Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships.

Cahill, Lisa Sowle

By James Kellenberger. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University, 2001. Pp. xi + 236. $35.

Kellenberger, a philosopher, seeks a middle position between relativism and absolutism in ethics by redefining Kantian "respect for persons" in terms of personal relationships. Engaging mostly contemporary philosophical interlocutors, especially John Kekes (The Morality of Pluralism, 1993), K. argues that relationships, taking similar basic forms across cultures (friendship, marriage), are the ground and standard of morality. Relationships between persons should always embody basic equality. Yet personal relationships permit and even require diverse particular forms and expressions in different circumstances and cultural settings.

K.'s approach avoids the abstract and insubstantial content of some neo-Kantian theories. He grants, with contemporary Aristotelian and "natural law" thinkers, that there are basic human needs and values that are universally recognized and even "transcultural" (129): "a prohibition against murder, the value of the family, and truth telling," "food," and "love" (41), "justice, respect for human rights, and a concern for human welfare in the face of deprivation or suffering" (130). With Kekes, K. distinguishes between "primary" and "universally human" values that "derive from a shared human nature" (97), and "secondary" values provided by traditions to concretize the primary values (98). For example, while respect for life may be a primary value, traditions vary in their specifications of the morality of killing. Variations in cultural respect for and protection of values are due to the fact that a specific practice in one culture may not have the same meaning for respectful human relationships under different social contracts--for example, the supposed willingness of Eskimo men to share their wives sexually with others; the difficulty in bioethics of understanding what autonomy and respect for privacy signify in the U.S. versus China; and the meaning of female circumcision in African societies versus its apparent meaning to Western critics.

While Kekes tends to read such variations as evidence of a pluralism of objectively valid moralities, K. avoids adopting the term pluralism or the terms relativism and absolutism. Yet he does grant, with relativism, that there is "no single true morality," no one absolute standard for moral lightness, or no one set of absolute moral norms. He also grants, with "absolutism," that "evil societies, evil personal values, or evil agreements," along with "evil social practices," can and should be recognized and protested (183-84). With Kekes's "pluralism," K. grants nevertheless that there are different valid moralities at the level of specific practices. He maintains that if we "appreciate that we always ought to treat persons as persons" (213), we have both a basic standard of moral judgment that can reject evil, and a way to understand and accommodate the pluralism and qualified relativity of moral systems.

The book's style is clear, with frequent sign-posts and summaries. It offers the reader an accessible tour of recent philosophical forays into the problems attending theories about reliable moral judgment in an age of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and globalization. It shows that these problems are of nearly universal interest in contemporary moral philosophy, and identifies many of the nagging puzzles that must be faced by thinkers who seek a coherent defense of moral objectivity today. The puzzles include how to arrive at a truly universal list of basic values; what secondary values to include; how to assign priorities among both primary and secondary values; how to define a conception of the good life that can help resolve the above questions; and how to resolve conflicts, especially over views of the good life (155). In the end, it is not clear how K.'s own theory differs significantly from more nuanced versions of theories he rejects, or how it avoids the same problems.

In particular, K. notes that not all societies actually accept that all persons are equal or should be treated as such. Yet he does not resolve this problem, any more than the theories he rejects as "absolutist" can show conclusively that there is an ideal morality that should be shared universally. This is not necessarily a fatal flaw. All the theories K. discusses converge on the idea that there are some shared human values based on commonalities in human nature, values that still look very different in different cultures. This alone is evidence that fundamental universality and considerable variability can coexist in ethics, whether or not all the theoretical problems have been resolved.

Theologians, especially Catholic theologians, will wonder why human nature and natural law traditions did not receive more than a five-page treatment, and why the one resource for interpreting Aquinas was a 1950 book by the Anglican, Robert C. Mortimer. K. concludes--oddly, given his own similar conclusion--that Aquinas "seems to allow a cultural application or determination of meaning of the natural law," and thus natural law's "force against relativism is negligible" (66). Recent work on practical reason by authors such as Daniel Westberg, Daniel Mark Nelson, and Pamela Hall bears resemblance to K.'s idea that the concrete realization of values can only be carried out and evaluated at the level of practical relationships among persons and in communities.

LISA SOWLE CAHILL
Boston College