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19 Reason and Culture: Debating the Foundations of Morals in a Pluralist World D. A. Masolo Mila ndiyo misingi ya utu (culture is the foundation of being human). Asiyekua na mila ni mtumwa (only a slave gets deprived of her own culture). - Kiswahili sayings. Recently I listened to an interesting dinner-table debate between my teen-age children about an issue that, to my mind, clearly raised questions closely related to the theme of the encounter of rationalities. In a conversation about indigenous Kenyan hair styles, my son had wanted to know why the Maasai ‘made’ their women folk shave their heads bold while young men braided their hair stylishly into what now has become a popular African hair-dress fashion, not for men, but for women. My daughter, who is quite a gifted debater, responded that it was just tradition, and tradition never answers to anyone’s ‘why’ question, especially when the questioner is an insider who is expected just to practise the norm. My son, in obviously frustrated wonder, then sought to know whether they could ever answer the question if it were asked by an outsider (of the tradition) like himself, to which his sister responded: ‘what makes you ask? I guess every tradition sets its own ways’. The boy: ‘why can’t everyone be left free to do what they feel they like at different times, just like I dress differently for different occasions?’ The girl: ‘You see, you are always reading and shifting your dressing according to the norms you want to conform to. You may not be aware, but you change from one set of norms to another, one when you are at College, and the other when you come home, can’t you see?’ The rest of us sat there, choking with the temptation to join in, and suffering the frustration of being denied the chance. I in particular struggled to stay neutral, but I succeeded greatly, not only by not joining in, but also by not revealing that I was working on this paper, 221 Masolo: Reason and Culture all the while thinking to myself: ‘this is all about the encounter of rationalities, and the arguments’ turns, back and forth, are all about the relative rationality of ends’. In many respects, and to my amazement, my daughter and son got immersed into debating the merits of the idea of autonomous reason. My amazement was not only about the depth of the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that these teenagers revealed in their debate, it also was about the revealed transient nature of the communities from which people source the points of view on the basis of which they question the rationality of opposing points of view. The topic of encounter of rationalities seemed, at least in the context of this dinner-time debate by teenagers, to be such a natural occurrence to anyone who consciously moves between different social and cultural locations. In this paper, I apply and expand the theoretical concerns raised by the two young people to the assessment of Kant’s culture-free moral principles against a communitarian view of the resources of reason. Questions of ethical universalism or the cultural prescription of ethical theory address matters at the heart of the nature of the relationship between universal moral principles and practical moral reasoning, and bring to the moral domain the kind of questions of (in)commensurability once suggested by Thomas Kuhn in his philosophy of science. Exponents of value commensurability, whom I loosely call cosmopolitan ethicists, uphold the view or thesis that it is possible to compare the considerations bearing on choices involving value, goods, ends, or actions worth doing. Their principle states that all human beings, everywhere in the world, have the same moral stature, and that individual human beings have greater moral importance than human associations. Some of the implications of such principles of cosmopolitan ethics are that people have moral claims on and obligations toward each other across national and cultural boundaries. As is quickly evident, cosmopolitan ethics argues that claims to national, cultural, religious, ethnic or any other restrictive claim of belonging, when made in such a way that they put the value of such bounded identity before that of universal human worth, fall short of the ideal expectations for the fundamental rights of the individual. Thus, if allowed, recognition of the autonomy of the diverse cultures of the world – the precept of multiculturalism – leads to the endorsement of the claims on the basis of which the...

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