"I challenge the multiculturalist attack on personal autonomy as a universal ideal. This attack is often based on forms of cultural relativism. In opposition to relativism, I propose value pluralism—a view associated in particular with Isaiah Berlin—a more satisfactory ethical starting point; one that balances recognition of legitimate cultural diversity with the possibility of intercultural criticism. However, Berlinian pluralism, too, has been used recently as a platform for the multiculturalist attack on personal autonomy in the work of John Gray, Bhikhu Parekh and William Galston. ...this tendency rests on a misunderstanding. ...Berlinian pluralism is primarily about the plurality of goods, not cultures. ...Far from undermining personal autonomy as a universal value, Berlinian value pluralism generates a distinctive argument in its favour. ...cultural relativism holds that cultures are indefeasible moral authorities."
A value is a universal value if it has the same value or worth for all, or almost all, people. Spheres of human value encompass morality, aesthetic preference, traits, human endeavour, and social order. Whether universal values exist is an unproven conjecture of moral philosophy and cultural anthropology, though it is clear that certain values are found across a great diversity of human cultures,
"Mathematics and ethics have this much in common, if they claim to be sciences they must be based on pure concepts. Experience and history are further from representing the laws of ethics than nature is from the accurate realisation of mathematical ideas; but these laws and ideas are rational forms equally necessary, the one to be the rule of the senses, and the other to guide and form a judgment on life."
"What morality requires is that the individual in all circumstances shall make his individual interest that of the universal interest. We even censure those who do not succeed in reconciling in their own souls the contradictions between the individual interests of the universal and interests which are merely individual. "Morality triumphs over interests only because it is itself the supreme interest" (Pratica p. 242)"
"In reviewing the several levels of life which morality defines, we may observe two types of universal value. The lower values in relation to the higher are indispensable. There is no health without satisfaction, no achievement without health, no rational intercourse without achievement, and no true religion except as the perfecting and completing of a rational society. The higher values, on the other hand, are more universal than the lower in that they surpass these in validity, and are entitled to preference. Thus the lower values are ennobled by the higher, while the higher are given body and meaning by the lower. Satisfaction derives dignity from being controlled by the motive of good-will, while the moral kingdom at large derives its wealth, its pertinence to life, and its incentive, from the great manifold of particular interests which it conserves and fosters."
"If we are content to accept that it is in Universal Value... that all values meet, that the Universe is one, and that goodness, beauty, and truth, are but aspects of it... then we may begin to understand how it is that in a world of all sorts, all sorts and conditions of men may, if they will but gaze outwards from themselves, see Value in the infinite from the side of the finite, and be strengthened thereby in their own finite lives. It is in that sense that the one Value which before we called by the name "good" may appear to ten thousand men in ten thousand different ways, though mainly by the great avenues, Goodness, Beauty and Truth."
"Every inspirational leader defines and, most importantly, lives by the values he holds dearest. It is in our nature to live by universal values, and generally speaking, we try and uphold them."
"There are other contentions which are more vital, and these Mr. Bradley himself urges. The State of to-day may not be reconcilable with the morality of to-day. The State may be in a confused or decadent condition; short of that, it may, being as it is in a state of development, retain unresolved elements of its past, which are opposed to ideal morality. Again, we have to reckon with cosmopolitan morality in the individual, who may seek to transcend the function allotted to his station in a particular community; we must recognise, for instance, the desire to produce philosophic truth or artistic beauty of a universal value, which can hardly be connected with the duty of a station. Such recognition may serve to drive us, or to lift us, to the conception of a higher organism than that of the State. By faith we may come to believe in the realisation of a society of all humanity as a divine organic whole; or as St. Paul wrote, we may come to see that we are organs, diversely endowed, "unto the building up of the body of Christ," which is "fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth."