Task 3 – (Western) Values: Universal or Relative?

Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? American

Anthropologist 104(3), 783-790.

 What are the ethics of the current “war on terrorism”, a war that justifies itself by
purporting to liberate, or save, Afghan women?
 There was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and
Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack
on New York’s World Trade Center and the US Pentagon, or how Afghanistan had
come to be ruled by the Taliban…
 The question is why knowing about the “culture” of the region, and particularly its
religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history
of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the US role in this history?
o Such cultural framing, it seemed, prevented the serious exploration of the roots
and nature of human suffering in this part of the world
o Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give
religio-cultural ones
o Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global
interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the
world into separate spheres – recreating an imaginative geography of West vs
East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus
others where women shuffle around silently in burqas
 Why the Muslim women in general, and the Afghan women in particular, were so
crucial to this cultural mode of explanation?
o Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against
Terrorism” in a way they were not in other conflicts?
 Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17:
o Constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorist, so that they became
almost one word – a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the-Taliban-and-the-
terrorists.
o The blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing
malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the
Taliban form employment, schooling and the joys of wearing nail polish
o Her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the “civilized people
throughout the world” whose hearts break for the women and children of
Afghanistan
o The speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in
Afghanistan and to make a case for the “war on terrorism” of which it was
allegedly a part
 Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the
women question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows
immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage, and ither
practices was used to justify rule
 It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan
women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa.
o Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has
been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their
burqas
 It should be recalled that the Taliban did not invent the burqa.
o It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when
they went out – developed as a convention for symbolizing women’s modesty
or respectability
o The burqa marked the symbolic separation of men’s and women’s spheres, as
part of the general association of women with family and home, not with public
space where strangers mingled
 Anthropologist Papanek (1982) – the burqa as “portable seclusion”
o Noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to
move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral
requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men
o Such veiling signifies belonging in a moral way of life in which families are
paramount in the organization of communities and the home associated with the
sanctity of women
 Then why would women suddenly become immodest?
o Why would they throw off the markers of their respectability?
o Why are we surprised that Afghan women do not throw off their burqas when
we know perfectly well that it would not be appropriate to wear shorts to the
opera?
 What had happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban is that one regional style of
covering or veiling, associated with a. certain respectable but not elite class, was
imposed on everyone as “religiously” appropriate, even though previously there had
been many different styles, popular or traditional with different groups and classes –
different ways to mark women’s propriety, or, in more recent times, religious piety.
 The majority of women left in Afghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were
the rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who
could not emigrate to escape the hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan’s
recent history
o If liberated from the enforced wearing of burqas, most of these women would
choose some other form of modest headcovering
 Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves have different meanings
in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused
with, or made to stand for, lack of agency
o Pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is
considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral
and have a sense of honor tied to family
 We need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential
sign of women’s unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of this form, as in
Iran or with the Taliban.
o What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are
social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and
belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings
of the world?
o Is it not a gross violation of women’s own understandings of what they are doing
to simply denounce the burqa as a medieval imposition?
 We must take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes of millions of
Muslim women to a single item of clothing
o Perhaps it is time to give up on the western obsession with the veil
 Ultimately, the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with
cultural “others”
  How are we to deal with difference without accepting the passivity implied by the
cultural relativism for which anthropologists are justly famous – a relativism that says
its their culture and its not my business to judge or interfere, only to try to understand
 We need to look closely at what we are supporting and to think carefully about why
 We must accept the possibility of difference
o Not implying that we should resign ourselves to being cultural relativists who
respect whatever goes on elsewhere as “just their culture”
o Advocating hard work involved in recognizing and respecting differences –
precisely as different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as
manifestations of differently structured desires
o We may want justice for women, but can we accept that there might be different
ideas about justice and that different women might want, or choose, different
futures from what we envision as best?
 Reports from the Bonn peace conference held in late November to discuss the
rebuilding of Afghanistan revealed significant differences among the few Afghan
women feminists and activists present
 One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World
feminisms, and feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into
polarizations that place feminism on the wise of the West.
o It is strategically dangerous to accept the cultural opposition between Islam and
the West, between fundamentalism and feminism
 Must be aware of differences, respectful of their paths toward social change that might
give women better lives.
o Might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living
in a godly way? Living without war?
 Mahmood (2001) – there seems to be a difference in the political demands made on
those who work on or are trying to understand Muslims and Islamists and those who
work on secular-humanist projects
 It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving
o When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something
o What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are
being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her?
o Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority
by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged.
 As anthropologists, feminists or concerned citizens, we should be wary of taking on the
mantles of those 19th-century Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to
saving their Muslim sisters
 A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to ask how we might contribute to
making the world a more just place
o A world not organized around strategic military and economic demands

