Some Myths About Ethnocentrism
(DRAFT: Please do not cite without permission)
I. INTRODUCTION
Ethnocentrism is no good thing. It is standardly regarded as a vice of some form – as
something worth avoiding, if at all possible. But what kind of vice is it? And what even is
ethnocentrism? What makes something or someone “ethnocentric?” Despite the strong currency
of concerns about ethnocentrism in fields as wide ranging as the social sciences,1 metaethics,2
moral psychology,3 human rights,4 global justice,5 and international law,6 the question of how to
define ethnocentrism, or of how to characterize its basic nature, is very rarely paid much
attention. This neglect carries with it certain costs. For one, it has allowed some mistaken
assumptions about ethnocentrism – i.e., assumptions that don’t quite stand up to further
reflection – to circulate widely. At least that’s what I intend to argue here.
My aim in this article is to expose some of these assumptions for what they are –
“myths”, as one might call them – and in the process to home in on a more adequate
understanding of ethnocentrism, one that best captures our common intuitions. Why is this work
worth engaging in? Why not just carry on with whatever rough and inarticulate understanding of
ethnocentrism we have now? Well, if ethnocentrism really is a vice or problem of some kind, or
at the very least something to beware of, then surely we have a reason to get clear on what it is
that we are up against. We can only do this by carefully working out a theory of the nature of
ethnocentrism. Once we have done that, we can then address other vexed questions about it,
1
Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (New York:
John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 36-38; Jürgen
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 78,
104, 197.
3
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2012); Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us
and Them (New York: Penguin, 2013).
4
Charles Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Ch.4; James
Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 7; Martha Nussbaum, Women
and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
Ch. 1; Henry Shue, “Thickening Convergence: Human Rights and Cultural Diversity” in The Ethics of
Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 217241.
5
Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), Ch. 2; John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 121-122.
6
Allen Buchanan, “Human Rights and the Legitimacy of the International Order” in Legal Theory,
2008, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 44-55; John Tasioulas, “Parochialism and the Legitimacy of International Law”
in Parochialism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), ed. M.N.S. Sellars, pp. 16-39.
2
1
including questions about why (and in what sense) ethnocentrism is a problem or vice, how
prevalent it is, whether it is ultimately avoidable, and what causes it. These subsequent but no
less important questions are not ones that I fully address here; this article is meant to be a
contribution to the task of definition first and foremost. That said, as the analysis proceeds, I will
highlight some of the ways in which our assessment of the desirability, prevalence, and
avoidability of ethnocentrism can be (and has been) misguided by impoverished views of the
nature of ethnocentrism itself. I will also highlight some of the ways in which our assessment of
such things ought to change in light of the alternative account of ethnocentrism I propose below.
Before I begin, I should highlight two significant features of the following analysis. As
already noted, ethnocentrism is characteristically understood to be a vice of some form. This
suggests, I think, that it would be at least a prima facie defect of any conceptual elucidation if it
turned out that, on its view, ethnocentrism (or being ethnocentric) is not an obviously
problematic condition. Thus, the pejorativity of ethnocentrism – its status as a vice or problem –
is not one of the “myths” that I’m out to debunk here; on the contrary, it is a basic premise of the
analysis presented below. Some may find this premise unattractive. Richard Rorty has sought to
portray ethnocentrism as a practical inevitability rather than a source of genuine concern.7 Others
have stressed its benefits (e.g., in promoting social cohesion) over its burdens.8 And sometimes it
is discussed in value-neutral terms: as when, for instance, it is cited as empirical evidence in
support of some brand of moral skepticism or relativism.9 But none of this undermines the value
of structuring the present inquiry around the undeniably common perception of ethnocentrism as
an ill. After all, the product of such an inquiry can only help us in understanding what these
evaluative disagreements are ultimately about.
Second, because ethnocentrism is often discussed but still rarely defined by contemporary
theorists, contemporary scholarship on ethnocentrism provides few helpful starting points for the
kind of analysis I want to undertake here. Instead, I have found it more useful to anchor the
following discussion in an older body of literature that does engage in definition: this is the
literature on ethnocentrism created by the early twentieth and late nineteenth-century cultural
anthropologists who are responsible for first bringing the term “ethnocentrism” into popular use
– anthropologists like William G. Sumner, Melville Herskovits, and Franz Boas. This focus does
not render the present analysis out of date or obsolete. On the contrary, as we’ll see below, early
anthropological work on the topic of ethnocentrism remains hugely influential to this day,
including among philosophers. Thus, the contribution of the following analysis to current
theoretical debates is in some ways oblique: it is meant to inform contemporary theoretical
debates about ethnocentrism by carefully evaluating an historical tradition of thought that
7
I briefly address Rorty’s thoughts in the conclusion below. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism,
and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 1-21.
8
William Graham Sumner, Folkways: a Study of Mores, Manners, Customs, and Morals (Mineola:
Dover Publications, 1907/2002), p. 13, where he notes that ethnocentrism “strengthens the folkways”;
Claude Levi-Strauss, The View from Afar (New York: Nasic Books, 1985), trans. J. Neugroschel and P.
Hoss, p. xiii.
9
See, e.g., Mackie 1977, pp. 36-38; Herskovits 1948, pp. 63-64.
2
continues to have pervasive (if not always entirely explicit) influence. As I shall explain, I
believe it is important that we finally wrest current debates free from this imposing older
tradition.
II. SUMNER’S DEFINITION
In one of the earliest known uses of the term, the early anthropologist, William Graham
Sumner, defined ethnocentrism as follows:
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things according to which one’s own group is the
center of everything, and all others are scaled with reference to it… Each group nourishes its own
pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.
Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other
folkways, these excite its scorn.10
There is quite a lot packed into Sumner’s definition, which is one reason why it’s a good starting
point: it captures more than one aspect of the phenomenon in question. Another reason is that his
definition still very much resonates today. Not only is it patently familiar to common sense,
Sumner’s definition also remains influential in scholarship across the humanities and social
sciences. Social scientists – those most responsible for bringing concerns about ethnocentrism to
popular attention over the last century – have largely stuck to Sumner’s original definition.
According to The Dictionary of Anthropology, for instance, ethnocentrism is “the belief that
one’s own culture is superior to others, which is often accompanied by a tendency to make
invidious comparisons.”11 And philosophers, too, have frequently co-opted it. For example, in
recent work, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Allan Bloom, Steven Lukes, and James W. Nickel all use
Sumner’s definition as the primary basis for their own discussions.12
According to Sumner, ethnocentrism involves seeing one’s cultural group and its
“folkways” as (fittingly) central in some evaluative sense. By “folkways”, Sumner meant
something close to what his predecessor, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, meant by “culture”: “that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”13 Thus, Sumner understands
cultures to be individuated not by ties of race, ethnicity, history, origin, location, and kinship per
10
Sumner 1907, p. 13.
Rhum 1997, p. 155.
12
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 2006), p. 16; Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has
Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of our Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p.
36; Steven Lukes, “Is Universalism Ethnocentric?” in Liberals and Cannibals (New York: Verso, 2003),
pp. 12-13; James W. Nickel, “Human Rights” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online,
2013), Section 4.
13
Sir Edward Brunett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: Bradbury, Evans, and Co., 1871), Vol. 1, p.
1; Sumner 1907, pp. 70-75.
11
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se (although these may also play a part), but by certain inevitably loose conformities of belief
and social practice. The members of a culture are presumably those who share, transmit, and/or
identify with its distinctive set of beliefs and practices, i.e., its “complex whole”. I will follow
Sumner and particularly Tylor – whose definition of culture is still widely recognized as
authoritative within the discipline of cultural anthropology – in this understanding.14
Ethnocentrically seeing one’s cultural group as “central”, in Sumner’s view, involves
judging it to be superior.15 Since his definition speaks of exalting local divinities, folkways,
pride, and vanity, etc., it is clear that the kind of superiority Sumner is talking about is a general
one, and not confined only to moral or practical matters. So, imaginably, it can be cashed out in a
multiplicity of ways: aesthetic, religious, epistemic, moral, political, practical, linguistic,
historical, etc. That is, ethnocentrically seeing one’s cultural group as superior can involve seeing
it (along with its beliefs, practices, conventions, history, and achievements, etc.) as not only more
just, but also as more beautiful, pious, wise, true, virtuous, interesting, and useful than foreign
alternatives. Insert any positive evaluative term you’d like here really.
Once we follow Sumner this far, however, we already encounter a difficult puzzle. This
is because believing in the superiority of one’s culture in just these ways is not as problematic as
it might seem at first glance. Indeed, there are numerous instances in which such beliefs seem
appropriate, i.e., justified and correct. For example, I see nothing amiss in the belief, common
among Norwegians, that Norway’s rehabilitative system of incarceration is more just and fair
than the largely retributive system of the United States. Some will of course disagree with me on
this particular matter, but that needn’t call into question the more general point: that judging
one’s own culture to be superior to others in some respect(s) seems appropriate at least in some
instances. If we are open, as many of us clearly are, to the possibility that some political
institutions are more just than others, that some social practices are more ethical than others, and
that some beliefs about the world are truer or more justified than others, etc., then we must
accordingly carve out some room for the possibility of right-minded judgments of cultural
superiority. Not only this; it may turn out that we are lucky enough to belong to a culture that is
better than others in one or more of these imagined respects. Certainly we should take great care
in estimating whether or not this is actually so, and remain vigilantly aware of the likelihood of
error. But we can be vigilant without denying the possibility of cultural superiority altogether,
nor denying that we may sometimes have good reasons for believing the superior culture to be
ours.
This point can be extended further. For, upon reflection, it is clear that believing in the
superiority of one’s own culture is in an important sense normal, and probably even desirable.
14
See: Michael Carrithers, “Culture” in The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1997), ed. Thomas Barfield, pp. 100-102. That said, I have no interest in engaging in ongoing
debates about the definition and reality of culture here. I merely assume, with some confidence, that there
are such “complex wholes,” roughly of the sort described by Tylor. If it turns out that there are none, then
so much the worse for the present analysis.
15
See: Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), ed. Piotr Sztompka, p. 248.
4
For instance, it seems only normal for a group that endorses some religious, scientific, or
normative belief to consider that belief to be in some way demonstrably better than its
alternatives, i.e., more true, plausible, or justified. Otherwise, why would they adopt it?
Similarly, if a group adopts and/or adheres to some custom, norm, or social practice, it’s only
normal for that group to consider it to be more useful, moral, virtuous, just, or fair than its
alternatives, including all foreign alternatives. Again: what better reason would there be for them
to do so? In other words, what Sumner describes as ethnocentrism is, on second thought, just the
regular (and presumably desired) course of events for any ostensibly reasoned commitment to
some belief, norm, idea, or practice.
This poses a problem for Sumner’s definition. Given its potential truth, justification, and
seeming appropriateness, how can a group’s belief in the comparative superiority of its beliefs
and practices in itself count as an instance of ethnocentrism, so long as we take that notion to
indicate that something (whatever it might turn out to be) has gone awry? Sumner’s definition
does not seem to capture the pejorative character of ethnocentrism. Do we need a new definition
then, or is there something more that can be said in favor of Sumner’s view?
III. A PROCEDURAL DEFINITION
In Sumner’s defense, we might consider whether ethnocentrism as he defines it may be
undesirable in light of the fact that judgments of superiority, of the sort described just above, are
(often or always) false. There are many social conventions (linguistic, behavioural, aesthetic,
conjugal, culinary, mathematical, religious, institutional, etc.) for which judgments of better or
worse are generally inappropriate. For instance, it would seem odd to claim that the Latin
alphabet is “superior” to its Cyrillic alternative; both appear to be equally “good” at what they
do, i.e., serving as a means of recording language in written form. Similarly, it would seem odd
to rank the convention of handshaking above that of bowing as a method of displaying courtesy
or respect; once in place, both conventions are, presumably, equally effective. Perhaps then, the
failure or danger of ethnocentrism as Sumner defines it consists in its presumption of evaluative
hierarchies where there are none, or at least very few. If ethnocentrism mires us in the adoption
of (inevitably or probably) false beliefs about the superiority of our culture’s beliefs and
practices vis-à-vis foreign alternatives, this would be a serious problem.
There are two reasons why this reply is not going to work. First, the idea that there are no
(or even very few) evaluative hierarchies to be discerned across cultures is controversial to say
the least. Presumably, cultures that endorse conventional creationist theories of the origins of
humankind and those that endorse evolutionary theories cannot both be right. Both theories may
of course be wrong, and it may be that some unknown theory is the right one, but regardless it
seems entirely reasonable to assume only one such theory (and the cultures, if any, that endorse
it) to be correct. At the level of practices, the presence of evaluative inequalities across cultures
is similarly compelling. For instance, it certainly seems absurd to think that all cultures treat
5
women in an equally fair, just, or considerate manner. And as long as we believe that some such
differences exist, it will be difficult to rescue Sumner’s definition in the manner just described.
But there is a second reason why this defense is problematic. Even if it were the case that
adopting a stance of superiority towards other cultures would always (or almost always) be a
mistake, it’s not clear that it would be an ethnocentric mistake. In other words, there is some
additional factor that is missing from Sumner’s account, even on this charitable interpretation.
And this is because worries about ethnocentrism are, upon reflection, better understood as
worries about how one arrives at or justifies judgments – i.e., about the quality of the reasoning
behind some belief – rather than as worries about their (likely or inevitable) falsity per se.
To illustrate this point, consider a scenario in which the members of some culture, let’s
imagine the ancient Romans, are contemplating how best to codify their language in written
form. The Latin alphabet has been their historical standard of choice, but they are now
considering changing it. And so they’re wondering which of the world’s many alphabets to
adopt, or whether to come up with some new one. As it happens, all of the world’s alphabets will
do a roughly equally good job of expressing (in an efficient, pleasing, and readable manner) their
language, and just as good of a job as any new alphabet one could come up with. Nevertheless,
the Romans want to settle on the best alphabet. And because that’s their intention, the
comparative judgment that they come up with is inevitably going to turn out to be false. That is,
they are going to come out in favour of the superiority of some alphabet (seeing it as more
efficient, pleasing, and readable) that will in fact only be just as good, or roughly just as good, as
other conventional and hypothetical alternatives.
Now, imagine all this is true, but that the Romans narrow in on their candidate in an
epistemically responsible way: deliberating extensively, open-mindedly, self-critically,
rigorously, and constructively on the question of which alphabet to adopt. They carefully
consider every worldly alphabet, as well as the suggestions of some inventors of new alphabets,
try each possibility over an extended period of time, consult foreign users in great detail, openly
discuss the uses they would like their alphabet to serve as well as which candidate best satisfies
those criteria, etc. And after all this, the Romans ironically end up concluding that their own
alphabet, Latin, is best. Now, what’s important to notice is that despite its inevitable falsity in
light of the (stipulated) fact of alphabetical equality, there seems to be no good reason to call this
judgment ethnocentric. After all, the reasoning behind it is markedly fair, diligent, self-critical,
and seemingly open to foreign or new alphabetical possibilities. To be sure, this whole
endeavour is somewhat ill conceived to begin with, since it is destined to produce an erroneous
conclusion. But it’s not clear that ethnocentrism is at work.
However, if we alter the picture of the Romans’ deliberative process and imagine it to
instead be skewed in favor of pre-existing linguistic conventions prevalent in Roman culture,
then we have indeed arrived at something genuinely troubling as well as intuitively more worthy
of being called ethnocentrism. For instance, if the answer had been decided without seriously or
fairly considering any alternatives to the locally entrenched Latin alphabet, if it was distorted by
the deliberators’ culturally-contingent lack of familiarity with the virtues of foreign alphabets, or
6
under the strong pressure of a nostalgic interest in the alphabetical status quo, then our
perception of the judgment changes. It suddenly seems appropriate to call it ethnocentric.
What all this points to is that Sumner’s definition misfires when it makes ethnocentrism a
matter of judging the members, beliefs, practices, and conventions of one’s culture to be (in one
or more senses) superior to foreign counterparts. On reflection, one can make that sort of
judgment without committing any obviously ethnocentric fault, even if the judgment is false, or
likely so. Instead, I propose that we understand ethnocentrism as a way of arriving at or
justifying judgments, claims, and beliefs more generally.16 That is, on this reading, ethnocentrism
affects the quality and character of the belief-forming and/or belief-maintaining process, i.e., the
deliberative process by which one comes to adopt and/or maintain some belief over others. In
particular, the suggestion is that ethnocentrism is a characteristically biased (and thus unjustified)
way of maintaining and arriving at beliefs, and we can say preliminarily that an ethnocentric bias
is one that prejudicially favors the beliefs, conventions, practices, and members of one’s own
culture, whatever and whomever they happen to be.
It’s worth noting that, like Sumner’s definition, this definition does still associate
ethnocentrism with a kind of cultural favoritism. Some such association seems central to the very
notion itself – there must be some significance attached, after all, to the “centrism” embedded in
the term. But the crucial caveat insisted on here is that the kind of cultural favoritism associated
with ethnocentrism cannot simply be a matter of believing or thinking one’s culture to be
superior to others in one or more respects, as Sumner’s definition suggests. It is rather a matter of
reasoning or arriving at beliefs in certain culturally biased or prejudicial ways. I will say
something more about the different possible kinds of cultural bias – the different potential forms
of “favoritism” – that might be at issue here in Section V. In the meantime, if this understanding
of ethnocentrism is generally on the right track, then I will need to say more about what I take a
“bias” in general to be, since the term is liable to induce confusion.
IV. WHAT IS A BIAS?
A “bias,” as I shall understand it here, can come in two main forms: moral and cognitive.
In the most general terms, a moral bias involves being morally partial towards certain individuals
or agents over others; a cognitive bias, by contrast, involves being partial towards certain
judgments or beliefs. Moral and cognitive biases do intersect. For instance, a moral bias can
sometimes take cognitive form, since it can affect the set of cognitive judgments that one is
willing to consider or accept: as when we are, say, unwilling to acknowledge evidence that
corroborates the criminal guilt of a loved one, or to consider the plausibility of an argument
raised by a despised political foe.
16
Throughout this article, I use the terms “belief”, “judgment”, and “claim” interchangeably.
However, sometimes I use the term “judgment” in a different but no less familiar sense, i.e., to refer to a
higher-order capacity for forming individual beliefs, judgments, or claims. Context will (I hope) make
clear in which sense I mean to use the term.
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Ethnocentrism can plausibly be understood both as a moral bias – i.e., a way of showing
special moral concern towards the members of one’s cultural group – and as a cognitive bias.
