> Just as our capacity for language is hardwired (though we have lots of room for using it creatively), so is a sense of justice. This view helps explain his faith in reason and empiricism - his passionate devotion to factchecking politicians and the media. Because if we can straighten that shit out, it will unblock the expression of our underlying rationality and sense of justice. If you believe, as Foucault did, that there is no such underlying structure, then politics gets a lot more complicated.
These aren't the only alternatives.
It's possible to make ontological and philosophical anthropological assumptions that constitute ethical principles as "universal" and human being as the being able to develop the capabilities required to know and actualize them, e.g. know and actualize such a principle of "right" as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Human history can then be interpreted as a developmental process that substitutes rational self-determination for instinctive determination, the former including determination in accordance with universal ethical principles, e.g those actualized in relations of mutual recognition.
This makes human being originally irrational, i.e. instinctive, and having to become rational via "a long and painful process of development.”
The fact that these ontological and anthropological ideas are inconsistent with others, e.g. with the idea that there are no universal ethical principles, doesn't demonstrate that they're mistaken.
Similarly, the fact that ethical ideas and practices differ radically across space and time also doesn't demonstrate that that there are no universal principles. Explained in terms of the philosophy of history that makes history a process substituting rational self-determination for instinctive determination, they are, like differing religious beliefs and practices, expressions of different stages of this development, different forms of "self-estrangement."
Ted