Diana asked:

How would Plato view the cultural defense and why?

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The following is an extract from 'Considering the "Cultural Defense": Immigrants, Gender, Race, and
Criminal Law' by Jennifer Haejoo Lee (currently online at
http://www.law.columbia.edu/crenshaw/Conference/JENNIFER%20LEE.htm):

On Sept. 7, 1987, Jian Wan Chen's husband smashed her skull with a claw hammer after she
allegedly admitted to having an affair. Chen's body was discovered by her teenage son in the family's
Brooklyn apartment. In March, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Pincus sentenced Jian's
husband to 5 years probation on a reduced manslaughter charge. After hearing the testimony of a
Hunter College anthropologist, the judge concluded that Dong Lu Chen, a recent immigrant, was
driven to violence by traditional Chinese values about adultery and loss of manhood.

The ruling sent shock waves through the Asian-American community last spring, and prompted calls
for an end to the use of the so-called "cultural defense" in felony trials. Asian and women's groups
quickly banded together to challenge the ruling, saying it "endangered women in general and
immigrant women in particular"...

The implication of your question is that Plato, who in his moral philosophy was steadfastly opposed to
the moral relativism of the Sophists, would have taken a very different line on the cultural defence
than, say, Protagoras, the most famous of all the Sophists:

Of all things a measure is a person — of the things that are, that they are; of the things that
are not, that they are not.
Jonathan Barnes The Presocratic Philosopherspara. 491, p. 541.

(I have substituted 'person' for 'man' in Jonathan Barnes' translation from the Ancient Greek, for
obvious reasons.)

You don't have to be a moral relativist to defend the cultural defence. Consider another legal defence
that gained notoriety some years ago, the Twinkie defence. Depressed after hearing that he is to lose
his job (I am making this case story up, but it could have been true) a man spends his lunch break
eating several packs of Twinkies (a nauseatingly sweet snack which sadly one cannot get in the UK).
Back at work, he grabs the nearest heavy utensil, and you can guess the rest. In court, his defence is
that the massive increase in his blood sugar level was the cause of his uncharacteristic rage, and the
judge accepts his plea of diminished responsibility.

A Western moral absolutist ought to view the cultural defence in a similar way to the Twinkie defence.
Indoctrination from childhood in a false value system which places disproportionate emphasis on the
evil of female infidelity to the point of exonerating (or appearing to exonerate) male violence, is
sufficient ground for claiming diminished responsibility. Because of his distorted sense of values, Jian
Wan Chen's husband was not in a position clearly to evaluate the rights or wrongs of his murderous
action.

I don't think that it is a very persuasive defence. But then the Twinkie defence was not much good
either.

I am far more suspicious of the moral relativist view of the cultural defence. This would be that taking
into account the moral standpoint of Jian Wan Chen's husband, killing her was the right thing to do.
Our own repugnance to such an act merely reflects our different moral standpoint. We have no moral
right to impose our moral values on someone who holds different moral values. I'm no Platonist, but I
am frightened that some people might be sufficiently muddle-headed about moral issues to think this
way.

Geoffrey Klempner