LIBERALS AND CANNIBALS by Steven Lukes
Steven Lukes’ important new book takes its title from an aphorism coined by the late Martin Hollis: “liberalism for the liberals; cannibalism for the cannibals”. According to Hollis, this ‘disastrous parallel’ is characteristically drawn by relativists, who hold the view that the liberal values of freedom and equality under the law are culturally embedded and do not apply across cultural boundaries or to ways of life different to ours.
Liberalism, in this picture, is just what “we” do, and its prescriptions don’t apply to “them.” To suppose that they do, the relativist argues, is to commit a kind of ethnocentric fallacy, and to fail to see that all cultures are valid in their own terms, bound by norms and principles applicable only to themselves.
This is a widespread and influential view. Lukes shares Hollis’s conviction that its influence in philosophy and social and political theory is baleful. He raises four main objections against it...
<http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume118issue3_more.php?id=85_0_21_0_C>
Dave
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