If racists use some issue as a proxy for race (religion, culture, immigration) there is an instinct on some strands of the left to insist that the proxy has no negative ramifications whatsoever. That's understandable in a way, racism is both a moral abhorrence, and in a time when it seems less of a social taboo, starting to genuinely scare me.
But by insisting that there are no negative aspects of certain religions, cultures, and immigration, they don't thwart racists, they enable them.
As I replied to Gurmendi:
"Saying all cultures are equally valid is explicitly saying that the culture of the American south in the first half of the 19th Century was just as valid as the one slavery abolitionists advocated for. It's nuts."
This is the horseshoe effect at work. It becomes OK to pay as little as posible and even let people go hungry and homeless—or even be enslaved—because “respect the culture.” Some basic living and economic standards that can improve humanity for all are worth fighting for.
The honest position would be to say that both our European-ancestral cultures and African ones have objectionable and laudable strategies, traditions, and other organizing principles, but once one raises this point, the accusations of discrimination flow freely and histerically.
These points and distinctions seem so obvious. Why would an intelligent person with classically "liberal" values (e.g. women's autonomy) suggest that cultures cannot be compared or evaluated along a spectrum of human-rights criteria? It's just obtuse, but why are very smart people being obtuse?
It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry. We simply can't have it that culture of the West is "superior" in any moral sense to a non-Western culture. If that's the premise, then there's nothing more to say except to be obtuse. I guess this is how you get Queers for Palestine.
I don't think it's that simple. In practice, if someone says that a culture associated with some ethnic minority is inferior, that someone often is using that statement as a thin veil for racist sentiment. People often express sentiments obliquely, using statements that, if taken purely literally, are reasonable but are meant to be understood in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" fashion.
Yes, some people make the sort of disingenuous high-minded statements that cover an ulterior motive. But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous. Because it really may be high-minded. For example, a person could be anti-open borders on economic, cultural, or racist grounds. Dishonest pro-open borders people will presume that all anti-open borders people are racist, which means you just get to bypass the arguments you'd rather not have to respond to.
It may or may not be anti-western bigotry to claim that cultures cannot be qualitatively compared, but it is certainly dishonest. It's nothing more than a dodge around confronting a rational argument that you can't (or don't want to) contend with.
Last night over dinner, I had a brief discussion with a friend about cultural assimilation in the context of immigration. My friend, an NA indigenous woman, expressed the view that cultural assimilation is a negative process leading to “loss of culture”. What my friend means by “culture” differs from Pluckrose’s meaning: “We have to understand culture as ideas, because that is what it is”. For my friend, culture is food, costume, music etc.; that is, cultural artefacts. But my friend also claims to believe in the creation myths of her indigenous culture. I am sceptical of this claim, but that’s another story. Here, it is relevant that my friend does not believe in most of the ideas traditionally held by her indigenous culture about, for example, women or slavery. Actually, I should say that my friend denies her indigenous culture ever held ideas which conflict with her assimilation of liberal democracy.
This kind of denialism in defence of cultures with abhorrent ideologies and, hence, abhorrent cultural practices is characteristic of woke leftists who need to see “BIPOC” cultures as universally innocent of any cultural blame in order to see them as universally culturally oppressed.
I agree with the main points in this article, but I want to push back on a few specific point:
1) I disagree that it is a bad thing to “conflate culture with… ethnicity. To use your example of Germany, German culture has changed between Nazi Germany and today, but I think it preposterous to claim that there is no German culture that is strongly tied to German ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that ethnicity is an inherently cultural concept.
Is there really no such thing as a German culture or an English culture or a Japanese culture?
2) I agree with you that certain cultures can be deemed superior to others, particularly when one focuses on one dimension, but this seems to fit very poorly with your argument in previous essays that government should not seek to shape culture (as the Right wants). I believed that you claimed that government and liberal institutions must be neutral and let the individual decide.
If a culture has certain weakpoints that undermine its own people, why would you not use the power of government and other institutions to improve or at least to protect it from getting worse?
This is particularly true for public education, where socialization plays a crucial role.
You claimed that liberal institutions and government must be neutral on these cultural issues, but also state that some cultures are inferior (and presumably must be changed).
That seems like a fundamental contradiction, particularly when previous generations of Liberals explicitly stated that a free society must have strong values or virtue (for example, the American Founding Fathers).
