Reference no: EM133516171

For some people, ethics and morality are crystal clear: there is "right", and there is "wrong". For some people, that is not so evidently the case.

Bennet (1998) argues "intercultural communication envisions a reality which will support the simultaneous existence of unity and diversity, of cooperation and competition in the global village, and of consensus and creative conflict in multicultural societies. In this vision, our different voices can be heard both in their uniqueness and in synergistic harmony" (p. 18).

In arriving at this conclusion, Bennet claims to have sufficiently navigated a primary ethical conundrum of inter-cultural communication in regards to moral, or ethical, relativity. Bennet claims that we can respect and have different subjective cultures, without sliding into pure moral relativism (the notion that there is no objective "right" or "wrong", that everything is negotiated through subjective context).

Bennet explains the dilemma as such, "People who are most critical of multiculturalism seem to be at Perry's stage of dualism. They think of ethic sand morality as absolute, universal rules. In this dualistic view, the acceptance of different cultures leads only to multiplicity, where all options are equal and ethical chaos reigns. Therefore, goes the dualistic argument, either you choose the absolutist ethical path that rejects cultural relativism, or you accept cultural relativism and the only alternative it offers to absolutism, moral relativity, and situational ethics" (p. 18).

Do you think Bennet has done a sufficient job of doing so? Do you think Bennet has succeeded in establishing that there is both room for intercultural differences, while also a sense of ethics? Or do you think Bennet fails? Do you think his view of intercultural communication requires us to accept that morality is subjective? That accepting other cultures/viewpoints as legitimate means we can never truly know "right" or "wrong"?