I. MORAL PLURALISM

• A. The Radicalization of Universalism
• B. Abusive Universalism
  • 1. Jewish Religion
  • 2. Greek Philosophy
  • 3. Cover and Ideal
• C. Reiterative Universalism
  • 1. Theological Argument
  • 2. Philosophical Argument
    • a. A Universalist Particularism
    • b. A Particularist Particularism
    • c. Prohibitions and the Minimal Code of Morality
    • d. Prescriptions and Reiteration
• D. Practical Particularim
  • 1. A Phenomenological Analysis
  • 2. Thick and Thin Now

A. The radicalization of universalism

Modernity is a project that strives to reshape the old pluralistic world into a uniform mode by using a standard universal rationality. Interestingly enough, the outcome of modernization in a liberal state such as the United States is anything but uniformity. What turns out, instead, is a religiously, morally, and politically pluralistic society. People living in a liberal state like this, Alasdair MacIntyre perceives, are entangled in conflicting claims devoid of rational justification. The picture he portrays is a fragmented society with fragmented selves. He attributes this phenomenon to the failure of modernity. Advocates of modernity believe in a universal rationality. But thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors have been proved unable to reach a broad consensus of what this rationality is. They put forward a variety of conflicting answers. “One kind of answer was given by the authors of the Encyclopédie,” MacIntyre observes, “a second by Rousseau, a third by Bentham, a fourth by Kant, a fifth by the Scottish philosophers of common sense and their French and American disciples.” Each claim tries to compete with the others but without great success. Academicians are entrenched in their own positions and engaged in an endless contest. Their debates, so far, have done more harm than good, for the debaters have already determined not to be convinced by other rationalities and to meet every challenge by counter argument, yet ordinary people are confused by their arguments and become cynical to rational justification. Gradually this cynicism gives way to a kind of fideism. “Fideism has a large, not always articulate, body of adherents,” warns MacIntyre, “and not only among the members of those Protestant churches and movements which openly proclaim it; there are plenty of secular fideists.” “Consequently,” he continues, “the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.”^{1A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame, IN, 1988, pp. 5-6.}

The unsettling American public life has also been documented by some sociologists. They are not satisfied with this situation either, and have suggested some solutions. MacIntyre’s proposal is different: he thinks that the ultimate solution has to be found in tradition. Modernity, he argues, doubly confuses us by excluding tradition from our sight. Its overemphasis on reason and its antagonism towards tradition blind its children from seeing the impacts of tradition upon their life. After having studied some prominent Western traditions, MacIntyre concludes that traditions are still present in liberal society, though often in fragmented and disguised forms. He reports that “it is indeed a feature of all those traditions with whose histories we have been specifically concerned that in one way or another all of them have survived so as to become not only possible, but actual, forms of practical life within the domain of modernity.”^{2A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, p. 391.} Furthermore, people mix liberalism and fragments of traditions in their own ways: “they tend to live betwixt and between, accepting usually unquestioningly the assumptions of the dominant liberal individualist forms of public life, but drawing in different areas of their lives upon a variety of tradition-generated resources of thought and action, transmitted from a variety of familial, religious, educational, and other social and cultural sources.”^{3A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, p. 397.} On the whole, the citizens of liberal states are neither liberal nor traditional. They live in a liberal social framework while unknowingly choose a combination of human values from different traditions. According to MacIntyre, a tradition that embraces rational enquiry as a constitutive part can provide people with a coherent understanding of their relationships with society and nature. Modernization has deprived us of our consciousness of tradition, and thus, of a way to the wholeness of life. Only by anchoring oneself to one particular tradition and engaging in dialogue with rival traditions can one overcome the drawback of the unfinished and unfinishable modernity.

MacIntyre’s proposal, though sounds plausible, is only a hypothesis. We have to wait and see how the project will be substantiated before giving our final judgement. Nevertheless, we can foresee the formidable, if not insolvable, problem of plurality, that is, how to construct, from the perspective of a particular tradition, a common morality, which will be accepted by other fellowcitizens holding other traditions. MacIntyre is not optimistic of finding a compromise among the traditions; he would probably just find a pot-au-feu of traditions so distasteful that he would never recommend it. He hints that the final solution must come as a result of the competition between rival traditions. In the end, only the fittest tradition will survive.

Another solution is to select a popular theory as the basic theoretical framework, and then brings in other theories as corrections so as to produce an improved version. Hopefully, the amalgamated programme will appeal to a wider audience. This strategy is adopted by John Rawls. In the preface of his Theory of Justice, Rawls underlines that utilitarianism has been the “predominant systematic theory” in modern moral philosophy. Since the great utilitarians such as Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill were both social theorists and economists of the first rank, the moral principles they worked out could be fitted into the comprehensive scheme of political economy.^{4J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. xvii-xviii.} Unfortunately, many utilitarian implications clash with our moral sentiments. One of the basic flaws often criticized is that the application of the theory often results in unfair distribution of goods, even though it intends to treat people justly. The utilitarian, as one critic succinctly sums up, “allows one person’s happiness to compensate for another’s misery.”^{5P. Pettit, Judging Justice. An Introduction to Contemporary Political Philosophy, London, 1980, p. 135. Pettit also gives an unhappy incident showing that treating people as equals in the utilitarian mould means treating them unequally (ibid., pp. 130-131).} With the intention to replace utilitarianism, Rawls sets out to reformulate a social contract theory based on the works of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. First of all, Rawls affirms that every person has some basic rights and liberties which are inviolable and untradable. But he also recognizes that inequality is a persistent social phenomenon. In order to account for the differences among people, he allows some inequalities on condition that the benefit of the least-advantaged will be maximized. Based on the model of Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls invents the Original Position. Then, by using “the English economics,” he shows that “good will” coincides with “practical reason”—both of them endorse the difference principle. The purpose of this synthesis is to provide a workable framework for a liberal society. “My hope,” Rawls declares, “is that justice as fairness will seem reasonable and useful, even if not fully convincing, to a wide range of thoughtful political opinions and thereby express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition.”^{6J. Rawls, A Theory, p. xi.} As a matter of fact, Rawls’s enterprise has been widely praised, and his moderate objective has, to a certain degree, been realized.

