The Racism of Philosophy's Fear of Cultural Relativism

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The Racism of Philosophy’s Fear of Cultural Relativism∗ ______

SHUCHEN XIANG Institute of Foreign Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Peking University, China ([email protected])

By looking at a canonical article representing academic philosophy’s orthodox view against cultural relativism, James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” this paper argues that current mainstream western academic philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism is premised on a fear of the racial Other. The examples that Rachels marshals against cultural relativism default to the persistent, ubiquitous, and age-old stereotypes about the savage/barbarian Other that have dominated the history of western engagement with the non-western world. What academic philosophy fears about cultural relativism, it is argued, is the barbarians of the western imagination and not fellow human beings. The same structure that informs fears of cultural relativism, whereby people with different customs are reduced to the barbarian/savage of the western imagination, can be seen in the genesis of international law which arose as a justification for the domination of the Amerindian (parsed as “barbarians”). It is argued that implicit in arguments against cultural relativism is the preservation of the same right to dominate the Other. Finally, it is argued that the appeal of the fear of cultural relativism is that, in directing moral outrage at others, one can avoid reflecting on the failures of one’s own cultural tradition.

Key words: racism; barbarian; moral universalism; cultural relativism; James Rachels; Amerindian; international law

1 Introduction

This paper will illustrate how the structure of mainstream western philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism can be understood as a continuation of the pervasive racist beliefs that have dominated much of western history. I focus on a representative expression of why western philosophy takes cultural relativism to be anathema—James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” (2012)1—as a key example of how the basic structures and assumptions that underlie racist ideology are still very much present in modern philosophical discourse. Although there are many dimensions to racism and this paper cannot possibly address them all, there are a few key features of racist ideology that I focus on. Generally, we can consider western racism to involve two key features. The first is ontology. The idea of “race,” i.e., the belief in the existence of discrete, hierarchical groups among human beings, involves assumptions about the natural world that date back (at least) to Greek society.2 As I will explain more below, the Greek man, who understood himself to be “rational,” also understood himself to be the highest on a hierarchy of different races and relatedly, to transcend nature. The idea of “race,” then, is fundamentally an interpretation of what things “are” (in this case: human beings). In other words, it provides an accurate descriptive account of these things. But the structure of the idea of race does not stop

∗ I would like to thank the editors of this journal, Dr. Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach and Dr. Amy Donahue, for their extensive comments and insightful feedback on previous versions of this paper and for their surpassing professionalism. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve my work. I would also like to thank Jacob Bender for reading previous drafts of this paper. His input has greatly helped clarify my argument. ______Journal of World Philosophies 5 (Summer 2020): 99-120 Copyright © 2020 Shuchen Xiang. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.5.1.07

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there. In the western context, because “white men” considered themselves to be the highest on the racial hierarchy and to transcend nature, they then believed that they had the right to (or, strictly speaking, the telos) to dominate the other races (who represent merely nature) and in this case, the non-Greek, whom as it will be shown, was equated with the barbarian and “natural slave.” The locus classicus of these two features that I describe can be found in Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery. In this enormously influential statement (which, as will be shown below, formed the basis of the Spanish justification for colonizing the Americas), Aristotle equates non- Greeks with barbarians and barbarians with natural slaves such that non-Greeks are natural slaves. A natural slave is one who is incapable of reason on his own and must be subjugated by a rational (i.e., male, Greek) agent in order to partake of reason:

There is another sort of monarchy not uncommon among foreigners, which nearly resembles tyranny. But this is both legal and hereditary. For foreigners, being more servile in character than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government. Such kingships have the nature of tyrannies because the people are by nature slaves; but there is no danger of their being overthrown, for they are hereditary and legal. For the same reason, their guards are such as a king and not such as a tyrant would employ, that is to say, they are composed of citizens, whereas the guards of tyrants are mercenaries. For kings rule according to law over voluntary subjects, but tyrants over involuntary; and the one are guarded by their fellow-citizens, the others are guarded against them (Pol.1285a18-1285a2).

From this it can be seen that: (1) the proper telos and the only telos of the slave is to be a slave. Even his physical nature is commensurable with his end: the natural slave is built for hard labor and the freeman for political life. As Aquinas later explains, the slave is “almost an animated instrument of service” (quoted in Pagden 2015: 104).3 And (2) the master and slave have the same interest because the slave can partake of reason by imitating his master; in his natural state he is incapable of fulfilling his proper telos. Each thing has one telos, and the slave’s telos is to be ruled by rational men. The slave, like the animal, is all body and no mind, and as such should be ruled by those who possess reason. That the slave should be dominated is part of the natural hierarchy, because the rational dominates the non-rational. The relationship between the master and slave as described in Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery has historically been applied to that between conqueror and conquered. Augustine’s City of God quotes Cicero’s de Republica as saying that the ruling of the provinces is just as “servitude may be advantageous to the provincials” because as “they became worse and worse so long as they were free, they will improve by subjection” (quoted in Isaac 2004: 183). This subjection of the provincials operates in the same way as the soul’s rule over the body and reason’s rule over the passions and other vicious parts of the soul. In sum, there are two parts to the racist structure that is exemplified in Rachels’ argument: (1) The idea of “race” always involved unempirical myths/fantasies about the natural world (i.e., “is”), and (2) on the basis of this ontological framework, this system and its (racist) participant further make claims about how “rational” persons should behave considering these racial differences (i.e., “ought”). When looking at Rachels’ argument, as I hope to illustrate below, there are clear examples of (1) basic racist myths/fantasies used to support his thesis, as if these stories were somehow accurate historical accounts, and (2) implicit in this assumption of ontological difference/hierarchy is the further claim about what “ought” to happen (on the basis of the assumption of ontological difference/hierarchy between different kinds of humans). What “ought” to happen is that rational persons ought to restrain, according to objective moral truths that only they can understand, those who are (culturally) different, as cultural difference is a sign

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of ontological difference and ontological difference is necessarily parsed hierarchically. Historically, one only assumed cultural incommensurability if one assumed that cultural difference is a symptom of ontological incommensurability, i.e., different races. The assumption of cultural (parsed as ontological) incommensurability and the concomitant fear of cultural (parsed as ontological) difference/relativism are distinctive features of racist ideology. A related problem is that, although some of Rachels’ examples are not racist myths, these examples still illustrate the problematic structure of how cultural difference was and is interpreted through a racist lens (i.e., cultural difference is assumed to be “incommensurable” or “inexplicable” and “antithetical” because it is understood as a sign of ontological difference/hierarchy). In other words, part of the history of racism in “western”4 countries involved seeing cultural difference as representing or expressing an underlying ontological difference/hierarchy and therefore as reasons to enslave, oppress, and kill native populations. Although Rachels does not explicitly claim that other cultures that participate in certain practices are inferior to those of the west, the asymmetrical structure of his argument implies this. Rachels’ argument is asymmetrical in the sense that he only employs the moral failures of other cultures to evidence global issues, such as sexism. This exclusive focus on the moral failure of others, simultaneous with his lack of self-critique and reflection on the same global issues within his own society, betrays the asymmetrical assumption that it is only ever the racial Other who is, by default, morally suspect. The structure of Rachels’ argument follows a classic structure of western racism. Traditionally, western moral universalism proved its universalism through fantasizing about the perverse behaviors of the “barbarian” as a negative proof of why its own values are universal. For the legal scholar of American Indian law, Robert A. Williams Jr., “Without this dark-sided version of the idea of the savage, the mythic warrior-hero, as imagined by the West since the time of Homer and the ancient Greeks, might never have been invented” (Williams Jr. 2012: 25).5 The west has always needed the savage for its own self-definition and self-affirmation. Similarly, as the authors of the manifesto Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism write,

For centuries Europe had nurtured an anxiety-ridden perception about Other People, those beyond its actual touch and reach, and about the natural world. Woven in monstrous and phantasmagoric detail, based primarily on fears, fantasies and demons inhabiting the Western mind from Herodotus to Pliny, and from St Augustine to Columbus, this perception had become an integral part of Europe’s self-identity (Sardar, Nandy, and Wyn Davis 1993: 1).6

