Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your two complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Books

The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes

Philip Badger considers Steven Lukes’ views about the diversity of morality.

Stephen Lukes has made a long and distinguished career out of exploring the relationship between the universalist moral claims of philosophy and the range of cultural variation in morality reported by anthropologists. In The Diversity of Morals (2025) he returns to these themes with all the energy, enthusiasm and depth of understanding for which he is so rightly respected.

In the course of this book, we meet a varied cast of protagonists, and learn rather a lot about them. However, I’ll focus on just a couple of them here: David Hume (1711-1776) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Interestingly, Hume’s role in the book is to champion the so-called ‘nomothetic’ claim that there are indeed universal values, while Herder plays the ‘idiopathic’ part of a proto-communitarian focused on the eponymous ‘diversity of morals’. I say that this is interesting because, for many readers, the big hitter when it comes to universalist claims for morality is not Hume but his philosophical sparring partner, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The main difference between the two is, however, not their unequal enthusiasm for moral universalism but their claims about its justification. For Kant, the common capacity for reason reveals the basis of a universal human morality, while for Hume, what’s universal about us is that humanity is equipped by nature with a facility for compassion. Herder, by contrast, sees difference rather than commonality as the most striking feature of human cultures. For him, our lives are animated and made meaningful by ‘thick’ idiosyncratic cultural narratives, and any generalised feeling we might have for our fellow humans is, by comparison, rather ‘thin’ and ephemeral.

It’s at this point that Lukes makes a plea for bridging the gap between the positions of Hume and Herder by pointing out that there’s a functional need to do so: while life within a ‘thick’ (read ‘blanketing’) cultural environment might be pretty comforting (especially for those with power in it), there comes a point when it’s necessary to look over the hill into the next valley, and interact with those whose narratives are different from ours. In these circumstances, what we need is exactly the kind of sense of common humanity Hume’s position allows. Following the writings of the existentialist Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Lukes locates the origins of this ‘thin’ appreciation of human commonality in the so-called Axial Age – roughly 800-200 BCE. This era saw a move away from tribal particularism towards a nore generalised notion of common humanity. Often this involved the emergence of a creation mythology that encompassed humanity as a whole. From this came moral claims about the relationship between God or the absolute (rather than gods) and human beings. In The European Spirit (1948), Jaspers claims this age of moral universalisation occurred in a similar way in very widely separated civilisations, from India and the teachings of the Buddha to China to the golden age of Greek philosophy.

Crossing the Moral Landscape by Oliver Li
For more art by Oliver Li please visit www.illustrationx.com/sg/artists/OliverLi

Ages & Movements

Some readers will be feeling sceptical at this point, and who could blame them? Firstly, the Axial Age seems as long as the proverbial piece of string. For example, surely we need to extend it to cover the claims of a certain Jewish carpenter who was really big on the notion of a universal morality? Secondly, it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the Axial Age and the ages that have followed haven’t always been about peace and love. Rather, monotheists have spent a couple of millennia contesting each other’s claims, often at the point of a sword, and latterly, a gun; and the atheists followed suit in the twentieth century, with communism and fascism contesting everyone.

What might be more plausible, is to consider the ‘Axial turn’ not as a historical moment but as a latent capacity which might be awakened at any time by cultural and material developments. For Lukes it requires a revolution in thinking, such that we attain some critical distance from our more parochial attitudes. It is, in other words, the moment when we start ‘thinking about thinking’.

For a psychologist, there are some obvious preconditions for this development. Specifically, at least some people need to be free of the kind of stress and preoccupation that has defined most of human history. I’m suggesting that systematically doing philosophy is only possible if somebody else is slaving away – in the Greeks’ case, literally – doing all the mundane stuff. Socrates might have been reliant on the kindness of strangers, but there was not much chance that he’d go hungry or without shelter. (Admittedly, the luxury of sitting around thinking about thinking didn’t end well for Socrates, but he had it pretty good there for a while.)

