> It is a well-established fact that
> the values we hold dear in an industrial society are not shared by
> people everywhere. For me, the conclusion is inescapable: we cannot
> assume that the values we hold, no matter how dear they are to us,
> should be applied as universal standards to rank societies as "better"
> or "worse". I know this is brazen moral relativism, but consider the
> alternative: if we arbitrarily say "the values in my society are the
> universal standards by which all societies should be judged", then
> we're
> engaged in equally brazen ethnocentrism.
As a logical matter, the fact that individuals and societies hold different values doesn't demonstrate that values aren't objective and knowable. About values, as about anything else, individuals and societies can be mistaken.
For the same reason, the fact that some particular value claims aren't universally shared doesn't demonstrate that they aren't universally valid, i.e. true.
The final episode in Adam Curtis's BBC documentary series, "The Trap," begins with Isaiah Berlin's assertion that any conception of the "good" as objective and knowable necessarily implies tyranny. In a certain sense, it;s obvious that isn't so since it's quite easy to conceive of conceptions of the "good" that are antithetical to tyranny. For instance, the ethical "good" that constitutes the essence of Marx's conception is relations of mutual recognition. I take "The Trap" to be subtly making this point by playing the choral part of the Ninth Symphony, an ode to the imagined "joy" of such relations, while asserting that something is missing from Berlin's limitation of "freedom" to "negative freedom."
Ted