An example of this self-definition through the barbarian is Montesquieu’s observation about African slaves: “It is impossible for us to suppose that these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians” (Montesquieu 1989: 250).7 This other-directed morality is simultaneous with the avoidance of self-critique. We see this same structure of directing moral outrage at a Manichean Other and lack of reflection on one’s own actions in Rachels’ paper. Nowhere does he critique the failures of his own society (the USA/the west) and its responsibility for global injustice. In section 3, I briefly describe the structure of much of western racism as this kind of resentment—a racist resentment that merely critiques “others” as the source of suffering and ill-fortune in human society whilst avoiding self-critique. Rachels’ moral outrage at the practices of the racial Other and his simultaneous lack of critique of the moral failures of his own society follows the classic structures of scapegoating a racial Other for the ills of society. The problem with reducing other human beings to symbols of iniquity is that one puts the Other beyond the pale of hermeneutic understanding, thus desensitizing us to how similar we in fact are. This is not to say that every position that suggests that there may be an incommensurability between cultural values is just a continuation of western racist history. In Rachels’ article, however, there are grounds for arguing

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that the many (exclusively non-western) examples of moral failure he cites as reasons for needing moral universalism are a part of this racist structure and history. It is with an understanding of the structure of racism that we can better critique Rachels’ argument. There are two central claims made by Rachels: (1) accepting cultural relativism would mean that we cannot make objections about morally repugnant practices, and (2) the empirical existence of cultural difference does not mean that this difference is legitimate. With regard to the first point, and as detailed in section 1, the examples Rachels uses as evidence of the “horrific” practices that an espousal of cultural relativism would prohibit us from objecting to are all racial stereotypes about the “barbarian” Other created by the western imagination as antitheses to what is western and “properly human.” In response to Rachels’ second argument against cultural relativism, a brief survey of the genesis of international law (section 3) will help to clarify how claims of moral universalism have been historically involved with the project of domination of the (racial) Other. International law—the “universal law governing all peoples”—arose out of the first European encounter with radical difference: the European encounter with the Amerindians. The European scholastics of the time argued for the universality of their customs, delegitimizing the empirical existence of (cultural) difference, in order to dominate the Amerindian. The first time the Europeans encountered radical difference—the Amerindians— they parsed those who were different as the barbarian/natural slave of the western imagination who had to be dominated by “international” (i.e., European) law. The genesis of international law illustrates how the fear of differences in cultures has been historically inextricable from reducing other human beings to the status of the subhuman, racial Other. Finally, section 4 answers concerns, such as Rachels’, that moral universalism is the only thing saving us from moral malfeasance. Here, it is argued that often what has historically led to moral progress isn’t necessarily a progress of our morals or more humans adopting certain moral systems, but an increasingly critical evaluation of our unempirical metaphysical assumptions. It should not be controversial to state that mainstream western philosophy assiduously avoids taking on its own burden of self-reflection with regard to its historical racism and colonialism. Where, for example, in John Rawls’ defining work of twentieth century political philosophy, A Theory of Justice, is there any mention of the justice owed to the black slaves who contributed so much to the American economy? 8 There is no hope for cross-cultural philosophical engagements between the west and the “rest” before we (both the west and the non-west) are cognizant of how racism is still so deeply embedded in its philosophical worldview. Rachels’ paper against cultural relativism is a barometer of academic philosophy’s willingness to engage with other cultural traditions. In sum, the non-western tradition is still parsed as the barbarian Other that must be controlled by the west’s moral universalism. Rachels’ paper can be read as a statement of mainstream academic philosophy’s reasons for refusing to engage with non-western traditions.9

2 The Racist Stereotypes in Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism”

James Rachels’ article “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” is a canonical text that expresses the orthodox position on cultural relativism in the discipline today.10 As David Wong writes, “The aim of most philosophical discussions of relativism [like Rachels’] is to establish its manifest falsity” (Wong 2006: xi).11 As Wong explains, cultural relativism

is overwhelmingly a term of condemnation, frequently of scorn or derision, a term for putting one’s opponent immediately on the defensive: “You sound like a relativist— explain yourself!” or “You are a relativist—shame on you!” […] Some liberals in turn

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accuse multiculturalists of moral relativism for not defending the universality of […] rights (Wong 2006: xi).

As Wong writes elsewhere,

The commitment to defending the existence of a single true morality often takes the status of a fundamental commitment in philosophy, meaning that it will be among the last to go in the face of disconfirming evidence that requires change in the body of one’s beliefs (Wong 2014: 337).12

In sum, in mainstream western academic philosophy, it is taboo to espouse the position of cultural relativism. What has not been noted is that the examples Rachels employs to counter cultural relativism are all racist stereotypes about cultures conventionally perceived in the west to be primitive and barbaric: female genital mutilation (henceforth “FGM”) in Africa, stoning to death of a woman in Nigeria because of outdated sexual mores, excessive penal laws in Indonesia, lashing a woman in Saudi Arabia because of taboos on female sexuality (Rachels 2012: 27-8), and the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. In sum, the picture Rachels paints is one of “medieval barbarism” in exotic countries and fits the usual (racist) stereotype of “oriental” cultures as uncivilized, primitive, depraved, and generally iniquitous. In this section, I will focus on Rachels’ examples of Indian cannibalism, Eskimo cultural practices, the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, and penal law in Indonesia. We will address his moral outrage at FGM, the contemporary Indian caste system, and Saudi Arabia in section 4. In using Herodotus’ example of endocannabalism of an Indian tribe (the “Callatians”) from his History, Rachels seeks to make the point that “What is thought right within one group may horrify the members of another group, and vice versa” (Rachels 2012: 14). Herodotus, however, is already filtered by (if not being one of the earliest sources of) the very fear of the Other that drives fears about cultural relativism. Historians and classicists have shown that for Herodotus there was an essential difference between east and west, Asia and Europe (Isaac 2004: 258, footnote 3; Starr 1991: 284f.).13 As the historian J. B. Bury notes,

The theme of Herodotus—the struggle of Greece with the Orient—[…] was the contact and collision of two different types of civilisation; of […] contest between the slavery of the barbarian and the liberty of the Greek, between Oriental autocracy and Hellenic constitutionalism, […] the contrast of Hellenic with Oriental culture pervades the whole work [the History]; it informs the unity of the external theme with the deeper unity of an inner meaning. It is the keynote of the History of Herodotus (Bury 1909: 44).14

Throughout the History, Herodotus describes exotic peoples according the “the idea of the savage [i.e., non-Greek] as the most extreme form of the difference from the Greeks” (Williams Jr. 2012: 63). Cannibalism was one of the signifiers of an antithetical Other. Herodotus describes the people in the Pontus areas as “Man-eaters”: “Their customs are utterly bestial […] they alone of these peoples, eat human flesh” (quoted in Isaac 2004: 208). Aristotle follows Herodotus and speaks of their “bestial disposition” and “inclination to murder and cannibalism” (Politics 1338b, 19–22). As Williams Jr. writes, for Herodotus cannibalism is “an effective and readily recognized categorical marker for identifying the most extreme forms of the barbarian’s degeneracy from the civilized norms and values of the Greeks” and was assumed to exist among distant (and therefore savage) parts of the world (Williams Jr. 2012: 65). Fantastic stories about savage peoples practicing cannibalism occur in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics15 and Politics, and as Isaac notes, Aristotle was merely generalizing an established opinion (Isaac 2004: 207). Cannibalism became the ascription non plus ultra throughout European history for reducing the racial Other