Not everyone agrees with Rawls, though. MacIntyre would probably not accept his theory, and Walzer has constructed a new theory of justice to rival his. Looking from the perspective of MacIntyre, Rawls’s proposal is at best a working theory that provides a modus vivendi. It scarcely touches upon the problem of how a person in late-modern society can respond to tradition and multiculturalism. On the other hand, MacIntyre’s solution appears to be backward-looking. He proposes to return to tradition, but he has not sufficiently considered the present conditions. It seems that he is not sensitive to the “arrow of time,” which carries society along an irreversible path.^{7The term “arrow of time”, which is explained in chapter 3, comes from Ilya Prigogine. Cf. I. Prigogine & I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, London, 1984; I. Prigogine, The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, New York, NY, 1997.} A better approach would be one that connects the present conditions with the past, and at the same time looks forward to the future.

Walzer is a connected forward-looking social theorist. By taking a long view, he perceives the present problem from a historical perspective, and proposes a solution which is a reasonable historical development of the past. One of the techniques he employs in finding the new directives can be summed up as the radicalization of modernity. He takes up the doctrines of modernity and uses them to measure modernity itself. If the standards of modernity are strictly applied to modernity, it will give quite astonishing results. For instance, if we apply universality to universalism, the result will be a pluralism.

Kant formulates the universal rationality as the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”^{8I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in J. W. Ellington (trans.), Ethical Philosophy. The Complete Texts of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Indianapolis, IN, 1983, p. 30.} Kant’s universal rationality involves an act of will. By willing it universally, I decide that other people will it too. Undeniably, the success of modernization rests on imposing a unified will on society and the environment alike. But this is only half of the modern art. The other half relies on the ability to adjust one’s will in response to the reactions of the others. In science, we do experiments and use the data to modify our theories. In politics, we set up democratic system and accommodate the preferences of the people. This mechanism is commonly called “reflexivity.” Rawls takes up reflexivity in philosophy too. He claims that he is using the method of “reflective equilibrium”—that is, by going back and forth between principles and moral judgements—to formulate his two principle justice.^{9J. Rawls, A Theory, p. 18.} Nevertheless, one may still criticize his primary aim. His philosophical intuition for unity, one may say, has overcome his reflexivity so that he fails to reflect upon the proposition of a single unifying principle. He wills to find a simple set of universal principles. But could this adequately accommodate the complex and often conflicting moral opinions of peoples? Reflexivity requires us to doubt even the fundamental tenet.

In reality, we have a variety of rationalities. There never exists a single universal principle that rules over the world of opinions regardless of time and space. This phenomenon is probably due to the fact that human beings are creative. We have commonalities because of our human nature, and we have differences because of our creativity. It thus follows that what is really universal is not our rationality but our commonalities and differences. Walzer takes this position as his point of departure. He says, “We are very different, and we are also manifestly alike. Now, what (complex) social arrangements follow from the difference and the likeness?”^{10M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford – Cambridge, MA, 1983 (repr., 1996), p. xii.} The proposal he gives is a moral pluralism that can accommodate both universality and particularity.

B. Abusive universalism

The struggle between moral universalists and moral relativists has a long history. Both sides have had their own faithful adherents and outstanding spokesmen. Sometimes one camp gains the upper hand, and sometimes the other. But so far, neither side has won a complete victory. It seems that the debate will go on and on without a foreseeable end. Walzer is reluctant to go into this battleground for fear that once inside, there will be no way out. His interest lies more in the practical moral issues: how to make moral decision, what justice requires here and now, when to intervene, etc. Nonetheless, as an ethicist, Walzer can hardly ignore the issue that the universalists and the relativists are struggling for. He recognizes that universality and particularity will always be two permanent features in morality, but he does not conceptualize them from either the universalist or the relativist perspective. He chooses to look at this problem afresh—from the standpoint of making practical moral decision. Thus, the question for him is no longer whether morality is relative or universal, but rather how to give a reasonable explanation to the two seemingly antithetical phenomena displayed in morality.

Walzer is sympathetic to the relativist claim that morality is uniquely connected with a particular society, which is prima facie a historical reality. Such historicity has always been the Gordian knot for the universalists, who have long tried to transcend it by various means. The pragmatic response, for Walzer, is neither transcending particularity nor denying the universality of humanity, but to find out their functions in practical moral reasoning. He thus allocates universality to international justice, and particularity to domestic justice. If each of them is confined to its own domain, there will be no more conflict. To distinguish himself from the universalists and the relativists, Walzer calls himself a “particularist.”^{11See M. Walzer, A Particularism of My Own, in Religious Studies Review 16 (1990) 193-197.} His argument for particularism consists of two main parts: a refutation of universalism and a harmonization of particularity and universality. It is important to lay out Walzer’s criticism beforehand in order to explain his apparent favouritism towards particularity. He has two good reasons to disparage universalism. First, universalism is often used by aggressive countries as a cover to stage an attack on another country or to expand their territories. Second, universalism leads to a single-minded pursuit of simplicity, which overlooks the complexity of the real moral world. The undesirable elements in universalism stem from two sources: one from Judaism, and the other from Greek philosophy. In what follows we will look into them separately and then explore their misuses.

