Moral Absolutes and the Multiplicity of Languages

Moral anthropology at a crossroads

In his article “Relativism and Universalism in Moral Anthropology” the leading American anthropologist Richard Shweder recounts the story of the tensions and disputes between extreme moral universalism and extreme moral relativism in anthropology. He recalls that in 1997, “the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (whose membership included the avowed cultural relativist Melville Herskvitz) refused to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Man on the grounds that it was an ethnocentric document”.

For his own part, Shweder advocates a position that he calls “universalism without uniformity”. The phrase sounds appealing: while acknowledging the danger of ethnocentrism inherent in attempts to formulate any universally valued moral absolutes, it implies a recognition of the fact that in the era of globalisation, the world, more than ever, needs some universal moral guidelines.

Shweder aligns himself with Montaigne, who on the one hand ridiculed the human tendency to absolutise the norms and values of one’s own society, and on the other, referred to virtues which he recognised as inherently admirable, and vices which he saw as inherently contemptible. Thus, in his essay “Of cannibals” he famously remarked: “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.” This didn’t stop him, however, from extolling the “courage” and “valour” of South Seas cannibals, and of expressing horror at “treachery”, “disloyalty”, “tyranny” and “cruelty” (which, he says, “are our ordinary vices”).

For Montaigne, then, these are examples of moral absolutes: “courage is good”, “cowardice is bad”, “disloyalty is bad”, “cruelty is bad”, “valour is good”. The examples cited by Montaigne translate reasonably well from French into English (although lacheté doesn’t mean exactly the same as cowardice, and implies a lack of moral fibre in general rather than, specifically, cowardice). But of course there are many languages into which these putative absolutes don’t translate well at all. So if we want to put forward some candidates for moral absolutes—if only as a starting point for debates in international or multicultural forums, in what language should these candidates be articulated? Would it be enough to articulate them in English?

Shweder, who wants to reconcile universalism and relativism with his formula “universalism without uniformity” sees the invocation of moral absolutes as legitimate if its primary aim is to provide “insiders and outsiders, minority groups and majority groups, familiar others and unfamiliar others (in other words, everyone) with a common frame of reference for engaging in genuine moral debates”. He insists that moral absolutes should not be equated with empirical moral universals or near-universals (that is, with what can be found in the moral lore formulated by many diverse human groups). Above all, following Montaigne, he urges caution.

It would be hard to disagree with Shweder’s emphasis on caution or with his distinction between descriptive and normative moral universalism. But it seems undeniable that some shared normative framework would be of great value to the globalised world: clearly, a common frame of reference is a prerequisite for meaningful moral debates. Where can such a common frame of reference be found and how should it be formulated? Is there anything at all in the realm of values that the representatives of many different human groups could agree on? Not as a matter of compromise, not on the basis of a majority vote, but wholeheartedly, from within their own cultural traditions and building, as Shweder puts it, on the deepest intuitions of their own people?

Here, the question of language comes to be fore. I don’t believe that native speakers of Arabic, Chinese or Malay could wholeheartedly agree that English words such as loyalty, kindness and fairness express accurately what they would see as an acceptable common moral frame of reference for the globalised world.

A point that many Anglophone moral philosophers, and even moral anthropologists, often seem oblivious to is that these words are English words, and that these words don’t have exact equivalents in most other languages. In other words, it is speakers of English who think with concepts like “loyalty”, “kindness” and “fairness”. Some of these concepts may have close equivalents in some other European languages—for example, French has the word loyauté, corresponding in meaning to the English loyalty—but even French doesn’t have words for “kindness” or “fairness”. And outside Europe, most languages don’t have a word matching loyalty in meaning either—just as European languages don’t have equivalents of many key value words of Arabic, Chinese or Malay.

In her recent book Why Translation Matters the acclaimed American translator Edith Grossman cites a bumper sticker popular with American campaigners against English/Spanish bilingualism: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me”.

In a globalised world, in which English has become, effectively, the first ever global lingua franca, it is easy to forget that the whole world doesn’t think in English. If humankind does, as Shweder suggests, share some deep moral intuitions on which a global ethic could build, then these intuitions must relate to particular speakers’ conceptual worlds. The diversity of languages that people across the world speak means that there is a diversity of conceptual worlds. If these different conceptual worlds didn’t share a common core then there would be no possibility of genuine cross-cultural understanding and no way to articulate any moral values that could provide a common frame of reference for working towards some global consensus, even on a very modest scale.

