural universal moral patterns. However, such a kind of cognitivism, as probably any empirical ethical theory, still does not resolve the question on what kind of shared moral values or principles should be the overriding among all of their class.

That is very important to clarify, since moral dilemmas are in fact the rule, not the exemption, into the intercultural moral debate. Still, I have already rejected both ethical naturalism and transcendentalism for an intercultural ethics. Meanwhile, somebody could think that my only way out is choosing between ethical decisionism and ethical emotivism. Nevertheless, I have to refuse them because they still support some kind of cultural particularism. Given the fact that some overriding cross-cultural rules must be assumed, I realized that I have to go on with full cognitivism, and explore all its philosophical possibilities further.

Neurocognitivist philosophy of Paul Churchland and others has no explicit ethical implications for the moment. Otherwise let me choose the Kantian practical philosophy for my inquiry. Kant is perhaps the first Western philosopher who outlines some general rules for a full cognitive mind and society. These are not the three, very well known “categorical imperative” formulas placed in his ethics, but those that appear later in his last anthropological philosophy. He only sketches three new supposed “pragmatic rules” for all kind of circumstances where human communication could be presented and should be trained. First, “To think for oneself”. Second, “In communication with men, to imagine oneself in the place of every other person”. And third, “Always to think in agreement with one’s self”. He scarcely says anything else about these general rules.

At any rate, note that each of those commands is procedural. They do not advocate nor suggest any substantive moral belief. Moreover, remind that each of these rules could be used and developed on the basis of a full cognitivism , it is to say, on the assumption of an integrated perceptual-intellectual mind. Although Kant’s philosophy divorces aprioristic reason and ordinary sensitivity, then duty and desire, he traces in his criticism no essential separation between mind and body, so between the natural reason and the natural world. The former division is merely a procedural dichotomy forced by the Kantian transcendental method, that is, by that philosophical standpoint which freely supposes that reason must shape experience a priori, not the contrary.

Nevertheless, this metaphysical point of view has been necessarily taken by natural reason. Thus, it could not be any substantive dichotomy between mind and nature. So this is the way for recovering Kant into the full cognitivist scope, which in my opinion is being required for an intercultural ethics. According to this scope, and whatever should be most of our moral options, two main presuppositions have to be acknowledged in this choice. One of them is theoretical: reason and emotion, although in different proportions, are both performing in our moral resolutions. The other assumption is practical: whatever should be the moral option, we consequently must become aware of the excluded rational or emotional share of our choice, and also do we must accept this exclusion.

It seems that the three Kantian rules mentioned above embrace pretty similar proportions of rational and emotional trainings. Then, they could reflect well the full human cognition and the integrated self. Let me explain that in short terms.

Think about the first statement: “To think for one self”. This rule commands us to deliberate and act in an autonomous way, and take a reflexive distance in relation to our tradition, the personal believes, and to our speech as well. That means, of course, the critical perspective of human understanding, which enables us to grow and change in knowledge and behavior. However, that also means an invitation to insight, which is the passage on examine, reform and become conscious of our values. Thus, to think for one self requires and enhances one personal, concrete self, not only an abstract mind.

See now the second rule: “In communication with persons, to imagine oneself in the place of every other person”. This is, in other words, the rule of reciprocity in human interaction. Then, we have now complemented the former reflexive distance to oneself with a reflexive proximity to others. Put in another way, autonomy has been balanced with some kind of heteronomy. Therefore, we are just focusing on a complementary, not merely formal reciprocity. Within the new boundaries, the more the self is concrete, not only abstract, the more the other appears as an individual other, not only as a generalized one. Reciprocity requests openness to others.

So that includes receptivity, no doubt, but also curiosity towards differences. Complementary reciprocity, according to the sense suggested by that second practical rule, could support this curiosity. Moreover, observe that this practical rule of reciprocity belongs to a broad rule of reversibility in social human action. This rule says: act in a way that the consequences of your actions were reversible. Obviously, we are faced with a consequentialist rule for action. Then, the complementary reciprocity, which is to take into account the concrete other, should be allocated in the right way for a full consequentialist human reciprocity.

Let me now remind the third practical rule: “Always to think in agreement with one´s self”. Reflexive proximity at this level has been moved from the relationship between one and the other to the connection between one and one´s self. We still deal with reflection and proximity, but the object now in one´s self. Unlike the preceding rules, the present one implies as much personally concerned reflection as abstract deliberation. And more than ever, we have now to emphasize our abilities for being consistent as individuals with our own cultural background and emotional constitution.

