Is culture a good, or an entity that shapes the good?

Where our textbook's chapters have been consistently engaging is in the way new realms of communication ethics, from interpersonal to organizational, have introduced new wrinkles to the formula we started with. In all disciplines, there's the need to recognize the other, accept the multiplicity of goods in our postmodern historical moment, concede that no good is inherently more right than others, and adhere to an objective of pragmatic learning. In organizational ethics, we follow these guidelines as they move forward a communal narrative that both influences and repurposes individual goods. In public and private discourse ethics, we use these guidelines as a means to maintain neutrality and foster discovery on different communicative stages. And in intercultural communication ethics, we place the culture of another--the inarticulate influence of history and experience on "standard" behavior in the now--as the good in a dialogue. Thus, the wrinkle that intercultural ethics places on our formula for respectful, educational interaction is that cultures, unlike the substantive and subordinate goods we started this semester with, cannot be assumed to be of equal ethical importance to one another (Arnett et al. 155). Unlike the usual goods, which equally forward our objective of pragmatic learning, the influence that culture wields on an individual or community varies. Cultures are not equally important in communicative space because the goods people exercise are not always, and not equally, built upon culture.

It took me awhile to parse what this idea, which opens Chapter 9, means for our real-life communication with someone from a different culture. Arnett et al. say that "a given good" is "culture itself," but also say, "Our communication ethics responsibility is to learn about other cultures without presupposing that each culture is simply equal in ethical importance to another" (155). If we are to equate one's culture with one's good, isn't it going against communication ethics theory to treat these goods as more or less important than each other? I think it's dangerous to treat culture as the good itself, as the authors suggest. Rather, we should include culture as a governing aspect of our pragmatic learning, recognizing the good of another as a distinct entity but also recognizing the possibility that this good was borne from culture, "the unreflective home of the communicative practices of a people" (159). Cultures aren't equally important in the sense that they don't influence the goods people exercise by the same degree universally. However, we can recognize the existence of one's culture, and the role it may have played in developing their goods, in any interaction, and we should: I can't think of a more effective way to learn about another's culture, the very goal of intercultural communication ethics, than by understanding their good(s) as a product of that culture. Therefore, I think it could be more valuable to think of one's culture as its own entity in dialogic space, rather than equivalent to the good. Our authors suggest the opposite, before contradicting their oft-repeated message of how goods should be treated with equal reverence in communicative space.