However, as decades of empirical cross-linguistic investigations in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework have shown, there is a conceptual common core on which cross-cultural dialogue about moral values can build. Above all, evidence suggests that all languages have words for “good” and “bad”, which can be used in “canonical” sentences like the following ones:

People can do good things.

People can do bad things.

It is good if people want good things to happen to other people.

It is bad if people want bad things to happen to other people.

Shweder suggests that “variations in concrete moral judgments of the many peoples of the world can be viewed, in part, as expressions of the many answers that are possible to … universal questions”. Among such universally relevant questions he includes, for example, “how should the burdens and benefits of life be distributed”. This conclusion seeks to strike a balance between universalism and pluralism: 

Those in the social sciences over the decades who have engaged in descriptive research in the cultural psychology of morality investigate local answers to those unavoidable and hence universal existential and metaphysical questions … What they have discovered is that moral judgments around the world are ubiquitous, passionate, motivating, truth asserting and divergent; and that in all cultures there is some sense of natural moral law and the development of some kind of normative language of rights, duties, obligations or values for regulating and justifying action. 

All this is very persuasive. I would add, however, that next to “local answers” to “universal questions”, there are also “local questions”, and among them, questions formulated in the culture-specific conceptual language of the investigator. If we want to find out what many people around the world may share, it would be more fruitful, to my mind, to ask questions in a conceptual language that people around the world can understand. Such language would have to be based on the universal concepts “good” and “bad”, and not on culturally shaped concepts like “right” and “wrong” or “rights” and “obligations”, or complex concepts like “burdens” and “benefits”. Furthermore, I would suggest that for various local answers to universal questions to be compared at all we need a conceptual common measure, independent of conceptual moral languages developed within particular cultures, including Anglo culture. Evidence suggests that sentences such as these can be translated, with exactly the same meaning, into any language of the world—unlike sentences with words like loyalty, fairness or kindness. Using such sentences, speakers of languages other than English can articulate their deepest moral intuitions in their own words, and yet in ways fully intelligible to speakers of other languages.

Anglophone scholars often unwittingly frame their research hypotheses in English-specific words. For example, when evolutionary biologists postulate a “universal sense of right and wrong” or puzzle over the evolutionary origins of “animal altruism”, or “the origins of kindness”, there is usually little awareness of the fact that their words right, wrong, altruism and kindness are English-specific constructs that lack precise equivalents in many languages of the world, including some European languages.

Accordingly, while a global dialogue about moral values cannot build on concepts like “loyalty”, “fairness” or “kindness”, or even concepts like “right” and “wrong” (often absolutised in English moral discourse), it can build on the concepts “good” and “bad” (used in sentences conforming to the shared syntactic core of all languages).

Shweder offers, as examples of moral absolutes, “benevolence” and “malevolence”, no doubt meaning by this that “benevolence is good” and “malevolence is bad”. The words benevolence and malevolence are quite close to the conceptual core of all languages, because they are obviously built on the universal concepts “good”, “bad”, and “want”. Still, benevolence and malevolence as such are not translatable into other languages of the world. To form a basis for a global moral dialogue they would first have to be translated into that mini-English which has its counterparts in the shared lexical and syntactic core of other languages.

Shweder doesn’t spell out what exactly he has in mind when he speaks of “benevolence” and “malevolence”. For my part, I would propose, as a starting point for discussion, statements [A], [B], [C] and [D], phrased in universal concepts and according to universal conceptual grammar: 

[A] It is good if someone wants to do good things for someone else.

[B] It is bad if someone wants to do something bad to someone else.

[C] It is good if people want to do good things for other people.

[D] It is bad if people want to do bad things to other people. 

The words benevolence and malevolence could also be understood as referring to “good will” and “ill will” alone, without any reference to actions. Relying on the universal conceptual language, we could articulate such intuitions as in [E], [F]: [G] and [H]: 

[E] It is good if someone wants good things to happen to someone else.

[F] It is bad if someone wants something bad to happen to someone else.

[G] It is good if people want good things to happen to other people.

[H] It is bad if people want bad things to happen to other people. 

These statements, too, could be a useful reference point for a global, or at least cross-cultural, dialogue about moral values. 

Can “goodness” be a moral absolute for the whole world? 

