The Enculteration Thesis
     The enculteration thesis, as I understand it, is the theory that claims that an individual moral values are a product of his/her culture and nothing more.  A person born in India will have the values of that culture, while a person born in Great Britain will have the values of that culture.  It goes further, by claiming that these values are theory laden and rest on unquestioned foundational premises of each respective culture.  These cultural moral axioms are often in conflict with the moral axioms of another culture.  The relativist solution is to say that each set of axioms is true relative to each respective culture, but not true in any broader, absolute sense. 
     That is not my opinion of the matter.  I believe that each culture possesses some general moral values, but these represent a mix between what the culture has learned and some unquestioned basic beliefs that come from basically nowhere.  Further, cultures do not evolve in a vacuum.  Their moral theories are a response to their environments.  Because of this, some cultures may be more evolved than others.  A person born in India will have the values of that culture, but those values are the product of life in that environment.  It is possible for one culture to stagnate morally and remain unchanged for uncounted centuries while another goes through great and much needed evolution.  With respect to the enculteration thesis in particular, one should not underestimate the impact of the individual's own contribution to his/her own values from personal experience and reflection.  I would say that there are three different sources of influence on a person's values.  1) Their religion (which is culturally determined), 2) their personal experience, and 3) their philosophy or discipline of thought (which may or may not be culturally influenced, but is by no means strictly a product of culture).  These areas sometimes overlap, so that there can be philosophy of religion, or experience of religion, etc...  
Long Live Socrates and the Eternal Search for Truth.  Death to Relativism in all its hideous guises.
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