Universalism

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

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 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

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, 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

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