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into the role “barbarian” (i.e., those antithetical to human civilization). The Amerindians, for example, were described by contemporary Europeans as cannibals, although scholars have not been able to find any evidence of the practice (Pagden 1982: 225-6, footnote 154). 16 “Cannibalism” under this historical context is a signifier for barbaric otherness. It functioned as a racial slur. As the historian of European imperialism Anthony Pagden writes, the European interest in cannibalism “amounts almost to an obsession.” The trope of cannibalism throughout European history was meant to de-humanize “the outsider,” as the eating of other humans was a marker of being non-human (Pagden 1982: 81). The attribution of cannibalism in historical texts should thus be read critically against an understanding of the context in which this term was deployed. In the case of Herodotus’ History, one cannot use a racist’s racial stereotyping of the racial Other as a true account about that racial Other. The “persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of the savage in the history of the West’s relations with the non-westernized world” (Williams Jr. 2012: 9) means we should never assume that western accounts of the cultural practices of the Other aren’t already distorted by racial prejudices about the savage. This point bears stressing: if it is acceptable to point out the racist structures in historical cultures such as Greek and Conquistador cultures, then the same should apply to contemporary discourses which bear the same racist structures. Rachels’ source stories from “explorers” of the “early and mid-20th century” (Rachels 2012: 15) about the sexual promiscuity, infanticide, and lack of care to the dying elderly in the culture of the “Eskimos” (Rachels 2012: 14-5) are thus also problematic. There is a long history of depicting the “Eskimos”17 as an inferior, primitive race. The earliest descriptions of Eskimos by Richard Hakluyt used the same familiar tropes of savagery as “brute beasts” eating raw meat and practitioners of cannibalism (quoted in Fienup-Riordan 1990: 12). 18 As the cultural anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan writes, in the nineteenth century “Eskimos” were described as “savages […] brutes, rude, ugly, and barbaric” (Fienup-Riordan 1990: 14). They were understood as sub-human “children of nature,” who because they lived within nature, were “decidedly inferior” (Fienup-Riordan 1990: 14) and low on the racial hierarchy (as they were unable to escape the “state of nature”). “Depictions of Eskimos bear witness to the western debate about human nature and Euro-American ambivalence concerning the encounter with non-western peoples” (Fienup-Riordan 1990: 14). The “disturbing revelation” about the practices of the “Eskimos” that Rachels thinks one must accept under cultural relativism should again be read critically against this overwhelming history of the idea of the savage in western cultural history.19 Just like Herodotus’ accounts of the “Callatians,” there are grounds to believe that the practices attributed to the “Eskimos” are more ideological (i.e., racist) than empirical. In making other cultures more horrifying than they are, by reducing them to the barbarian of the European consciousness, other peoples and cultures are portrayed as more repugnant than they actually/truly are. Rachels’ arguments against cultural relativism are thus founded on a false premise: the cultural practices of the racial Other are accurately depicted through the source stories he uses, and so the racial Other is the barbarian of the European consciousness. Another symbol which Rachels appeals to is oriental despotism, embodied in the figure of Chinese government, and specifically the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989:

[T]he Chinese government has a long history of repressing political dissent within its own borders. At any given time, thousands of political prisoners in China are doing hard labor, and in the Tiananmen Square episode of 1989, Chinese troops slaughtered hundreds, if not, thousands, of peaceful protestors. Cultural Relativism would preclude us from saying that the Chinese government’s policies of oppression are wrong. We could not even say that a society that respects free speech is better than Chinese society, for that would also imply a universal standard of comparison. The failure to condemn

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these practices does not seem enlightened; on the contrary, political oppression seems wrong wherever it occurs (Rachels 2012: 19).

It should be borne in mind that foundational to Greek self-identity was the dualistic antithesis of the barbarian Other.20 As we have already seen in Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, one of the characteristics of this barbarian Other is “oriental despotism.” The idea that the non-west is unfree and suffers under “oriental despotism” is foundational to Greek and subsequent western identity. That “Hellenic constitutionalism” and the liberty of Greek civilization is locked in a struggle against the slavishness of the “oriental autocracy” of the barbarian has, since ancient times, been essential to western self-identity. As Edith Hall writes, “The most important distinction Athenian writers draw between themselves and barbarians is […] political. Greeks are democratic and egalitarian; the barbarians are tyrannical and hierarchical” (Hall 1989: 2).21 Aristotle himself uncritically took up this view and based his idea of natural slavery on the assumption that “Asiatics” live under despotic/tyrannical government because they are natural slaves (i.e., they are servile by nature and so do not revolt). Hellenes, being masters by nature, live under democracies (Pol.1285a18-1285a2). The idea that non-Greeks (and later non- Europeans) cannot organize themselves under “legitimate” forms of governance and therefore need rulership by the Greeks (and later Europeans) is a well-known racist trope justifying colonialism, named by Aimé Césaire as a “dependency complex” (Césaire 2000: 59).22 This trope about the political illegitimacy of the non-Greek/European was used throughout European history to characterize non-Europeans, including the Chinese, and so legitimize their colonization.23 As the great idealist philosopher Ernst Renan (1823-1892) wrote, “Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor” and are thus “crying aloud for foreign conquest” (quoted in Césaire 2000: 38). The phrase “Yellow Peril” (die gelbe Gefahr) itself, it should be remembered, was coined at the end of the century by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to justify Germany’s grab for concessions in China. To illustrate his point, in 1895 the Kaiser commissioned a painting of the nations of Europe, dressed as female warriors, defending Christendom from the Yellow Peril24 (Lee 1999: 246, footnote 4).

Reinforcing racist stereotypes about the Chinese tradition as tyrannical, and its peoples unfree, very conveniently plays into the political mythology of the west as “gentle civilizers”25 of the world. It reinforces the racist trope foundational to Greek/European identity that “Asiatics” are “crying aloud for foreign conquest” so that they may be “gently” civilized. When Rachels uses the Chinese government and the Tiananmen Square Incident as examples of why cultural relativism is flawed, he is, in effect, talking about preserving the right of the west to pass comment on “oriental despotism” without obligation to assess its own flaws. Notice that one of the biggest objections Rachels has to cultural relativism is that, “We could no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own” (Rachels 2012: 19). Just as James Baldwin accused the American liberal of only being able to “deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man” (Baldwin 1998: 320),26 so has there been a failure, by and large, of the western imagination to deal with China as anything other than a symbol and victim of the west’s making. “Such is the ‘East,’” writes the sinologist and philosopher François Jullien “or rather its mirage, the eternal, exotic East that the ‘West’ has chosen to represent as its polar opposite that so conveniently fuels its own fantasies and that it constantly exploits to compensate for its own failings”27 (Jullien 2004: 84-5). And so was “the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a good century” (Césaire 2000: 74). This reduction of those who are different to a polar Other so as to exploit it and thereby affirm its own values makes “of them criminals and monsters” (Baldwin 1998: 386). One might question if Rachels’ examples were a rhetorical strategy that wishes to show that a reader sympathetic to cultural relativism actually does judge other cultures in objectivist/universalist terms. But if this were a rhetorical strategy then it is self-defeating. To focus solely on other cultures when the problems Rachels points to are universal is racist or at least culturally chauvinistic. Further, whilst it might be true that the examples Rachels uses are not concocted aspersions, that does not make them non-racist. Whilst it might be true that lashing women in Saudi Arabia is empirically true, to only use the example of Saudi Arabia to make a point about the global problem of misogyny ends up perpetuating the same structure of racism. If you wish to point out the moral failures of misogyny, then point out the instances of campus rape in the United States—an example, which, in fact, would be closer to home. Talk about how one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses in the USA28 and the institutional failures to protect women when these crimes are reported.29 To illustrate the problem of misogyny via the example of a culture that is, relative to the dominant, elite White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of the United States, radically Other, is the very example of the other-directed morality that I problematize. Note, however, that I do not wish to claim that Rachels is a racist. Rather, I would like to contend that his examples are problematic in that they perpetuate racist stereotypes and racist structures. Any person who holds so obsessively onto their moral universalism betrays their lack of faith in the humanity of the Other. If one held the assumption that human nature was basically the same everywhere and that human motives were all mutually intelligible given adequate context, then one would not be concerned with the possibility that there existed radically incommensurable practices, which, as has been shown, were traditionally parsed as a sign of ontological difference and so an incommensurable essence/difference. We would, under this view, all be human, and what different choices we made in life would be hermeneutically legible and translatable once we were informed of our respective motives and circumstances. One espouses racism/racist ideology when one assumes (1) the existence of ontological/essential difference, i.e., the barbarian Other, and (2) that the existence of the barbarian “justifies the right” to dominate the barbarian Other. If we did not assume this (racist) structure, then the different practices that we observe, which under a racist ontology would be parsed as a sign of essential difference/radical incommensurability, will become hermeneutically legible given adequate context.

