About the author…

Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) taught sociology and moral philosophy at the University of Helsinki; later, he taught sociology at the University of London. He initially sought graduate work in moral philosophy but quickly concluded that normative ethics must be based on empirical behavior and so turned to field work. As a pioneer in anthropological field work, he championed a comparative methodological approach which was later superseded by the functional methodology of Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski who viewed society holistically rather than in terms of specific customs. In our reading, Westermarck argues that the moral norms of a society emerge from the struggle for survival of that society and evolved from the general and disinterested moral emotions of the individuals making up the society. So his use of the term "moral emotion" is not necessarily related to personal feelings of approval and disapproval of specific forms of behavior. Westermarck's theory, here, is not so different from Durkheim's theory of collective consciousness: Westermarck's moral emotions are indeed the same sort of notion as Durkheim's collective conscience. Westermarck's work on moral philosophy in Ethical Relativity, from which our reading is taken, is the culmination of fifty years of research into human social behavior.

About the work…

In his Ethical Relativity,[1] Edward Westermarck argues for both psychological and ethical relativism[2] and attempts to base ethics on the biological basis of emotion. Westermarck holds that impartial moral emotions or moral sentiments are the basis for customary moral judgments. Consequently, Westermarck concludes moral values cannot be objective since they originate in emotion. Even so, impartial or dispassionate moral emotion is not entirely subjective since it is an customary human reaction to a particular moral experience. In the book from which our reading selection is taken, Westermarck argues forcefully for ethical relativism by emphasizing that there is no empirical basis for objective standards in ethical theory. Nevertheless, even though ethical judgments are based on feelings, he does not believe ethical relativism leads to ethical subjectivism.