Both definitions are intuitive and important. Sumner’s definition speaks of “contempt” for
“outsiders,” which certainly sounds like a form of moral discrimination. And Elizabeth Anderson
defines ethnocentrism as “feelings of affiliation and loyalty to groups with which [one
identifies]”17 or as “in–group favoritism,” i.e., as a moral bias of some sort.18 That said, the
cognitive aspect of ethnocentrism seems to overshadow its moral counterpart, at least in
contemporary debates. This is suggested by the fact that so many thinkers have found it perfectly
coherent to ask whether the belief in universal moral equality is itself ethnocentric.19 If
“ethnocentrism” were standardly understood as a moral notion – i.e., as a way of seeing outsiders
as morally unequal to members of one’s cultural group – then this would not be nearly as
coherent a question as it is.20
However, even if the moral dimension of ethnocentrism remains highly relevant, as I
suspect it does, the nature and merits of moral partiality towards one’s ethnos or co-nationals is a
well-developed topic in moral and political philosophy, and I don’t intend to say much about it
here. By contrast, comparatively far less has been written about its cognitive counterpart,
although that is beginning to change.21 By concentrating on this latter phenomenon, my hope is
that the current analysis can help build on that trend. I will briefly consider how ethnocentrism’s
moral and cognitive aspects can interact below in Section V.
As far as understanding what a cognitive bias is as such, one way to grasp it is to imagine
what cognition would be like without it. This won’t give us a technical definition, but it will
highlight the standard features of a bias, at least as psychologists have understood it.22 In what
we might call a non-biased deliberative process, one can stipulate the following: very broadly,
the deliberator (a) seeks all evidence that is relevant to their question,23 (b) evaluates the
17
70
Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p.
18
Anderson 2010, pp. 11, 19, 20.
See, e.g., Benhabib 2002, pp. 24-49, esp. 27; Martin Hollis, “Is Universalism Ethnocentric?” in
Multicultural Questions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), eds. Christian Joppke & Stephen
Lukes, pp. 27-44; Lukes 2003, Ch. 2.
20
I don’t mean to suggest here that there is no way of making sense of this question if we understand
ethnocentrism in moral terms. There are, for example, some who argue that the Western moral and
political commitment to moral equality and human rights is intimately connected to the violation of that
very commitment, i.e., the systematic oppression of non-Westerners by Westerners. See, e.g., Makau
Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), pp. 67-70.
21
See: Buchanan 2008; Haidt 2012; Greene 2013; Tasioulas 2014.
22
I rely here chiefly on: Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in
Many Guises” in, Review of General Psychology, 1998, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 175-220; Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky, “Introduction” in, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky, pp. 3-23; S. Matthew
Liao, “Bias and Reasoning: Haidt’s Theory of Moral Judgment” in New Waves in Ethics (London:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 108-128.
23
For an extremely interesting discussion of circumstances in which it is reasonable to expect
19
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evidence fairly, impartially, and objectively, and (c) actually draws the conclusion that the
evidence, in the aggregate, seems to suggest. Finally, we might add that a non-biased deliberator
(d) scrutinizes candidate beliefs according to fair or reasonable evidentiary standards. By
implication, then, we can describe a biased deliberative process in the following terms: one that
(a’) selectively avoids or fails to seek out some or all of the evidence that is relevant to a
question, (b’) unfairly interprets or distorts the evidence one is faced with, and/or (c’) fails to
draw the conclusion that the evidence one is faced with, in the aggregate, seems to suggest.
Finally, (d’) a biased deliberative process would subject some beliefs to unfair evidentiary
standards, e.g., as when one arbitrarily subjects the beliefs of others to higher evidentiary
standards than one’s own.
I won’t take the time to carefully illustrate these features here. Instead, the illustrations
will come in Section V below, in the process of developing a specific account of what
distinguishes ethnocentric cognitive biases from other types thereof. In the meantime, the general
account of a cognitive bias I have offered here is, I hope, clear enough for now. What stands out,
perhaps, is that this account is parasitic on a theory of epistemic responsibility, i.e., on a theory
of justification. Features (a), (b), (c), and (d) are hallmarks of most any description of our basic
epistemic responsibilities,24 and a bias as I’ve defined it is simply a way of shirking one or more
of them, and thereby failing to adequately justify some belief.25 By implication, then, the
prevalence and avoidability of ethnocentrism, on the present view, will in part depend on how
demanding one’s theory of epistemic responsibility is. On a lax view of our epistemic
responsibilities, ethnocentrism (and cognitive bias in general) may turn out to be more rare and
easily avoidable: on a stringent view, more common and difficult to avoid. I don’t want to adopt
any particular theory of epistemic responsibility here. The four features I’ve keyed in on are
meant to be uncontroversial and acceptable from a broad range of theoretical perspectives in
epistemology, including religious ones.26
But how broadly acceptable is this cognitivist account of ethnocentrism really? Given its
focus on (what some might call) stereotypically “enlightenment values” – ideals of truth-seeking,
open-mindedness, self-criticism, and rational or evidence-based inquiry, etc. – there may be
epistemic agents to gather more evidence than they currently have on some matter, see: Sanford C.
Goldberg, “Should Have Known” in Synthese (Forthcoming).
24
See, e.g., Lorainne Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover: Brown University Press, 1987), pp.
17-24; James Montmarquet, “Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility” in, American Philosophical
Quarterly (1992), Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 335-336; Karl Popper, “Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility”
in On Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), eds. S. Mendus & D. Edwards, pp. 17-34.
25
In this respect my understanding of a bias is in line with that of Liao (2011).
26
In endorsing this list of basic epistemic responsibilities, I do not intend to take sides in debates about
their nature, reality, specific content, or justification. For instance, the list is meant to be neutral between
“internalist” and “externalist” theories of justification. I appeal to such responsibilities here, then, only as
analytical devices, i.e., as useful reference points in the definition of ethnocentrism. If we deny the
existence of epistemic responsibilities because we reject the possibility of volitional control over one’s
belief states, then the list can still, I think, serve its definitional purpose. For instance, it can perhaps be
seen as a set of ideal epistemic standards that it would be blamelessly bad to fall short of.
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concern that such an account of ethnocentrism will only be comprehensible to members of
“Western” culture, or at least those parts of “Western” culture still caught in the grips of the
Enlightenment’s secular, scientific, and rationalistic ethos. Perhaps, in other words, this
cognitivist understanding of ethnocentrism is ethnocentric itself!
I think such concerns are overblown. As I make clear below, the main thought behind the
cognitivist account of ethnocentrism presented here is simply that there are ways in which one’s
parochial cultural attachments (e.g., one’s limited cultural experience, deference to local cultural
opinion, loyalty to one’s cultural group, etc.) can subvert one’s ability to fairly and fully consider
all of the evidence relevant to some question placed before them. That’s not a peculiarly
“Western” thought, nor is it especially secular or even “scientific.” Most religious
epistemologies, I take it, can make some sense of the idea that there are instances in which
formulating a responsible judgment on some question requires transcending the limited cognitive
resources and natural biases that come with a particular cultural upbringing – instances in which
that upbringing is insufficient or even an impediment to inquiry. For example, religious
epistemologies that are premised on the evidentiary power of divine or scriptural revelation (as
opposed to, say, cultural immersion) certainly have the tools to do this. And so too do ones that,
as in some schools of Classical Indian philosophy, privilege yogic perception or meditative
experience as a pathway towards knowledge and enlightenment.27 There may of course be some
cultures for which these cognitivist concerns about ethnocentrism are more familiar or intuitive
than others, but that’s probably going to be true for any specification of the nature and peril(s) of
ethnocentrism. And in any event, as I’ll demonstrate below, the ironic truth is that the point of
view from which these concerns make the least possible sense is that of cultural relativism, or
rather certain forms of it – a doctrine famously popularized in the “West.”
Despite all this, there is a certain indelible narrowness to this cognitivist account of
ethnocentrism. Even if we put to one side the fact that it doesn’t capture ethnocentrism
understood as a form of moral partiality, there is still the fact that, on the present view,
ethnocentrism is a problem that afflicts cognition, i.e., our attempts to know and accurately
represent the world in thought. But surely ethnocentrism can shape non-cognitive mental
processes as well, including attitudes, emotions, and dispositions. Consider, for instance, how
positive attitudes or feelings (e.g., of pleasure, comfort, etc.) naturally attach to customs that one
is familiar with from youth, and vice-versa: how negative attitudes or feelings (e.g., of disgust,
repulsion, etc.) naturally tend to form around customs that one is unfamiliar with. One’s
psychological reaction to eating insects, for example, seems at least largely (if not wholly)
dependent on cultural upbringing. Given how inflexible these attitudes can be, there is a sense in
which they can be called biases. And of course, such attitudes, emotions, or dispositions can
intertwine with cognitive biases.28 Ultimately what this suggests, I think, is that there is a third
27
For a general discussion, see e.g., Stephen Phillips, “Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy”
in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015), ed. Edward Zalta.
28
Indeed, some may challenge the very distinction between cognition and emotion that I am drawing
here [See: Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:
10
general form of ethnocentrism that is not cognitive but also not moral in the narrow sense
described above. While there is surely a lot to be said about this aspect of the phenomenon,
particularly for those inclined towards a non-cognitivist reading of moral judgment, it is not my
main interest here.