The three rules that we have seen are full cognitive, because they encompass reason and emotion, and connect one to another. The three are also procedural, because none reflects any particular moral belief. Then, they are probably available for developing an intercultural ethics in an era of cognitive revolution and cultural multiplicity. In conclusion, all these rules seem to say: proceed carefully. No moral culture and no religion exclude this kind of behavior, neither reflection in general. Reflection, in fact, approaches us to ourselves and commits us to the others.

In other words, I think that these suggested rules are not in contradiction with any existing moral culture or religion. Moreover, we could find those rules at the core of great religions and standard moral visions. One Chinese proverb states: “The same moon has different reflections in different streams”. Thus, if we explicitly develop these cross-cultural universal moral rules we also could make progress in the main civic virtues of tolerance and mutual respect within our multicultural societies and the global world.

Nevertheless, whatever should be the rules of an intercultural ethics, two supplementary prudential measures have to be taken for that purpose. First, when we speak about the cross-cultural universal moral patterns we should avoid at the same time some monocultural and biased adjectives as: basic, essential, preferential, substantive, intrinsic, fundamental, central, primary, transcendental, invariant, even natural values or principles. Instead of this, we must choose neutral qualifications as universal, intercultural, cross-cultural, shared, common, or merely public civic patterns.

The fact is that neutrality is the only engagement for cultural pluralism, except for those cultural claims that clearly are in contradiction with the cross-cultural universal patterns. Interculturality stands on a universalistic pluralism, not in a relativistic one. In addition to that, we can observe that there is no exact correspondence between the so-called “basic” and the “universal” values, and between the supposed “secondary” and the “particular” values. Some of basic could be particular, and some of secondary could become universal.

The second prudential measure to be kept in any search for an intercultural ethics is to avoid consider the world through the filter of bipolar terminology. We must use dichotomies carefully. For example, the yes/not opposition is clear, and the woman/man distinction is useful. However, bipolarities like these could limit our understanding of both the present and the potential cultural reality, and more usually are predisposing us to the hostile “either/or” value confrontation. In fact, most of the typical cultural dichotomies, as the Western/Eastern opposition, are still expressing the binary logic of the cultural domination. It is the case, among others, of the pairs Western world/Islamic world, Dar al-Islam/Dar-al-Harb, or Asian values/European values. All of them are running parallel. So, the Aristotelian principle tertium non datur does not work well in cultural conflicts, where considered equilibrium, as well as non-contradiction, are required in order to get a fair management of problems.

We can count nowadays at least thirteen civilizations in the world, and almost two hundred national states, more or less five thousand cultures, and a similar number of different living languages. However, from an ethical point of view there are only two cultures in our small planet: “Us”, the in-group culture, and “Them”, the culture of others. Rather, there is perhaps only one culture, ours, and the way how we reflect on it, mainly when the others arise before us and are waiting for our reaction.

Ethics, unlike most of rules, is never functional or merely suitable. The basic rules of moral behavior are not functions of any organ, but constituents of a special organ in nature that we call the human being. Thus, even an intercultural ethics is tied to the question of what kind of human beings do we want to be. Finally, we could know who do we are only after having answered to the question “Who do you think you are” made by a stranger.

Now it is time to summarize and to get ready for questions and commentaries. Courtesy is free in any situation. I have given my arguments in support of an intercultural ethics, one of the main keys for a democratic citizenship and the social involvement in multicultural societies. I am not supporting any specific universal value or moral norm. Not even “Human rights” or “responsibility” has been quoted in my speech. I only try to specify some universal conditions in order to assume those patterns and select among them whatever they are. The point is that cross-cultural universal claims can exist because cross-cultural patterns of mind do also exist and are able to be trained. My concern, then, is not idealism. I particularly dislike the sanctimonious rhetoric of most globalizing and humanitarian moral discourses.

So my program is, or could be, intercultural, no less than interdisciplinary. According to this, the foundation and normative development of an intercultural ethics, and obviously its practical applications into public life and the professions, correspond at least to a tripartite division of studies, including: Neurocognitive and Behavioral Sciences; Cultural anthropology and Ethnic studies; and finally Moral Philosophy, for the critic scrutiny.

In other words, the intercultural ethics research is not feasible for one single specialist. I could not imagine it without the contribution of several scientists and thinkers working together in an international project.