Why not just state that Liberalism flourishes in certain cultures and governments must nuture and protect that culture, particularly in public education.
I recall that when I studied cultural anthropology in the Before Times decades ago, we learned to distinguish between the etic approach and the emic approach. Briefly, the etic is the perspective of the outsider and the emic the perspective of the insider. The etic is cross-cultural and scientific. The emic is monocultural and faith-based. In the final analysis, the etic supersedes the emic, but it would be a poor anthropologist who didn't treat the emic seriously and take it into account in her analysis.
New Zealand is a good example of the emic taking precedence over the etic in its attempt to merge mātauranga Māori with science. Anything in mātauranga Māori that is of enduring practical value must be subject to rigorous testing and be falsifiable. One cannot admit it into the body of reliable knowledge solely because the Maori believed it for hundreds of years.
P. S. IMO, everyone should take an anthropology course as part of a liberal education.
I’m wonder if what Gurmendi is trying to say is that you might be able to judge one culture over another, but when we talk about “a culture” we are talking about the average beliefs/attitudes of many different people who live in that culture. So as soon as you start making assumptions about individuals who are from that culture you are doing something that is at minimum very similar to racism. They both come down to the principle that people deserve to be treated as individuals.
"(..) the historic sharing of cultural advances until they became the common inheritance of the human race implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different than others, but better than others. The fact that all people, whether European, Asian, African or other have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture in order to replace it with something from another culture implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively(...)"
"(...)Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of identity, to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall to the wayside, or survive only as curiosities like roman numeral today(..)"
There's probably like 10 more excerpts I could take from it but at that point it's just be pasting a transcript here.
And thats from the 90s. Similar ideas are found in his Migrations and Cultures and Conquests and Cultures books (and probably Race and Culture, but that one I have not read yet), but this speech really sums it up nicely.
It's crazy to me how long people have been trying to convince others and themselves of this nonsense.
I had a conversation at work with a friend who is certainly more left leaning probably progressive in some ways. We were talking about Iran, and I mentioned that British culture was better because of our freedoms we have and all the groups etc ... I also know that Iranian culture is very friendly and that their government does not reflect the people on the ground who do suffer from the regime. But many people support it also. He pointed out Britain and the West, more individualistic cultures had higher rates or mental health difficulties and as such was proof that although we have our freedoms. The people their are probably more happy. (I would argue that totalitarian regimes probably don't collect very sophisticated wellbeing data from the people they opress). I don't agree with the point but it made me think about separating top down bottom up culture. I wasn't demonizing Iranians my father in law is Iranian, my partner half Iranian in so many ways it is a beautiful culture and regimes like the Iranian government make me sad because it's such a waste of so much possibility for travel, tourism, cultural sharing business etc.... But I do not visit because I do not fancy being arrested for being a spy. (Although, one look at me and don't reckon they would get much for my bounty!).
I am unconvinced by that. I suspect individualistic cultures have higher expectations of happiness and seek mental health support more. However, even if it is true, the beauty of a liberal society is that you don’t have to be individualistic. You can voluntarily join a religious or other community and hold yourself to its standards. You just don’t have to.
Well, yes. What else do we have? To what external, objective power could we turn for the right answer? Even if one of the gods claimed to exist actually does, his/her/its stance on morality would be subjective by definition because it was produced by that being and there is nothing objective outside the god to validate its claims against.
We are all here arguing that one or another ethical framework is best for humanity. Some of those frameworks have metaphysical beliefs about gods in them and some do not. They are all, therefore, necessarily subjective and we must argue for them and keep trying to work things out among ourselves. I see no reason to think the universe can care if we spend our lives dedicated to each others' wellbeing or war ourselves into extinction. Only we care about that and so we keep arguing among ourselves, "What does it mean to live a good life?" "What should the meaning of life be?" "What responsibilities do we have to each other?" "Why?"
A conversation best held across a dinner table over the period of hours. But as far as, “what else have we got?” I would say that we have social science, history, and relatively large computing capacity. Culture is mostly based group reaction to common experiences of surviving. People like to live in a groove because that expectation eliminates the fear of the unknown and puts the greatest unknown, death, off another day. Culture lays the foundation for that groove, but the culture is usually sorted into hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy usually shapes and reshapes the culture. The answer to what else we have is answered by breaking cultures down to their components and seeing what is useful toward gaining basic survival, and questioning the rest. Especially questioning those elements that serve to give priority to the lives of one class over another or gives precedent to people who claim to speak for invisible beings.
