Should We Do as the Romans Do?

Analyzing how companies can think about this

Dipali Gupta
3 min readJul 15, 2020
Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

The expression “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” suggests that when someone is in a foreign country he/she should abide by the customs of that country. This view would be supported by cultural relativists as it articulates the fundamental view of cultural relativism. According to cultural relativism, no culture is superior to another. Consequently, truth itself is relative and is dependent on the cultural context and the moral codes of a society, making every cultural belief valid. This view is especially favorable for companies doing business abroad because if they do not follow the local traditions they can forgo business opportunities to profit from.

However, this view is invalid and there are several reasons to be skeptical of this view. This view is invalid because just because people have different beliefs it does not logically follow that there is no truth about what actually is. For example, just because people believed that the world was flat did not make it true. This view also implies that we cannot claim that slavery or genocide is wrong because the test for right and wrong is what society happens to believe. Thus, slavery before the 20th century was right because people believed that it was right. This view also suggests that we cannot make sense of moral progress because what…

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Dipali Gupta

Native New Yorker. @Georgetown Hoya. Currently @hubspot. Formerly @linkedin For NYC Politics content subscribe at: https://metromosaic.substack.com/