Descriptive and Normative Cultural Relativism

A Critique of Normative Cultural Relativism

The Incommensurability Thesis

On the Notion of Human Well-being

In Defense of Cultural Universalism

Distinguishing Cultural from Human Values

Human Nature and Human Values

On the Notion of the Common Good

The Universality of the Philosophical Attitude

Conclusion

Imagine a group of people—men, women, and children—in some natural environment, or a group of people who find themselves in a particular geographic space in the wake of, say, a shipwreck or a disaster of some sort, or in pursuit of a sheer determination to relocate in order to fulfill certain existential needs. Imagine, also, that these people come from different lineages or ethnic backgrounds, related to one another by both kinship and non-kinship ties. Now they have come or been coerced to live a settled life. They will immediately feel the need to evolve a shared life and establish a social framework within which they can function as human beings. To fulfill this need, they will evolve certain values, practices, institutions—in short, common forms or ways of life. They will nurture certain values, practices, meanings, and other symbols concomitant to a shared life. When these values and practices come in the course of time to gain currency in their patterns of thought and ways of acting and behaving, they would not only guide and influence their life, but in many ways they would come to condition their behavior. A social, conceptual, and normative framework would have thus emerged, embodying the people’s way of life in its totality: this framework would be the culture of the people. Culture is thus an enactment of a community of people, created and fashioned in response to the whole gamut of problems or questions that arise in the context of a people’s particular situation. The problems or questions themselves are universal, even though the approaches to dealing with them may be particular or specific, and may differ from society to society.

Thus, there may be different approaches to dealing with the problems of material existence—problems of providing food, clothing, shelter, and other material needs. The kind of food, shelter, and clothing that would be provided would be greatly influenced or even determined by climatic or environmental factors and by the knowledge and skills available to a particular group of people, and these in their different ways would in turn influence the techniques of obtaining food, the style of architecture, the type of preferable clothing material (for instance, winter clothing cannot sensibly be used in the tropics) and the style of dress that would be fashioned. There may be different approaches to dealing with the ordering of human relations engendered by different conceptions of both human nature and the nature of human society and how these (conceptions) are to be realized or made explicit in concrete social structures.

A social structure may be evolved that stresses the primacy of the status of the individual vis-a-vis that of the community, or that stresses the ontological priority of the community over the individual, or that sees the two (i.e., the individual and the community) as of equal moral standing. An organized human society would require the creation of political principles, systems, and institutions to deal with matters of governance, just as it would require—and so would have to develop—legal and moral codes in order to regulate the behavior of the members of the society and to bring about social stability, harmony, and peace. To deal with the problem of communicating with one another, language would be developed. Artistic forms, such as music and dance, would emerge as ways not only of expressing their creative talents but also of communicating their thoughts and feelings. The group’s perceptions or experiences of the universe might in time lead to questions about its origin and the postulation of some ultimate being (or beings) beyond the universe as the foundation of the universe and the establishment of a worshipful attitude to this being: herein lies the beginnings of religion.

The human capacity to wonder—a capacity that is universal—may give rise to two different attitudes: one is superstitious leading to beliefs and presuppositions that can hardly be rationally and scientifically grounded; the other is rational leading to beliefs and explanations that can be grounded in reason. The rational attitude leads some individuals in various cultures to raise fundamental questions about human experience. This engages philosophical reflection, a central part of which is metaphysical relating to a theory about the nature of being or existence. Thus, every culture produces dogmas concerning the human soul and its destiny and the existence of some ultimate being. The activity of wonder can lead to the creation of myths and fictional tales that serve as vehicles for abstract thought. Every culture abounds in philosophically oriented myths and tales; but these may differ in their meaning and purpose. All these approaches are responses to the varied experiences of a people; they are ways of negotiating the problems and enigmas encountered in human life. In many ways the problems, questions or perplexities that worry human beings can be seen as universal, even though answers or responses to them by various societies may differ. But it must be borne in mind that the original, as well as ultimate aim in creating culture—whether material or mental—is human well-being.