V. FORMS OF ETHNOCENTRISM
So far, I have argued that ethnocentrism is most illuminatingly understood as a form of
bias, both cognitive and moral in nature. In this section, I shall continue focusing on the
cognitive aspect of ethnocentrism. But now I want to enrich our understanding of it by
identifying three subcategories of ethnocentric bias understood in its cognitive sense. Together,
these subcategories give us a capacious understanding of the phenomenon, but they also give us
a clearer sense of how to individuate it. Their uniting features are twofold. First, they intuitively
qualify as forms of ethnocentrism. And second, they have plausible and proximate causal roots
in the realities of cultural membership, upbringing, and identification.
This second feature is a crucial part of what brings these biases under the common banner
of ethnocentrism. There are, after all, innumerable ways in which (and reasons for which) one
might be cognitively biased. Sometimes the source of the bias is individualistic, stemming from a
special personality trait, perhaps: for instance, excessive personal pride may block one from
considering the falsity of a long-held belief, say, in their skill at basketball. Sometimes the source
is vocational, as when a scientist, after years of costly research, finds it impossible to accept the
ambivalence of their meticulously accumulated data. There is no end to the number examples we
can give, but the point is that not all examples of cognitive bias should count as instances of
ethnocentrism. The individual and vocational examples just cited seemingly do not. Presumably,
then, cognitive biases of an ethnocentric order have their roots in the special influence that
cultural membership itself can exert on our judgment. At least this is what I shall assume in what
follows. As demonstrated below, and as one might expect, this influence is extraordinarily
diverse both in its mechanisms and its results.
The brief taxonomy of cognitive biases sketched below is not an exhaustive account; it is
a provisional list, which surely excludes some aspects of ethnocentrism (not least its moral
dimension). Nonetheless, these biases are capacious, and can affect both normative and
descriptive judgment. This differentiates the following account of ethnocentrism from that of
Allen Buchanan, which includes much that is insightful, correct, and that overlaps with the
present account, but which remains exclusively focused on the role of ethnocentrism in
normative judgment; not only is the scope of the present account broader than this, it also
acknowledges the important role of descriptive biases in normative judgment itself, which is
Cambridge University Press, 2001)] This is not a debate I can presently dive into. But if turns out that the
distinction fails, this may be just as well. After all, it may simply mean that this third possible category of
ethnocentrism collapses back into (something like) its cognitive counterpart.
11
something Buchanan’s account overlooks. 29 Finally, the categories of bias below are not
mutually exclusive. They can operate together, both in individual instances and over long
stretches of time, in reciprocally reinforcing ways.
(i) Biases That Result From Limited Cultural Experience
In the case of one kind of ethnocentric bias, one decides some normative or descriptive
question by appealing to one’s limited cultural experience, when more is called for. This last
qualification is important. It’s not always the case that one needs to reach beyond their limited
cultural experience to adequately understand some phenomenon. For instance, if I try to
understand why my neighbor dresses differently on the thirty-first of October, or the sarcasm
behind an insult hurled at me by an old friend, then it’s probably enough that I appeal to the
knowledge and knowhow that I’ve acquired through my limited life experience. On the other
hand, if I try to understand the meaning of tribal tattoos in the Philippines, or whether negotiating
the price of fish in a Manila marketplace is considered appropriate, such an appeal will not be
adequate to the task (at least not in my case). In the latter cases, I will need to gather new
relevant evidence – learn new facts, perhaps even a new language, and to gather foreign cultural
experience – in order to be a competent interpreter. And if this heuristic work is not done, the
resulting interpretation will be ethnocentric.30
This kind of ethnocentric failure – which is a failure along dimension (a) highlighted above
– is best illustrated in the context of cross-cultural understanding or evaluation. There it can
manifest in at least two interestingly different ways. In one manifestation, it involves an
inadequate but straightforward appeal to one’s culturally homegrown experience in a foreign
cultural context; in other words, it involves an under-acknowledgment of the foreign features of
that context.31 For instance, in his ethnographic work, the early 20th Century Danish
anthropologist, Peter Freuchen, discussed the routine abandonment of orphans among the Inuit.
He noted that his initial reaction was to understand such acts as he would any similar act in his
own society, i.e., as motivated by cruelty, neglect, and/or (at best) self-preservation. This
interpretation was revised, however, once he raised the topic with members of the Inuit
community itself, who told him otherwise. According to them, the practice was part of a sincere
and concerted attempt to prepare Inuit youth for the extraordinarily formidable hardships of adult
life in the North American Arctic.32 I am in no position to verify or justify their account here.
29
“The parochialism objection [to human rights] takes many forms. What they all have in common is
the charge that human rights are expressions of either an arbitrarily limited set of values or an arbitrary
ranking of values.” Buchanan 2008, p. 44.
30
This is of course a classic dictum of ethnography. See e.g., Franz Boas, “The Mind of Primitive
Man” in Journal of American Folklore (1901), Vol. 14, No. 52, pp. 1-11; Herskovitz 1948, pp. 79-93;
Geertz 1973, Ch. 1.
31
Nussbaum calls this “Chauvinism”, in Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical
Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 118-123.
32
For the reference, see: Peter Freuchen, Book of the Eskimos (New York: Fawcett, 1961), pp. 41-42.
12
The point is rather a general one. It was only when Freuchen reached beyond his limited cultural
experience and consulted locals, who drew fresh attention to the uniqueness of life among the
Inuit, that he became open to this unexpected and plausible interpretation of the practice in
question. Moreover, this change affected not just his understanding, but his evaluation of the
practice as well.
The evaluative fallout from oversights of this sort can be both approbatory and derogatory.
For instance, in Freuchen’s case, it was derogatory, leading him to see the Inuit as perhaps
crueler than they actually are. However, in other cases, the evaluative fallout can be approbatory.
Consider, for instance, how someone reared in the basketball-loving culture of the United States
might naively praise the use of scarce foreign development funds to build basketball courts in
Ghana, where soccer (not basketball) is in fact the sport of choice. In that instance, let’s imagine,
the interpreter’s upbringing in the United States leads her to hastily assume that basketball is
equally popular abroad, resulting in a more favorable evaluation of the development initiative
than is perhaps deserved.
In a second manifestation of this kind of ethnocentric bias, the cross-cultural application of
homegrown beliefs, experiences, and knowledge is more complex. In particular, it is complicated
by an ulterior fixation on the “otherness” of the foreign culture in question. Thus, while someone
who is culturally biased in a straightforward sense typically underplays, or fails to adequately
acknowledge, the distinctiveness of a foreign culture, their complex counterpart does just the
opposite: they exaggerate and over-acknowledge its distinctiveness.33 Here, foreign cultural
phenomena of all sorts (including foreign individuals) are seen through the lens of a set of
orienting oppositions that sharply distinguish “us” from “them”, e.g., familiar vs. exotic, normal
vs. abnormal, civilized vs. barbarian, human vs. inhuman, rational vs. irrational, clean vs. dirty,
peaceful vs. violent, industrious vs. lazy, self-governing vs. dependent, etc.34
An obvious example of this is what Edward Said described as orientalism: a Western
European “discourse” about the Orient that unjustifiably foists exotic and unfamiliar qualities
onto the latter, e.g., pre-scientific naiveté, natural servitude, unspeakable cruelty or barbarity, an
unrepressed attitude towards human desire, etc.35 But other examples are abundant, and
particularly evident in the way that cultural, religious, and political identities (Hutu vs. Tutsi,
Christian vs. Muslim, Democrat vs. Republican, etc.) are often used to evoke grossly overIn his insightful book, Morality and Cultural Differences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), John
W. Cook discusses this case and generally names misinterpretations of this sort “projection errors”,
providing a number of useful examples (esp. pp. 93-101). Also see: Bernard Williams, Morality: And
Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 23-24.
33
Nussbaum calls this “Romanticism” (Nussbaum 1997, pp. 123-130).
34
Indeed, some have defined ethnocentrism merely as a matter of adopting an exaggerated (and
antagonistic) understanding of the differences between “us” and “them”. See: Donald R. Kinder & Cindy
D. Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 7-8. See also: Sumner 1907, p. 13: “Ethnocentrism leads a people to exaggerate
and intensify everything in their own folkways which is peculiar and which differentiates them from
others.”
35
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
13
exaggerated thoughts about the differences between groups.36 And while this usually has a
derogatory effect on our normative evaluation of other cultures, it can also do the opposite. For
instance, Michel de Montaigne’s idyllic description of 16th Century native Brazilian life (evoking
the myth of the “noble savage”) seems less like sober ethnography than it does reality inversion,
i.e., a reverie of an ideal society in which the ills of 16th Century French society are
conspicuously absent.37 And although positive, such idealized caricatures of foreign cultures are
on reflection quite plausibly categorized as ethnocentric.
(ii) Dogmatic Attachment to Culturally Received Opinion
When understood as a cognitive bias, ethnocentrism can take on a second main form.
Here it involves treating a culturally received belief or opinion as something like a “fixed point”
in one’s judgment, in the following rough sense: (a) avoiding relevant evidence that might speak
against it, (b) unfairly discrediting encountered evidence that speaks against it, (c) failing to
disown the belief when that is what a thorough encounter with all relevant evidence
recommends, and (d) arbitrarily subjecting contrary beliefs to higher evidentiary standards. In so
far as one’s cultural upbringing or experience can lead to the assimilation and treatment of
culturally received opinion in this way, then this kind of ethnocentric bias may be a subcategory
of the former.