1. Jewish religion

Judaism can be interpreted as a universal religion.^{12Judaism may have gone through various stages of development before it finally produces a monotheistic theology. But I would refrain from discussing its history here.} In its creation narrative, the God of Israel is described as the creator of the universe. He creates the world in six days, and assigns a function to every creature he brings into existence. Thus the world is transformed from the primordial chaos into an ordered paradise where men and women stage their adventure. Among the nations on earth, God chooses Israel, and gives them the Law. They are to live as a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, and a light unto the world. One God, one Law, one Chosen Nation, these three make up a seedbed for universalism. Generally speaking, universalism means a comprehensive view of the whole. But there can be many equally valid views of the unity, and thus different versions of universalism. In fact, the canons of Judaism and Christianity themselves have already contained different kinds of universalism.^{13For discussions of different kinds of universalism, see J. D. Levenson, The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism, in M. G. Brett (ed.), Ethnicity and the Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series, 19), Leiden, 1996, 142-169; J. M. G. Barclay, Universalism and Particularism. Twin Components of Both Judaism and Early Christianity, in M. Bockmuehl & M. B. Thompson (eds.), A Vision for the Church. Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology in Honour of J. P. M. Sweet, Edinburgh, 1997, 207-224.} As it is not our purpose here to explore the various kinds of universalism, we shall focus only on a specific universalism which has dominated the Western world. Walzer calls it the “covering-law universalism.” This universalism, as Walzer elegantly articulates, “holds that as there is one God, so there is one law, one justice, one correct understanding of the good life or the good society or the good regime, one salvation, one messiah, one millennium for all humanity.”^{14M. Walzer, Nation and Universe, in G. B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. XI, Salt Lake City, UT, 1990, 507-556, p. 510.}

The notion of the covering-law universalism can be found in some prophetic books, especially in Isaiah. In one passage, we are told that the end of human history will be the final victory of Yahweh, that his holy mountain Zion will be exalted over all mountains, and that his law will prevail forever. All nations will be subdued, weapons will be destroyed, and a perpetual peace will be established on earth:^{15Is 2,2-4. Quoted from the King James Version. Walzer prefers this version because the early political reformers and revolutionaries used it. Therefore, I shall follow Walzer’s practice. All biblical quotations will be quoted from the King James Version unless otherwise stated.}

The vision of all nations going up one mountain, prostrating before one God, and walking under one Law was a hope shared among the Jews in the prophetic period, or at least among the literary élite.^{16P. D. Hanson, The People Called. The Growth of Community in the Bible, San Francisco, CA, 1986, pp. 312-324.} It is repeated thrice in Isaiah that the servant of God will be “a light to the Gentiles.”^{17Is 49,6; 42,6; 60,3.} Who this servant is is unclear in the texts and hence open to speculation. Perhaps he is a certain king of Judah, or a future leader of Israel. Or he is just a symbol of the whole Israelite nation, or he is indeed Jesus of Nazareth as the Christians have proclaimed. No matter who this servant is, the passages point towards a universal history: Israel is chosen not only for its own sake but also for the whole human race; the Jews are erected as the representative for all nations. It follows that only the history of Israel has meaning and significance; all the other nations are living purposelessly waiting to be enlightened. Until they go up the mountain, their life is meaningless. In this way, the theology of one god is elaborated into a universal history hinging on one nation.

It is paradoxical that the bearer of the universal history has manifested itself as an exclusive faith, the very emblem of a tribal religion. Why have most of the Jews been uncommitted to the holy mission of universalizing their creed? Walzer suggests that the doctrine of the universal history has something to do with the “experience of triumph.”^{18Nation, pp. 510ff.} It is true that the notion of universalism is embedded in Judaism, but its elaboration and propagation require the sustained effort of its believers, who can only be motivated by pride or by a sense of victory. Since the ancient Jews lacked both, it is not surprising that Judaism has not evolved into a kind of triumphant universalism, Walzer reasons.

What the Jews did not manage to accomplish, the Christians have achieved. At the start, Christianity was merely a sect of Judaism. However it was able to break open the constraint of Jewish ethnicity by transforming the peculiar, myriad rites and laws of the Jews into universal symbols. The early Church claimed that it had fulfilled the eschatological biblical prophecy: it was now the last days, the Church was the true Israel and the heir of God’s promise to Abraham. One of the often-quoted texts which asserts this claim can be found in the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Ephesus:^{19Eph 2,11-22.}

The covering-law universalism in Christianity has basically the same form as that in Judaism except that Christ Jesus, in place of Israel, plays the pivotal role in the world history. Christ is the holy temple. Through his death on the cross, all nations are brought into mystical communion with God—the final destiny of humanity. There is no more distinction between Jews and Gentiles. By faith, people are granted equal citizenship in the heavenly kingdom. In this way, Christianity turns itself into a universal religion characterized by its zeal for mission. And the covering-law universalism, Walzer observes, attains its standard form in the hands of the Christians.

Walzer is not ignorant of the fact that in the Christian doctrine, it is the sacrifice of the Son of God rather than the law that covers all men and women.^{20Cf. Nation, p. 510.} To the Christians, “Christ died for your sins” is a timeless truth that can be applied to any person, at any time, and in any place. Faith in Christ, nevertheless, does not destroy the law.^{21Cf. Mt 5,17; Jas.} Christians, except for a few extremists, have never denied the relevance of the laws or the moral rules in the Bible, though which set of laws should be kept and which should be ignored vary from time to time and from community to community. To some, the Christian morals serve as the perfect codes of conduct and provide a yardstick by which the non-Christians are measured, if not publicly, at least privately among themselves. Strange though it is, they have not been led by such practice to a form of Jewish legalism, nor have they given up their claim to be the bearer of the good life and the good society.

