In a short review of Roger Trigg's Morality Matters, Steven Poole ends with a strange question. After setting up the contrasting positions of relativists and pragmatists on the one side, and foundationalists on the other, he writes:
In a series of careful essays [Trigg] wants to show that, for instance, concepts of human rights are incoherent if we do not accept the validity of an idea of a universal human nature. And if there is such a thing as a universal human nature, then some things must be objectively good or bad for it. There follow interesting discussions on international law, notions of privacy, multiculturalism and nationalism, but one can still suspect that the foundation is not sufficiently well defined. Trigg often appeals to evolutionary arguments, but of course they can equally be used to defend racism and sexism. Who decides what is "natural"?Isn't the answer to this that we all decide, doing the best we can on the basis of the available evidence - whether biological, historical, anthropological, whatever. That it's sometimes difficult to decide shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that it sometimes also isn't difficult; or the fact that there are many other issues on which it's sometimes difficult to decide. Who decides what really happened? Who decides what is good for a child? It can be, indeed, difficult. Nevertheless, anything doesn't go.
