Response to "On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy"

In: The review of politics, Band 73, Heft 1, S. 135-143

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum, in a reaction to the cultural relativism that pervades much of social science, made the following comment:Highly intelligent people, people deeply committed to the good of women and men in developing countries, people who think of themselves as progressive and feminist and antiracist, are taking up positions that converge … with the positions of reaction, oppression, and sexism. Under the banner of their radical and politically correct "antiessentialism" march ancient religious taboos, the luxury of the pampered husband, ill health, ignorance, and death. (And in my own essentialist way, I say it at the outset. I do hold that death is opposed to life in the most binary way imaginable, and slavery to freedom, and hunger to adequate nutrition, and ignorance to knowledge.)