Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Understanding human morality is important in appreciating the ethical dimensions of environmental problems. As a first approximation, morality is a behavioral system, with an attendant psychology, that has evolved among some social animals for the purposes of regulating their interactions. This chapter discusses and rejects challenges to morality from amoralism, theism, and relativism, arguing instead that morality is ubiquitous and difficult to escape, does not need the support of God in order to have content or be motivating, and is not culture-bound. However, this does not imply that there is a single, true morality, that belief in God is inconsistent with morality, or that there is no conflict between morality and individual desire. Armed with this understanding of human morality, we are now prepared to discuss some substantive questions in moral philosophy.

In Chapter 2, I develop and defend an account of human rights as universalist and minimalist. First, I characterize rights as universal, protecting all people universally and absent any qualifying characteristic. Second, I argue that the human right to subsistence is a basic human right. I argue that without enjoying the substance of the human right to subsistence, we will neither be able to enjoy the substance of any other, non-basic right nor pursue any other ends, moral, or non-moral. And third, in response to critics who believe that the universality of human rights entails remaking the world in our image (i.e., maximalism), I develop a minimalist account of human rights. According to minimalism about human rights, human rights should enable us to live minimally decent and autonomous lives. On these terms, human rights aim to protect people from the worst rather than to promote the best.

This final chapter shifts to look to Herodotus’ reception in the early fourth century in the Dissoi Logoi. What questions does Herodotus raise for subsequent philosophers? How does allusion to the Histories in a treatise that is explicitly philosophical expand our understanding of his project? What is the consequence of this for Herodotus’ generic positionality? The Dissoi Logoi offers a case study in the reception of the Histories as an example of its prominence in intellectual culture. The second half of the chapter reprises the conclusions of the book and reexamines the value of reading what will become early Greek "historiography" alongside philosophy.

Objections against digital self-normativity are primarily related to questioning whether a moral dimension is embedded in the normative function of algorithms, and the increase in predictive power connected to the automatic implementation of norms. These matters concern secondary level rules of implementation and practice but are often thought to reflect the moral dimension of digital primary norms. There appears no comparable continuum between self-made private rules and international or domestic legal instruments governing digital human rights. I term such an absence as the idealism abyss; that is, the idealistic nature inherent in human rights articulated by positive legal instruments is not carried as uninterrupted into the self-normativity of digital agents. Once the self-normativity of digital private enterprises becomes justified, the idealism abyss leads to the necessity of self-constitutionality. In this case, primary and secondary self-regulation form one logical structure. The rejection of the idealism abyss shows an image where the self-made secondary norms rely on primary- (constitutional-) level norms originating from the non-digital realm, but their content may have changed in the course of the transposition.

This chapter discusses whether the appropriation of Kuhnian thoughts by the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge is appropriate. In order to answer the question of appropriate appropriation, Kuhn’s and the Strong Programme’s stances on two “isms” are compared: relativism and naturalism. It is shown that the Strong Programme clearly goes beyond Kuhn and breaks more radically with philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, there are also philosophical continuities and similarities.

This chapter shows the limits and ambiguities of the concept of moral clarity even when it is applied with good intentions. Using concrete examples from contemporary politics, it warns that quite often claims invoking moral clarity are an expression of reductionist thinking and tend to overrreach.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.

This chapter describes some of the main areas of interaction, overlap, or mutual concern between the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy, primarily as these are reflected in contemporary moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone tradition. The discussion is focussed on three broad themes, each falling under one of the main branches of moral and political philosophy as conventionally understood, namely ‘moral theory’, ‘applied ethics’, and ‘metaethics’. Under the heading of ‘moral theory’, the focus of discussion is the relationship between ideas of the good, the right, and the virtuous. Under the heading of ‘applied ethics’, the focus is on ideas of equality, justice, and cosmopolitan ideals. Under the heading of ‘metaethics’, the focus is on debates about interpretation, difference, and relativism. In each case, an attempt is made to connect some of the most influential literature in recent moral and political philosophy with relevant work in social anthropology.