In evolving and nurturing approaches or solutions to deal with the variety of problems or questions affecting their social, moral, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual well-being, a group of people in fact creates a culture: the approaches or solutions nurtured over time mature as features of the culture. Even so, I do not imply by any means that the culture created or evolved by a people is to be perceived as a homogeneous culture that features a monolithic set of ideas, feelings, outlooks, or world-views. On the contrary, there are interminable debates and conversations even within the same culture. Often these derive from the exercise of the creative capacities and endowments of the participants of the culture. They may reflect as well the different ways in which individuals or groups of the present or successive generations respond to the various experiences they encounter as participants of the culture. Given the different conceptions individuals generally hold about human nature, society, and the world, these debates and conversations are inevitable, but can be also appropriate and fruitful. In the absence of the dynamic debates, conversations, as well as struggles internal to a culture, that culture becomes stunted, losing its vibrancy and buoyancy. Indeed, the growth of a human culture, its capacity to avoid atrophy, decadence, and dysfunction and to adapt itself to new situations and demands is due to fresh ideas and orientations that follow upon such debates and struggles. This said, however, we must recognize that the organizational and functional structure of a human society derives from this thing called culture. This fact suggests the conviction that some degree of convergence on some basic values and practices of a culture would be inevitable if human society is at all to function and human life is to flourish.

There is no denying that there would be—and in fact indeed

are—diversities in the elements and features of cultures created by human beings. These diversities merely reflect the approaches or solutions fashioned by a particular society to the various problems or questions posed for it by climate and environment, and the normative and conceptual framework desired by a group of people. They reflect also the aesthetic endowments of the members of a group. Different social contexts spawn diverse cultural values, practices, and institutions, even though I believe that the diversity among human cultures is often exaggerated. Some scholars interpret cultural diversity as leading to relativism. The kind of relativism I am concerned with in this lecture is cultural relativism, which must include the relativity of moral values. (Moral relativism is an offshoot of cultural relativism, the reason being that, since any morality contains elements of custom, convention, and practice which clearly are among the main constituents of culture, it follows that cultural relativism entails moral relativism.) Cultural relativism denies the universality or objectivity of cultural values. It asserts that values are relative to particular cultures in the sense that values held by a particular society or culture are true and valid for that culture or society. In consequence, any culturally dominant conception of the good is as valid as any other, there being no single or common culture-neutral (or transcultural) standard by which the various goods or values can be evaluated.

A CRITIQUE OF NORMATIVE CULTURAL RELATIVISM

The two different cultural systems can be judged against certain backgrounds, the ultimate background being, to my mind, the possibilities each can exude for enhancing human well-being. Advocates of normative relativism imply that ‘ anything goes.’ In maintaining such a position, they betray themselves as uncritical celebrants of difference, an attitude that I argue cannot be defended on moral or functional grounds. It cannot be defended morally because it appreciates factors that may be deleterious to human well-being; nor can it be defended on functional or practical grounds because it appreciates factors or characteristics the pursuit of which cannot assist the achievement of the practical goals—social, economic, political, and so on—that a culture is created to achieve.

Second, the position of normative relativism to disallow evaluation of cultures is vulnerable to criticism. The arguments for disallowing evaluation of other cultures are, as I see it, threefold. One argument is that, since the values and practices of each culture or society are valid for that society or culture, any attempt by someone outside that culture to evaluate it would be irrelevant, otiose, inconsequential, and an unjustified interference. Another argument involves challenging the basis of anyone’s claim to understand other cultures beyond his own. Since, as the relativist argument goes, it is impossible for an ‘outsider’ to fully appreciate the nuances of the meanings and symbols of a different cultural system, there would be no basis for anyone’s judging and evaluating another culture. A further argument, which is a corollary of the one just stated, is that, since an ‘outsider’ would have no real basis for evaluating another—alien—culture, any attempt on their part to do so would always and unavoidably be conditioned by their own background values and beliefs. This would result in a necessary distortion of the judgements that would be made as these can only reflect the ‘outsider’s’ own cultural norms and perspectives. Let us briefly look at these arguments.

It would be correct to aver that the values and practices of human cultures are created with a view, originally, to enhancing human well-being generally. This is a basic presupposition in creating a culture, even though we know that, due to several factors that include human limitations and lack of foresight, some of the values and practices turn out to be malignant and dysfunctional. But what this generally means is that whether or not a cultural value or practice maintained by a particular society is valid depends on the consequences for human well-being of the pursuit of that practice or value. The underlying functionalist thrust here cannot at all be disregarded in view of the fact that the values, practices, and institutions of a society (moral, social, political, aesthetic, etc.) are established for some purpose, to serve some function, such as the achievement of social harmony or human flourishing. The fact that a value or practice is upheld by a particular culture does not seem to be a good reason for considering it as valid and off-limits to criticism or evaluation by others outside that culture. Thus, if the pursuit of a particular cultural value turns out to be detrimental to basic human interests and well-being—if it derogates human fulfillment—the fact that it is maintained by a particular society cannot redeem or vindicate it, for a belief or practice even if maintained by an entire society could be wrong from some point of view, such as one that pays adequate regard to human values or welfare. It is worth noting that it is possible for a society, held in thrall by either its atavistic values and sensibilities or the moral incapacities of its members, to be almost totally oblivious to certain pernicious beliefs or practices of its culture, notwithstanding the deleterious consequences for human well-being of the pursuit of such beliefs and practices.