Ignatieff, M. (2001). The Attack on Human Rights. Foreign Affairs 80 (6), pp. 102-116.
 Since 1945, human rights language has become a source of power and authority.
Inevitably, power invites challenge.
o Human rights doctrine is now so powerful, but also so unthinkably imperialist
in its claim to universality, that it has exposed itself to serious intellectual attack.
o Are their claims to universality justified or are they just another cunning
exercise in Western moral imperialism?
 The cultural challenge to the universality of human rights arises from 3 distinct sources:
from resurgent Islam, from within the West itself and from East Asia.
o Together, have raised substantial questions about the cross-cultural validity of
human rights norms
 The challenge from Islam has been there from the beginning:
o When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafter in 1947,
the Saudi Arabian delegation raised objection to Article 16, relating to free
marriage choice, and Article 18, relating to freedom of religion.
“the authors of the draft declaration has, for the most part, taken into
consideration only the standards recognized by Western civilization and
had ignored more ancient civilizations …”
o Argued that exchange and control of women is the very raison détre of
traditional cultures, and that the restriction of female choice in marriage is
central to the maintenance of patriarchal property relations
o Saudi delegation refused to ratify the declaration
 There have been recurrent attempts, including Islamic declarations of human rights, to
reconcile Islamic and Western traditions by putting more emphasis on family duty and
religious devotion and by drawing on distinctively Islamic traditions of religious and
ethnic tolerance
 Since the 1970s, the relation of Islam to human rights has grown more hostile.
o When the Islamic revolution in Iran rose up against the tyrannical modernization
imposed by the Shah, Islamic figures began to question the universal writ of
Western human rights norms
o Western separation of church and state, of secular and religious authority, is
alien to the jurisprudence and political thought of the Islamic tradition
 The freedoms articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights make no sense
within the theocratic bias of Islamic political thought.
o The right to marry and establish a family, to freely choose one’s partner, is a
direct challenge to the authorities in Islamic society that enforce the family
choice of spouse, polygamy and other restrictions on women’s freedom
 In responding to this challenge, the West has made the mistake of assuming that
fundamentalism and Islam are synonymous.
o In fact, Islam speaks in many voices
o National contexts may be more important in defining local Islamic reactions to
Western values than are broad theological principles in the religion as a whole
 Where Islamic societies have managed to modernize, create a middle class, and enter
the global economy, a constituency in favor of basic human rights can emerge.
 A second challenge for the universality of human rights comes from within the West
itself.
o For the last 20 years, an influential current in Western political opinion has been
maintaining that human rights are a “Western conduct of limited applicability”,
a 20th century fiction dependent on the rights, traditions of the US, UK and
France and thus inapplicable in cultures that do not share this historical matrix
of liberal individualism
 Human rights are seen as an exercise in the cunning of Western reason: no longer able
to dominate the world through direct imperial rule, the West now masks its own will to
power in the impartial universalizing language of human rights and seeks to impose its
own narrow agenda on a plethora of world cultures that do not actually share the West’s
conception of individuality, selfhood, agency or freedom
 The Asian challenge is a consequence of the region’s staggering economic success.
o Because of Malaysia’s robust economic growth, for example, its leaders feel
confident enough to reject Western ideas of democracy and individual rights in
favour of an Asian route that depends on authoritarian government and
authoritarian family structures
o Same can be said about Singapore
 An “Asian model” supposedly puts community and family ahead of individual rights
and order ahead of democracy and individual freedom.
o In reality, there is no single Asian model
 These challenges have forced human rights activists to question their assumptions, to
rethink the history of their commitments, and to realize just how complicated
intercultural dialogue on rights questions becomes when all cultures participate as
equals
 In the desire to find common ground with Islamic and Asian positions and to purge
their own discourse of the imperial legacies uncovered by the postmodernist critique,
Western defenders of human rights norms risk compromising the very universality they
ought to be defending
 The members of the drafting committee of the UDHR saw their task not as a simple
ratification of Western convictions but as an attempt to delimit a range of moral
universals from within their very different religious, political, ethnic and philosophical
backgrounds
o This fact helps to explain why the document makes no reference to God in its
preamble – communist delegations would have vetoed any such reference
 It remains true that Western inspirations played the predominant role in the drafting of
the document
o Even so, the drafter’s mood in 1947 was anything but triumphalist – they were
aware that the age of colonial emancipation was at hand: Indian independence
was proclaimed while the language of the declaration was being finalized
o Its drafters clearly foresaw the coming tide of struggles for national
independence – it does proclaim the right of people to self-government and
freedom of speech and religion, it also concedes the right of colonial peoples to
construe moral universals in a language rooted in their tradition