The Introduction begins with an attempt to understand the concept of nihilism itself. Six different aspects of the concept are identified and briefly explored. While nihilism is usually associated with twentieth-century schools, it is argued that in fact the true origins of modern nihilism can be found in the rapid development of the sciences in the Enlightenment. The scientific perspective revealed the seemingly insignificant role of humans in the universe and led to a struggle with nihilism, which became an important topic for many thinkers in the nineteenth century. Five theses are outlined: (1) the problem of modern nihilism arose in the wake of the scientific development of the Enlightenment; (2) nihilism was not a local issue confined only to a specific place or country, but instead was something central to the general Zeitgeist of the entire nineteenth century in Europe and the West; (3) nihilism was not a problem confined to philosophy, but it received detailed treatment in works of poetry, drama, and other forms of literature; (4) the problem of nihilism is more widespread than has been acknowledged; and (5) the discussions of nihilism in the nineteenth century anticipate the key topics of the existentialist movement.

The chapter outlines a mentalist theory of ethics and law. It clarifies its background in the cognitive revolution of the twentieth century. It discusses mayor conceptual elements like the distinction of competence/performance, performance errors and experimental design and the poverty of stimulus argument. It outlines a detailed descriptive account of principles of moral cognition generating richly structured moral judgments. The content of justice, duties to care for others and respect for human beings are specified. New findings from child psychology indicate that children in early, preverbal states of development operate with normative principles. Approaches like the social intuitionist model and recent theories of moral ontogeny are considered, including models of statistical learning. The epistemology of ethics is a central concern of this chapter, particularly the epistemological merits of universalist accounts of human rights. The argument shows that epistemological universalism does not exclude the possibility of a legitimate pluralism of concrete attempts to bring to life the imperfectly understood (at least by this author) meaning of justice, solidarity and dignity.

This overview chapter introduces philosophical tools that can be used to aid managers in making decisions in situations which go beyond simple cost/benefit analyses. Value terms such as right, wrong, fair, justice, beneficence, responsibility, eco-consciousness, and discrimination are discussed and illustrated using real-world examples. Starting with the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India and the contemporary aftermath, it examines the complexities such situations present and assesses the usefulness of creating a theoretical framework that can lead to principled and defensible policies and actions. The challenges of exclusive self-interest and ethical relativism are examined, where morality simply echoes personal preference. Immediate profit maximization is compared to a more subtle long-term and more encompassing stakeholder approach. Reliance on the law is shown to be an insufficient ethical guide, while principle-based approaches that can be applied across a wide range of cases are more successful in working out what we should do in novel and difficult situations.

This chapter introduces the concepts of convergence and fragmentation in international human rights law (IHRL) by providing and discussing their definitions and meanings. Building on the conclusion of the 2006 ILC Report on Fragmentation in international law and drawing on existing literature on the matter, the chapter assesses the extent of normative fragmentation and proposes a new definition of judicial fragmentation in IHRL. Moreover, this chapter also engages in a discussion of how convergence and fragmentation relate to the concepts of universality and relativism, key for any comparative discussion on human rights.

This chapter discusses whether Heidegger’s holism – roughly, the view that the meaning of the parts (entities) depends on the whole (the world) – entails a vicious relativism. I argue that Heidegger is a holist because he is committed to both object externalism (the view that intentional states depend on environmental objects) and social externalism (the view that intentional states depend on other people). Whether his holism entails relativism depends on how we understand these two commitments. Discussing recent interpretations of Heidegger’s holism (Lafont, Dreyfus, Okrent, Carman), I argue that Heidegger’s holism entails a form of relativism only if we take his social externalism to be a function of social conventions. I then go on to challenge that this is the case by arguing that Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist according to whom intentional states do not depend solely on our relation to social conventions (or any other particular social formation such as language or tradition) but on our on-going social interaction broadly construed.