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Martin Hollis (in one of his last writings before his untimely death) opens up the first section, Is Universalism Ethnocentric?, with a fiery defence of Enlightenment universalism and an attack on the relativist who says ‘Liberalism for the liberals; cannibalism for the cannibals.’ Focusing especially on universal claims about human nature, civil society, and the best forms of government, Hollis argues for a substantive and not merely procedural liberalism as a ‘fighting creed with universalist pretensions’ that can justify ‘robust and sharp‐edged moral declarations’. As Hollis argues, universalism works for minorities too. This is because excluded minorities must show that they have been wrongly excluded; they need a standpoint that is ‘not cognitively arbitrary’ to exclude racists and sexists.

Relativism is distinguished from pluralism; mathematical theses which are true in some systems but not others are held to express different propositions which different truth values in each. Comparisons are drawn with if-thenism, postulationism, and deductivism. A number of objections are tackled: that proofs need not be formal, that mathematicians believe theses without having proofs, that axiom systems can be inadequate and incomplete, that any consistent sentence counts as a mathematical truth, since it is provable from some system. In response, further comparisons are drawn with neo-logicism, and the role of abstraction principles such as Hume's principle discussed. The superiority of neo-formalism is urged, in the treatment for example of the ‘Julius Caesar problem’ and the problem of pairwise inconsistent abstraction principles. Finally Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the problem of true, but unprovable, Gödel sentences, is raised. A quick response by the neo-formalist is rejected, and the difficulty set aside until the last chapters.

This chapter provides an analytical discussion of some of the salient elements of the contemporary religious discourse of anti-relativism, focusing in particular on the use made of five key terms: relativism, truth, authority, freedom and totalitarianism.

This chapter advances the thesis that far from constituting a problem for democracy, moral relativism is actually the most solid intellectual foundation for it in the first place, through an analysis and discussion of the work of Hans Kelsen.

The essay presents a synopsis of quantitative studies of human values across cultural groups and poses a puzzle to be solved. A quantitative study of values reveals very few “East versus West” differences in value judgments and great deal of similarity not only in value dimensions (for example, individualism versus collectivism) but also in the rating of particular value items. The results of the study are challenging on a number of levels. On the empirical level, the quantitative results contradict decades of ethnographic research on cultural differences. On a methodological level, these results from survey questionnaires are different than the results from participant observation, leaving uncertainty in the choice of methods. On the theoretical level, if every group’s values are almost identical to every other group, what causes or sustains cultural differences? The finding of value similarity across cultures may seem implausible. But that is what these data show. The essay then considers ways that cultural differences in moral evaluations of behavior and estimations of what is right and wrong in everyday life are compatible with the existence of universal human values.

The nominalist assertion that “psychiatric disorder” is only a name for conditions that psychiatrists decide to treat is unacceptably relativistic. One of the best thought-out attempts to regiment the concept of disorder in response to such relativism is Jerome Wakefield's harmful dysfunction model, which is an explicitly essentialist model. In contrast, the imperfect community model seeks to avoid both the relativism of the traditional nominalist account and the speculative, metaphysical inferences of the essentialist account. The imperfect community refers to the fact that the various symptom configurations that are classified by psychiatrists resemble each other in a number of ways, but there is no property or group of properties that all of them share in common as a class. This non-essentialist model is illustrated by exploring causally related symptom networks as alternatives to the essentialism promulgated by latent variable models.

The influence of the Counter-Enlightenment has not been entirely nihilistic and rejectionist. It has deeply influenced Isaiah Berlin, one of the chief apostles of liberal political theory in the twentieth century. Berlin hoped to infuse what he saw as the rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment with the Counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on individuality, self-expression, moral diversity or what he called “value pluralism.” These ideas were best expressed by German romantics like Herder but can also be found in writers like Vico, Montesquieu, and Hume. Berlin saw moral and political life as torn between competing and irreconcilable values that applied also to nations and cultures each of which contains morally distinctive ways of life. It was this awareness that not all values are compatible and that life is a matter of choice between competing goods that gives his liberalism both a tragic and a heroic dimension.

Advocates for new approaches to development have increasingly called for people-led implementations. However, many models have failed, being both weak in the theory framing them, and in the practice that actualised them in the ground. This chapter weaves together theories to analyse critical flaws in how human rights and human development are enacted in the field. It advocates for human rights education interventions that engage people’s imaginative collaborative potential as they aspire toward the common good. Chapter 2 investigates the challenges of integrating human rights, as international instruments, in the local (especially non-western) setting. It is suggested that Human Rights Education (HRE) can play a key role in their contextualisation. The chapter also explores how individual and collective behaviours are influenced by both cognitive and social factors, drawing on two social science theories, cognitive schema theory and social norms theory. Drawing on key literature on gender and power, the last section offers an analysis of the structural conditions that shape what people think to be possible and achievable; that is: their aspirations and capabilities.