The Australian moral philosopher Raimond Gaita puts “goodness” at the centre of his moral philosophy and, implicitly at least, advances it as a value to which all people can be expected to pledge allegiance. In Gaita’s splendid family memoir Romulus, My Father (1998) and in its sequel After Romulus (2011) it is the author’s father Romulus and his best friend Hora who embody this value.

In her review of Gaita’s recent book, the writer and historian Maria Tumarkin writes: “Could it be that the goodness exemplified by Romulus and Hora—of which Romulus, My Father, like no other book in Australia, speaks—is so rare, so ‘wondrous’ (Gaita’s word) that we cannot help but bow to it?”

Tumarkin is right when she notes that no other book in Australia speaks of “goodness” as Gaita’s books do. But the broader point to note is that the word goodness is normally not used in modern English the way it is used by Gaita. The most salient value word akin to “benevolence” that is used in modern English is not goodness but kindness, and the concept of “goodness” in Gaita’s sense does not occupy a prominent place in the contemporary English moral lexicon.

Where does that concept of “goodness” come from in Gaita’s conceptual world? Gaita was raised in Australia, but his father was Romanian, his mother German, and German was the dominant home language in his childhood. German was also the language that Gaita as a child spoke with Hora. It seems likely, therefore, that the German word Güte, and the common German phrase menschliche Güte “human Güte”, contributed to the unusual use of the word goodness in the adult Gaita’s English, and to the great value that he placed (following Romulus and Hora) on the moral ideal that he sought to express with the word.

The German noun Güte is derived from the adjective gut “good”, just as the English noun goodness is derived from the adjective good, but the two words, Güte and goodness, are not used in the same way. In fact, the abstract nouns derived from the adjective meaning “good” have different meanings in different European languages. For example, the French bonté, derived from bon “good”, differs somewhat in meaning from the Polish dobroć, derived from dobry “good”, which in turn differs from the Russian dobrota, derived from dobryj “good”. Furthermore, none of these languages has a word corresponding in meaning or in cultural significance to the English word kindness.

These differences in meaning are reflected, inter alia, in the typical collocations. For example, the Polish collocations kobieca dobroć “feminine goodness” and matczyna dobroć “maternal goodness” indicate that dobroć has a feminine prototype; and the common Russian collocation dejstvennaja dobrota “active goodness” indicates that “dobrota” as such is seen as, above all, a property of the soul (duša) not necessarily reflected in actions. One doesn’t speak in Polish of czynna dobroć “active goodness”, because dobroć is inherently active; and one doesn’t speak in Russian of a ženstvennaja dobrota “womanly goodness” because “dobrot” does not have its prototype in women or mothers. The common German collocation menschliche Güte is also significant as it is significant in English that people talk of “human kindness” much more frequently than “human goodness”. (In the English database, The Cobuild Bank of English, there are sixty-five sentences with “human kindness” and only thirteen with “human goodness”.)

But, significant as the shadow of Güte in Gaita’s conceptual world may have been, it is even more likely that his elevation of “goodness” (in some special sense) to the status of a supreme moral value owes a great deal to the moral world of Romulus and Hora shaped by the Romanian language.

Gaita acknowledges that as a moral philosopher he owes a profound debt to his father, Romulus, and his “second father” Hora. For example, he writes: “Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, my first philosophical work, often described as radical and controversial, was profoundly influenced by my father’s example … Insofar as I have a distinctive voice, it was formed by my early life with my father and Hora.” And again: “I have spent much of my life thinking about what I learned from my father and Hora. Much of my philosophical writing owes its inspiration to them.”

The roots of his idea of “goodness” in the lives—and the talk—of Romulus and Hora is a leitmotif of Gaita’s 2011 book of essays After Romulus. In his own words, “It is philosophising by a son—a philosopher to the core—in the remembered company of his father from whom he has learned much of what he knows about his subject.”

In this moral world shown to Gaita by his father, “goodness” was, as Gaita stresses, a focal concept: “goodness was the concept that determined his ethical perspective … he was a man whose understanding of integrity, courage, honour and nobility was transformed in the light of a moral conception in which goodness is a focal point.”. In the same context, Gaita remarks that “goodness of that kind is not a heroic virtue” and that “for that reason Nietzsche, who is now greatly admired, despised it”.

The reference to Nietzsche is interesting, because of course Nietzsche wrote about Güte, not about “goodness”. For example, in the Genealogy of Morality he says: “Die Schwäche soll zum Verdienste umgelogen werden … und die Ohnmacht die nicht vergilt, zur ‘Güte’” (translated into English by Carol Diethe as: “Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment … and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’”.

