Status of norms (metaethics)

If reason is one and everywhere the same, then the principles of justice hold universally, and not by divine decree or local custom. Morality is secularized: it no longer depends on a revelation but rests on reason or on sentiments common to all men, which makes it possible to judge established mores rather than submit to them. Kant will give it its most rigorous form, a moral law valid for every rational being. Yet the current carries its own limit within it: Montesquieu's attention to the diversity of laws according to climate and people opens the way to the relativism that will soon contest this universalism.

Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals · Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book I

The principle of utility holds for all people and all times: the criterion of pleasure and pain is a universal natural fact, and the calculus applies the same way everywhere. Bentham does not relativize morality to cultures nor reduce it to mere convention; this is a naturalistic universalism, grounded in a sentience common to all beings.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I-IV (the principle and its measure, universally valid)

Norms are neither conventional nor constructed but grounded in the objective order of being: the good is the One itself, principle and end of all, and a thing's worth lies in its degree of nearness to it. The hierarchy of virtues mirrors this real scale of being, hence a realist universalism rooted in metaphysics.

Enneads, I, 2 (On Virtues) · Enneads, VI, 9

Stoic morality is universalist: there is a natural law, the expression of the single logos, binding on all rational beings everywhere. Good and evil depend neither on convention nor on cities: to live according to nature is to live according to this reason common to all humankind.

Cicero, On the Republic, book III · Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 4

Husserl's great battle is aimed at relativism: to make the validity of the true depend on a species, a culture or a psychic constitution is to contradict oneself, since that very thesis would claim to be universally true. What he establishes for logic he extends by right to any norm: there are ideal validities, independent of the facts that think them. His fight bears on the status of intellectual norms more than on moral values, which he little thematised; but its spirit is clearly universalist, hostile to reducing everything to variable conventions.

Logical Investigations, I, §32-39 (the refutation of relativism)

The principle of utility serves as a universal criterion of the good, the same for all men and all ages: Mill does not relativise morality to cultures. The good is an objective fact, happiness, measurable by its effects, which ranks him on the side of a naturalistic universalism rather than relativism.

Utilitarianism, ch. 2 and 4 (the greatest happiness principle as a universal criterion)

By opposing nature to nomos, Cynicism presupposes a criterion of the good independent of conventions and valid for all: what accords with nature is good everywhere, what is merely local custom does not bind. The sage judges customs in the name of a universal natural norm rather than according to each city.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 70-71

By opposing nature to nomos, Diogenes presupposes a criterion of the good independent of conventions and valid for all: what accords with nature is good everywhere, what is merely local custom does not bind. He therefore judges customs in the name of a universal natural norm, and this is what licenses the cosmopolitanism. But the weapon is double-edged: the same critique of nomos feeds a de facto relativism, since Diogenes delights in stressing how modesties and prohibitions vary from one people to another, proof that none derives from nature. The relativist strand stays secondary, put to the service of a normative naturalism.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 70-73

A corollary of the metaphysical realism: truths, practical ones included, are objective and accessible to reason, not relative to a culture or an individual. Spinoza deduces the true good from the nature of substance, more geometrico, as a necessary and universal truth, and Leibniz grounds justice on eternal truths inscribed in the divine understanding. Reason, everywhere the same, gives access to a universal normative order.

Spinoza, Ethics, IV, preface and propositions 18-37 · Leibniz, Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice

The demand for a single definition of justice or courage presupposes that virtue has a nature, the same for all, and not a mere variable convention. Socrates thereby opposes the sophists and their relativism, summed up in Protagoras' saying, man is the measure of all things: if each measures the true and the good as they please, examination would lose its object. The just is discovered by reason, not decreed.

Plato, Theaetetus, 152a and 161c-e (Protagoras' formula, criticized) · Plato, Gorgias, 482e-484c (nature and convention)

The Way (dao) and ren 仁 (humaneness) hold as objective norms, anchored in the order of Heaven (tian) and the wisdom of the Ancients: the good is not a matter of arbitrary convention. Yet this objectivity is embodied in historically situated li 禮 (rites), inherited from a tradition, which leaves some room for the instituted character of the norm.

Analects, IV, 8 (hearing the Way in the morning, one may die content at evening) · Analects, VII, 23 (Heaven has begotten the virtue that is in me)

Revolt posits a near-universal limit, a "no" that every man opposes to humiliation and murder, which brings Camus close to a de facto universalism. Yet this value is not deduced from a nature or an absolute: it emerges from the shared experience of revolt, hence a constructive share.