That said, it is still useful to highlight this phenomenon on its own. This is for two
reasons. First, experience involves the acquisition of not just propositional knowledge and
beliefs, but also of certain skills or knowhow (e.g., how to speak and understand a certain
language, interpret certain gestures, etc.).38 And some of the biases that result from one’s limited
cultural experience may simply be a result of a lack of epistemically necessary skills, whether
linguistic, social, psychological, or otherwise. Second, as demonstrated in the last section, the
limited nature of one’s cultural experience can sometimes render their judgment insufficiently
alert to idiosyncratic environmental and social conditions affecting life in a foreign culture (e.g.,
harsh conditions, unique traditions, special historical experience, etc.). This isn’t so much a
matter of assimilating a belief and sticking to it, as it is being ignorant or inattentive to
epistemically relevant facts. Thus, the phenomenon I am targeting here is narrower than the
range of biases that fall under the previous category. This is a testimonial bias that involves
assimilating the beliefs of the members of one’s culture, and then maintaining those beliefs in the
dogmatic manner described above.
36
For a much-discussed example of this, see: Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in
Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, 1993, pp. 22-49. For a critique, see: Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence:
The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).
37
Michel de Montaigne, “On the Cannibals” in The Complete Essays (London: Penguin Press, 1987),
tr. M.A. Screech, pp. 228-241. For a similar analysis of Montaigne’s account, see: Steven Lukes, Moral
Relativism (London: Profile Books, 2008), pp. 30-31.
38
Gilbert Ryle, “Knowing How and Knowing That” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (19461946), Vol. 26, pp. 1-16; Geertz 1973, Ch. 1.
14
Examples of this type of bias are numerous and familiar. Its presence is obvious, for
example, in the domain of moral-political opinion, where judgments (on matters such as the
proper “size” of government, the morality of gun control, abortion, etc.) are often formed at a
young age under the influence of parents, teachers, media, peers, and then rarely revised or even
made available for scrutiny.39 But it is also evident in the scientific domain. Beliefs about the
truth of evolutionary theory and the role of human activity in producing climate change, for
instance, are notoriously subject to cultural influence.40 And once in place, they are frequently
held onto regardless of the preponderance of evidence, in the same way that late proponents of
the Ptolemaic system would either presumptively discredit evidence in favor of heliocentrism, or
if necessary add theoretically inelegant “epicycles” to the system on the assumption that it must
ultimately be right.41
Sometimes dogmatism of this sort is generated by the fact that beliefs can function as
markers of identity, and not merely as cognitive representations of the world. For instance, in
some African countries, disapproving of homosexuality is seen as part-and-parcel of being both
African and Christian.42 Those Africans who argue even for the legality of homosexuality are
often stigmatized as treacherously loyal to the “West”. Cultures are often self-consciously
distinguished by their commitment to some (loosely or rigidly) shared set of beliefs in this way.
And there is consequently almost always some pressure to cognitively step in line if one wants to
establish one’s membership in a given cultural group. This means that the process of forming and
maintaining such “marker” beliefs may be influenced by epistemically extraneous concerns
about social conformity, belonging, and recognition. For instance, there is likely to be some
pressure to treat a marker belief as incontrovertible, since that will leave one’s membership less
in doubt.43
There are, I think, two main sources of epistemic concern about biases of this sort.
Testimony is an important means of acquiring knowledge and justified belief.44 However, unless
we are so-called “fundamentalists” about the epistemic status of testimony, its justifiability in
39
See e.g., Haidt 2012.
See e.g., Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, & Donald Braman, “Cultural Cognition of Scientific
Consensus” in Journal of Risk Research (2011), Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 147-174.
41
See, e.g., Thomas Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of
Thinking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 91. It’s worth noting that this kind of dogmatism can be
(a) a form of wishful thinking – i.e., born in a strong desire that belief x be true – and/or (b) a result of
one’s strong conviction in the truth of x: a conviction that stands apart from one’s desires.
42
See: Rahul Rao, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), pp. 173-195.
43
Waldron has written insightfully about the way in which one’s attachment to cultural practices can
become a non-negotiable “costume” or “badge of identity”, for similar reasons. [See e.g., Jeremy
Waldron, “Tribalism and the Myth of the Framework” in, Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals (New York:
Routledge, 2004), ed. Philip Catton and Graham MacDonald, pp. 203-230.] Here I am describing the
same phenomenon as it applies more broadly to beliefs in general (including beliefs about cultural
practices).
44
See: C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
40
15
any given case depends (quite reasonably) on the reliability of one’s testimonial source.45 And
this is where we encounter the first source of concern: for one might reasonably doubt the
reliability or expertise of one’s culture on a great number of subjects (morality, science,
anthropology, etc.). For instance, surveys have shown that public opinion across the globe is
strikingly at odds with that of experts on the topic of the role of human activity in producing
climate change.46 This is presumably one subject, then, for which it would be epistemically
imprudent to rely on received opinion instead of the opinion of experts, e.g., as published in the
latest IPCC report.
Nonetheless, a reliance on poor testimonial sources will not be an epistemic disaster,
providing one is later willing to revise their beliefs in light of available evidence and/or expert
opinion. But such flexibility is precisely what this kind of bias rules out; once the belief is
acquired, it is dogmatically held onto. This is the second source of epistemic concern, then, and it
seems more serious than the first. Adopting a false and/or unjustified belief is epistemically
undesirable; being dogmatically committed to such a belief is even worse.
(iii) Biases That Serve Cultural Interests
There are various ways in which one’s reasoning might be made to serve the interests of
one’s cultural group. For example, groups may have an interest in maintaining a positive selfimage (e.g., as blameless, praiseworthy, enlightened, etc.) that influences their interpretation and
evaluation of all manner of things. A group may feel inclined, for instance, to whitewash its
history by omitting its morally unsavory aspects from school textbooks. Or, it may find
reassurance in turning its critical attention outwards rather than inwards. For instance, some
commentators have accused Western critics of female genital mutilation, which is common in
Africa and the Middle East, of having just this kind of selective attention, i.e., being eager to
lambast a foreign cultural practice but self-servingly slow to criticize similarly problematic
practices at home.47 Regardless of the veracity of the accusation, it seems entirely natural to see it
as picking out a form of ethnocentrism. Certainly, it picks out a kind of cognitive bias.
Groups may also have an interest in power or dominion over others, and this too can
influence their reasoning in recognizably ethnocentric ways. For instance, a group interested in
dominating its neighbor may be inclined to ignore evidence of the latter’s peaceful nature and
willingness to compromise, preferring instead to see and portray them as unreasonable brutes in
need of suppression. It is precisely this desire to legitimate asymmetric relations of power that
motivates the stereotypes of orientalism, as Said understood it. In his persuasive analysis, the
West’s groundless portrayal of “Orientals” as naïve, servile, barbaric, and exotically uninhibited,
45
Coady 1992, esp. pp. 21-24.
See: Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman 2011.
47
Yael Tamir, “Hands off Clitoridectomy: What our Revulsion Reveals about Ourselves” in, The
Boston Review, Summer 1996.
46
16
etc., was instrumental to justifying the Orient’s colonial domination.48
There is a sense in which these interest-serving biases can be seen as cognitive
manifestations of ethnocentrism understood as a moral bias. After all, if one is radically partial to
the interests of members of their own culture, then they may naturally be inclined to reason in
these culturally self-serving ways. Interest-serving biases are thus one possible point of overlap
between the moral and cognitive dimensions of ethnocentrism, which makes them particularly
convincing instances of the phenomenon in general.
This completes my brief positive account of ethnocentrism. The account does not go into
any great detail about the sources of ethnocentrism, but it does, again, assume that it has some
causal root(s) in the experience of cultural membership. Certainly, part of that experience
includes something like “enculturation,” which is the classically cited source of ethnocentrism.49
This is a learning process, typically understood to begin during youth, through which one comes
to identify with a given cultural group (or set thereof) and internalize its beliefs and practices.50
Understood broadly as such, the process of enculturation seems variegated enough to serve as a
kind of “umbrella” cause of ethnocentrism, if one is sought after. That said, this is not the place
to commit to any detailed causal story. A more detailed account of the sources of ethnocentrism
would surely be worth pursuing, not least because it would be useful for the development of a
theory of avoidance. But that is a task for another occasion.
As mentioned above, their proximate causal link to something like enculturation or
cultural membership helps explain why these biases are suitably categorized as forms of
ethnocentrism. But their particular nature also helps explain this, and in particular it helps it
explain why they qualify as forms of ethnocentrism – that part of the term plausibly has a role to
play too. Each category of bias above involves some kind of cultural “centrism” or “favoritism.”
In the first case, (i) the favoritism or centrism is perhaps the most complex, in that it involves
looking at the greater world with a set of unwieldy and parochial cultural “lenses,” as it were. In
the second instance, (ii) the favoritism is one of reasoning in ways that favor beliefs popular in
one’s cultural group. And in the third instance, (iii) it is a matter of reasoning in ways that reflect
a moral favoritism or partiality towards that group. It’s worth pointing out that one of the
frequent outcomes of ethnocentrism as it’s understood here – particularly in its second form (ii) –
will be self-aggrandizing “views of things” of the very sort described by Sumner. If one’s
judgment dogmatically conforms to that of one’s group, then the views of the latter will naturally
48
Said 1979, esp. pp. 9-15.
See, e.g., Herskovitz 1948; Renteln 1988, pp. 62-63.
