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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
in good faith that demonstrate the tenacity of traditional beliefs, how-
ever erroneous, in the life of certain individuals.
To account for the fact that these statements may be true for some
and false for others, I have found useful Spiro’s definition of belief.
Spiro ( 1987 a, 163 – 165 ) defines a belief as a proposition or a state-
ment that is held to be true by the members of a society. The proposi-
tion may be about oneself or about other entities, whatever they may
happen to be, fellow human beings, God, spirit, atoms, or germs. In
other words, to hold a proposition as true is to believe. Beliefs held to
be true may belong to any realm of experience: science, politics, econ-
omy, religion, or another body of theoretical and/or practical knowl-
edge. To live with others and to conduct one’s professional activity one
has to hold certain propositions as true. No one is not a believer and
“the role of the ‘will to believe’ in the acceptance of scientific ideas is
as prominent as the role that William James attributed to it in the ac-
ceptance of religious doctrines” (Spiro 1987 b, 103 ). To hold beliefs
with others in a society or in a professional body is to share with oth-
ers a worldview and an ethos.
Spiro further distinguishes various degrees of belief. To learn about
an assertion that someone or something exists is a first level of be-
lief. To understand the meaning of that assertion is a second level of
belief. To believe that the proposition is “true, correct or right” is a
third level of belief (Spiro 1987 a, 164 ). To act upon this assertion is
a fourth level of belief. The statements held as true are then “genu-
ine beliefs, rather than cultural cliché” (Spiro 1987 a, 164 ). The fifth,
deeper level of belief, involves a deep emotional attachment to these
truths. One’s life is then lived as the emotionally satisfying enactment,
as a member of a group, of a set of propositions that one knows, un-
derstands, and holds as conforming to the way things are and/or ought
to be. The interaction described above between myself and a student
illustrates that we were behaving on the basis of assumptions or prop-
ositions learned from aboriginal peoples, in a manner that was sat-
isfying to us.
The analytical value of Spiro’s conceptual framework allows us to
distinguish between contemporary Native North Americans and Euro–
North Americans according to their degree of familiarity with aborig-
inal propositions or beliefs. Irrespective of their ancestry, individuals