This chapter explores theopoetics and the question of relativity, critically reflecting on the role of theopoetics in philosophy. Addressing whether or not theopoetics can be termed a relativistic endeavor and whether or not Whitehead's particular theopoetic notions make for sound philosophy, the author ultimately highlights the ways in which theopoetics sparks imaginative insights in loci where orthodoxy has led to stagnation. Along the way, the chapter assesses theopoetics’ ability to speak to and from a variety of religious positions, including eastern religious perspectives. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of Whitehead's statement that God is the poet of the world, noting the significance and creativity of the divine-human relation and the value of transformative thinking that emerges from Whitehead's invocation.

This chapter distinguishes between two ways to believe in an age of relativism and postmodernism. The first form smacks of fideism, and it is without any other cause besides that of naï self-fulfillment. Part of the cult of the self, its expression is “think positive” and its content is self-entitlement. It is an uncomplicated form of belief that has great currency in a consumer-oriented society. A prime example can been seen in the movie Polar Express. The apologue of this major production was that any dream will come true so long as one believes that it will. Hence, this form of belief is also relativistic. The second form of belief is properly postmodern in that its aim is to view the real in the imaginary. The movie Finding Neverland exemplifies this form of belief. Based on the life of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, the movie conflates real life events with imaginary storylines to take the heroine to Neverland or to her death. In this way, the imagination provokes and sustains the distanciation between the subject and her fantasy and brings the real of facticity to the fore by way of an imaginary trope.

The conclusion reviews the historical debate about the meaning of autonomy to enter the contemporary one. Many contemporary Kantians seek to counter the charge of relativism or nihilism by maintaining that Kant provides a true account of morality for imperfectly rational being such as ourselves. The problem with this approach is that it freezes Kantianism—and the Enlightenment—in its original eighteenth-century form. The task of autonomy requires those inspired by Kant's writings to think creatively about how to welcome new religious constituencies into the twenty-first century Enlightenment.

Leavis would frequently recall how Wittgenstein had charged him with having more character than intelligence. Ellis ponders how much character he did in fact need as the effects of consumer capitalism which he and many others had identified in the 1920s become irresistibly predominant. They caused his cultural criticism to appear increasingly irrelevant, and the literary critical discrimination he believed in was undermined by a general spirit of relativism in philosophy which made the Oxford don's rebuke to Graves for preferring one book to another seem more avant-garde that it was meant to be at the time. Squeezed between literary scholarship and cultural study, the concept of English as a subject with literary criticism at its centre became difficult to maintain. And yet (Ellis concludes) it is that essentially Leavisian notion which provides the best insurance against the subject's descent into functional autonomy.

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.

Lachs argues that belief in the uniformity of human nature underlies dogmatism about absolute values. He rejects this view since he finds that the natures of individuals vary. Values are relative not to individuals’ thoughts and feelings but to their natures. This form of relativism does not lead to anarchy, however, since natures are similar and compatible enough to make social organizations possible, even if their overlaps do not constitute or consist in a uniform essence. Relativism has the chief advantage of promoting human liberty so that individuals can pursue their unique forms of perfection.

This chapter considers metropolitan attitudes and ideas about Africa and empire to which officials were exposed, both via formal training, and British culture more broadly. Such training was marked by a lack of specificity and an unwillingness on the part of those being trained to engage with the material. Nevertheless, that officials were exposed to imprecise ideas does not mean that officials registered in such ideas an irreconcilable tension between universalistic reform and a relativistic conservation of an African status quo. Officials learnt to love the empire without learning how.

In the past two decades, the anti-religious movement known as New Atheism has been working to define a scientific basis for opposing religion and its influence in public affairs. New Atheist thought on religion is rooted in scientism and a narrative of progress and Enlightenment that refers to ideas derived from evolutionary biology for its authority. A notable feature of this approach is the New Atheism’s critique of the social sciences, which it dismisses as relativistic and seeks to replace with evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. This chapter examines the New Atheism’s position in terms of an historical division within atheist thought between approaches to religion that are grounded in the natural sciences and the social sciences, and argues that contemporary atheism should be understood primarily as a political project to advance the authority of an ideological vision of ‘true’ science and its representative experts. While typically understood as a response to religious fundamentalism, the New Atheism is as much a reaction to a perceived weakening of universalistic standards of knowledge and morality in an increasingly pluralistic western cultural milieu. Through a reading of influential New Atheist texts in relation to the historical development of modern atheism, the chapter examines the relative decline in importance of the social sciences in popular atheist discourse. This decline is a result of the evolving politics of contemporary atheism, which, in some major forms, has drifted away from its roots in progressive social justice movements and ideologies toward a more libertarian position.