50
The term, I believe, originates in the work of Herskovitz, and is to be distinguished from the term
“acculturation” (which standardly describes a process of cultural change or transformation). Herskovitz
writes: “Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of
his own enculturation… When we reflect that such intangibles as right and wrong, normal and abnormal,
beautiful and plain are absorbed from infancy, as a person learns the ways of the group into which he is
born, we see that we are dealing here with a process of first importance. Even the facts of the physical
world are discerned through the enculturative screen, so that the perception of time, distance, weight, size,
and other ‘realities’ is mediated by the conventions of any given group.” (Herskovitz 1948, pp. 63-64).
49
17
appear to one as right. Thus, even if ethnocentrism need not always result in a belief in the
superiority (i.e., truth, virtue, etc.) of local beliefs and practices, it is often likely to do so. The
present account can therefore be seen as a deeper and more flexible conception of ethnocentrism
that can explain the enduring appeal of Sumner’s definition while also accommodating a wider
set of conceptual intuitions.
VI. SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE VIEW
Now that we have a clear idea of the nature of ethnocentrism, and its various forms, in
hand, we can draw some general implications regarding its prevalence and avoidability. One key
implication, particularly for gauging the prevalence of ethnocentrism, is that it does not make the
ethnocentricity of a judgment hinge on brute facts about its place or culture of origin. This is
significant, because there are many who have assumed otherwise. For example, it is often said
that the mere (alleged) fact that human rights were originally conceived by “Westerners” is itself
proof of their ethnocentricity.51 On the cognitivist reading offered here, however, the cultural
idiosyncrasy of a belief (e.g., its origination in Enlightenment Europe or Roman antiquity) has no
direct bearing on its ethnocentricity. To establish the ethnocentricity of a belief in, say, human
rights, on the current view, we would need to examine the deliberative route by which any such
belief is formed and maintained and determine whether ethnocentric biases (i), (ii), or (iii) play a
role therein. In this sense, it is the quality of reasoning behind a belief that really matters, not the
identity or location of its progenitor. The analysis here can therefore take account of (at least one
version of) the so-called “genetic fallacy”, i.e., the false drawing of inferences about the truth
and/or justification of a belief from brute facts about its geographic or cultural origins.52
This observation has a counterpart. If, as just argued above, a belief’s place or culture of
origin has (in itself) no bearing on its ethnocentricity, then it also follows that a belief’s cultural
ubiquity has no direct bearing on this either. This undercuts strategies of avoidance that attempt
to counter the threat of ethnocentrism by appealing to a belief, norm, or idea’s universal
currency. For instance, the anthropologist Alison Dundee Renteln has suggested that human
rights are not ethnocentric because they are “cross-cultural universals”, i.e., moral standards that
are universally recognized.53 And a basically identical argument is, I believe, implicit in Michael
Walzer’s defense of the global applicability of a “moral minimum”: a “thin” set of injunctions
against “murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny” that can justifiably be applied
everywhere because it is commonly endorsed by all “thick” moral cultures (barring some
51
An early example of this claim can be found in the American Anthropological Association’s 1947
“Statement on Human Rights,” American Anthropologist (1947), Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 539-543.
52
See: Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice: Second Edition (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 69-70; Roger White, “You Just Believe That Because…” in
Philosophical Perspectives (2010), Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 573-615.
53
Alison Dundes Renteln, “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights” in, American Anthropologist
(1988), Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 56-72.
18
extreme anthropological examples).54 On the cognitivist reading of ethnocentrism advanced here,
however, pointing to the global ubiquity of some belief, norm, or idea (x) will not be enough to
absolve x of ethnocentrism. That kind of avoidance strategy, if we may call it that, errs by
making the wrong kind of argument. It is the deliberative or justificatory route by which one
arrives at x, and not x’s level of global popularity, that determines its ethnocentricity or lack
thereof.55 The fact that most people around the world believe something (e.g., that god exists) to
be true does not in any way rule out the possibility that I may come to believe it for culturally
biased reasons.
Furthermore, if, as suggested above, ethnocentrism is not simply a matter of believing in
the superiority (however one cashes this notion out) of one’s culture vis-à-vis foreign alternatives
– remember de Montaigne’s ethnocentric belief in the superiority of Native Brazilians! – but
rather a matter of how one reasons more generally, then, by implication, avoiding ethnocentrism
will not simply be a matter of denying or avoiding any such claim of superiority. The illusion
that this is so can stem not just from holding a Sumner-like definition of ethnocentrism, but also
from familiarity with the work of early twentieth-century cultural anthropologists who
influentially used the term to stigmatize an earlier generation of anthropologists that ranked
cultures (from “primitive” to “civilized”) according to a set of purportedly universal
developmental criteria. As a result of their influence, avoiding ethnocentrism has instinctively
come to be seen as a matter of denying the existence of any evaluative hierarchies between
cultures.56 But this is clearly inadequate if we accept the broader understanding of ethnocentrism
advanced here.
One can certainly see this kind of avoidance strategy still at work in popular culture, or at
least in prominent segments of it. As Allan Bloom famously observed in the 1980s (and it seems
no less true today), affirming the “equality” or “equal validity” of cultures has become a basic
standard of political correctness, one deeply linked to anxieties about ethnocentrism.57 And it
remains an employed strategy among theorists concerned to overcome the problem of
ethnocentrism in the context of human rights. For instance, in a book-length critique of the
pervasive “eurocentrism” of the modern human rights movement, Makau Mutua argues that in
order to transcend this shortcoming, “Proper human rights ought to assume that all cultures are
equal.”58 But on the analysis presented here, this strategy is misguided. Judgments of cultural
superiority may sometimes cause offence, or even harm.59 But that does not make them
54
See: Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: Notre
Dame University Press, 1994.), pp. 9-11.
55
This point is made forcefully by both Tasioulas [“International Law and the Limits of Fairness”, in
The European Journal of International Law, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 995-1006)] and Buchanan (2008,
pp. 44-45).
56
In their famous, “Statement on Human Rights,” [Ibid.] for example, the American Anthropological
Association, insisted that “respect for cultures” and their basic equality was the key to avoiding
ethnocentrism in the drafting of the yet-to-be-ratified Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
57
Bloom 1987.
58
Mutua 2002, pp. 109-111.
59
One of their possible harms may be a harm of “recognition”, i.e., a failure to see some group as it
19
ethnocentric, at least not in the cognitivist sense explored here. What matters in this respect is
how well-reasoned these judgments are, or turn out to be: that is, how responsible, fair, rigorous,
and sensitive to the actual evidence they are. An unthinking commitment to the “equality of
cultures”, or to some form of cultural relativism (a matter I shall discuss just below in Section
VII), is no guarantee against the influence of cultural bias on one’s judgment. Far from it: it may
itself be a product of such bias. Moreover, as I suggested just above, one can still be
recognizably ethnocentric while believing their culture to be (in one or more ways) equally as
good as, or even, like de Montaigne, worse than foreign alternatives.
One last issue is worth mentioning here. There is a strong temptation to understand
ethnocentrism as involving judgments of universal or at least cross-cultural scope. For instance,
in his insightful account (one that comes very close to the kind of account offered here), Martin
Hollis understands “the charge” of ethnocentrism to consist in the following claim: “that the
accused did unwarrantedly presume the truth of a universal proposition and/or its applicability to
persons of contrary opinion, such presumption being of cultural origin.”60 Hollis is not alone in
thinking that ethnocentrism involves making a universal claim of some kind. In his early but
influential article on the topic, Paul Taylor takes the same view.61 And in practice allegations of
ethnocentrism are nearly always targeted at universalist projects and claims – e.g., human rights
being a prime target – which likely fuels (and is fueled by) this widespread intuition. On a
historical note, this intuition, along with others, likely has a lot to do with the above-mentioned
fact that the allegation was first used to denounce theories of sociocultural evolutionism that, so
it was alleged, ethnocentrically used Western cultural beliefs and practices as lodestars of
progress for all societies. The result of this, I think, is that ethnocentrism is still commonly
thought to involve judgments of universal scope today.
But there is reason to resist this assumption. A judgment can be cognitively biased and, in
particular, ethnocentrically biased, even if it is non-universal in scope, or only about what “we”
ought to do “around here.” For instance, an American considering whether (specifically)
American homosexual couples should be granted the right to marry may nevertheless biasedly
decide against such a right. She may fail, say, to give a decent or fair hearing to arguments in
favor of the right because the religious subculture of which she is a member is radically against
it, or because mainstream culture is not supportive of such a right – bias (ii) above. Or, she may
reason in ways that are hindered by her limited cultural experience. Perhaps she’s never met a
homosexual couple before, or lived in a culture that accepts them, and so holds naïve or
delusional views about their lifestyle – bias (i) above. In any event, if this locally oriented
judgment can be as culturally biased as any other, it’s hard to see why it should not be able to
count as an instance of ethnocentrism. Indeed, on reflection I think it’s clear that it does. And so
sees itself. See: Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics
of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1994), pp. 25-73.
60
Hollis 1999, p. 31. (my emphasis).
61
See: Paul Taylor, “The Ethnocentric Fallacy” in, The Monist (1963), Vol. 47, No. 4, p. 565.
20
there is reason to hesitate before assuming, as many do, that ethnocentric judgment must be
universalist in scope or form.
