Thread by @peterboghossian

Here’s a breakdown of:

“Not all cultures are as valid as each other”.

This thread will explain, in plain language, what disbelieving “not all cultures are equally valid” entails.

If you disbelieve the claim that “all cultures are as valid as each other,” then you believe, “All cultures are as valid as each other”. If you believe all cultures are as valid as each other, then you must believe…

…that there is no objective, independent, non-perspectival way to make a judgment about a culture or cultural practice. If you believe this—and you must believe it if you disbelieve that all cultures are as valid as each other—then…

….you can only advocate for positions like antiracism or rights for trans people from your own cultural perspective. You cannot advocate that these—or any other—values be adopted by societies apart from your own because their culture is equally valid to yours.

You have no authority to make any moral claim and nobody from another culture should take you seriously, or even listen to you at all. But there are far deeper problems with this position:

1. You can only advocate for your position from your position. “All cultures are as valid as each other” is a “you claim”. Independent of how many people dis/believe it in your society, it’s subject to the same contradiction. It’s not based on anything other than your belief.

2a. All cultures are equally valid is a contradiction. Unless you’re trafficking in a bizarre notion of “valid,” to know they were equally valid you would need an objective standard by which to judge cultures. But you cannot believe that because you believe they’re equally valid.

2b. You also cannot simultaneously claim that all cultures are relative and that they are equally valid. They cannot be both relative and valid. If you have a standard to judge their validity then they cannot be relative.

You can attempt to “cheat” the logic of this by redefining “validity” in a nonstandard way, or claiming that you have some privileged access to moral knowledge, or by opting out of the law of noncontradiction (in other words, not caring that you’re a hypocrite.)

This thread is based on Kemi Badenoch’s recent comments. The fact that this is even a discussion, nevertheless controversial, speaks to the failure of our schools (kids should have learned basic reasoning skills by the 6th grade) and the moral orthodoxy which has wormed its way into the minds of large swaths of the population.

For more here, see Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors

Karl Popper's "myth of the framework" is also a solid response to cultural relativism. It challenges the notion that people from different cultural backgrounds cannot critique each other's practices and beliefs due to insurmountable differences in their conceptual frameworks.

Popper introduces the "myth of the framework" to describe the belief that communication and discussion between individuals of different cultural backgrounds is impossible because their underlying assumptions are fundamentally incompatible. (In fact, we do it all the time.)

I hope this thread has added some clarity to Badenoch’s comments and the considerable confusion and misunderstanding surrounding them.

Typo. The first sentence needs a “not”.

If you disbelieve the claim that “Not all cultures are as valid as each other…”

My bad.