Do you believe that men and women think differently? How do you know? If so, to what do you attribute the difference—nature, education, or choice?

Philosophy, Sex, Race, and Culture

1. Do you believe that men and women think differently? How do you know? If so, to what do you attribute the difference—nature, education, or choice?

2. Do you believe that members of different races think differently? How do you know? If so, to what do you attribute this difference— nature, education, or choice?

3. When you describe yourself (notably, to yourself), with what do you most closely identify—your nationality, your neighborhood, your social class, your sex, the people you love, your race, your beliefs, your achievements or ambitions, or still something else? Of what importance to your self-identity are the features you chose not to mention?

4. What makes one culture different from another? How is it possible to translate a practice or a belief from one culture into another? Do you believe that all cultures could understand one another, if only they learned to “speak the same language”?

5. Why do you think it is that white males have so dominated Western cultural life?

6. Before the legal abolition of slavery, was it morally legitimate to own slaves? Why or why not?

7. In India, some wives have been expected to share the funeral pyre with their just-departed husbands. In what terms is it possible for us to criticize or object to such a practice? In some parts of Africa, even very recently, young women have been expected to undergo the painful operation of clitoridectomy. In what terms is it possible for us to criticize or object to such a practice? In many countries today, infant boys (or, sometimes, young men) are expected to undergo the painful operation of circumcision. In what terms would you criticize or defend such a practice?