People outside a particular culture who may look at the beliefs or practices of that culture with disapproval may be doing so on the basis of other considerations than the peculiarities of their own culture (or cultures); indeed their own culture (or cultures) may even be pursuing those same pernicious beliefs or practices. Even so, their critical attitude to features of another culture (or other cultures) should not be rejected with the standard rebuke asking them to remove first the beam from their own eyes. In other words, a critical attitude to some practices or features of another culture may be motivated by genuine concerns for human well-being in the other culture as well as in the critic’s own culture. It must be noted, though, that the motivating factors in judging other cultures can be complex. The critical judgments of those from within the culture may be motivated by moral or practical considerations: they may come to the conclusion that the cultural beliefs and practices of their society are morally reprehensible as well as practically dysfunctional. The moral considerations would appeal to values that we would regard as human values.

Moreover, it is not true—certainly not entirely true—to say that we always see other cultures through our own cultural lenses, that we express appreciation of the values and practices of the other culture (or cultures) only because those same values and practices exist in our own culture, and that we evince negative attitudes because the features—some features—of the other culture are incompatible with our own. The reason is that we do express appreciation and evince positive evaluative attitudes to features of an alien culture (or alien cultures) even when we do not have those features in our culture. In such a case, the appreciation or positive evaluation cannot be said to reflect or derive from the values of our own culture as such—and cannot thus be said to be culturally determined. A positive evaluative attitude to (some) features of an alien culture may derive rather from an appreciation either of the aesthetics of those features for their own sake or of their highly functional worth, which may in fact lead us to want to adopt them. The latter reason for positive evaluation is indeed the whole basis of cultural borrowing, a common phenomenon in the cultural history of human societies. (I shall return to this phenomenon in due course.)The forgoing arguments are intended to show that it would not be entirely correct to assert that judgments about other cultures are always and ineluctably conditioned by one’s own local background values and beliefs, and therefore that those judgments are necessarily distorted. It is possible to climb over the cloistering walls of one’s cultural values and beliefs to ruminate on and show concern about values that can be said to be culture-neutral. I will call such culture-neutral values human values. This possibility adumbrates a distinction between cultural and human values which I will elaborate shortly. But it must be noted for the moment that critical evaluations, by people both from within and outside a particular culture, can be said to be inspired essentially or ultimately by concerns for human values.

Another—a third—argument I wish to deploy in my criticism of normative (cultural) relativism derives from the empirical fact that people of one culture do feel scandalized when some morally outrageous actions are committed in societies or cultures outside their own, and consequently do make critical judgments about those actions or situations. There is no denying that scathing criticisms have been made of societies that practice racial segregation, slavery (of any kind), female genital mutilation, and other practices that palpably derogate human dignity. Critical judgments about actions or practices of other cultures by people outside those cultures can—and fairly often do—have effects, even if not immediately. This fact, to my mind, has significant implication for the regard people may, consciously or unconsciously, have for the transcultural (or culture-neutral) status of the moral values invariably involved in those actions or situations that are being critically judged. This means that they do not regard such values as deriving simply from a local culture and therefore as having only local relevance or importance, as of interest or concern only to the local people, i.e., the people of some particular society. It is interesting, however, to note that it is only such practices of a particular culture as are clearly careless and destructive of human dignity or well-being that generally come under criticism by others outside that culture, not just any cultural practice or institution. If all this is true, what is its basis? What is the underlying assumption? What is the justification, if any? Why do people genuinely feel greatly morally outraged by actions or practices pursued in cultures or societies outside their own? These questions need to be explored. But, before taking them up, I would like, for a moment, to turn my attention to a thesis that may be regarded as a conceptual affiliate of relativism, but perhaps more correctly is its offshoot. This claim or thesis is the incommensurability of cultures or conceptual systems.

