From the podcast, Dr. Bezio discussed assumptions and some of the causes and effects. Assumptions are certainly something that is unavoidable regardless of who you are. I believe most people make assumptions to rationalized the actions of the people around them with. This is more specific to individual assumptions, but socially it’s more apparent. Cultures are a lot more concrete than people, meaning the qualities that make up a society are easier to point out than individual people. We make assumptions based upon our own experience in our own culture and compare it to the actions of another. For Americans, a majority of our cultural practices are directly tied to Western European nations which strongly derives from Judeo-Christian values. Our opinions are completely derived from subjectivity which I believe correlates back to the reading we did on ethics.
In the first reading we did, we went over the concepts of cognitivists and noncognitivists. Cognitivitsts believe there are moral arguments and noncognitivists believe that there are no moral arguments. The noncognitivist line of thinking I believe correspondence directly to the idea of assumptions. We make assumptions based upon our culture. Culture can derive many different levels from a national identity to a small social group. Nevertheless, we can’t necessarily say that one culture’s practices are right or wrong. We may disagree with them, but we cannot morally argue that they or right or wrong because it’s based on subjectivity. Therefore, assumptions are subjective in nature and cannot have any moral truth.
I agree that assumptions are subjective and can’t have any moral truth in most scenarios. However, when we make an assumption for the sake of our argument, in the context of that argument I believe that we can assign our assumptions moral values.
I agree that the distinction between cultures and individuals is important to note. Our inclination is to simplify our perception of others, so that we can better keep track of everything that we see and experience in the world. We want to put each other into very rigid boxes. For example, we might assign character traits to a person by deciding that they are shy, athletic, charismatic, cynical, etc. This approach ignores the fact that people’s actions don’t always adhere to a strict set of characteristics. For example, a typically shy person can be fun and outgoing in certain settings. In this sense, humans often perceive each other as sort of oversimplified archetypes or characters, rather than incredibly nuanced and dynamic individuals. Group associations make it easier for us to place people into these categories and make snap judgements.