One thing that Walzer has not clearly articulated is that the covering-law universalism is not merely a set of universally applicable moral norms. Rather, it has to be understood, and indeed more appropriately, within the framework of a particular view of world history, namely the so-called salvation history. According to this understanding, God creates the world from a plan and for a purpose. That purpose is progressively revealed in the course of human history. Yet, not every national history is significant, at least not equally significant. Only the history of the chosen people is related to the salvific plan of God, first the Israelites, then the Christians (the spiritual Israelites). God dwells among his chosen people, who see themselves as the representative of humanity and the only ones who lead a meaningful life. They call the other people gentiles or heathens, which carry the pejorative meaning of a lower humanity. The pagans are “aliens” from the commonwealth of the saints, and “strangers” from the promise of God, hence they have absolutely “no hope” unless they are converted and incorporated into the body of Christ. There is scarcely anything that the saints can learn from the history of the heathens. In short, the covering-law universalism consists of this general form: one origin, one world history, one authentic people, one law, one good life, and one mission. Such has become the standard form of universalism in the Western culture, whose different versions can be found in the Hegelian/Marxist philosophy of world history, in the social theory of progress, and in the political theory of liberalism.

2. Greek philosophy

The other origin of universalism, which Walzer frequently mentions and repudiates, is the ancient Greek philosophy. He thinks that the search for singularity and uniformity is “overdetermined” in Western philosophy, that is, the search for a single principle or a set of principles has almost been the sole task of philosophers. This, relative to the covering-law universalism, can be called the singular universalism. Walzer sees the singular universalism as one of the chief enemies of pluralism. He has devoted at least four books to counterclaim this tradition.^{22Spheres; Interpretation and Social Criticism, Cambridge, MA – London, 1987 (repr., 1993); The Company of Critics. Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, New York, NY, 1988; Thick and Thin. Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, IN – London, 1994.} He argues that plurality is a reality of our world. To subdue plurality under one single principle is to mistreat the otherness of reality; this amounts to an act of tyranny. While fiercely denouncing the singular universalism, Walzer scarcely writes about its origin. Maybe he assumes that his Western readers are already well informed of this tradition. It would be trivial to repeat what is so obvious. But those who are not well versed in Western philosophy will find it hard to understand why Walzer and his antagonists should spend so much time on this. For the sake of this group of readers, I will give a short account of the singular universalism. For those who are familiar with this subject, they may as well skip this section and go directly to the next section.

A Neo-Platonist philosopher, Dominic O’Meara, once made a penetrating remark about the deep-seated Western way of thinking: “Throughout the history of philosophy and science can be found the idea that everything made up of parts, every composite thing, depends and derives in some way from what is not composite, what is simple.”^{23D. J. O’Meara, Plotinus. An Introduction to the Enneads, Oxford, 1993, p. 44.} He calls this idea the “Principle of Prior Simplicity.” O’Meara is right: the reduction to the simple is certainly the most important methodology in philosophy and in science. It is, however, not merely a means but also the goal of the reflective enterprise. Philosophers believe that what is more simple is more real—the simpler, the realer. The simplest is the realest substance that causes everything into being. And the ultimate reality embodies the truth, the good, and the beauty. Thus, the search for the simple is the destiny and the passion of life. We can find an extensive record on the pursuit of the simple in the writings of Plato, who first discriminates the world of sensible things from the world of Forms or Ideas. His is a philosophy of Ideas. Since Plato wrote so much about Ideas, it is advisable to begin with a summary report given by his pupil Aristotle:^{24Aristotle, Metaphysics, A. 6, in W. D. Ross (ed.), Metaphysica (The Works of Aristotle, 8), Oxford, 21928 (repr. 1966).}

The above passages are complicated, obscure, and at some points, inaccurate. They can nonetheless serve as a starting point for our appreciation of the Principle of Prior Simplicity at work in the thought of Plato. First of all, we are told that Plato accepts the Heraclitean doctrine that all sensible things are in a constant flux, and that what is in constant flux cannot be known. Heraclitus sees the world changing unceasingly. If something is changing continually, no true statement about it can be made. Thus he concludes: “it is impossible to step twice into the same river.” The reason is that the river which the person first stepped into has changed—it will never remain the same river. Cratylus even pushes this logic to its extreme to say that “one could not do it even once.”^{25Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1010a 12.} Plato, however, believes that in contrast to the contingent things, there exist some eternal entities which do not change. The former, we can hold opinions about them, whereas the latter, we can speak of true knowledge.^{26Cf. D. Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas, Oxford, 1971, pp. 124-125.}

Of his eternal entities, Plato takes inspiration from his mentor Socrates’ search for definitions on moral matters such as pious and impious, noble and ignoble, just and unjust, sanity and insanity, fortitude and cowardice. He regards these not merely as definitions or names but entities of another kind which can only be grasped by reason alone. He calls them Ideas, or Forms. Since Ideas are pure and unchangeable, they are simpler than their related sensible things. And what is composite must own a simpler source. Therefore, sensible things (rather than Ideas) are names of Ideas, and they derive their existence by their participation in the Forms. In the words of Aristotle, “the many existed by participation in the Ideas that have the same name as they.”

Consider the famous parable of the cave which depicts the contrast between the world of sense perception and the world of thought. Plato asks us to imagine a cave with a long and steep tunnel leading to the outside world. Inside this dark cave, there are some human creatures who have been chained from their childhood so that they can neither move nor turn their heads around. The only thing that they can see is the wall directly in front of them. Suppose a fire is burning high up behind them, and people carrying objects of different kinds walk between the fire and the prisoners. The light from the fire will cast the shadows of the objects onto the wall. Under such circumstances, the prisoners will certainly mistake the shadows as the real passing objects. They will, if they can talk to each other, give names to the shadows which are actually the names of the objects.^{27Plato, Republic 7.514ff.} Plato uses the analogy of shadow and its object to illustrate the relationship between sensible things and Ideas. Sensible things are only shadows of the Ideas. Out of one Idea come the many imperfect material copies. By this, Plato tries to demonstrate that we are the prisoners of our sense perception. We take what we see or hear as real. But in fact, there is something more real than the sensible things. These things belong to the world of Ideas which can only be seen through the light of reason. The world of Ideas is more real than the world of sensible things and hence superior to the latter. According to Plato, most people dwell in the world of senses, only a gifted few can ascend to the world of eternity.