Goodness and Güte have rather different ranges of use. For example, one could not possibly use the word Güte to translate goodness in sentences like the following ones from the Cobuild Bank of English corpus: 

Or is there no design, just a random universe where some people live and others die, with no justice or fairness or reward for goodness and punishment for badness? 

Christians strove for goodness by fasting in order to purge themselves of the evils of the flesh. It is this urge to reach an impossible goal of goodness which today drives many young women and some young men to starve themselves. 

The words goodness and Güte are also defined differently in English and German dictionaries. For example, The Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1984) defines “goodness” as “the quality or state of being good”, whereas Langenscheidts Grosswörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdspreche (1997) defines Güte as “eine freundliche, grosszügige Einstellung gegenüber anderen” (“a friendly, generous attitude towards others”).

Raised in a German-speaking household, Gaita was apparently inclined to equate sometimes his father’s “focal concept of goodness” with the German concept of Güte. But it was not Gaita’s German mother, Christine, who was a major influence on his moral outlook, but his two Romanian mentors, Hora no less than Romulus. When he was fourteen and fifteen, he and Hora often went sailing in the boat they built with his father, and Hora told him stories about men and women he admired—and these stories often expressed something that caught the young Gaita’s special attention: “It was love of the goodness that he had read about or seen in the people in his village in Romania, one of them his mother. Tears came into his eye when he talked about her.”

So if Hora read about “goodness” in Romania, and saw it in the people in his village, what was the Romanian word he had in mind? 

The Romanian key value word omenie 

The cultural semantics of Romanian suggests that the word must have been the Romanian cultural keyword omenie, from om “human being”, a word which plays a key role in Romanian moral discourse and which seems to fit to perfection everything Gaita says about the “goodness” of Hora and Romulus.

I will illustrate the use of omenie in Romanian with a number of examples—first, examples of proverbs which highlight the importance of this concept in Romanian culture, and then, examples from a large Romanian database (Romanian Language Corpus). Some examples of proverbs with omenie (from a paper by Alina Harabor of ANU): 

Greed kills omenie.
Omenie is more precious than riches.
Omenie is the heart of om [man, human being].
The world without omenie is like the body without soul. 

And here are some examples from the Romanian Linguistic Corpus, which illustrate various aspects of omenie: feeling the pain of others, treating others, including for example one’s servants, like equals, doing good things for others no matter how those others treat us (also from Alina Harabor): 

Hacik talks to us a lot and he is despaired of Viky’s illness. I have never seen an om de omenie [“a man of omenie”] more perfect than he is, pained by everything that happens around him. 

My great-great-grandfather, Gore, and his sister, Fira, had died faithfully serving lord Ienache Kretulescu and his daughter, Lady Luxita Bantas, oameni de omenie [“people of omenie”], who used to eat from the same pot with their servants. 

In my mind the sacred image of my mother started to appear and it seems that I heard coming from far away Dad’s words: “Child, remember, you have to respond with omenie to omenie and to neomenie still with omenie, so you distinguish yourself from the one who was neom with you. 

In the railway station and in the train, we were surrounded by simple people, who gave us everything they had handy: fruit, cigarettes, food, newspapers, drinks … The Romanian omenie hadn’t been destroyed yet in the prison called Romania. 

He wasn’t a reckless man, you know. He did not use force recklessly, and he wasn’t bloody and during his reign he showed omenie. 

The cultural distinctiveness and cultural significance of the Romanian concept of “omenie” are reflected in many Romanian commentaries. I will quote here one, by the theologian Gheorghe Racoveanu (omenia is a form derived from omenie): 

Omenia, a verbal expression of a collective notion, has always preoccupied lexicographers when they tried to translate it. Because to translate the word omenie as hospitality, honesty, honour, good manners, goodness or simply humanity means to translate it only partially. As reality and a life document, omenia is a unitary whole which consists of many essential components. Omenia is not just a certain virtue, but a true analogy, a bunch of flowers of the soul. Love for strangers, keeping one’s given word, honour, self-sacrifice, the spirit of justice, courage, modesty, faith in God—all these are the adornments of omenie. 

Gaita calls both his father’s and Hora’s attitude to life “compassionate fatalism”: “Like my father, he [Hora] showed a profound pity for the human condition because he thought it was defined by our vulnerability to suffering and misfortune.” Hora and his Maltese-Australian wife Mary “lived in entirely different ethical worlds”, and Mary objected to him speaking Romanian with his Romanian friends. Presumably, Hora’s reliance on Romanian cultural keywords like omenie was part of his “ethical world”, from which his wife felt excluded.