The word ‘incommensurability’ has its roots in the Latin word mensura, which means ‘measure,’ ‘scale,’ or ‘standard.’ "Incommensurable" thus means having no common basis or standard in terms of which different things such as different belief systems, conceptual systems, cultural values, moral goods, and so on, can be evaluated and compared. A and B, as moral or cultural values, are incommensurable if there is no standard or quality in virtue of which they may be measured or compared. Several philosophers claim that the diversity and plurality of cultural values, beliefs, and practices make these values, beliefs, and practices incommensurable. They are incommensurable because they are held to be so radically or irreducibly different that there is, consequently, no single or common measure on the basis of which they can be evaluated. If A and B are so radically different, then all that others can or will have to do is merely to recognize the fact of the difference, to see them as simply two different conceptual systems or cultural values or forms of life, not to attempt a critical evaluation of them. Any such attempt would, in the supposed absence of a common measuring scale, not be appropriate or justifiable. The incommensurability thesis would therefore consider inappropriate, irrelevant or meaningless such relativistic expressions as ‘better than,’ or ‘worse than,’ ‘inferior to,’ or ‘superior to,’ that clearly make reference to judgments of quality or value. It would also consider impossible the terms ‘equal,’ or ‘unequal’ as applied to different cultural values or forms of life, since there would be no basis for measuring their equality or inequality. The thesis is thus clearly an uncritical, an obtuse celebration of difference or otherness.

The word ‘incommensurable’ is used to refer to situations in which we either have to make a rational choice between values or principles that conflict or evaluate and make judgment about the moral values, outlooks, and practices of different cultures and traditions. I am, however, more interested and concerned in this lecture about the incommensurability claim made about values and practices across cultural boundaries. The claim, here too, as we have noted and is forthrightly and unambiguously asserted by Herder, is that there is no common measure or scale for evaluating different cultures. According to the incommensurability thesis, culture cannot be placed in a single normative scale for they cannot be weighed from the same respects; there is no common ground between them. What we are therefore required to do is simply to recognize and come to terms with the differences between cultures, not to judge or evaluate them. In due course I will challenge this thesis as applied to the value and belief systems of cultures.

Culture, and we must always bear in mind this banal truth, is created by human beings to serve the purposes and interests of human beings. For this reason, the basic or ultimate criterion for evaluating cultures is human well-being, the extent to which a particular culture is set to fulfill the conditions that make for human well-being. All cultures evolve practices, beliefs, values, and institutions; these beliefs, values, practices, and institutions may differ from one culture to another. Some beliefs, practices, or institutions of a culture may be said to be innocuous from the point of view of human well-being. A culture may believe in myriads of spirits or supernatural beings without this belief having negative consequences on the well-being of the practitioners of that culture. I would have no justifiable grounds for criticizing such a cultural belief. But there are beliefs, practices, values, and institutions of a culture that clearly are obnoxious and destructive of human interests or welfare; these cannot be morally accommodated. For instance: if a belief in myriads of spirits leads to human sacrifice or to the murder of human beings for ritual purposes, or if a belief in a certain form of life in the hereafter leads to human sacrifice in the wake of the death of some ‘great’ man, such a belief cannot be defended on moral grounds. A metaphysic that breeds a practice detrimental to human well-being ought to be repudiated; and the culture that fosters it can justifiably be criticized. Similarly, a culture that under the inspiration of false, weird or skewed theories of anthropology enslaves other people or discriminates against sections of its members and thus lacerates their human dignity cannot be given high marks.

Also, since cultures or ways of life are created directly to serve the people who create them, the question that immediately comes up is whether or not a given culture functions satisfactorily. That is, does it have a viable framework within which its participants can flourish and lead fulfilling lives, and can the society so develop on a sustainable basis in ways that satisfy basic human needs. If a culture spawns and nurtures attitudes, beliefs, practices, mental outlooks, and behavioral patterns that can be shown to hinder its development or effective functioning, then it can be said that that culture, as presently constituted, can hardly serve as an adequate framework for the fulfillment of the basic needs of its participants.