Plato does not stop short at applying the Principle of Prior Simplicity to the reduction of sensible things to Ideas. He wants to find the ultimate cause. Influenced by Pythagoras, he believes that numbers are the causes of the reality of other things, including Ideas. The numbers that Plato has in mind are the integers starting from 2 ad infinitum. In his time, number denotes plurality and thus 1 is not a number but the first principle of number.^{28Cf. D. Ross, Plato’s Theory, pp. 178-182.} Neither are the numbers sensible numbers or numerable groups (groups of two, three, four, …, entities) nor abstract numbers or mathematical numbers which mathematicians manipulate without regard to any particular groups of things. They are, instead, ideal numbers which are universals, and things that are referred to as twoness, threeness, fourness, etc. They are the formal causes of other Ideas. Somehow every Idea shares the Idea of a particular number. For example, 4 is the formal principle of justice for justice involves two persons and two possessions to be exchanged.

Numbers, Plato further proposes, are derived from two principles: the One and the indefinite dyad. The One is oneness, the Idea of one. As we have mentioned above, 1 is the first principle of number. For Plato, this principle alone cannot generate numbers. A second material principle is needed—the great and small, that is, the indefinite dyad.^{29Aristotle interprets the dyad as “the great and the small” which are actually two principles. Whereas Plato’s original meaning is “the great and small,” which is one principle having dual characteristics. Cf. D. Ross, Plato’s Theory, p. 184.} The great and small is the principle of division and comparison. Imagine a finite line with two ends. We first divide it into two equal halves. Then we continue to cut the line in a certain ratio so that the point of division is always on the right side of the divided parts. Gradually the first segment will become greater and the second smaller. Theoretically this process can go on without end. The One combining with the dyad brings forth all integers.^{30Aristotle speaks of all numbers except prime numbers, this is probably wrong. For discussion, see D. Ross, Plato’s Theory, pp. 187-205.} The generation of numbers has various interpretations and models, and the one given by David Ross is perhaps the best. To illustrate this philosophical doctrine, let us use a segmented line as below:

Suppose AB is bisected at the mid-point X¹. Then we can compare the length of AX¹ to that of X¹B. Given the Idea of One, we can say that the length of AX¹ to that of X1B is in the ratio 1:1. In effect this transforms the ratio of AB to X¹B into 2:1, thus generates the number 2. If then AB is divided at X² in the ratio of 2:1, the resultant ratio of AB to X²B will be 3:1, which gives us the number 3. The process can continue until all numbers are generated.

Plato’s search for the ultimate cause does not end in one single principle. To him, the creation of other beings from one source without the aid of a second agent of a different kind is inconceivable. It was not until Plotinus, a Neo-Platonist, that the quest for singularity reached its completion. While accepting Plato’s teaching that sensible things come from Ideas and that Ideas from the dyad and the One, Plotinus, nevertheless, holds that there is a first and ultimate principle of reality from which all other beings come, either directly or from the beings in between (that is, the beings originated from the One). In one passage, we are told that the multiplicity are emanated from the One:^{31Plotinus, Enneads, V. 1[10]. 6. 3-9, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Cambridge, MA, 1984.}

Plotinus reads Aristotle’s report as if it were saying that for Plato all things come from the One. The indefinite dyad is not an independent principle but one that depends on the One. Indeed, Plotinus has constructed a hierarchy of beings as follows: the One emanates the dyad; together they generate the Forms and Numbers, that is, the Intellect; the Intellect produces the soul in a way similar to the birth of the dyad; finally, the soul brings forth all material beings.^{32Cf. D. J. O’Meara, Plotinus, pp. 60-69.} We have to notice that the One under the interpretation of Plotinus is no longer Plato’s Idea of one. The One is lifted out of the Forms and treated as the first and ultimate source of reality. Why did Plotinus do this?

The answer has to be sought in Plotinus’ zeal for priority and simplicity. The idea of prior simplicity, according to Plotinus, can have two applications with respect to the sequence of causes and to the composition of beings. Plotinus believes that the cosmos has a hierarchy with the ultimate cause at the top, and then the second causes, then the third causes, and so on. “If there is anything after the First,” he says, “it must necessarily come from the First; it must either come from it directly or have its ascent back to it through the beings between, and there must be an order of seconds and thirds, the second going back to the first and the third to the second.”^{33Plotinus, Enneads, V. 4[7]. 1. 1-5.} What Plotinus perceives is a cosmos of ordered beings with different ranks. The first is the cause of the seconds, and the seconds the thirds. Between them, there are clear lines of distinction. It is, no doubt, a caste cosmos. Plotinus also contemplates that within the first caste, a monarchy is most appropriate to its magnificence; an oligarchy does not match the perfection of the first cause since the members of the oligarchy will inevitably share power among themselves and result in degraded nobility for each of them. In order to argue for the singularity rather than the plurality of the first cause, Plotinus appeals to the reduction of things to their simplest form. He says, “For there must be something simple before all things, and this must be other than all the things which come after it, existing by itself, not mixed with the things which derive from it, and all the same able to be present in a different way to these other things, being really one, and not a different being and then one; it is false even to say of it that it is one, and there is ‘no concept or knowledge’ of it; it is indeed also said to be ‘beyond being’.”^{34Plotinus, Enneads, V. 4[7]. 1. 5-11.} For any sensible thing, we can divide it until we obtain the simplest indivisible element. But for the simplest element or the One, it is beyond our comprehension. It is said to be “beyond being,” so it is nonsense to count it as one or two or three. Otherwise, it would be captured by the Ideas of number and reduced to the same order as the Intellect or to the orders below. Therefore, the One must be the simple and the first of all.

Being the simple and the first is the source of all goods: power, beauty, values, etc. Human beings, as Plotinus sees it, are souls dwelling in bodies. As souls, we are given the task to organize and perfect material existence. If, however, we indulge in material things and forget our true nature, we will become ignorant, evil, and unhappy. The way to prevent us from falling into vice and misery is to look up to the One. To achieve this, we might distinguish three stages: (1) return to one’s true self as soul, (2) attain the life of the Intellect, (3) be united with the One.^{35Cf. D. J. O’Meara, Plotinus, pp. 103-106.} It does not serve our purpose here to dwell further on Plotinus’ methods. Suffice it to say that the search for a unifying principle is not merely a methodology but the ultimate goal of life and the mystical desire for union with the origin. Neo-Platonists affirm this ideal, and some Christians as well. But I am not sure to what extent modern philosophers aspire to it.

3. Cover and ideal

At the core of both covering-law universalism and singular universalism lies the intuitive notion that the multitudes have a single origin. While this tenet may be true, Walzer warns that the two universalisms have developed into a form that can be used as a cover for a multitude of sins. Covering-law universalism naturally instils a sense of pride in its heirs. Since there are always people who know and keep the law and those who do not, the law can be used as a sieve to sift people into two distinct groups. And since the universal law is transcendent, the knowers and keepers tend to see themselves as superior. This attitude, though normally prohibited under the covering law, is clearly expressed in words like “the chosen,” “the people of God,” “the true believers,” and “the priestly nation.” Walzer concedes that some keepers could truly renounce the thrill of pride, but they would still have “confidence.” They are confident that their legal code is true and universal, and that they are living in the way of life which some day all men and women will imitate. “Confidence,” Walzer says, if not “pride,” is the most appropriate state of mind and feeling of such people.^{36Cf. Nation, pp. 512-513.}

Singular universalism, likewise, instils a sense of superiority into its possessors. Philosophers commonly believe that they themselves are intellects, and thus possess special rational power for knowing things that are more real than the sensible things which ordinary people know. They have exclusive access to eternal knowledge; the laity, by contrast, merely hold contingent and accidental opinions. Plato, in his argument for aristocracy, accentuates the supremacy of the intellect. In the parable of the shipmaster, he writes: ^{37Plato, Republic 6.488B, quoted from Plato’s Republic. Translated with an introduction by A. D. Lindsay, London – New York, NY, 1935 (repr., 1969).}

A ship in the hands of untrained sailors will be disastrous. A democratic state, to Plato, is like a ship without a skilful master. The ship of democracy will finally fall into irrational and dangerous hands. A state as such will certainly result in chaos and turmoil. The majority rule is not a good form of government. A state requires a competent master for its steering. Politics, according to Plato, is a τέχνη which is far more complicate than any other trade or skill. Only philosophers possess the specialized knowledge of politics. Hence a city or a state should, ideally, be ruled by a philosopher-king.

Covering-law universalism and singular universalism, different though they are, are not incompatible. Of course they may work against each other, for covering-law universalism lays its claim on revelation, while singular universalism on reason, and reason may challenge revelation as it has done before. But sometimes, covering-law universalism may espouse singular universalism in perfect harmony. Theologians have put reason in the service of faith. Through the use of reason, covering law can be proved to be true and universal, and hence should be acceptable to every reasonable man. However, the roles of master and servant have been reversed in the age of reason. With respect to the covering law, since it has been widely accepted and institutionalized, it can serve as the basic source from which one formulates a more abstract set of unifying laws. Once an abstract principle is formed, it will be separated from its original context, and new meaning can be given to it by its inventor. This form of abstraction has proved to be a powerful ideational means for the reorientation of the social world. Some grand narratives are actually created thus, for example, the derivation of the Marxist historical materialism is derived from Christian teleology. Because covering-law universalism and singular universalism, either working separately or in joined forces, inspire confidence and superiority, they can be used as a perfect cover for the will to power.

Some philosophers have classified people into two groups according to their dominative trait. “If we consider the objects of the nobles and of the people,” Machiavelli writes, “we must see that the first have a great desire to dominate, while the latter have only the wish not to be dominated … to live in the enjoyment of liberty.”^{38N. Machiavelli, quoted in Nation, p. 537.} Given that Machiavelli is correct, the world can thus be dichotomized into nobles and plebeians, or as it were, masters and slaves. The psychological state of the nobles is characterized by the will to power. Imagine that the nobles inhabit a society ruled by covering-law universalism or singular universalism. Though the law will inhibit their actions, it will also enhance their appetite for power. The will to power definitely finds “confidence,” “pride,” or “superiority” desirable. These qualities are ideal virtues of nobility. Besides, the covering law, or the singular law, or the singular covering law, can be shaped, through the magic hand of the propagandists, into a powerful ideology for domination—either to exploit their own society or to conquer other nations.

Covering-law universalism and singular universalism are theories of unification. The former imposes a system of laws on the people and the latter a set of principles. They bind people to some so-called objective and transcendent laws. Discrepancies in social behaviour can then be curbed by banning the unwanted acts as outlawed or irrational. Moreover, universal laws usually prescribe a social hierarchy. Walzer calls it “the social version of the gold standard.” It has the appearance that “one good or one set of goods is dominant and determinative of value in all the spheres of distribution.” “And that good or set of goods,” he continues, “is commonly monopolized, its value upheld by the strength and cohesion of its owners.”^{39Spheres, p. 10.} A monarch, or an oligarchy, or a class who monopolizes the dominant good can effectively control the whole society.