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We can take the Indonesian penal law, which Rachels believes evidences a society misunderstanding what is “really true” and committing a moral “error,” in which an Australian woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison for smuggling nine pounds of marijuana into Indonesia (Rachels 2012: 27), as an example of how a sympathetic understanding of an Other rehabilitates them from a mere symbol of moral depravity/moral incomprehensibility/moral sociopathy to a fellow human being. Before concluding that the Indonesian penal code is “morally erroneous,” let us take stock of the situation, specifically, the history of drugs as an instrument of western colonialism in Asia. By 1850, the British opium trade in China accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue (Bradley 2015: 17)30 and was “the single largest commodity trade of the nineteenth century” (Bradley 2015: 14). By 1850, “the entire commercial infrastructure of European trade in Asia was built around opium” (Trocki 1999: 52).31 The historical scale of the western drug trade, its debilitating effects on Asian states, and its association with colonialism is the context for the contemporary harsh penal drug laws in Asian countries. Given this context, would we still be inclined to conclude that that the Indonesians were committing a moral error in their sentencing of the Australian drug smuggler? In sum, there are two types of racist stereotypes that Rachels makes use of: (1) racist fictions about the racial Other that are literally myths/mythic stereotyping according to tropes of barbarism that are as old as Greek/western civilization itself, and (2) treatment of different cultural practices as radically incommensurable because one assumes such practices are a sign of ontological incommensurability (i.e., the dualistic Other-barbarian-savage). Rachels’ example of misogyny in Saudi Arabia, for example, would fall under this latter type of racist stereotyping. This second point will be explored in more detail in the following section.

3 International Law: Dominating the Savage

As was outlined in the introduction, Rachels’ article is orientated around two claims. The first claim was dealt with in the previous section. In this section we will look at the second claim: the empirical existence of cultural difference does not mean that this difference should exist. It will be argued here the claim that one’s own customs are universal has historically been preceded by the motivation to dominate those (culturally) different from oneself, as cultural differences were assumed to be a sign of ontological difference/inferiority. As David Stannard reminds us, the Puritans, in the seventeenth century, justified the extermination of New England’s native populations on the basis of God, and the Spanish legitimated genocide in Meso- and South America on the basis of Christian Truth (Stannard 1992: 153). In this section, through the example of the history of the genesis of international law, I will outline how western claims to universalism have historically been a camouflage for the domination and exploitation of the Other. For many “third world” legal scholars, such as R. P. Anand, Mohammed Bedjaoui, and T. O. Elias, international law is the product of imperialism and the means by which European interests were maintained. As the legal scholar Anthony Anghie writes, “It is now hardly disputable that classical international law was complicit in the imperial project and the exploitation which accompanied it” (Anghie 2004: 8).32 The genesis of international law is indebted to sixteenth-century jurist Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), who, in the aftermath of the discovery of the Americas, tried to establish an international legal framework. In his “On the American Indians” (De Indis), one of earliest texts of international law, Vitoria described the Amerindians as deficient humans. As Anthony Pagden summarizes, for Vitoria, the Amerindian is:

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some variety of fully grown child whose rational faculties are complete but still potential rather than actual. Indians have to be trained to perceive what other men perceive without effort, to accept what other men regard as axiomatic without prior reflection. […] They were not free agents, they had, as Vitoria observed, no access to the natural law, and they shared the same social status as the slave. […] [H]e [the Amerindian] must, for his own benefit, remain in just tutelage under the king of Spain, his status now slave- like, but not a slave (Pagden 1982: 104).

The “barbarism” of the Amerindian—their supposed unreflective, passion-dominated, half- reasoning man-child nature—gave the Spanish the legitimate right of political dominium over them (Pagden 1982: 105). As Anghie summarizes, Vitoria characterized the Amerindians as primitive and so lacking in full legal personality in order to justify the Spanish “civilizing mission” in which they govern the Americas on behalf of the Amerindians (Anghie 2004: 9). Those being dominated—the Amerindians—are the natural slaves that Aristotle described in the Politics. The effect of this argument is to say that foreigners require domination. In sum, “the Indian is excluded from the sphere of sovereignty” and “it is the Indian who acts as the object against which the powers of sovereignty may be exercised in the most extreme ways” (Anghie 2004: 28). Similarly, for the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili (1552-1608)—another jurist named as a father of international law—the Amerindians “are alien to humanity and to all religion, these he [a conquering Christian monarch] may most justly compel to change conduct which is contrary to nature” (quoted in Williams Jr. 2012: 190). The genesis of international law in the Spanish justification of the colonization of the Americas shows that the reduction of the racial Other to sub-human status goes hand in hand with the claim to (moral) universalism that justifies a colonial takeover. The justification of conquest lies in the creation of a sub-human Other to whom the full force of “law” needs to be applied. From the earliest legal discussions on the rights of the Spanish to colonize the Amerindians, we find a whole catalogue of ills attributed to the Amerindian to prove their status as the natural slaves that needed Spanish wardenship. For Vitoria, the Indians are obviously mentally incapacitated as, “The Indians have neither laws nor magistrates that are adequate (convenientes); nor are they capable of governing the household (rem familiarem) satisfactorily” (quoted in Pagden 1982: 79-80). For Vitoria, the different cultural practices of the Amerindians justified Spanish “disciplinary measures of war, which is directed towards effacing Indian indemnity and replacing it with the universal identity of the Spanish” (Anghie 2004: 29). For Vitoria, the Amerindians were not sovereign because they were pagans (Anghie 2004: 29). In Libellus de insulanis oceanis (Book on the Oceanic Islands) the jurist Palacio Rubios observes that as the Indians formed matrilineal societies, they were not real communities but a mere horde (Pagden 1982: 52-4). On the basis of these customs, Palacio Rubio concludes that they are “so inept and foolish that they do not know how to rule themselves.” They may thus, “broadly speaking, be called slaves as those who are almost born to be slaves” (quoted in Pagden 1982: 54). Likewise, by insisting that violations of the law of nations “granted the right to any state, or individual, to exact punishment and thus wage a just war against the violators,” Gentili was, in effect, “handing the European powers a license to conquer virtually any peoples whose behavior did not conform to the codes established by our [i.e., European] jurists” (Pagden 2015: 92). The motivation for Vitoria and Gentili’s claiming that European law was universal was to discredit the customs and sovereignty of the Amerindians and so legally legitimate a colonial takeover. It should be noted that European claims that the “international” law legitimating their colonial takeover of the Americas were universal were only ever claims. As the Dutch legal scholar J. H. W. Verzijl (1888-1987) writes, “the actual body of international law, as it stands today, is not only the product of the conscious activity of the European mind, but has also

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drawn its vital essence from a common source of European beliefs, and in both these aspects is mainly of western European origin” (cited in Bedjaoui 1991: 9).33 Both Vitoria and Gentili—the fathers of international law—took European customs as universal. The logic went something like this: the universal law of nature = law of nations = European customs ergo European customs = universal. The source of the principles behind Vitoria’s proto-international law were “all western and thoroughly Christo-Eurocentric in their normative orientation,” i.e., Roman law, Holy Scripture, and classical writers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas (Williams Jr. 1990: 106).34 Likewise, Gentili, as the first writer to develop Vitoria’s arguments on the issue of the justification for universal empire, saw Roman law as the civil expression of the law of nature. Roman law was thus not simply the accumulated customs of all the peoples of the entire world but was the ontological structure of reality itself: Roman law was natural law per se (Pagden 2015: 83-4). Claiming universalism to dominate the Manichean Other, of course, was not invented in the sixteenth century. The experience of the Crusades had already given Europeans a systematically elaborated legal discourse on colonization. The universal right asserted by popes and Christians princes in enforcing “Christianity’s vision of ‘civilization’ and natural law legitimated and dignified the conquest, dispossession, and enslavement of non-Christian peoples throughout the non-European world” (Williams Jr. 1990: 15). There is a long history of the west claiming universalism to oppress those—the racial Other—it deemed to be on the wrong side of its universals. It is against this historical context of western claims to universalism being inseparable from the domination of the Other that one must place Rachels’ defence of moral universalism. To his caution that “we must bear in mind the difference between what a society believes about morals and what is really true” (Rachels 2012: 27), we might say that western claims to universalism have historically been an instrument of conquest. We might remind him that the same argument about Amerindians not knowing what is really true was used to wrest the Americas from their native inhabitants. To his anxiety that “to say that the moral code of one’s own society ‘is merely one among many,’ seems to deny the possibility that one moral code might be better or worse than some others” (Rachels 2012: 28), we might remember the projects of domination with which western claims to universalism have been associated. As Frantz Fanon puts it:

But it so happens that when the native hears a speech about western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when western values are mentioned in front of him (Fanon 1963: 34).35

The problem of cultural relativism is but the latest manifestation of the fear of the barbarian Other which was concomitant with the use of universals for the project of domination. The legal history of the genesis of international law exemplifies how western claims to universalism have been concomitant with, if not motivated by, the desire to dominate the racial Other. This history shows the lie in Rachels’ assertion that, “There is a difference […] between (a) judging a cultural practice to be deficient and (b) thinking that we should announce that fact, apply diplomatic pressure, and send in the troops” (Rachels 2012: 26). The historical record shows that in practice, one’s intellectual worldview is not easily separable from one’s actions; it’s hard not to act on a sincerely held belief. Likewise, David Harvey (in a discussion on Kant’s racist geography) remarked that condescending moral judgments on the Other lead to practical consequences on the ground:

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Popular geographical and anthropological knowledges in the public domain (in the United States in particular) are […] of a similar prejudicial quality to that which Kant portrayed. Stereotypes about geographical “others” abound and prejudicial commentary can be heard daily in casual conversations even in elite circles (listen in to any conversation about Mexicans, sub-Saharan Africans, or Arabs in university common rooms let alone upon the street, and see how quickly stereotypes are invoked only to usually pass unchallenged). It then becomes all too easy for the U.S. government to portray itself as the bearer of universal principles of justice, democracy, liberty, freedom, and goodness (as Former President George W. Bush did on such a persistent basis) while in practice he operated in an intensely discriminatory way against others judged different, unfamiliar or in some sense lacking in proper qualifications or human qualities (Harvey 2011: 281).36

Just as the Spaniard’s belief that the Amerindian was the barbarian of the western imagination motivated their practical act of colonizing the Americas, likewise, racial stereotypes easily fall into racialized violence. It is possible that Rachels and defenders of Rachels and his type of argument would argue that his examples of cultural difference do not imply a racial Other. The issue is, however, that he comes to the conclusion of radical incommensurability on the basis of examples that can be easily rendered hermeneutically legible given a historical context. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre wrote of the racist humanism of the west, which pretended to the highest universalistic ideals without the commensurate actions to deserve the esteem that it claimed:

Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters (Fanon 1963: 22).

The same dissonance between the esteem the west claims for its universals and the lack of corresponding demonstrable actions that prove its universalism has compelled Baldwin to declare, “All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority” (Baldwin 1998: 404). The continued presence of Rachels’ paper in standard ethics textbooks is deeply troubling for the following reasons. Rachels argued for moral universalism against cultural relativism seemingly unaware (1) of the conspicuous western history of parsing difference in the tropes of barbarism, (2) that many of his sources are foundational elements of the history of othering, racializing, or orientalizing other peoples, (3) that in characterizing other cultures in these same barbaric terms he is perpetuating oppressive racist structures, and (4) of the problematic European history of equating cultural difference with ontological difference/inferiority that has then served as a pretext for deeply violent if not genocidal “just war” campaigns of domination justified through “moral universals.” This four-point summary of the west’s problematic history with different cultures is well known. Many celebrated postcolonial scholars, such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, have made the point better than I. It’s troubling that a canonical text about cultural relativism does not even acknowledge the existence of such serious critiques of the history of western moral universalism as an instrument of oppression. It is further troubling that a defense of moral universalism evidently saw no need to qualify how its version of moral universalism will avoid the flaws with which moral universalism has been so

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deeply implicated. It is further unsettling how, in the three decades since the paper’s publication, mainstream academic philosophy has either sincerely not noticed the problems in Rachels’ argument or deemed it unworthy of mention. Instead of attributing ulterior motives to Rachels for these problematic absences in his paper and to the mainstream philosophical community for passing over these problematic absences, let me conclude that this epistemology of ignorance that Rachels and the mainstream philosophical community display is deeply injurious to the cause of cross-cultural understanding.

4 Avoiding Self-Critique

The fear of cultural relativism that leads to the canonization of arguments such as Rachels’ or, to put it positively, the main attraction of moral universalism as a necessary foundation for cross- cultural dialogues, can be understood via a terse but profound statement from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: “And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves” (Baldwin 1998: 310). We can replace “Lord” here with moral universalism. What I take Baldwin to be saying is this: the psychology that motivates an espousal of universal principles betrays a fear of reflecting on one’s own actions. To safeguard the universalism of one’s own position, those peoples with different values are reduced to a Manichean Other with whom there is no possibility of sympathetic understanding. To engage with others different from ourselves is to make ourselves fallible and to open the way to potential understanding of how and why others differ from ourselves and thus open the possibility of re-assessing our own values. The fear of making ourselves vulnerable in this way and so having to reflect on our received values and actions puts an iron curtain between ourselves and empathetic engagement with the perspectives of others. The more we hold onto our own universal principles (thus avoiding self-critique and being potentially fallible), the more we reduce other human beings to, and scapegoat them as, the Manichean Other beyond sympathetic engagement, and the less we reassess our putatively universal principles. In this way, our avoidance of ourselves, our love of universalism, and our hatred of strangers become mutually implicating and self-fulfilling, not to mention self-destructive. Historically, this structure is a sign of racism, and this same structure arguably shapes Rachels’ discourse. One prominent example of scapegoating others so as to avoid self-critique in Rachels’ paper is his use of FGM, which for Rachels is a horrific practice we would have to accept if we accepted cultural relativism. In discussions of cultural relativism, the evocation of FGM operates much like Godwin’s Law: it demarcates an ultimate evil at which meaningful discourse has to respectfully end. FGM has been turned into a symbol of barbarism, with its history and context rendered unintelligible. This is the way that this symbol operates: it symbolizes an ultimate evil that is demarcated as beyond the boundaries of anything we “rational peoples” can and should understand. A typical broadside of this sentiment has it that FGM is a “torture so hideous that most of humanity does not even want to think about it” (quoted in Gollaher 2000: 188).37 The western paroxysm of outrage at (non-western) female genital mutilation is simultaneous with the pervasive practice and promotion of (western) male genital mutilation. According to the WHO, the vast majority of American males are circumcised (75.5%). As one headline goes, America is “addicted to circumcision.”38 The numbers are 60% for Australian males, 32% for Canadian males, and 8.5% for British males.39 FGM as the standard bearer of barbarism is simultaneous with the widespread western cultural practice of male genital mutilation (henceforth “MGM”), which is, in fact, vehemently defended in the USA (by the “pro-circumcision lobby”40). Infant circumcision of white American boys is not the poster-child of human rights violations in the same way that infant circumcision of little black girls in African slums are. The schizophrenia (to

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put it charitably) or hypocrisy (to put it less charitably) that the west displays with regard to infant genital mutilation demonstrates how, in the process of turning them into the barbaric Other, the practitioner of an other-directed moral universalism becomes blind to just how similar we all are. The fact that the promoters of infant MGM argue that it is very different from FGM 41 is only another sign of this schizophrenia inherent to an other-directed moral universalism. It makes human beings with commensurable habits into symbols of radical alterity and so blinds itself to our commensurability. FGM functions as a symbol of inhumanity; it signifies an incomprehensible, inhuman action.42 Its reduction into a symbol of perversity can be likened to the reduction of the Jew under Judeophobia into an abstract symbol of all that is anti- human:

Thus, at the intellectual heights [Luther, Abraham a Sancta Clara] as in the lower depths of European society, the Jew had by the dawn of modernity, long ceased to be a living human being—he had become ineluctably transformed into a theological abstraction of truly diabolical perversity and malice (Wistrich 1999: 5).43