There is a world of difference between a belief or practice whose pursuit enhances human well-being, and one whose pursuit does violence to human well-being. But the difference between the two kinds of belief or practice is not incommensurable, as relativists suppose. For both can be considered from the perspective of the common standard of human well-being or interest. In other words, the common ground or measure of human well-being makes the two different beliefs or practices commensurable.On this showing, differences in beliefs, practices, or institutions do not have to be brought into a relation of comparison and may not be evaluated where such differences are innocuous from the perspective of human well-being. Music and dance forms of various cultures may—and in fact often do—differ. They may arouse the aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation of people outside the cultures that produce them. Ways of preparing food differ among cultures; and so do some other practices or creative productions of the various cultures of the humankind. But beyond such generally harmless differences in cultural practices or productions there are such values as human dignity and liberty and, indeed, life itself, which are not the creation of a culture as such, but which every human culture is rather required to recognize, respect, protect, and promote; such values are thus human values. Differences in the way the latter cluster of values is perceived and pursued can be critically evaluated, using the notion of human well-being as the common measure or standard.

Adequate considerations of human well-being will cast serious doubt on the unqualified assertion of the cultural relativist that any value or practice of a culture is valid for that culture and cannot therefore be critically evaluated by others outside that culture. It would be more correct to assert, rather, that our common humanity—which is grounded in our human nature—on the one hand sets limits to normative cultural relativism and its progeny, the incommensurability thesis. For it often disposes us to see beyond the boundaries of our own cultures, to express our moral dismay or disgust at certain actions being pursued by other cultures or societies, and justifiably—on moral grounds—to make critical judgments about those actions. Our common humanity, on the other hand, grounds (or should ground) the culture-neutrality or at least some degree of universality of values that can appropriately be characterized as human values, to which people who make critical judgments about another culture would wittingly be appealing. In other words, given that relativism is opposed to universalism (or, the existence of objective values), recognition of the limits of relativism opens the way for a viable conception of universal (human) values; it opens a window through which we can appreciate a defensible conception of universal values. A discussion of the possibility of universal values constitutes the next segment of the lecture.

It can hardly be denied that people of different cultures do make critical judgments about actions or practices that obtain in other cultures in a contemporary world as well as about actions or practices that obtained in past cultures or societies. The apartheid system was criticized and roundly condemned by most societies of the world; the practice of human sacrifice by some societies in Ghana and perhaps elsewhere was criticized by others; the female circumcision practiced in some cultures has been criticized by people outside those cultures who are morally outraged by that practice; and so on. Critical judgments made against the practices and actions of a culture are not necessarily and invariably inspired merely by the particular cultural values (such as the local values of the critics) as their justificatory basis. At least sometimes they appeal to values that can be said to transcend the peculiarities of a particular culture or cultures.

The critical response to practices or actions of different cultures has at least seven implications. These are: (i) that from the standpoint of a deeper, non-superficial, level, the relativist has unduly exaggerated the differences between cultures; (ii) that no culture is unique and practiced by people whose thoughts, activities, and other types of experience are never completely unrelated to those of people belonging to other cultures; (iii) that, in consequence of (ii), the ‘wall’ in my metaphorical expression ‘cultural wall’ can only be regarded as a thin wall that is intended merely to point to the differences in cultures; (iv) that human beings typically do not believe or say that they have been shepherded into cloistering thick cultural walls to live lives unrelated in all respects to those of other human beings beyond those walls, but that boundaries between human cultures are fluid and porous; (v) that the particularities of cultures, as human creations need not be perceived as weird phenomena that are arcane, recondite, or morally inaccessible to human beings other than those who practice them; (vi) that no single human culture is a morally impenetrable wall; and (vii) most importantly as far as the arguments that I am going to advance are concerned, that there are universal values which, because they transcend particular cultural boundaries, can be characterized as human values.

On the basis of assertions made in the foregoing paragraph, a case can, I believe, be made for the universality of cultural (including moral) values, values that thus go beyond cultures. I use the expression "beyond cultures" to convey the idea that there are beliefs, perceptions, outlooks, values, and practices that are not features, properties or characteristics of a particular culture as such, but can be seen rather as transcending cultural particularities. They show up as universal or common to the various cultures fashioned by humankind. The argument I am going to advance in defense of universalism (at least of a moderate type) is two-pronged, one empirical—based on observation, and the other conceptual—based on the notion of an organized human society.

Let us take the empirical points first. The investigations and accounts of cultural anthropologists are the major sources of an empirical argument for the universality of cultural values. Time will not allow references to many of the works of cultural anthropologists; but the spirit or essential meaning of their accounts is instructive and noteworthy. It would appear from those accounts that the social needs (moral, political, economic, etc.) and other kinds of human experience have led the various cultures of the world to evolve values and practices many—but by no means all—of which can be said to be common in their underlying essential meanings, though not necessarily in their elaborate forms and in all respects. Let us mention some of the values and practices spawned by the various cultures that can be said to be universal.

It would be correct to assert that every culture has:

- a doctrine on the metaphysical constitution of the human being—a conception of the human personality, i.e., of the soul and its mundane or post-mundane destiny; each culture has ceremonies that pertain to the fact of death;

- a taboo on incest;

- a Weltanschauung or a world-view that derives from its perception of the world;

- the nuclear (primary) family institution;

- kinship relations;

- as a result of the need for sheer existential survival through the satisfaction of material needs, an explanation of the division of labor and of social roles that are features of the economic organization;

- a moral code as well as legal rules to regulate the conduct of its members in order to make possible cooperative living possible (though there may be differences in the contents of the moral codes, there are many similarities that I will discuss shortly);

- a system of socio-political hierarchy responsible for making social decisions at different levels;

- shared values, which give meaning to a common life;- myths and fables or legends that deal with questions of a society’s past and provide psychological basis for solidarity and belonging;

- the cultivation of friendships between members of a society;

- work toward common goals; and

The foregoing are among the values, outlooks, beliefs, and practices that can be said to be common to all human cultures. There is no suggestion or implication, however, that each value is held with the same commitment and that each practice is of the same form in all cultures or societies. What this means, though, is that what obtains in each culture can be a variation on a common theme or phenomenon, an instantiation of some universal principle or value. The social act of greeting, for instance, which is a universal social value, manifests itself, that is, is performed, in different ways in different cultures. But the important thing here is that the various cultures recognize the act of greeting as a social value, as an act that enhances human or social relations. The fact of a particular style or form of greeting is inconsequential and does not detract from the universal recognition of that social practice as a social value. I would thus acknowledge that the basic universal values are to some extent differently conceptualized and therefore differently experienced in different cultures. To insist on the absence of local variation as a necessary requirement of universality, to expect universality in all spheres of the cultural life manifested in all human societies, is not only to blithely ignore the fact of the specific creative talents and endowments of individual human beings, but also to disregard the essential need to respond to certain specific problems of people in a particular human society. The different aesthetic talents of human beings as well as different ways of coming to grips with the existential problems posed by different environments gives rise to a cultural tapestry on the global cultural landscape, rather than to a cultural monolith. The fact of a great overlap between the basic values of the different cultures, however, cannot be blithely set at naught.

Now, it will be seen that there are values that, even if they appear to be reached through the empirical account of the cultural anthropologist, can nevertheless, on reflection, be considered as necessary or intrinsic features of the moral arrangement of a society, even before the actual investigation into the values and practices of a particular society is undertaken. That is to say, each society can be conceived of as maintaining or cherishing those values as part of its corpus of values and practices. This leads me to my second approach to demonstrating the universality of cultural values: the conceptual approach.

It is doubtful whether such a society can really claim to be an organized and satisfactorily functioning human society. In all societies people expect promises to be kept; the fact that they are not always kept is irrelevant. Again, one cannot conceive of a society that normally does not, as a matter of principle, maintain the ethic of respect for human life and where wanton killing is the order of the day. That society cannot survive as a human society for any length of time. I am not suggesting by any means that wanton killings do not occur in (some) societies; but if in fact wanton killing were accepted in a society as an established principle or norm in social relations, life in that society simply could not be lived. (The Rwandan society would most probably have disappeared if the internecine feuds had gone on for a very long time). Genocidal conflicts in multiethnic societies are extreme cases that can surely be said not to be a morally acceptable feature of any social arrangement. Similarly, the concepts of individual property and the enjoyment of the benefits of one’s labor would have no meaning if a society countenanced stealing as a principle of individual or group action, just as life would not be worth living if a society tolerated violence within itself. It would be an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms—for a society aimed ultimately at enhancing the well-being of its members to place a value on suffering as an end in itself.