Gaita characterises this world, and the “goodness” at the centre of it, by saying that “goodness” is “a moral concept that marks a distinctive way of behaving towards people”. It is “‘goodness’ with a capital G”, “spontaneous kind-heartedness” and “generous open-heartedness”. He assures us that “goodness is the right word” to describe this attitude, but evidently goodness is not used here in the way it is commonly used in English.

Among the clues to that special sense of goodness that Gaita presents to his readers are his reference to his father’s “sense of a ‘common humanity’ with everyone he met”, his “compassion” (which “had been an emotional force that simply overwhelmed him”), the fact that after his wife left him and went to live with her lover Mitru (Hora’s younger brother), he paid the rent for her and Mitru because “he found it impossible to turn his back on their need” and because he “saw his actions as morally necessary in the light of his understanding of her need”. We are also told that it was his father’s (and Hora’s) “goodness” that showed in their attitude to Vacek Vilkovikas—a homeless man who lived between two boulders, pickled various edibles in his own urine and was (Gaita insists) literally mad, but whom Romulus and Hora regarded as a friend and treated without a trace of condescension.

Trying to pull these different clues together, I would suggest that what Gaita calls his father’s and Hora’s “goodness” can be explicated as follows: 

“goodness” (in Gaita’s sense) and “omenie” 

it can be like this:

someone thinks like this about someone else:

“this someone is someone like me

very bad things can happen to this someone,

because very bad things can happen to all people

I don’t want this someone to feel something very bad

I want to do something good for this someone

I can’t not do it”

because this someone thinks like this, this       someone does some things

it is very good if it is like this 

It seems clear that the concept of “goodness” in Gaita’s sense is very close, if not identical, to the Romanian key concept of “omenie”.

Gaita didn’t speak Romanian with his father or Hora, but he understood it, and he listened to it for hours at a time. After all, Romulus and Hora were great talkers, and their deep friendship was nourished by a great deal of talk, and they talked, in Raimond’s presence, in Romanian. 

When Hora was at Frogmore he and my father often talked into the early hours of the morning, the kitchen filled with cigarette smoke and the smell of slivovitz. They talked to each other in Romanian, which I understood reasonably, but could not speak … Their individuality was inseparable from their talk—it was revealed in it and made by it, by its honesty. 

Romulus “complained that one would not just drop in on Australians and talk, talk freely for hours”. For him, as for Hora, talk was essential to human relations. “You were always welcome at his table, to eat and more importantly, to talk; always to talk.” Not surprisingly, he deeply missed the opportunity to talk, talk for hours, and talk about things that matter, after Hora married and moved to Melbourne.

In the eulogy that Gaita gave at his father’s funeral (quoted at the end of Romulus, My Father) he spoke of what he described as his father’s “unqualified sense of common humanity with everyone he met” and of his “unhesitating acceptance” of people, even those whom he judged very severely.

The echo of the Romanian word omenie is unmistakable here—a word that Gaita must have heard innumerable times during those endless talks, in Romanian, that Romulus and Hora conducted in his presence. Later Gaita became dissatisfied with the English phrase “common humanity” and switched to “goodness” to describe his father’s moral values, but his earlier phrase “common humanity” is revealing of the roots of what he later came to call “goodness” in the key Romanian value of “omenie”. I believe the NSM component, “this someone is someone like me”, captures accurately the aspect of “omenie” that Gaita saw as his father’s “unhesitating acceptance” of other people, regardless of their conduct, and the other components of the NSM explication of “omenie” also fit in with what Gaita said in his eulogy for his father.

To those familiar with Russian culture, it must also be apparent that the Romanian concept of “omenie”, lurking behind Gaita’s “goodness”, has a good deal in common with the Russian cultural key concept of “žalost” (and the verb žaleť).

In her recent Russian best-seller Podstrochnik, the Russian writer Lilianna Lungina recalls Victory Day in Moscow (May 9, 1945) and the endless columns of starving, skeletal German soldiers, prisoners of war—and the scenes which engraved themselves in her memory: old Russian women, hungry and often skin-and-bones themselves, who approached the columns with a sign of the cross and who (oblivious to all the atrocities committed by the Germans on Russian soil) extended pieces of bread or cups with water to the emaciated men—because they žaleli [achingly “pitied”] them, with it seems, the same “compassionate fatalism”, the same “profound pity for the human condition … defined by our vulnerability to suffering and misfortune” that Gaita saw in Romulus and Hora.