I think there needs to be a base of common culture that revolves around the actual material needs of the world and places those things above class and station. Until there is that base standard, comparisons can’t be made. Things that we objectively need to survive as opposed to what we would subjectively like to see our world be. If we can’t even hit that bar, and make it so that there aren’t people dying of war, hunger, and treatable disease, then we should save the subjective concerns of culture, when we’re mature enough as a species, to make sure wars don’t break out over those examinations.
So, I guess my subjective answer is that the only superior culture would be more of a meta-culture. It would be objective, and my belief in it would be subjective. How to make that happen? Especially in the face of capital resistance which relies on war and poverty serves their bottom line?
But you’re right. Quite honestly, anything that isn’t awareness of the here and now is subjective.
I’m not following you. The things you mention are a product of human reason. Perhaps you meant in a narrower sense. Assume that when ai say we have to rely on ourselves, I mean all the things our rational brains create to a help us understand the world, our place in it and morality. I’m not sure what the rest means.
Apologies, I’m not writing as cohesively as I’d like, I’m fairly exhausted. And, like I said, a conversation best held at a dinner table. I just want to clarify, I don’t begrudge anyone their religion or spirituality, as long as other people don’t have to pay for their beliefs, but I certainly don’t believe that a person claiming their god talks through them so we must all obey should have much of a place in policy of pluralistic society.
The point here is that you *can* have a scorecard. The exact nature of the scorecard is, as you say, subjective. Helen is arguing for a liberal scorecard and chastising someone who should also have a liberal scorecard. A conservative will have a different scorecard, a libertarian yet another. But we can all have one. Arguing for a scorecard for your own culture while also arguing that it can’t apply elsewhere is the inconsistency, one liberals are probably uniquely, or at least more, susceptible to than either conservatives or libertarians.
Indeed! Although the definition of liberalism I use is very broad because it is framed as the opposite of 'authoritarian' so most conservatives and certainly libertarians are included within it. Only authoritarian collectivists who would deny people human rights according to their own value system do not fit here.
You identify the difference between 'subjective' and 'relative'. I recognise that my own value system cannot be 'objective' in any meaningful sense because it is one set of principles among many - an argument for what makes society work best - and it will not convince anybody who wants, say, an Islamic theocracy. What it is not, is relative. I do not say that individual liberty and human rights make the most ethical system in my culture while an Islamic theocracy the most ethical in another. I think individual liberty and humans right make the most ethical system.
I would like to understand . You talk about some culture are better than others. That progress needs consistent principles. Are you suggesting that there is or should be a stable moral standard. It seems that you might be implying that a “better” culture would be a Western liberal one, yet your logic does appear to allow for non-Western moral progress as well. Do you suggest that a moral standard should be grounded in natural law, modern construct or something else ?
I suppose the another question is whether moral truth can be derived purely from reason? Or maybe it requires some metaphysical grounding. I too would reject cultural relativism, for virtue is the same everywhere, and cultures can be closer or further from rational, virtuous order.
I myself believe in moral progress through the correction of false judgements and the harmonisation of individual reason with universal reason.
Yes, I think this should be the stable, moral standard. Am I confident of it becoming so/remaining so? No, not really. WEIRD societies are an anomaly in human history and globally. I think we could easily lose liberalism and go back to one authoritarian regime getting strong enough to seize power and impose itself on everyone until knocked aside by another. That seems to be the default for our species.
Can moral truth be derived purely from reason? I don’t see what else we have to work with. Various gods have been claimed to exist, of course, and want particular things, but there’s no reason to think any of them actually exist. I’d continue to argue that liberal principles have been the best if your aim is to make the world better for humans and enable them to advance knowledge and resolve differences. Anyone whose aim is not that will not, of course, agree with me.
However, I think most people reading my piece will have the same default regard for individual liberty and human rights that I do. The man I am criticising has a job rooted in doing so.
If racists use some issue as a proxy for race (religion, culture, immigration) there is an instinct on some strands of the left to insist that the proxy has no negative ramifications whatsoever. That's understandable in a way, racism is both a moral abhorrence, and in a time when it seems less of a social taboo, starting to genuinely scare me.
But by insisting that there are no negative aspects of certain religions, cultures, and immigration, they don't thwart racists, they enable them.
As I replied to Gurmendi:
"Saying all cultures are equally valid is explicitly saying that the culture of the American south in the first half of the 19th Century was just as valid as the one slavery abolitionists advocated for. It's nuts."
These are worrying times.
This is the horseshoe effect at work. It becomes OK to pay as little as posible and even let people go hungry and homeless—or even be enslaved—because “respect the culture.” Some basic living and economic standards that can improve humanity for all are worth fighting for.
A massive beartrap-topic in my country.
The honest position would be to say that both our European-ancestral cultures and African ones have objectionable and laudable strategies, traditions, and other organizing principles, but once one raises this point, the accusations of discrimination flow freely and histerically.
Very well stated.
These points and distinctions seem so obvious. Why would an intelligent person with classically "liberal" values (e.g. women's autonomy) suggest that cultures cannot be compared or evaluated along a spectrum of human-rights criteria? It's just obtuse, but why are very smart people being obtuse?
It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry. We simply can't have it that culture of the West is "superior" in any moral sense to a non-Western culture. If that's the premise, then there's nothing more to say except to be obtuse. I guess this is how you get Queers for Palestine.
"It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry."
I don't think it's that simple. In practice, if someone says that a culture associated with some ethnic minority is inferior, that someone often is using that statement as a thin veil for racist sentiment. People often express sentiments obliquely, using statements that, if taken purely literally, are reasonable but are meant to be understood in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" fashion.
Yes, some people make the sort of disingenuous high-minded statements that cover an ulterior motive. But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous. Because it really may be high-minded. For example, a person could be anti-open borders on economic, cultural, or racist grounds. Dishonest pro-open borders people will presume that all anti-open borders people are racist, which means you just get to bypass the arguments you'd rather not have to respond to.
It may or may not be anti-western bigotry to claim that cultures cannot be qualitatively compared, but it is certainly dishonest. It's nothing more than a dodge around confronting a rational argument that you can't (or don't want to) contend with.
"But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous."
True, but it's so annoyingly common that it makes your claim "It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry" untrue.
Last night over dinner, I had a brief discussion with a friend about cultural assimilation in the context of immigration. My friend, an NA indigenous woman, expressed the view that cultural assimilation is a negative process leading to “loss of culture”. What my friend means by “culture” differs from Pluckrose’s meaning: “We have to understand culture as ideas, because that is what it is”. For my friend, culture is food, costume, music etc.; that is, cultural artefacts. But my friend also claims to believe in the creation myths of her indigenous culture. I am sceptical of this claim, but that’s another story. Here, it is relevant that my friend does not believe in most of the ideas traditionally held by her indigenous culture about, for example, women or slavery. Actually, I should say that my friend denies her indigenous culture ever held ideas which conflict with her assimilation of liberal democracy.
This kind of denialism in defence of cultures with abhorrent ideologies and, hence, abhorrent cultural practices is characteristic of woke leftists who need to see “BIPOC” cultures as universally innocent of any cultural blame in order to see them as universally culturally oppressed.
I agree with the main points in this article, but I want to push back on a few specific point:
1) I disagree that it is a bad thing to “conflate culture with… ethnicity. To use your example of Germany, German culture has changed between Nazi Germany and today, but I think it preposterous to claim that there is no German culture that is strongly tied to German ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that ethnicity is an inherently cultural concept.
Is there really no such thing as a German culture or an English culture or a Japanese culture?
2) I agree with you that certain cultures can be deemed superior to others, particularly when one focuses on one dimension, but this seems to fit very poorly with your argument in previous essays that government should not seek to shape culture (as the Right wants). I believed that you claimed that government and liberal institutions must be neutral and let the individual decide.
If a culture has certain weakpoints that undermine its own people, why would you not use the power of government and other institutions to improve or at least to protect it from getting worse?
This is particularly true for public education, where socialization plays a crucial role.
You claimed that liberal institutions and government must be neutral on these cultural issues, but also state that some cultures are inferior (and presumably must be changed).
That seems like a fundamental contradiction, particularly when previous generations of Liberals explicitly stated that a free society must have strong values or virtue (for example, the American Founding Fathers).
Why not just state that Liberalism flourishes in certain cultures and governments must nuture and protect that culture, particularly in public education.
