Intercultural Ethics

Intercultural ethics includes questions such as:

• How does a culture treat other cultures? How does it treat its subcultures?
• Relative to its other values, how much weight does a culture place on the autonomy of other cultures to live by their own values?
• How forgiving is one culture of another culture that does not share its ethics?

For a clearer understanding of what intercultural ethics are, and what your intercultural ethics might be, try the following exercises.

Personal and cultural ethics

• List the things that you think are important in life — things that differentiate between fair and unfair, between right and wrong, and between good and bad.
• Choose a couple important items from this list, and write each one on a slip of paper. Don't choose too many or the next step will take too long.
• Using the slips, arrange the items to show which ones are most important. This is extremely difficult, but it shows a lot more about your ethics than merely listing them.

If you asked many people from your culture to also complete this exercise, you would get a picture of your culture's ethics.

Interpersonal and intercultural ethics

Look at your first list — the longer one. Checkmark every item in the list that concerns the way you judge or treat other people. All the checkmarked items represent a subset of your ethics that you could call interpersonal ethics.

Similarly, if you were to take a list of your culture's ethics, the items that applied to other cultures would be your culture's intercultural ethics.