One of the implications of broadening our view of the phenomenon in this way is that it
turns ethnocentrism into a more pervasive and insidious problem than it might otherwise seem. If
ethnocentrism, on reflection, can afflict our judgment both at home and abroad, then we now
have more to worry about, so to speak. Domestically oriented debates about marriage rights, gun
laws, and healthcare, are now as liable to be ridden by ethnocentrism as their internationally
oriented counterparts. This is, in fact, not a new idea. Even if it hasn’t been explicitly framed as
concern about “ethnocentrism” as such, anxiety about cultural bias “at home” – i.e., in the
context of locally oriented judgment – has an inarguably long history. For instance, Saint
Augustine saw our natural tendency to assimilate and dogmatically maintain the beliefs of those
around us as a dangerous obstacle to understanding not only what is true for others but also for
us (i.e., Catholic doctrine).62 And John Stuart Mill saw the same general danger in ethnocentrism.
What he called the “magical influence of custom” – the way in which customary social norms
naturally appear “self-evident and self-justifying” to their adherents – was, in his view, an
obstacle to any principled discussion of political morality, including that of On Liberty, which
was of limited scope since it only concerned the requirements of liberty amongst “civilized”
peoples.63 In any event, if we find that, on reflection, (cognitive) ethnocentrism afflicts beliefs of
varying scope, then we ought to follow Mill in thinking (and worrying) about ethnocentrism in
these more general terms. If we do follow Mill in this, as I believe we should, it means that
turning our judgment inwards, so to speak, and suspending belief about universal and crosscultural matters, will not serve as a complete remedy for ethnocentrism: the problem exists both
at home and abroad, as it were.
VII. ETHNOCENTRISM AND RELATIVISM
Before concluding, I want to briefly consider how the preceding analysis bears on our
understanding of the relationship between ethnocentrism and relativism. These notions have long
been associated with one another. A key historical reference point is, again, the work of early
twentieth century anthropologists. Many such anthropologists were “cultural relativists”, a
doctrine they linked to the notion of ethnocentrism in at least two ways.64 First, they considered
cultural relativism indispensable to understanding the problematic nature of ethnocentrism. And
second, they saw its recognition as crucial to avoiding ethnocentrism.65 I have already said
62
Saint Augustine, “Letter 93” in Letters (New York: New City Press, 2001), pp. 376-409.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
ed. S. Collini, p. 9.
64
Franz Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification” in Science (1887), Vol. 9, No. 229,
pp. 587-589; Herskovits 1948, pp. 63-78.
65
“[Cultural relativism] gives us the leverage to lift us out of the ethnocentric morass in which our
thinking about ultimate values has for so long bogged down” [Melville Herskovits, “Cultural Relativism
and Cultural Values” in Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism (New York: Random
63
21
something about the utility of cultural relativism (or rather ideas loosely associated with it) as a
method of avoidance. In particular, I denied that affirming the “equal validity of cultures” and/or
suspending one’s judgment about foreign societies hold much promise as methods of avoidance.
There is certainly much more to say about this second claim about avoidance, but in any event I
shall only focus on the first claim (about understanding) here.
Relativism comes in a bewildering variety of forms. And so it can be difficult to discuss
in general terms. However, if we focus on the doctrine of cultural relativism endorsed by the
anthropologists mentioned above, we can (very roughly) approximate its content in the following
way. According to cultural relativism, as I shall understand it, the truth is culturally variable; that
is, normative and descriptive facts fundamentally vary in accordance with cultural context.66
Moreover, the facts that hold in some cultural context are determined by the content of the
normative and descriptive beliefs that have broad currency in that culture. So, for example, if
capital punishment is widely believed to be permissible by some culture, then it will actually be
permissible in that culture; and if omnipotent divinities are widely thought to exist by some
society, then, for all intents and purposes, they will actually exist therein.
How does all of this bear on the issue of ethnocentrism? Well, from the point of view of
influential thinkers like Herskovits, ethnocentrism is dangerous precisely because it involves
making judgments of universal scope (e.g., capital punishment is universally wrong; divinities
are universally non-existent) that fly in the face of this cultural variability. More specifically, it
involves holding culturally local beliefs that are naturally absorbed through the process of
enculturation to be true cross-culturally, when in fact their local currency only guarantees their
local veracity. In other words, ethnocentrism, in this classical view, involves trying to understand
some foreign cultural reality by appealing to one’s limited cultural experience when more (i.e.,
consulting foreign beliefs and practices) is required: (i) the first type of ethnocentrism discussed
above. The key additional thought here, however, is that this kind of ethnocentric failure can
only really be grasped via the relativistic assumptions used to elucidate it here. And this is not
just an early twentieth-century idea; several contemporary thinkers claim this as well.67
There are, I think, a few reasons to resist this claim of indispensability. First of all, it is
clearly too strong. Cultural relativism, as I’ve understood it, gives us one way of grasping how
one’s limited cultural experience may not adequately prepare them for understanding foreign
cultural realities, but it is certainly not the only way. For instance, there is nothing relativistic
about the way I fleshed out this possibility above. There, I appealed to the straightforward idea
House, 1972), ed. Frances Herskovits, p 34] Also see e.g., Cook 1999, pp. 24-31, for an array of
references.
66
Note: For illustrative purposes, I am understanding relativism here strictly as a claim about truth,
i.e., not as a claim about justification, nor as one about the semantic analysis of sentences.
67
See: Lukes 2008, pp. ix-xi. And consider the following passage from Cook: “A moral judgment is
said to be the product of ethnocentrism if those making the judgment have failed to realize that a moral
principle cannot be stated in an entirely general way (e.g., “Rape is wrong”) but must be formulated in
such a way as to include a reference to the culture(s) that espouse the principle… Obviously, the term
“ethnocentrism” presupposes that the relativistic account of morality is correct.” (Cook 1999, pp. 80-81).
22
that special skills and knowledge are sometimes required for understanding foreign cultural
phenomena (i.e., acts, intentions, expressions, circumstances, etc.) – skills and knowledge not
likely to be obtained merely through lived experience in one’s home culture. The coherence and
plausibility of that explanation show that there is no basic need to frame the problem of
ethnocentrism on relativistic grounds in order to fully appreciate it.
The absence of such a need only becomes more obvious once we consider the other types
of ethnocentrism discussed above as well, i.e., types (ii) and (iii). For instance, we do not need to
appeal to relativistic assumptions at all in order to understand what might be problematic about
being dogmatically attached to culturally received opinion. The explanation I offered in the
previous section – which suggested that such dogmatism might irrevocably saddle us with false
beliefs – made no necessary recourse to relativism. Nor must we do so in order to see what might
be morally and epistemologically problematic about reasoning in ways that serve group interests.
Since these concerns are all perfectly intelligible on ordinary objectivist or “absolutist” grounds,
there is also no need to appeal to skepticism (nor even to the ethical doctrine of “pluralism”),68 as
some have suggested, in order to make full sense of these maladies.
There is a further reason why the indispensability claim should be rejected. For on closer
inspection, it becomes clear that cultural relativism is more naturally equipped to assuage
concerns about ethnocentrism than to motivate them. Consider, for instance, how difficult it is to
find fault in ethnocentrism if we adopt an assessor-based version of cultural relativism.
According to such a theory, whether or not some (descriptive or normative) fact holds for some
agent (or set thereof) will depend on whether that fact is generally believed to hold by the culture
of the assessor. This means that, for any given assessor, the truth will always be a reflection of
the beliefs that they assimilate through the process of enculturation. If, for example, my culture
rears me to believe that capital punishment is permissible, then it will indeed be permissible in
any context I care to consider, precisely because it is believed to be so by my (the assessor’s)
culture.
Thus, on this view, it becomes difficult to see how one’s limited cultural experience could
ever leave them ill equipped to understand any phenomenon at all, whether culturally foreign or
not. The truth will always be a function of the beliefs propagated through that experience.
Moreover, it also now becomes difficult to see how dogmatic deference to the received opinion
of one’s culture could in fact count as a bias – so long as we consider that term, as I do, to
indicate that some basic epistemic responsibility has been shirked. Since assimilating the beliefs
of one’s culture (without even considering alternatives) is on this view a superb way of accessing
the truth, that kind of cognitive process is unlikely to count as a bias or a problem in this
instance. It will instead look more like the epistemically responsible thing to do. Ironically, it is
very hard to get worries about ethnocentric bias going on this view.
The brand of cultural relativism that is usually appealed to by cultural relativists who
condemn ethnocentrism is slightly different from this, however. The usual idea is not that the
facts that apply to (or “hold” for) some agent are determined by the culture of the assessor, but
68
See e.g., Tasioulas 2012; Buchanan 2008.
23
that they are determined by the agent’s own culture. That is, the relevant doctrine is an agentbased form of relativism, according to which the (descriptive or normative) facts that hold for
some agent (or set thereof) will depend on whether they are generally believed to hold by the
culture of the agent in question. On this view, a culture’s established judgments (e.g., its “moral
code” and/or its broader system of belief) have only local authority, since they determine the
facts that hold for members of the culture in question and no one else.69
In this case, the process of enculturation is not similarly guaranteed to steer our judgment
right, at least not in all instances of inquiry. If one’s aim is to apprehend (normative or
descriptive) truths that apply in one’s own culture, then a reliance only on one’s limited cultural
experience, or a biased deference to culturally received opinion, will again be unproblematic,
since this will align one’s thought with the beliefs that dictate the facts in question. But if, on the
other hand, one’s aim is to understand what is true for other cultures, then the process of
enculturation will have aligned their judgment with the wrong set of beliefs (unless of course the
belief systems of both cultures are the same). Thus, by contrast with the previous form of
relativism, the epistemic risks of ethnocentrism reappear on this account, but their presence
depends on the scope of one’s inquiry.
