The Origin of Regulation

            Within “Ethics and Religion; Moral Relativism”, the author compares the diversity in different cultures’ ethical views to the diversity in the rules of various sports. However, this analogy does not seem to be entirely accurate. The author claims that even though different sports have different rules, there are common rules within each game that are taken for granted, citing examples like being forbidden to use assassins or being forbidden to use explosives (14). However, many of these larger rules are taken for granted because they belong to a higher code than that of the individual sport. For instance, the rule of being forbidden to throw explosives at the other team is taken for granted because it comes from the legal system rather than from the game itself. If a player purposefully killed another player during a game, they would not simply receive a yellow card, they would be arrested.

            This does not relate to the subject of cultural morality, since there is currently no set of rules or enforcement above it. Every rule that is shared by multiple cultures is decided upon by each of those cultures individually. If, for example, every single country claims that murder is illegal, every one of those countries actively chooses to put that law in place, without a larger authority enforcing it. One could object by claiming that cultures like America have a tendency to enforce their own laws within other cultures, though even in that case America is not in control because it’s more ethically enlightened, or because its views hold more moral weight; it maintains its control through force. Ultimately, the commonalities within different sports are predetermined and preserved by a higher force, while this higher force does not exist among different cultures, making the author’s analogy ineffective.