It also isn’t entirely surprising that Socrates – or aristocratic Plato using Socrates as a mouthpiece – wasn’t a great fan of democracy, but this might be because he mistook fully realised human potential as something exceptional. Yet perhaps most of us are capable of our own ‘axial’ revolutions, incorporating the whole of humanity into our personal moral thinking, given the right circumstances. (This is more or less the conclusion J.S. Mill came to.) A combination of evolutionary, physiological, and social psychology tells us exactly what those ‘right circumstances’ might be. To be specific, if you want to think beyond the reach of your own culture, you need the following ingredients. Firstly, lots of psychological security (including consistent care in childhood and a sense that life is going well as an adult). Secondly, good ongoing doses of appropriate nutrition (omega 3 anyone?). And thirdly, plenty of opportunities to cooperate with people unlike yourself in non-threatening situations. What you get, if all these ingredients are present, is a society that the residents of Copenhagen or any of the Scandinavian countries might find familiar (it’s no surprise that Francis Fukuyama joked that he wanted to call his book on the preconditions of political order How to Get to Denmark).

Unfortunately, all of this also points to the fragility of the Axial turn. If there are such strong preconditions for moral universalism’s achievement, it seems more than just possible that they won’t be met. Specifically, since the financial crisis and the disruption caused by Covid, our age is one of insecurity. That means we’re at a cultural moment where universalist moral thinking is at significant risk.

Weird & Insubstantial?

Two major points remain to be addressed. Firstly, some have suggested that ‘Axial’ thinking is actually the local product of Western liberalism dressed up as something more universal. In the words of Joseph Henrich (The Weirdest People in the World, 2010), this is to say that Western society is WEIRD: not just ‘Western’, but also ‘Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’; and that any claim that liberal values are universal human values dissolves on recognition of this peculiarity.

Lukes puts some effort into defending Axial thinking against the charge. I’d suggest Lukes is right to think that global society is one where, more than ever, ‘thin’ thinking is a necessity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t identify the biologically shared human potentials that make this universal thinking possible. Hume was right about the facility we naturally have for compassion; but his ‘naturalism’ has had to wait for evolutionary psychology to intellectually underpin it.

Finally, there is the claim, explicit in Herder and in his modern communitarian counterparts, that axial/thin/liberal thinking is just too insubstantial to sustain meaningful human existence. We can hear this complaint reflected in the nativism/tribalism of the populist right across multiple societies, and it’s highly seductive. People, they often claim, need deep and rich narratives about cultural, national, and religious identity, and without these things we are ‘lost’ and ‘anomic’ (that is, identityless). Such arguments inevitably involve a retreat from the global, and with it, from the notion of a shared humanity. The result is a kind of insularity, and, in the most chilling circumstances, a desire for ‘purity’.

By contrast, liberals – such as this reviewer – have an almost visceral distrust of the idea that uncritiqued tradition confers purpose. We certainly should not take lying down the claim that life is meaningless without local tradition. The universalist idea (in my own formulation) of a life guided by respect for the individual’s right to define their own deepest commitments, lived with compassion for the suffering of others, alongside the conviction that we might help people achieve their full potential, is not, in any sense, meaningless. The idea that we can get by without the need for a local cultural foundation for our morality might enrage those less inclined to cosmopolitanism than Lukes. However, that needn’t stop us asserting that the ‘crooked timbers that make humanity’ (to paraphrase Kant) should not be forced to fit arbitrary local moulds in some Procrustean authoritarian manner.

The Diversity of Morals is a fine book by a fine writer, and readers will gain huge amounts from it (I haven’t even touched on the enlightening sections about liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, for example). Lukes ultimately doesn’t bridge the gap between the perspectives he outlines, but he deserves credit for trying.

Phil Badger is a teacher of Philosophy and Social Sciences in a Sheffield school sixth form.

• The Diversity of Morals, Stephen Lukes, Princeton University Press, 2025, 256 pages, £21.45 hb, ISBN: 978-0691157191