In my own work I have linked the Russian cultural key concept of “žalosť”, absent from the moral vocabulary of the Protestant and Catholic European nations, with the distinct moral culture of Orthodox Christianity. But Romania, too, developed in the orbit of Orthodox Christianity. So perhaps Romanian cultural key concepts such as “omenie” also bear traces of Orthodox moral traditions. In Romania, the view that “omenia” has religious (Christian) roots appears to be widespread. As one Romanian writer, Mihaela Feraru, puts it, “Omenia of Romanians has its roots … in the teaching of the Gospel”. But since the moral lexicons of traditionally Protestant and Catholic do not have counterparts of the word omenie, it seems likely that this concept reflects an Orthodox perspective (shaped also by other aspects of Romanian history and culture) rather than a Christian perspective as such. And perhaps Gaita’s conception of “goodness”, which he learnt, as he says, from his two Romanian fathers, also has its roots in those traditions, transplanted through the family’s German lingua franca into the future philosopher’s English.

Given this apparent Romanian substratum in Gaita’s English, it is all the more interesting to note a transfer in the opposite direction: Gaita lending to his two Romanian fathers a concept derived from English, which I believe couldn’t have been part of their conceptual world. I have in mind “decency”—an understated conceptual artefact of British English, absorbed, to varying degree, by other Englishes of the world, including Australian English.

“I have never known … anyone who lived so passionately, as did these two friends, the belief that nothing matters so much in life as to live decently,” says Gaita in After Romulus, quoting what he said earlier in Romulus, My Father. And again: “because I realised that nothing mattered more to him [Romulus] than to live decently—and by nothing I really mean nothing—I also realised how terrible it would be for him to wrong someone”.

It seems highly unlikely that either Romulus or Hora would have thought in precisely such terms. As Gaita shows clearly, Romulus and Hora did not inhabit the conceptual world of English and it is to Gaita’s great credit that in describing their moral outlook he avoids key value concepts of English such as “right” and “wrong”, “fair” and “unfair”, or “reasonable” and “unreasonable”. As far as I see, the only misstep in this regard is that word decently—but it is an unfortunate one, because it appears in sentences which purport to state what mattered to Romulus and Hora in life most.

It seems more than likely that what mattered for Romulus and Hora more than anything else was not “living decently” but “omenie”. The English word decent does have equivalents, of sorts, in other European languages, including German and Romanian, but the equivalents, generally speaking, refer to social proprieties and decorum. The moral discourse of “decency”, the kind of discourse in which “living decently” can be seen as the highest priority in life, is an Anglo cultural specialty (comparable, one might say, to the once high value of acting like a “gentleman”).

Gaita expresses a hope that his book about his father will answer the question “Who was that man?”, and in particular, that it will show what his father’s values were. And of course it does, in a narrative way. But to articulate these values in a non-narrative way, to make them conceptually clear to the readers—especially readers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds—we need to go beyond labels like “decency” and even “goodness”, and to explain these values in simple concepts that everyone, regardless of their background, can understand in the same way; for example: not “goodness”, but “thinking: I want to do something good for this someone”, not “moral necessity” but “thinking: I can’t not do it”, not “fatalism” but “thinking: very bad things can happen to all people”, not “treating people without condescension” but “thinking: this someone is someone like me”.

Proceeding in this way, we are building, I believe, on one aspect of our “common humanity”: our conceptual common currency. Using this currency, we can explain both universally binding moral absolutes and culturally shaped “local” norms. When such “local norms” are clearly explained and well understood, they can enrich the moral discourse of other societies. For example, the discourse of goodness—what Maria Tumarkin calls “the goodness exemplified by Romulus and Hora, of which, Romulus, My Father like no other book in Australia speaks” can enrich what Gaita calls the “conceptual environment” in English-speaking Australia. In my view, however, it is good to bear in mind that, first, the multiplicity of languages creates obstacles to cross-cultural understanding, and second, that such obstacles can be overcome with the help of the shared conceptual currency of simple and universal concepts. This applies to both articulating presumed moral absolutes and explaining unfamiliar moral conceptions shaped by languages and cultures other than our own. 

