Moral Isolationism In Trying Out One's New Sword

In Mary Midgley's Trying Out One's New Sword, she explains that moral isolationism "Consists in simply denying that we can never understand any culture except our own well enough to make judgments about it. Midgley argues that not only is moral isolationism incorrect, it is logically incoherent. She explains that the people who take up this idea of moral isolationism think that it is being respectful to other cultures and societies but you cannot claim to be respectful to something that is “unintelligible” to you. To illustrate her argument, she describes the Samurai practice of trying out one’s new sword. To avoid dishonor, the swords of Samurais had to be able to slice through a person in one stroke. To assure that his sword could do so, …show more content…
Outsiders can, in fact, judge foreign cultures. These judgments will be provisional and limited in scope, but they can still be fair. In particular, she cites the judgments made by anthropologists as a paradigmatic example. Moral isolationism is thus simply wrong about the matter.
Second, if moral isolationism is true, it ought to preclude both positive and negative judgments of foreign cultures. However, it seems that we can legitimately praise certain aspects of foreign culture. For example, it seems that we understand the Samurai well enough to praise their discipline and loyalty. Therefore, once one had understanding of a culture, one can blame or praise it.
Midgely was able to introduce the important distinctions between judgments – two judgments – one talking about being ‘crude’ and one talking about judgment itself. She also pointed out that “there is much that we don’t understand in our culture too.” (Midgely) In this kind of thinking, we allow ourselves conclude that we cannot judge within our culture we still don’t