The symbolization of the Jew into an abstraction of “diabolical perversity and malice” makes the Judeophobe forget that the Jew is ultimately a human being like himself. As this mere symbol of non-western depravity and barbarism, FGM like the Jew (under Judeophobia) is an abstraction of “diabolical perversity and malice.” Just as the Jew as a mere symbol makes the Judeophobe blind to how the Jew is ultimately a human being like himself, so does FGM as a mere symbol blind the west to how FGM is directly comparable to its own practices, MGM. To put the issue another way, why is the practice of infant mutilation obvious in one context as a moral problem and not in another? This hypocrisy/double standard indicates that the Other is not afforded the same status; such a double standard is racist. The existence of a Manichean Other towards whom one can direct moral outrage simultaneously allows one to demand from others rigorous order and for oneself disorder without responsibility. In his example of the unfair treatment of women in Saudi Arabia (Rachels 2012: 27-8), for example, if Rachels did not assume that Saudis exemplify the irrational, barbarian Other, then he would not allow himself such an intellectually lazy explanation—they do not understand what is “really true.” Instead, he would perhaps realize that the United States and Europe are instrumental in the continued existence of Saudi Arabia as a political entity. In directing all of his moral criticisms against other cultures, Rachels is able to direct moral outrage at a Manichean Other and thereby conveniently direct attention away from the fact that misogyny is normalized in his own culture.44 The assiduousness with which Rachels avoids self- reflection can be seen in the reason he gives for why it is bad that, under cultural relativism, “We could no longer criticize the code of our own society” (Rachels 2012: 20). Here, instead of actually criticizing his own society’s (the United State’s!) racial inequalities, he uses the example of how an Indian would not be able to criticize their caste system. Similarly, in characterizing the Chinese government in terms of the tropes of oriental despotism, Rachels conveniently does not have to mention that, since its founding, the USA has been at war in 226 out of 242 years. He does not have to think about how, as we saw in the case of international law, his own country was founded on the genocide of the Amerindians—how European settlement on the American continent necessitated “the most extensive and most violent programs of human eradication, that this world has ever seen” (Stannard 1992: 54). This eradication program has led to the decimation of 95 percent of the native Amerindian population in what one historian now calls “the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world”45 (Stannard 1992: x). Nor does Rachels have to mention that Hitler himself explicitly modelled his own Lebensraum plans on the European precedent of the genocide of the Amerindians. In a 1932 speech, Hitler “explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long trajectory of European racial conquest”

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(Finkelstein 1995: 53).46 He does not have to mention that demographers have argued that slavery may have halved Africa’s population through exportation and deaths on the continent itself (Bayly 2004: 409). 47 Or that, according to Louise Marie Diop-Maes, the slave trade amounted to at least 400 million human losses to Africa (Diop-Maes 1996: 272).48 He does not have to think about how reparations the USA owes to historic slave labour in 2009 dollars have been estimated to range from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion (Craemer 2015: 639).49 To put this number in perspective, the size of the American economy was $19.39 trillion in 2017. Taking into consideration the fact that United States was built on land illegitimately expropriated from the Amerindians, it is feasible to say that the entirety of American GDP is not sufficient to cover the reparations that it owes. Nor does Rachels have to mention how, since 1945, the USA has either overthrown or interfered in the government, assassinated the leaders, dropped bombs, or suppressed a populist or nationalist movement in 71 countries (i.e., more than a third of the world) and in this process has ended the lives of millions of people as well as condemning many millions more to a life of misery (Blum 2013: 2).50 He does not have to think about how domestically, the disproportionate number of incarcerated African-American males has led one scholar to call this contemporary caste system “the New Jim Crow” (Alexander 2012).51 In directing his moral outrage at a Manichean Other, Rachels conveniently forgets that, as Aimé Césaire reminded us in Discourse on Colonialism, “Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history” (Césaire 2000: 45). The hypocrisy of western claims to universalism allows Rachels to talk as if it were only ever racial others who are morally suspect and, in the process, ignore just how much responsibility the west itself has to bear for global injustice. Telling oneself that it is only ever racial others who are transgressional is a psychological subterfuge to avoid confronting one’s own failures, to allow oneself disorder without responsibility but to simultaneously demand rigorous order for others. Once the idea of the barbarian is rendered unavailable as an explanation of the existence of (moral) difference and moral imperfections in the world, then the philosopher is pushed to think, by way of explanation, about the contexts that resulted in these differences and whether she/he herself/himself shares a burden of responsibility for having contributed to environments that resulted in these less than perfect human beings and behaviors.

5 Do We Need Moral Universals?

Rachels’ argument against cultural relativism is two-fold: he charges cultural relativism as falling foul of the is-ought fallacy (i.e., it is logically invalid to derive moral relativism from the existence of cultural differences in morals), followed by a three-part critique of the undesirable consequences of adopting moral relativism. This three-part critique involves the following: if we adopt moral relativism, then three morally undesirable things follow: (1) we could no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own, for example, the anti- Semitism of Nazi Germany; (2) we could no longer criticize the code of our own society; and (3) the idea of moral progress is called into doubt. There are many metaethical and epistemological ways to critique Rachels’ argument, and it will take another paper to fully explore them. Here, I will only give two examples. First, the is- ought distinction that Rachels assumes is arguably a culturally contingent one. One only arrives at the idea of the is-ought distinction under certain philosophical assumptions. Daoism or Confucianism, for example, would not assume a disjunction between is and ought.52 Second, and relatedly, Rachels does not recognize that what often impedes moral behavior and moral progress is not a lack of moral universals but a lack of recognition of the metaphysics that frame moral judgements. The concept of race in western history is a good example of this. In deploying racial stereotypes, Rachels and others who make use of such stereotypes, such as the Spanish

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who colonized the Amerindians, deny moral status to the racial Other. As such, racism is a metaphysical (mis)interpretation that takes precedence before any moral system. In sum, morality is dependent upon ontology. In his work The Invasion of America, for example, the historian Francis Jennings writes of how to the Europeans colonizers, the Amerindian was considered to be beyond the pale of moral concern:

To invade and dispossess the people of an unoffending civilized country would violate and transgress the principles of international law, but savages were exceptional. Being uncivilized by definition, they were outside the sanctions of both morality and law (Jennings 1975: 60).53

As the ontological status of the Amerindian was determined to be the barbarian/natural slave of which Aristotle spoke, the Amerindian was deemed as having no moral status. Similarly, as Anthony Pagden writes, for the Spanish scholastics who justified the conquest of the Americas, “Any judgment on the nature of the Indians” had to necessarily be rooted “in a scheme which offered an explanation for the structure of the whole world of nature and the behaviour of everything, animate or inanimate, within it” (Pagden 1982: 28). The idea that other races were not even subjects of moral concern or had no moral status under European colonialism is detailed by Charles Mill’s The Racial Contract. Here, Mills uses the idea of a nonideal or naturalized racial contract as a theoretical concept for recognizing, describing, and understanding how racism actually structures the polities of the west and elsewhere. Under the racial contract, we have been living under a two-tiered moral code, with one set for whites and another for nonwhites (Mills 1997: 23). Under the racial contract, “non-whites” were not considered to have “intrinsic” moral value. At best, they were only “instrumentally valuable,” i.e., as property or objects, and never fully subjects or agents. As such, any conduct towards or dealing with a “non- white” person could at best be “accidentally” moral in the sense that, for example, the harm done to a slave could only ever be a wrong towards their owner and never a moral wrong against the slave as subject. For the “racial contract,” morality was dependent upon ontology. As such, the “progress” of understanding non-whites as having moral status is not merely a progress of “morality” but the correct critique of certain metaphysical assumptions or claims (mis- interpretations of the world). To Rachels’ anxiety that without moral universals we could not critique ourselves or others or recognize moral progress, we could therefore say that even with moral universals we might not be able to or have not historically been able to achieve any moral progress. Pointing out the flaws in our metaphysical assumptions, for one, might have been more useful. The issue of race is an example of how, in practice, the is-ought distinction is collapsed. Judgments on the ontological nature of the Amerindian led to judgments on how the Spanish ought to have behaved. The metaphysical judgment that the Amerindians were not fully human led to their having no moral status in the eyes of the Spanish. In sum, none of the three undesirable consequences that Rachels takes to be attendant upon a lack of moral universalism necessarily follows. Without moral universals one can still criticize one’s own culture and other cultures as well as have measures for gauging moral progress. One can simply point out that one’s own or another culture’s metaphysical assumptions are inaccurate, and one can measure moral progress in terms of how naturalistic a certain culture’s metaphysics are. The example of FGM is a case in point. One does not have to default to moral strictures in confronting the phenomenon. One can instead point out that biologically, FGM serves none of the hygiene functions its practitioners believe it to serve.

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6 Conclusion

Rachels’ argument can be summarized and problematized as follows: (1) Rachels assumes that what “is” given is the existence of the barbarian of the western imagination who is radically antithetical to civilization. It was shown that these assumptions were based on unempirical and racist stereotypes. Without this assumption of the barbarian (and cultural incommensurability), cultural differences/variation would be trivial. Once Rachels correctly recognizes the “is”—that we are all human and the differences between us are not so incommensurable that dialogue cannot resolve them—there would be no fear of cultural relativism. This paper has argued that James Rachels’ canonical paper representing academic philosophy’s orthodox opinion on cultural relativism rests on the same structures of an Other- directed moral universalism. Central to this racist humanism is the creation of the barbarian Other whose existence serves, via a negative proof, to affirm the universalism of the morality of its promoters. This paper has contextualized academic philosophy’s phobia of cultural relativism against the persistent and enduring history of European parsing of the racial Other in terms of barbarism. Academic philosophy’s phobia of cultural relativism, it was argued, springs from this western tradition’s/philosophy’s assumption of the racial Other as the barbarian subhuman. The thought goes that without the universal moral law to dominate this savage, the savage would be practicing all kinds of immoral actions. This paper has argued that there is nothing special to fear from fellow human beings who differ from ourselves; the fear that drives the phobia against cultural relativism is the deep-seated racism which projects the idée fixe of the barbarian/savage in European culture onto fellow human beings. What is feared is a figment of the west’s imagination. The best example of how the fear of cultural relativism turns other human beings into the savage of the west’s own fantasies is, as we have shown, in the genesis of international law, in which the Amerindian was parsed as the barbarian/natural slave that Aristotle described. Their status as barbarians meant that they required domination by the moral law. The genesis of international law also exemplifies our point that historically, the kind of moral universalism that does not tolerate difference has been motivated by the desire to dominate others. For those who wish to defend moral universalism, the onus is on them to find instances of cultural difference in moral codes that are (1) not racist fictions and (2) not explainable and justifiable given adequate historical situation or context—i.e., the other’s motivations are intelligible and completely commensurable given the right context. As I have mentioned at the beginning of this paper, there is scarcely any hope for cross-cultural philosophical engagement before academic philosophy is aware of how age-old racist tropes about the Other still structure its perception of other cultures. Until it becomes aware of its prejudices, it will continue to treat (those of) other cultures as the subversive, Manichean Other of its own imagination. This paper has also problematized a sine qua non of moral philosophy in mainstream western academic moral philosophy: that the only thing saving us from moral failures such as Nazism is moral universalism. This paper has described how, even if that were the case, our love of universals needs to be judged against the moral failures with which they have historically been implicated, if not allowed for. The awareness of the conspicuous failures with which moral universalism have historically been implicated should qualify mainstream western academic philosophy’s uncritical commitment to moral universalism. What should further qualify this unquestioning assumption is the fact that, as was detailed in section 4, moral universalism arguably never did much for human moral progress anyway. So, given the deeply problematic past failures of moral universalism, its evident vulnerability to abuse, and the fact that human beings can arguably be moral without it, its infallible status as the sine qua non of morality bears scrutiny.

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Shuchen Xiang is assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Peking University. She specializes in comparative philosophy between the Chinese and western traditions. She received her PhD (summa cum laude) jointly from the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and King’s College London. Her first monograph, based on her dissertation, A Philosophical Defence of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Ernst Cassirer, is forthcoming with the State University of New York Press. She is the translator of History of Chinese Philosophy through Its Key Terms, which is forthcoming with Springer Verlag.

1 James Rachels, “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” in The Elements of Moral Philosophy. 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 14–31. 2 On the idea that racism is indebted to the Greek heritage please see Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Although Isaac uses the term “proto-racism” in this work, he drops this qualifying pretext as potentially misleading of his original meaning in his later co-edited volume, The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). He clarifies his position in his contribution to this volume, “Racism: a Rationalization of Prejudice”: “Thus it is clear that proto-racism, as the prototype of racism is not meant to be just a weakened form of racism. It is racism in the full sense, but it is an early form which precedes Darwin, based on pre-modern scientific concepts” (Isaac 2009: 33). “It may be appropriate here to note that my introduction of the term ‘proto-racism’ was rather tentative. While I would and will defend the reality of early forms of racism in antiquity, I shall not insist on calling them proto-racism rather than simply racism” (Isaac 2009: 34). For a summary of the consensus around the Greek origins of racism please see Charles Mills’ “Critical Philosophy of Race” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (New York: 2016), 711–12. I am personally of the view, following Isaac, that the main elements of the idea of race and racism already have their origins in the Greek worldview. Key to my interpretation of race and racism as essentially indebted to its Greek origins, as I described in my two-part paper “Why the Confucians had no Concept of Race,” is the essentialist conception of personhood in the Greek context. Please see my papers “Why the Confucians Had No Concept of Race (Part I): The Anti- Essentialist Cultural Understanding of Self,” Philosophy Compass, DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12628 and “Why the Confucians Had No Concept of Race (Part II): Cultural Difference, Environment and Achievement,” Philosophy Compass, DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12627. In Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, whereby an equation is made between foreigners and barbarians (who are only quasi- rational), we already see the most defining characteristics of (later) racism: (1) foreigners (the barbarian) are ontologically inferior and this cannot be changed, (2) they should be ruled by Greek or western men, (3) the foreigner/barbarian improves through the process of what Aimé Césaire would later call a “dependency complex” (explained below). That is, the foreigner/barbarian is able to achieve his/her telos only through being ruled by Greek or western men. This means that, for me, as all the most defining elements of the racial worldview is already present in the Greek context, the qualifier of “proto” is arguably unnecessary. As Isaac writes, “I tend to say that it is not very significant whether we speak of proto-racism or racism in the classical world, as long as we recognize the phenomenon for what it is: a pattern of recurring efforts to ascribe to groups of human beings common characteristics on seemingly logical and presumed scientific grounds from the later fifth century BC to late antiquity” (Isaac 2009: 5). David Stannard is also of the opinion that the idea of “race” is as old as the Greek tradition. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 164–65. 3 Anthony Pagden, The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4 By “western countries,” I refer specifically to all those political entities that colonized, i.e., subjugated, peoples they deemed to be inferior to themselves since the “Age of Discovery” and so are most responsible for global inequality in the world today. This definition of the “west” ______Journal of World Philosophies 5 (Summer 2020): 99-120 Copyright © 2020 Shuchen Xiang. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.5.1.07