The Rebel (1951)

The distinctions of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, are for Laozi correlative carvings the mind projects: "all know the beautiful as beautiful, and there is the ugly." One might read a relativism here. But these oppositions are relative to a ground that is not, the Dao and the course of nature, which supplies a norm: to follow the natural. The norm is thus real and universal, even as it dissolves particular human codes.

Dao De Jing, ch. 2 · Dao De Jing, ch. 25 and 51

Conscience, the « infallible judge of good and evil », speaks in every man: its verdicts depend not on local customs but on a feeling common to the species. Rousseau thus maintains a moral universalism, even though, as legislator for Poland or Corsica, he acknowledges that institutions must be fitted to the particular genius of each people.

Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar · Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland

In his ethical books, Sextus sets the inexhaustible diversity of peoples' laws, customs and beliefs against the claim that anything is good or bad "by nature": were anything so, all would hold it such. Lacking a criterion, he suspends judgment on the existence of universal norms and regulates his conduct by the "law and custom" of his country, without holding them true. From this relativism-by-suspension follows a null universalism and only a thin constructivism, since following convention is not grounding it: it is conforming to it in the absence of any established moral truth.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 168-238 (things good and bad) · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 145-163 (the tenth mode, on customs)

The verdict of indeterminacy applies to values as well: nothing is just or unjust, beautiful or ugly "by nature", but only by convention and custom. Timon reports that for Pyrrho "nothing is beautiful or ugly, just or unjust" in itself. Lacking a criterion to decide, the sage suspends judgment on the existence of universal norms and regulates himself, by default, on received usage, without holding it true. Hence a null universalism and a thin constructivist strand, since following custom is not grounding it: it is conforming to it in the absence of any established moral truth.

Aristocles (after Timon), cited by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, XIV, 18 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61 and 101

Zhuangzi's perspectivism issues in a relativism: what is beautiful, right, or useful for one is not so for another, and no standpoint overlooks the rest. A man sleeping in the damp falls ill, but not the eel; which of the two knows the right dwelling? Sharp moral distinctions lose their claim to universality.

Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things)

By anchoring morality in sentiment and experience rather than in universal reason, the school relativises moral foundations. It is Hume in particular who derives the virtues from their felt usefulness and agreeableness and treats justice as an artificial virtue born of convention rather than of a given nature. The weighting blends a core of human constants with a large share of relativity and social construction.

Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sections III and V · Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, III, 2 (of justice as an artificial virtue)

Values are neither inscribed in an intelligible heaven nor purely relative: they are instituted by freedoms that recognize one another and commit themselves. Beauvoir always starts from singular, historical situations, yet the freedom she sets up as a requirement holds for all: a situated constructivism, universalizing without relativism or moral realism.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the grounding of values in freedom

Moral values, for the pragmatists, are neither eternal essences to be discovered nor purely arbitrary conventions: they are worked out and justified within inquiry, tested by their consequences for shared experience. Dewey treats value judgments as revisable hypotheses, submitted to the same practical test as statements of fact. The good is constructed in social deliberation.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) · Dewey, Theory of Valuation (1939)

Morality belongs to the ideological superstructure: the law, justice and morality of an age express the relations of production and vary with them, so that no eternal moral norm hovers above history. This historicisation of values, referring them to material conditions rather than to a universal foundation, is above all a historical constructivism, with a share of class relativism.

Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 2 (moral ideas as products of the relations of production) · The German Ideology, I (morality, religion and metaphysics as ideology)

If God does not exist, no table of values is written in an intelligible heaven: values are created by human choices. Sartre nonetheless holds that in choosing oneself one chooses for all humanity, which brings the position closer to constructivism than to sheer relativism.

Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

The principle of utility is universal in scope, holding for all sentient beings everywhere, yet its ground is no transcendent moral law: the good is built from a natural fact, pleasure and pain. Utilitarianism thus combines a universalism of the rule with a naturalist anchoring, midway between moral realism and a constructivism of the good out of welfare.

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

Hume spots an illicit leap in moral treatises: their authors slip without warning from propositions joined by is to propositions joined by ought, though a new ought cannot be deduced from any set of purely descriptive premises (Hume's guillotine). No relation of fact, and so no act of reason alone, can ground an obligation: value is not a quality of things but lies in the spectator's sentiment of approval. Morality thereby loses its realist foundation, against the rationalist moral realism that thought to read the good off being. Yet this sentiment, common to all human beings and regulated by shared utility, lends judgements a near-universal stability: the position is broadly constructivist, with a relativist share, without lapsing into arbitrariness.

A Treatise of Human Nature, III, I, 1 (the is-ought passage) · Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. IX and Appendix I