The absurdities of a society’s not recognizing certain values seem to suggest, if indirectly, that there are certain values that are intrinsic or concomitant to the notion of an organized and functioning human society. If in fact there are values that can be said to transcend cultural particularities, values that are—and have to be—maintained by a human society, values that are the desiderata of an organized human society, then more appropriately such values should be regarded rather as human than purely cultural values. They are human values, not cultural, because each culture or organized society upholds—or should uphold—them. Even if the greatest majority of the members of a society engaged in slavery of any kind, that act would not justify slavery: it would not imply that slavery was morally right and acceptable, for that act goes against the grain of human dignity and all that makes life worth living. Human dignity is certainly a basic human value. Human values must, thus, be distinguished from cultural values, even though they (i.e., human values) find their way into the texture of the culture of a people. Thus, human values, such as love, compassion, generosity, sympathy, kindness, and benevolence are found articulated in such features or elements of culture as folk-tales, proverbs, myths, and moral codes. The possibility of a human society—any human society—must be grounded on the reality of a fundamental core of human values, the pursuit of which makes for the continual existence, stability, and smooth and harmonious functioning of society. Human values, qua human values, must be universal.

Human values are values that are essential for the flourishing—the well-being—of human beings and their societies and transcend the particularities of cultures. Similarities palpable in human cultural experiences can be explained in terms most probably of the notion of human values, a notion that is at the base of the universal search for human fulfillment. Human values constitute the foundation of what are now referred to as human rights (which prior to twentieth century were known as ‘natural rights’). Values are to be distinguished from rights in that rights can be asserted or claimed against the state or some group or institution and cannot be taken away, whereas values are not always adhered to and maintained and can, thus, be set at naught or outweighed by other values. Nevertheless it would be correct to say that rights—human rights—originated from values and therefore are grounded or rooted in values. What are called human rights, then, are simply special or fundamental human values, generally or ultimately of a moral nature. Like human values, human rights are human rights, not cultural rights; they belong to the human being not by virtue of membership a particular culture, but simply by virtue of being human. Given the close, perhaps intrinsic, connection between human rights and human nature then, it is bizarre and incomprehensible for contemporary Western scholars to be skeptical about the notion of human nature while at the same time defending and making the human rights concept a central plank of their political platform. Also, by reason of its being derived from human nature or essence, the human rights concept is clearly an essentialist concept and is, as such, a universalist concept. It would clearly be inconsistent therefore to advocate and defend the human rights concept and at the same time reject universalism (essentialism).

In the context of Sartre’s arguments, it would be correct to say that the universality that is "being perpetually made" may be considered or interpreted as a contingent universality. But even if Sartre’s statement can be so parsed, we would need to look for a reason—a background—for this contingent universality: a reason for this perpetuity. Sartre would probably say that this universality emerges from understanding the purposes of different peoples; but this begs the question against the reality or possibility of perpetually understanding the purposes of peoples of different societies or cultures. Our human nature (or, what I regard as its conceptual affiliate, namely, our common humanity) is crucially important in inter-cultural understanding or communication.

It may be correct to say that we can in many cases anticipate or predict what human beings will do in certain human situations. The basis of the anticipation or prediction is surely certain kinds of experiences that can be said to derive from our human nature. If there were no human nature—no basic value or disvalue experiences—responses of some human beings to other human beings in respect of the latter’s situations would be random and generally unpredictable. Consciousness of the characteristics of human nature engenders degrees of spontaneity in attitudes of some humans toward others: I show sympathy to someone in distress because I anticipate that he would, as a feature of his being human, want some relief from pain or some difficult situation.

In this connection, I wish to say that I find a remarkable insight made in a well-known paper by Donald Davidson to be very relevant to my position against the incommensurability thesis. Even more importantly, it supports my conviction that some understanding of utterances of human beings of different cultures or belief systems and normative commitments can be held as implying some appreciation of sufficiently common purposes or perspectives, even if this understanding or sense—from Davidson’s convincing arguments—manifested itself in agreement or disagreement. We could neither agree nor disagree if we could not make sense of cross-cultural utterances or arguments. But the possibility of making sense of cross-cultural utterances or arguments is grounded on shared perspectives on at least some aspects of the human experience.

The establishment in all human societies of moral, legal, economic, political, and other institutions is surely inspired and guided by a system of shared values—a common good that itself is structured on a common understanding of the interests, needs, goals, and aspirations of the members of a society. These institutions are set up in pursuit of certain commonly shared values and goals—i.e., a common good—that a human society would like to achieve for all of its members. The institution, for instance, of a government or a legal system is surely based on a common understanding of the importance of the societal values of social order and social peace. These values that can be said to be transcultural and thus shared by all societies and cultures. Thus, we can feel confident about the meaningfulness and importance of the concept of the common good if we reflected on our intuitions about the telos of organizing a human society, as well as the well-being of every individual member of the society.