The legitimization of the monopoly of a dominant good constitutes an ideology. Aristocracy is the principle that the best-born or the most intelligent rules; this group usually monopolizes land and familial reputation. Theocracy is the principle of those who possess or know the revelation of God; they are the monopolists of divine grace and office. Meritocracy is the principle of careers open to talents; they monopolize knowledge. Free exchange is the principle of risk-takers who are ready to wager their money; they are the monopolists of movable wealth. These groups compete with each other and struggle for supremacy. The struggles take place in a paradigmatic way. Whenever a group wins, it will work out a systematic conversion of the dominant good into all sorts of other goods. The principle of monocracy prevails, although government changes from monarchy to oligarchy, and then to democracy. A single principle instead of a single person becomes the key player in modern politics. In totalitarian Marxist states, political power intrudes into every aspect of life and maintains cohesion by coercion. While it is true that people have freedom in the capitalist world, the exercise of liberty is dependent on how much money one possesses. The principle of free market is working everywhere. It infiltrates people’s life. Our educational system, for instance, is on the whole programmed to produce effective competitors in the arena of the market, and our social system is geared to facilitate its proliferation.

Both kinds of universalism have an internal moral compulsion to extend their influence to the whole globe. Confidence, pride, or superiority cannot be contained within a territorial boundary either. Conceivably there are noble nations as well as plebeian nations. The noble nations, similar to individuals, would always try to conquer, to command, and to rule, while the plebeian nations would be content living within their own territory free of external intervention. If a noble nation inherits any one or both of the universalisms, its ambition to expand will easily find moral justification, even moral imperative. Covering-law universalism or singular universalism puts forward a legal code or moral principle claimed to be true and applicable everywhere. The noble nation itself serves as the model for all nations to imitate: what it possesses, the other nations must acquire. But how are other nations to adopt the noble ideal which they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a messenger? Now, men have to be sent, and the noble nation becomes, in Walzer’s word, a “nation-with-a-mission.”^{40Nation, p. 540.}

This conception disparages the experience of the nations that do not keep the law. Because they do not know the law and because they do not keep the law, their life is meaningless, or at least, insignificant. The noble nation brings salvation, so to speak, to them. And many nasty things can be justified for the ultimate good that the salvation will bring. Envoys are first sent to teach the law. If the plebeian nations refuse to accept it as they usually do, military can then be sent to enforce the law. Occupation and domination are thus seen as the inevitable processes in the way of actualizing the universal law and civilizing the world.

The above description is not merely a possibility. Walzer once bravely pointed out to the Oxonians that imperialism had actually argued as such. Consider these lines from Rudyard Kipling’s “Song of the English”:^{41R. Kipling, quoted in Nation, p. 511. Nation and Universe is comprised of two lectures delivered by Walzer at the Brasenose College of Oxford University in 1989.}

Kipling (1865-1936) lived in the heyday of the British Empire, whose Union Jack never set. Born in Bombay to a native English couple who belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society, what did he think of the British rule in India? Would he consider the British rule as occupation and exploitation? The answer is an absolute “No.” As a journalist, poet, and novelist, Kipling celebrated the British imperialism. His chief writings, to borrow the words of a biographer, “were bound up with a genuine sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman, or more broadly, every white man, to bring European culture to the heathen inhabitants of the uncivilized world.”^{42J. I. M. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling, in Encyclopaedia Britannica (2002). CD-ROM. Italics added.} This statement makes sense only to some Englishmen and white men. To those peoples who have been conquered and exploited by the British Empire, it explains nothing but adds insult to injury. I think Kipling did not, or dared not see the covered and deep down hatred of the Indians. What he saw was the admiration of some Anglophile Indians for the English technology and for their high society.^{43The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy discloses the local name of the British Anglophile as chhi-chhi poach, which in Hindi means shit-wiper. See A. Roy, The God of Small Things, London, 1997, p. 51.} Kipling’s imperialist persuasions were widely circulated among the Englishmen, especially among the British soldiers in India. The other Europeans, perhaps, while admiring the achievement of the Englishmen, were moved by Kipling’s convictions, at least before the First World War, and awarded him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Imagine the scene when the “Song of the English” is being sung by marching English adventurers and soldiers. They are marching to stamp out evil, and they will continue until peace is established throughout the world. They know the law and are sent by the law. “Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown.” The commission is clear enough and each has to strive for his own salvation. History will only end when all the nations would serve the Lord. Right now, we are the agents of the future peace. Let’s build roads and bridges so that missionaries and soldiers could reach every hinterland. Law will be enforced and civilization secured. Peoples of all places will praise the Lord in peace under the Union Jack. This is a beautiful conviction that every noble nation is more than ready to accept. Sincere? Yes. Tyrannical? More so. The Englishmen did bring their “civilization” and their law to the conquered lands. Some of the establishments might even be helpful to the indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, the native history and autonomy were devalued: the “uncivilized” people were treated as if they did not know what was good for themselves and that they had to learn the law, by force if necessary. Indeed, people were coerced to serve the Highest Majesty. Each conquered nation became a cog within the mechanism built by and for the British Empire. Subjection and exploitation followed and stood side by side with coerced civilization, as they always are.

C. Reiterative universalism

Being a Jewish American, Walzer is sensitive to the diversity of cultures and experiences. It is obvious to him that each nation has developed its particular way of living, and that its people value their creative particularities. No doubt, some of their behaviour and costume may seem strange and incomprehensible to outsiders. These, however, cannot simply be brushed aside as tribal, uncivilized, or irrational. One who disparages the experience of other people and imposes one’s culture against the others’ will acts like a tyrant. Though many universalists are ready to tolerate queer custom in trivial matters, they are unwilling to compromise in serious matters like justice, law, and social institutions. Seeing themselves as the vanguard of human dignity, the universalists take it as their responsibility to defend the universal standards. Their motive may be respectable but their attitude is arrogant and their act despotic. The gravest consequence is that their argument can be exploited by aggressive régimes to cover their aggression. Despite these, Walzer does not want to renounce universalism, because he still recognizes some universal or “almost universal” values shared among different societies.^{44Interpretation, p. 24.} He opts for a minimalist universalism, which he deems would leave the largest room for creative plurality. He proposes a reiterative universalism as an alternative. This reiterative universalism consists principally of a minimal core of moral codes—a set of abstract conception of human values. It assumes that each nation has elaborated the core into particular social institutions and practices. To defend his reiterative universalism, Walzer offers two arguments, a theological one and a philosophical one. Although Walzer is not a trained theologian, he tries to provide a theological argument, for he is very aware of the fact that the theological argument for the covering-law universalism is pervasive, perhaps even more persuasive than its philosophical counterpart. His main concern is to offer a plausible alternative interpretation of the Bible rather than to offer a definitive statement.