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overlaps to a great extent with the definition of the “west” as those who were formed by a Greco-Christian heritage and converges geographically with the Western European countries and the Anglo-Saxon countries (USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) appropriated through colonization. In case the reader feels that I am essentializing the west, it should be borne in mind that it was the “west” who first essentialized or defined themselves in this way—that is, as superior to the darker races and so bear “the white man’s burden” to free, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, the “new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child.” I am therefore only citing the “west’s” own self-definition of itself. 5 Robert A. Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 6 Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Merryl Wyn Davis, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism (London and Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press, 1993). 7 Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, ed. and transl. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8 I was reminded of this fact by Charles Mill’s The Racial Contract (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 77. 9 I speak of the dominant approach in western philosophy. I recognize that there are, of course, exceptions to this generalization/rule—for example, the works of David Wong, Owen Flanagan, Jesse Prinz, and J. David Velleman. Please see, in particular, David Wong’s Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Owen Flanagan’s The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017). Their works, however, are exceptions that prove the rule. 10 Another canonical text that reiterates themes similar to that of Rachels’ paper is Harry J. Gensler’s “Cultural Relativism” in Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2011), 8–16. 11 David Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 12 David Wong, “Integrating Philosophy with Anthropology in an Approach to Morality,” Anthropological Theory 14, no. 3, (2014): 336–35. 13 Chester G. Starr, A History of the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 14 J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (Harvard Lectures) (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909). 15 The Achaeans and the Heniochi “eat raw meat and human flesh” (NE, 1148 b 22-3). 16 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 17 Note that the term “Eskimo” is today considered by many to be derogatory as it was used by non-Inuits to refer to Inuits and was thought to mean “eater of raw meat.” 18 Ann Fienup-Riordan, Eskimo Essays: Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 19 For an excellent account of how the idea of the barbarian is foundational to the self-identity of western civilization, please see Williams, Jr. (2012). 20 Please see Williams Jr. (2012: 31–82). 21 Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Clearly, the Greek belief about the both barbarian and themselves was not empirical. Greek society was only democratic to a degree as it was not egalitarian. Racism is based on fictions about what both the self and other are. 22 Césaire Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, transl. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

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23 It would be naïve to think that colonialism of China was a thing of the past. According to John Pilger’s documentary, The Coming War on China, “more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons.” https://newint.org/features/2016/12/01/the-coming-war-on-china. 24 By Hermann Knackfuss – Self-scanned, Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=3885756 25 I use this term ironically in reference to Martti Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26 James Baldwin, James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1998). 27 François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). 28 https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2015/06/12/1-in-5-women-say-they-were- violated/?utm_term=.2045ad739080; https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/aau-climate-surveysexual- assault-and-sexual-misconduct-2015 (last accessed May 11, 2020). 29 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than-percent-rapes-lead-felony- convictions-least-percent-victims-face-emotional-physical-consequences/ (last accessed May 11, 2020). 30 James Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown, and Company, 2015). 31 Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999). 32 Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 33 ed. Mohammed Bedjaoui, International Law: Achievements and Prospects (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1991). 34 Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 35 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Constance Farrington (New York, Grove Press, 1963). 36 David Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropology and Geography,” in Reading Kant’s Geography, ed. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 267–84. 37 David Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of The World's Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 38 https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/foreskin-wars-why-is-the-united-states-so-addicted- to-circumcision-gmp/ (last accessed May 11, 2020). 39 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19072761 (last accessed May 11, 2020). 40 As a doctor in the 2012 article, “Ugly, Messy and Nasty Debate Surrounds circumcision” in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, puts it, “[a]dvocates for [male] circumcision use medical literature to promote their cause and don’t give a damn if it’s true or not.” In the past 140 years removal of the male foreskin has be touted as a cure for paralysis, restless sleep, bad digestion, masturbation, and recently penile cancer and HIV. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3255195/ (last accessed May 11, 2020). 41 Examples of this kind of argument are: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/mens- health/10998633/Dont-compare-male-circumcision-with-FGM.html (last accessed May 11, 2020). As the medical ethicist Brian D. Earp summarizes, “You often hear that genital mutilation and male circumcision are very different.” That, “anyone who tried to compare the two [MGM and FGM] on ethical (or other) grounds would be making a serious mistake—anatomically, at the

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very least.” https://aeon.co/essays/are-male-and-female-circumcision-morally-equivalent (last accessed May 11, 2020). 42 There are, arguably, very simple explanations for the prevalence of FGM among certain societies, for example: poverty, lack of education, sexism, and beliefs about hygiene. To take one of these examples, poverty, surveys have found FGM to be most common in underdeveloped, impoverished, uneducated, war-torn countries. “Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Statistical Overview and Exploration of the Dynamics of Change.” New York, 2013, 28, 40, 41. http://data.unicef.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/FGMC_Lo_res_Final_26.pdf (last accessed May 11, 2020). These are countries that fit under the rubric of what Edward Said called the “endless instability of ‘primitive’ societies” that western countries have major responsibility for. Please see Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994). The ranking of countries by prevalence of FGM reads like a “who’s who” list of countries destroyed by western intervention/exploitation: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan. “United Nations Children’s Fund, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global concern” (New York, 2016, 2. https://www.unicef.org/media/files/FGMC_2016_brochure_final_UNICEF_SPREAD.pdf, last accessed May 11, 2020). Given that there is such a strong correlation between FGM and the destruction of culture, civil society, access to education, and thus resultant poverty, it is simply wrongheaded to frame the question of FGM in such simple moralizing terms, as has tended to be the case, and is exemplified by Rachels. It is the wrong question to ask whether or not we should tolerate FGM, because if the complex culture and society which once existed was not continuously undermined (if not destroyed) in the first place, then FGM might not have become as tenacious a problem as it is today. Again, the issue is to understand the other’s historical context, not to frame the other in terms of moral dualisms, see below. 43 ed. Robert S. Wistrich, Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999). 44 Whilst it is true that Rachels points approvingly to the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King Jr., I would argue that this does not count as a criticism of his own culture. A real critique of his own society would involve more than just name-dropping Martin Luther King Jr., or any other deceased revolutionary figure who, shorn of their political power, is no longer a threat to the status quo and now functions as a status symbol signifying one’s liberal credentials without requiring any real ethical commitment. A real critique of his society would have been actually marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama; it would be, although this is anachronistic, taking a knee with Colin Kaepernick; it would be drawing attention to the American history of sponsoring dictators in Latin American countries throughout the post-war period—Rachels’ own lifetime, for example. 45 By Stannard’s count, close to 100 million peoples were killed during the “American Holocaust.” By the end of the nineteenth century, writes Stannard, native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people” (Stannard 1994: 146). 46 Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995). 47 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell: 2004). 48 Louise Diop-Maes, Afrique noire, sol, démographie et histoire: Une analyse pluridisciplinaire et critique (Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1996). 49 Thomas Craemer, “Estimating Slavery Reparations: Present Value Comparisons of Historical Multigenerational Reparations Policies,” Social Science Quarterly 96, no. 2, (2015): 639–55. 50 William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (New York: Zed Books, 2013). 51 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012). As Alexander writes, “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label

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people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. […] As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (Alexander 2012: 2). 52 Interested readers can see: Jeeloo Liu, “The Is-Ought Correlation in Neo-Confucian Qi-Realism: How Normative Facts Exist in Natural States of Qi,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43, no. 1, (2011): 60–77; Jeeloo Liu, “Wang Fuzhi’s Philosophy of Principle (Li) Inherent in Qi,” in Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy, ed. John Makeham (New York: Springer Verlag, 2010), 355– 80; A.T. Nuyen, “Confucianism and the Is-Ought Question,” in Searle’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement, ed. Bo Mou, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 273–93; Steven Burik, “Invaluable Justice: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism Thinking on Values and Justice,” in Value and Values: Economics and Justice in an Age of Global Interdependence, ed. Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), 400–17. In passing, I would also like to mention that Hegel not only characterized “oriental” cultures as being unable to make the is-ought distinction, he systematically excluded Chinese philosophy because he deemed it incapable of making such a distinction. The is-ought distinction, under the Hegelian view, is something that only characterizes western religions as it is only the Caucasian race who have subjective capacity for freedom (Hoffheimer 2005: 198). In the appendix to the introduction of his lectures on the Philosophy of World History, for example, Hegel talks of the oriental realm as one still immersed in external nature and so being able to “attain the inward conditions of subjective freedom” (Hegel 1975: 202). As such, within the oriental realm, “Ethical life has an immediate and lawless character” (Hegel 1975: 198). On the basis that philosophy arose only in Greece with the historical dawning of self-consciousness, Hegel (following Kant), excluded Asia from the philosophical canon (Park 2013: 114). The lack of the is-ought distinction in Chinese philosophy, quite tragicomically, was part of the reason for the exclusion of Chinese philosophy from “Philosophy.” See: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, ed. Maurice Cowling, E. Kedourie, G. R. Elton, J. R. Pole, and Walter Ullmann, transl. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); Michael H. Hoffheimer, “Race and Law in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 194–216. 53 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975).