 The declaration was not so much a proclamation of the superiority of European
civilization as an attempt to salvage the remains of its Enlightenment heritage from the
barbarism of a world war just concluded.
o Declaration written in full awareness of Auschwitz and dawning awareness of
Kolyma
o It was written when faith in the Enlightenment faced its deepest crisis
o Declaration more as a warning by Europeans that the rest of the world should
not reproduce their mistakes
 Declaration as a studied attempt to reinvent the European natural law tradition in order
to safeguard individual agency against the totalitarian state.
 The core of the declaration is the moral individualism for which it is so reproached by
non-Western societies.
o Human rights, it is argued, can recover universal appeal only if they soften their
individualistic bias and put greater emphasis on the communitarian parts of the
declaration
o Desire to water down the individualism of rights discourse is driven by a desire
both to make human rights more palatable to less individualistic cultures in the
non-Western world and to respond to disquiet among Western communitarians
 at the supposedly corrosive impact of individualistic values on Western social
cohesion
 Rights are meaningful only if they confer entitlements and immunities on individuals;
they are worth having only if they can be reinforced against institutions such as the
family, the state and the church.
o Remains true even when the rights in question are collective or group rights
o Group rights needed to protect individual rights – protection of the individuals
of the composed group
o Group rights to practice religion should not cancel the right of individuals to
leave a religious community if they choose
 Rights are inescapably political because they tacitly imply a conflict between a rights
holder and a rights “withholder”, some authority against which the rights holder can
make justified claims.
o Individuals and groups will always be in conflict, and rights exist to protect
individuals
 The language of human rights is the only universally available moral vernacular that
validates the claims of women and children against the oppression they experience in
patriarchal and tribal societies; it is the only vernacular that enables dependent persons
to perceive themselves as moral agents and to act against practices that are ratified by
the weight and authority of their cultures
o These agents seek out human rights protection precisely because it legitimizes
their protests against oppression
 Universality cannot imply universal assent, since in a world of unequal power, the only
propositions that the powerful and powerless would agree on would be entirely
toothless and anodyne.
o Rights are universal because they define the universal interests of the powerless
 Human rights represent a revolutionary creed, since they make a radical demand of all
human groups that they serve the interests of the individuals who compose them
 The idea that groups should respect an individual’s right of exit is not easy to reconcile
with what groups actually are
 Individual and group interests inevitably conflict
o Human rights exist to adjudicate these conflicts, to define the irreducible
minimum beyond which group and collective claims must not go in constraining
the lives of individuals
 Adopting the values of individual agency does not necessarily entail adopting Western
ways of life.
o To seek human rights protection is not to change your civilization – just to be
free from oppression, bondage, and gross physical harm
 Human rights do not, and should not, delegitimize traditional culture as a whole
 Human rights have gone global by going local, empowering the powerless, giving voice
to the voiceless
o In Pakistan, it is poor rural women who are criticizing the grotesque distortion
of Islamic teaching that claims to justify “honor killings”
 Human rights rhetoric does not require adherents to jettison their other cultural
attachments
 What the declaration does mandate is the right to choose, and specifically the right to
exit a group when choice is denied
  The idea that human rights represent the moral arm of global capitalism falsifies the
insurgent nature of the relationship between human rights activism and the global
corporation.
o The activists of NGOs who devote their lives to challenging the labor practices
of global giants such as Nike would be astonished to discover that their human
rights agenda has been serving the interests of global capital all along
 Although free markets do encourage the emergence of assertively self-interested
individuals, these individuals seek human rights in order to protect themselves from the
indignities and indecencies of the market.
 What makes human rights demands legitimate is that they emanate from the bottom,
from the powerless.
o How to create conditions in which individuals on the bottom are free to avail
themselves of such rights
o Increasing the freedom of people to exercise their rights depends on close
cultural understanding of the frameworks that often constrain choice
o E.g. female circumcision vs female genital mutilation
 Human rights role is in trying to enfranchise all agents so that they can freely shape the
content
 Rights discourse is individualistic
 The doctrine of human rights is morally universal because it says that all human beings
need certain specific freedoms “from”; it does not go on to define what their freedom
“to” should comprise.
 In the moral dispute between the “west” and the “rest”, both sides make the mistake of
assuming that the other speaks with one voice
 European voices that once took it upon themselves to silence the babble with a
peremptory ruling no longer take it as their privilege to do so, and those who sit with
them at the table no longer grant them to right to do so.
o All this counts as progress
o Human rights as part of a language that creates the basis for deliberation