Conclusions 

In a chapter titled “From book to film”, in which he discusses the truthfulness of his memoir Romulus, My Father and the film based on it, writes: 

even when it is reflective, art cannot do the conceptual work alone that we need if we are to understand ourselves. Narrative, and art more generally, speak to us only against the background of a common understanding whose conceptual structure it is philosophy’s distinctive task to delineate, examine and, if possible, to render perspicuous. 

As I have tried to show in this article, to delineate the conceptual structure of moral norms and to render it transparent we need also to reflect on the problem of language. We cannot achieve “a common understanding” if we don’t address the question of the multiplicity of languages.

Romulus lived his life through a number of languages. Born in a Romanian-speaking part of the former Yugoslavia, he no doubt had his first conceptual home in Romanian and when he lived in Australia, he spoke Romanian with his Romanian best friend, Hora, at least when they were alone. But he was also at home in Serbo-Croatian, and this is the language he spoke with his second wife, Milka. With his first wife, Christine, he spoke German: 

German was the language of their love … When twenty years or so after my mother died, two young German men came to my father’s house in Maryborough, he spoke to them in German with evident pleasure. For a day and a half afterwards he could speak no other language. He tried persistently to speak to me in English and to Milka in Serbo-Croat (Yugoslav, he called it) but failed each time. 

To his Australian neighbours, Romulus (“Johnny the Balt”, as he was sometimes called) spoke of course in English, but English was not the language of his thoughts and his values. One can’t adequately explain what these values were through academic English, or even through non-academic but idiomatic, “full-blown” English, using words like condescension, integrity or decency.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Romulus’s values cannot be delineated in English, and through English. As I have tried to illustrate, they can, but only through a mini-English—an English trimmed to the bone, that is, to that part if it which it shares with Romanian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and any other language.

It is that inner core of English which represents, I believe, our conceptual “common humanity”, and it is in this language of our common humanity that moral norms, both universal and local, can be delineated with precision and clarity—accurately from the point of view of the insiders, and intelligibly for the outsiders.

As the example of the Romanian omenie illustrates, different languages embody different moral values in their lexicon. For speakers of Romanian, cultural keywords such as omenie can represent moral absolutes, just as loyalty, fairness or decency may be seen as moral absolutes by speakers of English.

By emphasising the “local” nature of moral norms such as “omenie” I do not mean to somehow call into question their moral authority. On the contrary, I believe that key value concepts encoded in the vocabulary of different languages can contribute moral insights to the global pool of moral understanding. Value concepts such as “omenie”, “fairness” or “loyalty” are not empirical moral universals, recognised by all, or even most, human groups. They crystallise distinct, culture-specific perspectives arising from the moral experience of particular human groups and as such are worthy of attentive consideration by people from other groups.

In many cases, value concepts developed in one particular cultural context will not be seen as relevant, inspiring or persuasive to people living in very different existential and conceptual environments. But in some cases they will.

I would suggest that studying key moral concepts from many different cultural traditions could be one way (among others) to approach the formidable task of moral education in multicultural countries, and in the global world. At the very least, such education would stretch moral imagination of young people, and enable them to look at life from many different moral perspectives.

This doesn’t mean, however, that moral education should lead to “moral pluralism”. In the end, students need moral guidelines that they can hold on to in their own lives. Such guidelines need to be freely chosen by every human being—not in view of their personal wants and interests but on the basis of their moral intuitions, deepened and sharpened by moral education, and by guided exposure to other people’s lives and other people’s moral values. Books like Romulus, My Father (and the film based on it) can play an important role in such a pluralist moral education, aimed at helping everyone to find some moral absolutes, and at helping diverse human groups in the increasingly globalised world to work towards some degree of consensus on what such absolutes might be.

Thus, as an alternative to Shweder’s formula “moral pluralism without uniformity”, I would propose “a pluralist moral education without moral relativism”.

Next to literature, films and philosophical reflection, lessons drawn from the multiplicity of languages can also have an important role to play in a pluralist moral education open to moral absolutes—especially if conceptual artefacts of different societies, embodied in these societies’ distinct moral vocabulary, can be made accessible to cultural outsiders. The shared currency of universal human concepts can facilitate “moral exchange” between people from different cultural backgrounds while helping them to find absolute moral values on which to stake their lives.

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Language Studies at the Australian National University. She was awarded the International Dobrushin Prize for 2010. Among her books are Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English (2010) and Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (1997) both published by Oxford University Press.

 

References

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