I recall that when I studied cultural anthropology in the Before Times decades ago, we learned to distinguish between the etic approach and the emic approach. Briefly, the etic is the perspective of the outsider and the emic the perspective of the insider. The etic is cross-cultural and scientific. The emic is monocultural and faith-based. In the final analysis, the etic supersedes the emic, but it would be a poor anthropologist who didn't treat the emic seriously and take it into account in her analysis.
New Zealand is a good example of the emic taking precedence over the etic in its attempt to merge mātauranga Māori with science. Anything in mātauranga Māori that is of enduring practical value must be subject to rigorous testing and be falsifiable. One cannot admit it into the body of reliable knowledge solely because the Maori believed it for hundreds of years.
P. S. IMO, everyone should take an anthropology course as part of a liberal education.
Indeed! I have been working closely with a case of precisely this. We should teach anthropology like this!
And religions too, religions are ideas and can be ranked even if they are all false in their premise of believing in gods and whatnot.
I’m wonder if what Gurmendi is trying to say is that you might be able to judge one culture over another, but when we talk about “a culture” we are talking about the average beliefs/attitudes of many different people who live in that culture. So as soon as you start making assumptions about individuals who are from that culture you are doing something that is at minimum very similar to racism. They both come down to the principle that people deserve to be treated as individuals.
Reminds me of this speech from Thomas Sowell: https://youtu.be/On2x5a5Y030?si=jmNa8Yb8rWcgRkNj
"(..) the historic sharing of cultural advances until they became the common inheritance of the human race implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different than others, but better than others. The fact that all people, whether European, Asian, African or other have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture in order to replace it with something from another culture implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively(...)"
"(...)Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of identity, to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall to the wayside, or survive only as curiosities like roman numeral today(..)"
There's probably like 10 more excerpts I could take from it but at that point it's just be pasting a transcript here.
And thats from the 90s. Similar ideas are found in his Migrations and Cultures and Conquests and Cultures books (and probably Race and Culture, but that one I have not read yet), but this speech really sums it up nicely.
It's crazy to me how long people have been trying to convince others and themselves of this nonsense.
I had a conversation at work with a friend who is certainly more left leaning probably progressive in some ways. We were talking about Iran, and I mentioned that British culture was better because of our freedoms we have and all the groups etc ... I also know that Iranian culture is very friendly and that their government does not reflect the people on the ground who do suffer from the regime. But many people support it also. He pointed out Britain and the West, more individualistic cultures had higher rates or mental health difficulties and as such was proof that although we have our freedoms. The people their are probably more happy. (I would argue that totalitarian regimes probably don't collect very sophisticated wellbeing data from the people they opress). I don't agree with the point but it made me think about separating top down bottom up culture. I wasn't demonizing Iranians my father in law is Iranian, my partner half Iranian in so many ways it is a beautiful culture and regimes like the Iranian government make me sad because it's such a waste of so much possibility for travel, tourism, cultural sharing business etc.... But I do not visit because I do not fancy being arrested for being a spy. (Although, one look at me and don't reckon they would get much for my bounty!).
How might you respond to such pushback Helen?
I am unconvinced by that. I suspect individualistic cultures have higher expectations of happiness and seek mental health support more. However, even if it is true, the beauty of a liberal society is that you don’t have to be individualistic. You can voluntarily join a religious or other community and hold yourself to its standards. You just don’t have to.
A subjective conversation for the most part, dependent on one’s own strong beliefs, preferences and situation.
Well, yes. What else do we have? To what external, objective power could we turn for the right answer? Even if one of the gods claimed to exist actually does, his/her/its stance on morality would be subjective by definition because it was produced by that being and there is nothing objective outside the god to validate its claims against.
We are all here arguing that one or another ethical framework is best for humanity. Some of those frameworks have metaphysical beliefs about gods in them and some do not. They are all, therefore, necessarily subjective and we must argue for them and keep trying to work things out among ourselves. I see no reason to think the universe can care if we spend our lives dedicated to each others' wellbeing or war ourselves into extinction. Only we care about that and so we keep arguing among ourselves, "What does it mean to live a good life?" "What should the meaning of life be?" "What responsibilities do we have to each other?" "Why?"