Souter, J. (2009). Human Rights Pragmatism (pp.45-46). In: Humanity, Suffering

and Victimhood: A Defence of Human Rights Pragmatism. Politics 29 (1), pp. 45-52.

 Ignatieff is primarily concerned with the development of a global consensus on human

rights that will strengthen their capacity to prevent suffering and violence.
o This consensus will be fostered most effectively if we dispense with
foundational arguments concerning the nature of humanity and instead focus
upon just this capacity
o Must remain neutral between diverging conceptions of humanity when building
support for human rights, and to leave the content of the ‘human’ in human
rights unspecified, allowing it to be filled in by each individual according to
their own world-view
o This consensus will be strongest if it is negative in character – cultures can agree
about what is insufferably, unarguably wrong
o There can be considerable cross-cultural agreement on what must be avoided at
all costs
o There are diverging conceptions of the good life
 Badiou speaks of an ‘ethic on human rights’- defines man as a victim
 o Since the prevailing ethic of human rights regards evil as primary and self-
evident, and ‘subordinates the identification of (the) subject to the universal
recognition of the evil that is done to him’ it actively ‘defines man as a victim’
o The only presupposition concerning humanity is that we require constant
protection from abuse
o The real man of rights underlying his pragmatism is the ‘emaciated’ and
‘suffering beast’
 Badiou argues that if humanity is defined solely in relation to the evil that can be
committed against it, and human rights are seen only as rights to ‘non-Evil’, the upshot
is a lack of any positive alternative of how things are, or any truly ambitious moral or
political programme
o Limiting ourselves to the negative reduction of cruelty is compatible with the
egoism of current capitalism and precludes the possibility of more radical
change
 Badiou himself recognizes that it will not do simply to claim that the ethic of human
rights defines man as a vulnerable creature, since this ignores the active benefactor who
may step in to prevent abuses from taking place
o While the victim is undeniably a crucial protagonist in all human rights
discourse, abuses obviously do not occur by themselves, but are committed by
other human beings.
 It is clear that Badiou’s argument needs to be modified to say that the ethic of human
rights presupposes a more complex conception of man as victim, benefactor and
perpetrator.
 It seems doubtful that the ethic of human rights actively defines human beings as
victims, rather than simply focuses on them
o Since one of the main functions of human rights is to reduce suffering and
cruelty, human rights practitioners are bound to concern themselves with
victims of abuse

Parekh, B. (2000). Moral Monism (excerpts). Forms of Pluralism. Rethinking

Multiculturalism. Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (pp.16-18, 33-49; pp. 67-79). New
York: Palgrave.