In this way, cultural relativists are certainly not self-deluded if and when they speak out
against ethnocentrism and emphasize the risks it poses for cross-cultural judgment, provided they
adopt something like this agent-based view. But the necessarily limited scope of their
condemnation is significant. On their view it will be difficult to find fault with ethnocentrism as
a way of forming and maintaining beliefs about culturally local affairs, as Mill and Augustine
did. These common anxieties are not logically available to the cultural relativist, or at least not
obviously so.
Nor, famously, can cultural relativists make easy sense of the moral hazards traditionally
associated with ethnocentrism. The early cultural anthropologists that I mentioned above
frequently warned against the arrogance, interventionism, and intolerance that might be fostered
by ethnocentric misperceptions of other cultures.70 These are valid concerns. But it is not clear
how a commitment to cultural relativism is compatible with such normative pleas for universal
tolerance and non-intervention. After all, the bindingness of the norm of toleration for any given
agent will depend on the content of her culture’s system of beliefs (or its “moral code”), which
leaves the universal bindingness of any such demand vulnerable to the existence of intolerant
and interventionist cultures, of which many examples can be provided.71
Recognizing that one can be worried about ethnocentrism in the absence of any
commitment to cultural relativism is important for at least two reasons. First, it shows that the
problem of ethnocentrism is a persistent one. It represents a cogent concern from the point of
view of a number of very different fundamental assumptions in metaethics, metaphysics, and
69
For a contemporary example of this kind of relativism, or at least something close to it, see: David
Velleman, Foundations for Moral Relativism (Open Book Publishers, 2013), Ch. 4.
70
See e.g., American Anthropological Association 1947; Renteln 1988.
71
This is a widely noted inconsistency, and defined as the “anthropologist’s heresy” in Williams 1972,
pp. 20-22.
24
epistemology. And second, it shows that undermining the plausibility of cultural relativism (or
“responding to the relativist”) will not on its own serve as an adequate response to concerns
about ethnocentrism, as is sometimes assumed.72 Indeed, in many ways, as I’ve shown, worries
about ethnocentric deliberation have their securest foundation in straightforwardly objectivist
conceptions of truth and/or justification, and so casting doubt on the philosophical plausibility of
cultural relativism will not make the problem seem any less grave; it will likely do the opposite.
VIII. CONCLUSION
This article offers an account of the nature of ethnocentrism. In fact, it offers more than
one: ethnocentrism is both a moral and a cognitive phenomenon. Sorting out the nature of
ethnocentrism has important benefits. As I’ve argued above, it helps us form a clearer
understanding of how prevalent ethnocentrism is – of where and when we need to worry about it.
It gives us a sharper understanding of why ethnocentrism is a problem or a source of concern in
the first place. In the case of cognitive forms of ethnocentrism, which have been my focus, we
know that the concern is first and foremost epistemic – i.e., that ethnocentrism impairs our ability
to form justified, and ultimately true, beliefs about the world. As such, ethnocentrism can be
understood as one epistemic hazard, “burden of judgment,”73 or source of error among many.
Certainly, these epistemic concerns have moral dimensions as well, and many very important
ones. For instance, to take just one example, as Miranda Fricker has insightfully pointed out,
there can be something uniquely unjust, insulting, and harmful about dogmatically adhering to
the word of “insiders” and automatically dismissing of judgment of “outsiders” – bias (ii) above
– a phenomenon with which we are all too familiar, whether the relevant boundaries are cultural,
social, religious, or political.74 Surely there is much more to be said about the various moral
considerations at issue here, on another occasion.
The question of how to avoid ethnocentrism, and of whether this is even possible, is to a
large extent one for psychologists and social scientists. All I have done here is point out some of
the general conceptual implications of the preceding analysis for the question of avoidance. Let
me conclude by highlighting two more implications of this sort. First, given the diversity of the
phenomenon as I’ve described it here, there is unlikely to be a single blanket fix for
ethnocentrism. It is common for philosophers concerned about the ethnocentricity of, say, the
human rights movement, to zero in on one “big fix,” as it were – e.g., intercultural dialogue, or
sound institutional procedure.75 These grand proposals are valuable and important, but theorists
72
This technique is widely employed. See, e.g., Donnelly 2003, Ch. 6; Griffin 2008, Ch. 7; Nussbaum
2000, Ch. 1; and James Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights: Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell,
2007), Ch. 11.
73
The term is from John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), pp. 54-58.
74
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
75
See e.g., Tasioulas 2012, p. 31; Buchanan 2008, pp. 46-49; Griffin 2008, p. 211; Jeffrey Flynn,
25
should also bear in mind that a vice as multifaceted as ethnocentrism is likely to require a
plurality of fine-tuned solutions rather than one big one. For instance, if our understanding of
some foreign culture is hampered by our limited cultural experience, then we may need to gather
firsthand experience of that culture in order to compensate; mere dialogical exposure to the
views and arguments of foreigners may not be enough. And in the absence of such knowledge or
experience the crucial thing may be to suspend belief about the culture in question, rather than
rush into any hasty judgment. If, on the other hand, we are trying to break out of a dogmatic
attachment to cultural beliefs, then we may need other fixes. These might include consideration
of alternative narratives about the cultural heritage of some belief or practice.76 Or it may be that
intensive personal reflection, or discussion with a trusted and tactful interlocutor from one’s own
group (i.e., intra-cultural dialogue), is what does the trick.77 And if one is trying to avoid
entrapment in prejudices motivated by a group interest in power, then it may be imaginative
effort – i.e., effort to sympathetically “see things” from another point of view, perhaps through
personal engagement with art or literature – that will evoke the necessary change.78 At the very
least, what is clear is that we can only benefit from taking a more piecemeal and fine-grained
approach to the question of avoidance.
Second, on the account offered here, how likely is it that ethnocentrism is, in the end,
avoidable? The answer, I think, is that there is a sense in which it is avoidable and a sense in
which it isn’t. If we understand ethnocentrism as a species of cognitive bias – a bias that involves
shirking some basic epistemic responsibility – its avoidability ultimately depends on how
stringent or demanding our understanding of our epistemic responsibilities is. If the general
content of these responsibilities boils down to something like “doing everything reasonably
within one’s power” to seek out and fairly interpret the evidence relevant to whatever question
one is trying to answer, then ethnocentrism is clearly avoidable. An American who travels to
India and assumes that homosexuality is openly accepted there simply because she sees so many
men holding hands, would qualify as ethnocentric on such an account; it is reasonable to expect
her to have done more evidence gathering – and in particular, to have found out whether hand
holding between men has the same sexual connotations in India as it does in her home culture
(which it does not) – before forming any such conclusion. But many judgments will not count as
ethnocentric on this picture of our epistemic responsibilities. For instance, a member of an
uncontacted tribe in the Amazon forest with no knowledge of modern technology (and no easy
way of gaining such knowledge) who sees an airplane flying overhead and, after careful
consideration, takes it to be a rare species of bird would not be ethnocentric on such an account:
Reframing the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Approach (New York:
Routledge, 2014); Amartya Sen, “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights” in Philosophy and Public
Affairs (2004), Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 348-355.
76
See: Rao idem.
77
On this last possibility, see: Haidt 2012, pp. 48, 312-313.
78
On the uses of imagination, see: Martha Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming
the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), Ch. 5, pp. 139-187.
26
what more can we reasonably expect of him or her? Perhaps their judgment is “ethnocentric” in
light of the sheer limitations of their cultural circumstances – perhaps there is no concept of
airplane in their society, making it impossible for them to correctly identify what they are seeing
– but not because of any fault or ethnocentric bias of their own.
On the other hand, if the content of our epistemic responsibilities is understood in more
demanding terms, terms not as limited by thoughts about what epistemic agents can “reasonably”
or “feasibly” be expected to do or believe – if they are modeled, say, on the abilities of an ideal
agent that can transcend the natural encumbrances of cultural membership – then this changes
things quite a bit. It’s far less likely, on such a view, that ethnocentrism is ever entirely avoidable
and practically inevitable that we will fall victim to cognitive biases of various sorts. Surely, the
Amazonian tribesperson would qualify as ethnocentric on such an account; their judgment is
blatantly inattentive to knowledge and evidence that a culturally unencumbered agent would no
doubt hold in view. That doesn’t mean that ethnocentrism cannot at least be mitigated on such an
account, and perhaps that’s how the task of avoiding ethnocentrism should be approached on this
general picture of our epistemic responsibilities: as one of mitigation rather than transcendence.
When Rorty deems ethnocentrism an “inescapable condition” on account of something as
basic as our “human finitude” – i.e., our inability to “rise above the historical contingencies that
filled our minds with the words and beliefs they presently contain” – he is drawing on a highly
demanding picture of what our epistemic responsibilities are, or of what it would mean to reason
or judge in a non-biased manner.79 If “climbing out of our minds”80 and holding every one of our
beliefs up to perfectly impartial scrutiny from some (acultural, ahistorical, and omniscient)
Archimedean vantage point is what we think it takes to properly avoid ethnocentric bias, then
clearly our model of justification is not constrained by facts about what epistemic agents can
reasonably and/or feasibly achieve in the world as it is. Perhaps it should be. Either way, all I
want to point out here is how much this question matters in determining the avoidability of
ethnocentrism. And even if we cannot entirely settle that question here, hopefully we at least
now have a better idea of what it is that needs avoiding in the first place.
79
80
Rorty 1991, pp. 14-15.
Idem.
27