However, even though human experience is felt most directly within a particular cultural context, it does not follow at all that the concerns and problems to be attended to and investigated by philosophers are necessarily unique to a specific culture and can be seen as being—or as having been—grappled with only by philosophers belonging to that culture. For some reason or other, many of these problems and concerns—which are generally of a basic character—tend to feature in the preoccupations of thinkers of other cultures. So it is, that despite the fact that peoples of the world may be said to belong to different cultures, there is nevertheless a common ground—a commensurable ground—of shared human experiences. The fact of the community of human experiences explains the similarity of some basic questions regarding their existence on this planet that resonate in the different human cultures. Such questions are bound to exercise their minds as humans, and thus may be described as necessary questions. Such necessary questions can be said to be universal and so to transcend cultural particularities. That is why it would not be surprising to discover that a number of problems or topics raised and explored in the philosophy of one culture can be found also in the philosophy of another culture. Even though they do not elicit the same answers and proposals from thinkers of different cultures, the relevance or significance of the philosophical doctrines that emerge from a specific cultural and historical experience is not to be tethered to that specific culture, for those answers and proposals can be of interest and relevance to other cultures. This is evidenced not only in the appreciation and positive assessment by one culture of ideas produced by another culture (or other cultures), but also in the historical phenomenon of cultural borrowing or exchange. Our common human purposes, affiliated to a sensus communis (common human understanding), must be at the base of all this.

It is, of course, not logically impossible for a thinker, even if his (or her) thoughts and orientations have an originate in a particular cultural ambience, to focus attention on wider human concerns as such, and to put forward ideas and theses that will be attractive to people outside—and beyond—the cultural origins of those ideas. The reason is that, even though the cultural and historical experiences of human beings do differ in some respects, yet the value and disvalue experiences, discussed a while ago, that derive from sedimented common human purposes, may not widely differ. The experiences of people and cultures that have been exploited or enslaved or subjected to foreign political domination or discriminated against can be said to be largely commensurable among themselves: they would share a common ground of, for instance, resentment at the denigration of their humanity. To the extent that the cultures that inflict inhuman treatments on others would not like to be treated in similar fashion and would therefore like to avoid (or escape) those inhuman treatments themselves, it can be said that they also have some idea of what those experiences would be like, even if they have not directly had them. On this showing, human experiences can be said to be essentially or fundamentally commensurable: sharing for instance a common scale of the desire for respect for their human dignity, for instance. The background of the commensurability is the existence of certain basic values and attributes so intrinsic to the nature and life of human beings that they can be considered common to all humans. The fact that the philosopher is unavoidably embedded in a culture does not necessarily preclude the possibility of his philosophical reflections taking off from problems sensibly related to our common human nature and thus appealing to certain fundamental values of humanity. A philosophical inquiry into such human values should be of interest and benefit to all people irrespective of their culture.

It has been argued in this lecture that culture is created to serve the purposes of humankind and that therefore the fundamental test for the validity of a culture is the well-being of its participants, that is, the extent to which its values, practices, and institutions conduce to human flourishing. On this showing, let us take a materialistic culture that disposes its participants to exploit other human beings, enslaves others, tortures, discriminates; or a spiritualistic culture that evolves a metaphysic the pursuit of which leads to the destruction of human lives as in human sacrifice or ritual murder. The cultural relativist cannot seriously argue that such practices of a culture must be considered valuable and valid for that culture simply because they are the practices of that culture, or because they have persisted over generations and thus are not subject to critical evaluation. Neither can the incommensurability thesis seriously deny the existence of any common standard by which such practices can normatively be measured. In a critical response to the twin doctrines, it can be said that human well-being is the measure of all the values and practices of a culture. It is thus clear that cultural relativism, together with its progeny, the thesis of incommensurability, has clear-cut limits, a fact that points to the truth of (at least a moderate kind of) universalism, which itself rests mainly on values that we can characterize as human values. Implicit here, is a distinction between cultural and human values. The former (i.e., cultural values), even though they may resonate on many other cultural terrains, can nevertheless be particularized and so lose some of their universal character; human values, which are affiliated to our human nature and derive from common and fundamental human purposes and have substantially found themselves into the texture of human cultures, truly constitute the foundation of cultural universalism. Thus, what you see when you look over the cultural wall is a common humanity, bearing human values in its bosom.