A conversation best held across a dinner table over the period of hours. But as far as, “what else have we got?” I would say that we have social science, history, and relatively large computing capacity. Culture is mostly based group reaction to common experiences of surviving. People like to live in a groove because that expectation eliminates the fear of the unknown and puts the greatest unknown, death, off another day. Culture lays the foundation for that groove, but the culture is usually sorted into hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy usually shapes and reshapes the culture. The answer to what else we have is answered by breaking cultures down to their components and seeing what is useful toward gaining basic survival, and questioning the rest. Especially questioning those elements that serve to give priority to the lives of one class over another or gives precedent to people who claim to speak for invisible beings.
I think there needs to be a base of common culture that revolves around the actual material needs of the world and places those things above class and station. Until there is that base standard, comparisons can’t be made. Things that we objectively need to survive as opposed to what we would subjectively like to see our world be. If we can’t even hit that bar, and make it so that there aren’t people dying of war, hunger, and treatable disease, then we should save the subjective concerns of culture, when we’re mature enough as a species, to make sure wars don’t break out over those examinations.
So, I guess my subjective answer is that the only superior culture would be more of a meta-culture. It would be objective, and my belief in it would be subjective. How to make that happen? Especially in the face of capital resistance which relies on war and poverty serves their bottom line?
But you’re right. Quite honestly, anything that isn’t awareness of the here and now is subjective.
I’m not following you. The things you mention are a product of human reason. Perhaps you meant in a narrower sense. Assume that when ai say we have to rely on ourselves, I mean all the things our rational brains create to a help us understand the world, our place in it and morality. I’m not sure what the rest means.
Apologies, I’m not writing as cohesively as I’d like, I’m fairly exhausted. And, like I said, a conversation best held at a dinner table. I just want to clarify, I don’t begrudge anyone their religion or spirituality, as long as other people don’t have to pay for their beliefs, but I certainly don’t believe that a person claiming their god talks through them so we must all obey should have much of a place in policy of pluralistic society.
The point here is that you *can* have a scorecard. The exact nature of the scorecard is, as you say, subjective. Helen is arguing for a liberal scorecard and chastising someone who should also have a liberal scorecard. A conservative will have a different scorecard, a libertarian yet another. But we can all have one. Arguing for a scorecard for your own culture while also arguing that it can’t apply elsewhere is the inconsistency, one liberals are probably uniquely, or at least more, susceptible to than either conservatives or libertarians.
Indeed! Although the definition of liberalism I use is very broad because it is framed as the opposite of 'authoritarian' so most conservatives and certainly libertarians are included within it. Only authoritarian collectivists who would deny people human rights according to their own value system do not fit here.
You identify the difference between 'subjective' and 'relative'. I recognise that my own value system cannot be 'objective' in any meaningful sense because it is one set of principles among many - an argument for what makes society work best - and it will not convince anybody who wants, say, an Islamic theocracy. What it is not, is relative. I do not say that individual liberty and human rights make the most ethical system in my culture while an Islamic theocracy the most ethical in another. I think individual liberty and humans right make the most ethical system.
Good points.
I would like to understand . You talk about some culture are better than others. That progress needs consistent principles. Are you suggesting that there is or should be a stable moral standard. It seems that you might be implying that a “better” culture would be a Western liberal one, yet your logic does appear to allow for non-Western moral progress as well. Do you suggest that a moral standard should be grounded in natural law, modern construct or something else ?
I suppose the another question is whether moral truth can be derived purely from reason? Or maybe it requires some metaphysical grounding. I too would reject cultural relativism, for virtue is the same everywhere, and cultures can be closer or further from rational, virtuous order.
I myself believe in moral progress through the correction of false judgements and the harmonisation of individual reason with universal reason.
I argue from liberal principles. I set them out here.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/relaunching-the-overflowings-of-a
Yes, I think this should be the stable, moral standard. Am I confident of it becoming so/remaining so? No, not really. WEIRD societies are an anomaly in human history and globally. I think we could easily lose liberalism and go back to one authoritarian regime getting strong enough to seize power and impose itself on everyone until knocked aside by another. That seems to be the default for our species.
Can moral truth be derived purely from reason? I don’t see what else we have to work with. Various gods have been claimed to exist, of course, and want particular things, but there’s no reason to think any of them actually exist. I’d continue to argue that liberal principles have been the best if your aim is to make the world better for humans and enable them to advance knowledge and resolve differences. Anyone whose aim is not that will not, of course, agree with me.
However, I think most people reading my piece will have the same default regard for individual liberty and human rights that I do. The man I am criticising has a job rooted in doing so.