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The argument for metaethical relativism, the view that there is no single true or most justified morality, is that it is part of the best explanation of the most difficult moral disagreements. This text discusses the latest arguments in ethical theory in an accessible manner, with many examples and cases.

Introduction. Part One: How Pluralism and Naturalism Make for Natural Moralities. 1. Pluralism and Ambivalence. 2. Pluralistic Relativism. 3. Objections and Replies. Part Two: Constraints on Natural Moralities. 4. Identity, Flourishing, and Relationship. 5. Community and Liberal Theory. 6. Does Psychological Realism Constrain the Content of Moralities?. Part Three: Having Confidence in Our Moral Commitments. 7. Moral Reasons -- Internal and External. 8. Morality and Need. 9. Coping with Moral Difference. Bibliography

This essay explains the inescapability of moral demands. I deny that the individual has genuine reason to comply with these demands only if she has desires that would be served by doing so. Rather, the learning of moral reasons helps to shape and channel self- and other-interested motivations so as to facilitate and promote social cooperation. This shaping happens through the "embedding" of reasons in the intentional objects of motivational propensities. The dominance of the instrumental conception of reason, according to which reasons must be based in desires of the individual, has made it harder to recognize that reasons shape desires. I attempt to undermine this dominance by arguing that the concept of a self that extends over time is constructed to meet the demands of social cooperation. Prudential reasons to act on behalf of the persisting self's desires are often taken to constitute the paradigm of reasons based on desires of the individual. But such reasons, along with the very concept of the persisting self, are constructed to promote human cooperation and to shape the individual's desires.

Arguments for the preservation of culture are based on an extremely problematic essentialist conception of culture as a fixed entity. The inadequacy of the essentialist conception has received increasing recognition, but an adequate positive conception has yet to take its place. This essay reframes the debate about cultural preservation by proposing a new conception of culture as conversation. The new conception acknowledges the fluidity and internal contestation that occurs within actual cultures, and the agency of a culture's members in creating, transmitting and revising that culture. We make this new conception our basis for proposing that a proper concern for the value of a culture should be realized in enabling its members to sustain it, not to preserve some pre-existing essence. Adopting this more viable notion of culture also changes our conception of what needs to be done to sustain it, and allows us to acknowledge and better deal with the complex arguments for and against sustaining culture.

SECTION I: RIGHTS AND COMMUNITY --Are individual rights necessary? : a Confucian perspective /Craig K. Ihara --Rights and community in Confucianism /David B. Wong --Whose democracy? Which rights? : a Confucian critique of modern Western liberalism /Henry Rosemont, Jr. --The normative impact of comparative ethics : human rights /Chad Hansen --SECTION II: SELF AND SELF-CULTIVATION --Tradition and community in the formation of character and self /Joel J. Kupperman --A theory of Confucian selfhood : self-cultivation and free will in Confucian philosophy /Chung-ying Cheng --The virtue of righteousness in Mencius /Bryan W. Van Norden --Concept of the person in early Confucian thought /Kwong-loi Shun --Questions for Confucians : reflections on the essays in comparative study of self, autonomy, and community /Alasdair MacIntyre.

The Chinese ethical tradition has often been thought to oppose Western views of the self as autonomous and possessed of individual rights with views that emphasize the centrality of relationship and community to the self. The essays in this collection discuss the validity of that contrast as it concerns Confucianism, the single most influential Chinese school of thought. Alasdair MacIntyre, the single most influential philosopher to articulate the need for dialogue across traditions, contributes a concluding essay of commentary. This is the only consistently philosophical collection on Asia and human rights and could be used in courses on comparative ethics, political philosophy and Asian area studies

Pt. 1: Toward a political theory of affective relations Pt. 2: Probing the history of affective relations Pt. 3: Locating affective relations in institutional contexts