 The obvious fact that different societies understand and organize human lives
differently and entertain different even conflicting conceptions of the good life has been
noted and commented upon in all civilizations.
 Moral monism refers to the view that only one way of life is fully human, true, or the
best, and that all others are defective to the extent that they fall short of it
 Moral monism either argues that one value is the highest and others merely a means to
or conditions of it, or more plausibly and commonly that although all values are equally
important or some more than others, there is only one best or truly rational way to
combine them.
 For the monist, evil, like error, can take many forms, but the good, like truth, is
inherently singular or uniform in nature
 The monist is not committed to the view that all human beings ought to live by this
truth
 In order to show that one way of life is the best, the monist needs to ground it in
something that all human beings necessarily share and is transcultural in nature.
o The obvious candidate is human nature
 o He might define human nature strongly or weakly, as something that determines
or only disposes humans to act in a certain way
 If his conception of human nature is to do the required philosophical work, the monist
needs to assume the following:
o The uniformity of human nature: human beings share a common nature
consisting of certain unique capacities, dispositions and desires
Differences define their particularity not their humanity
Although the objects of their desires differ, the underlying desire is the
same, be it that for pleasure, status, recognition or pride
o The monist assumes the moral and ontological primacy of similarities over
differences – human similarities are far more important than their differences
Differences vary from individual to individual, do not affect let alone
form part of their humanity, and are ultimately inconsequential
o The monist insists on the socially transcendental character of human nature
Human nature as a natural endowment
o The monist assumed the total knowability of human nature
o The monist takes human nature as the basis of good life of, what comes to the
same thing, asserts the unity of good and truth
 Monism can take several forms:
o rationalist monism of Greek philosophy – advocates a substantive and
comprehensive way of life, secular definition of human nature
o the theological monism of Christianity, - a substantive body of doctrines and a
way of life based on them, theologically grounded definition of human nature
o and the regulative monism of classical liberalism – thin version of the good life
to which all ways of life are expected to conform, thin and secular definition of
human nature
 Since liberalism developed within a cultural milieu suffused with centuries of Christian
influence, it could hardly avoid being shaped by it.
o Some early liberals such as Locke, Montesquieu and Tocqueville thought that
Christianity was the only religion to develop the liberal values of human dignity,
freedom, equality and even dissent, and was alone worthy of a free man
o Liberalism as a secular expression of and sustained by Christianity, which is
why the expression ‘spreading Christianity and civilization’ (meaning
liberalism) aroused no anxiety on either side
 Liberals represented the ‘light’, the rest lived in darkness; they had discovered the truly
human way of life, others left much to be desired
o Pre-liberal Europe lived in ‘dark ages’
o Nonliberal societies were benighted, backward unconsciously yearning for
liberal truths, made up on ‘anonymous’ liberals, and desperately in need of
liberal missionaries
 Liberalism developed during the period of European colonial expansion
 Liberal writers had to take a principled stand on colonialism and show why the colonies
were not free to lead their self-chosen ways of life
o Colonialism confronted them with theoretical problems and perplexities, and
shaped the way in which they articulated their conception of the individual, the
content and their principles, and the conditions and limits of their application
 The rise of the nation-state was a historical fact by the time liberalism appeared on the
scene – liberalism formed a close alliance with it and successfully shaped it in a
particular direction
 o Almost all liberals assumed that every society needed such a state and was a
major distinguishing mark of a ‘civilized’ society
o As liberalism gained intellectual and political ascendancy, it gave the state its
modern character – it emphasized and institutionalized such ideas as the rule of
law, equality of citizens, individuals as sole bearers or rights and obligations…
 In order to consolidate itself both politically and ideologically, the state set about
dismantling traditional institutions – liberal writers had to show why their vision of the
good life was superior and deserved to be enforced
 Even as liberals sought to civilize ‘backward races’ abroad, they used the state to
civilize the ‘reactionary’ feudal and ‘backward’ working classes at home
o A liberal state could not consistently claim to civilize backward races abroad
while leaving their domestic counterparts untouched, and vice versa
o Unless liberals were constantly engaged in distinguishing themselves from and
subduing their ideological opponents at home and abroad, they felt they were in
danger of losing their sense of what they stood for
 Classical liberals stressed the centrality of reason and arrived at a vision of the good
life based on such values as critical rationality, choice and personal autonomy
 Locke:
o God created human beings and gave them the earth in common
o God’s gift entailed both rights and duties, the right to mix their labour with
nature and use its products to satisfy their needs, and the duty to develop natural
resources to the full and maximize the conveniences of life
o All men are equal – implied that all humans had equal dignity and rights, that
no authority was legitimate unless it was based on their uncoerced consent
o Humans expected to govern their affairs rationally
o The rational person possessed such qualities as industry, energy, enterprise,
self-discipline, civility, control of passions, obedience to the law,
reasonableness
o A truly rational society established the institution of private property and
encouraged industry and accumulation of wealth
o State had a clearly defined territorial boundary, a centralized structure of
authority and the will to persist as an independent polity that made it ‘too hard’
for its neighbours to attack and overrun it
o Political power subject to clearly stated procedures and checks – separate
executive, legislative, federative powers
 Locke claimed that Indian land was empty and was not a nation in itself – it never
occurred to Locke that the very idea of owning land appeared odd and sacrilegious to
those who saw themselves as inseparable from and defined their collective identity in
terms of it
o For Locke, land must not be wasted, but again he defined ‘waste’ in extremely
narrow and utilitarian terms, considering land used for hunting, roaming for fun,
or chasing animals as a waste
o Locke insisted that the right to property must be based on labour, be it one’s
own or one’s servants
o For Indians it was not their land because they laboured on it; rather they
laboured on it because it was their land, which they owed it to their ancestors to
keep un good condition
 Locke’s whole approach to the Indian way of life was based on the belief that there was
only one proper or rational way to organize personal and collective life, and that those
 that differed from it were defective and deserved neither respect nor even a patient and
sympathetic exploration from within
 J.S.Mill:
o A qualified utilitarian
o Teleological liberalism
o Secular and intended to provide a secular alternative to Locke’s religious bias
o Aimed to show the kind of life human beings ought to lead and explore the type
of society that was most conductive to it
o Man is the highest being on earth and should lead a life worthy of his status
o His ‘destiny’ and ‘comparative worth as a human being’ consists in perfecting
himself, in becoming the ‘best thing’ he is capable of becoming
o Involves all-round development of his intellectual, moral, aesthetic and other
capacities
o A fully human life involves individuality, self-determination or autonomy
o The goal is to become the author of one’s life
o For Mill, the diversity of individual character, lifestyles, and tastes was both
inescapable and desirable
o Diversity added richness and variety to the human world and made it
aesthetically pleasing
o Diversity can also lead to progress because it creates a climate conducive to the
emergence of exceptional and original minds
o Insisted that societies too were unique – have different histories, traditions, and
their members differ in temperament, character and level of mental
development
o Deeply disturbed by the tendency towards social homogenization and cultural
assimilation that he found dominant in his age
o Case for diversity may be inadequate: rests on the assumption that human beings
are naturally unique and that human uniqueness somehow underwrites moral
and cultural diversity
o Mill naively assumed that different ways of life and types of characters can all
happily coexist, that the social structure is neutral between them and that the
best for them will win out in the end
o Mill had difficulty appreciating the role of culture and finding a secure space
for it in his theory of man – culture matters to him only as a context to be taken
into account in deciding how best to realize a transculturally valid vision of the
good life
o He saw no difficulty in justifying colonialism and dismantling the traditional
cultures of subject societies – those cultures had ‘no history’ and had to be
civilized
The right to one’s way of life and to territorial non-interven tion only
belonged to those who were ‘mature’ enough to think and judge for
themselves.
o For Mill, great empires served 3 important liberal goals:
Carried liberal ways of life and thought to backward parts of the world
Made the world safe for liberal societies by eliminating potential threats
By fostering national pride, self-confidence, sense of greatness, lofty
sentiments and a high sense of moral purpose, they inspired their citizens
to pursue great ideals and scale yet greater heights of intellectual and
moral excellence from which both the country and the entire humankind
benefitted
 o Welcomed the ‘blending’ or nationalities
 The thought of Locke and Mill, like that of Christian thinkers, dis plays a strange blend
of moral egalitarianism and political and cultural inegalitariansim: equality of human
beings but inequality of cultures, respect for persons but not their ways of life, rejection
of racism but advocacy of cultural domination, equal concern for all as individuals but
not as self-determining collective subjects.
 Critique of monism:
o Since cultures mediate and recon stitute human nature in their own different
ways, no vision of the good life can be based on an abstract conception of human
nature alone.
o Moral life is necessarily embedded in and cannot be isolated from the wider
culture – a way of life cannot be judged good or bad without taking full account
of the system of meaning, traditions, temperament and the moral/emotional
resources of the people involved
o The very idea that one way of life is the highest or truly human is logically
incoherent – rests on naïve assumption that valuable human capacities
o Human capacities conflict for at least 3 reasons:
They often call for different even contradictory skills, attitudes,
dispositions
Because human energies, motivations and resources are limited and one
can cultivate only some of the valuable human capacities
Because every social order has a specific structure with its inescapable
tendency to develop some capacities rather than others
o Since human capacities conflict, the good they are capable of realizing also
conflicts
o Values and virtues too conflict
o The idea that different ways of life can be graded is equally untenable –
presupposes that a way of life can be reduced to a single value/principle (no way
of life can be based on one value alone)
o Moral monism also runs the constant danger of grossly misunderstanding other
ways of life and spells a hermeneutic disaster – approach is primarily
judgmental, only a limited interest in understanding them
Biased frame of reference
o Views differences as deviations