1. Theological argument

The covering-law universalism championed by Christianity is characterized by triumphalism. This sense of triumph has something to do with the experience of the Christians. In the Roman Empire period, the Church successfully converted a large number of people to Christianity and gradually became dominant in the Empire. The triumphant church tended to forge its theology in the form of a covering-law universalism so that the whole population would fall within its jurisdiction. Thus said, it implies that the covering-law universalism is not the only interpretation of the Old Testament—there are other possibilities. A Jewish biblical scholar, Jon Levenson, writes that “there is no one ‘biblical’ position on this or on most other great theological issues.”^{45J. D. Levenson, The Universal Horizon, p. 145.} Since the Bible is an anthology of writings composed over a long period, in different places, and by different authors, we really cannot expect it to present a unified view on a particular matter. The universality of the deity, besides the covering-law version, has been developed into the universality of humanity whereby every human being has equal access to the knowledge of God, or into a theology of nation-states whereby God deals with each nation separately.^{46Cf. J. D. Levenson, The Universal Horizon, pp. 142-151.}

Walzer is prepared to exploit the diversity of the biblical texts, and he argues that the universality of the deity does not warrant the universality of the moral norm. One obvious example is Judaism, which is allegedly charged with clannishness. He reasons that while God can be the creator of the universe, he needs not care about all his creation in the same way or in the same measure. It is not difficult to imagine that God favours human beings, who are made in his own image, over animals, or that God chooses one nation as the recipient of his special favour and forgets the rest, or that God prefers one person to another, as is recorded in the Book of Genesis that God has more regard for Abel than for Cain.

A reiterative universalism is proposed by Walzer as an alternative: a universal God hates oppression generally, but he has individual plans for the liberation of each nation—a unique one for each unique nation. It is a universalism devoid of triumphalism and in peace with the particularism of other peoples. Walzer asserts that this is the true doctrine in the Jewish history. It was repressed when Judaism was in full-scale conflict with Christianity. However, this reiterative universalism can be recovered from biblical fragments.^{47Nation, p. 513.} In the course of defending his case, Walzer cites four biblical passages. We will look into them one by one.

The most crucial fragment, elaborated by Walzer in many of his works, comes from the prophet Amos, who, speaking in God’s name, asks the Israelites:^{48Am 9,7, quoted in Nation, p. 513. In a retrospect, Walzer says: “Much of my own work, particularly but not only in recent years, is an effort to work out a philosophical understanding of those lines. Not, I should stress, a theological understanding; divine election has never been my subject. I don’t doubt that a God who ‘elects’ not only the Israelites but also (their enemies) the Philistines and the Syrians is an interesting and unconventional God, but what Amos has in mind I cannot say; my own mind is theologically blank. The questions that interest me are worldly questions: How are we to recognize the groups that enact or might enact this serial liberation? In what sense are these the primary groups for moral and political analysis? What happens when their different liberations bring them into conflict with one another? How are we to judge the different outcomes of the liberation process—legal codes, social practices, political regimes, and so on?” (Particularism, p. 195, c. 2.) Literally understood, this statement is in conflict with what Walzer argues in Nation and Universe, where he does put forward, albeit briefly, a theological justification for reiterative universalism. But in general, it is true that Walzer occupies himself more with philosophical questions. He touches upon theological issues only when they have serious social and political implications. Even in such cases, he differs from the “standard” theological works in two major aspects. First, he is not seeking metaphysical justification in the biblical text. His interest lies in the meaning of the text in respect of ethical, social, or political issues as understood by different historical régimes, and ultimately its deeper meaning. Second, Walzer does not use the “proper” exegetical method. The formation of the text and the historical meanings are not his main concern. He focuses largely on the popular interpretation employed in the justification of a political cause by politicians, political theorists, social activists, crusaders, and revolutionaries. Examples of this kind can easily be found in Walzer’s works such as Exodus and Revolution, and Interpretation and Social Criticism.}

These questions are probably a starting point of Walzer’s questioning of the standard covering-law universalism. By putting Ethiopians, Philistines, and Syrians on a par with Israel, Amos poses a serious challenge to the Christian doctrine of one God, one people, one law, and one redemption. He suggests the possibility that there might be more than one liberations and salvations. The unique God, who is the creator of the universe, finds oppression universally hateful, and he uses liberation as his universal method of salvation. He delivers people from the land of slavery whenever they cry to him. He sets them free and gives them a unique identity. In this way, he helps fashion the nations. He is not only the creator of people but also the maker of peoples. Walzer calls this paradigm—one liberator, one pattern of salvation, but many particular liberations—“reiterative universalism.”

The main characteristics that distinguish reiterative universalism from the covering-law universalism are its “particularist focus” and its “pluralizing tendency.” “We have no reason to think,” Walzer says, “that the exodus of the Philistines or the Syrians is identical with the exodus of Israel, or that it culminates in a similar covenant, or even that the laws of the three peoples are or ought to be the same.”^{49Nation, p. 513.} In other words, it is possible that each people experiences its own exodus, enjoys its particular divine relationship, and strikes a specific covenant with God according to their specific circumstances. This understanding is congruent with the God who liked Abel but not Cain, and who, out of one man, made all kinds of human beings. If anyone still inclines to think that God has designed only one salvation and one law for all nations, and that every exodus is but an enactment of the same plan, the diversity of histories must render his or her argument implausible.

A second text which speaks the same message but in a more elaborate and dramatic way is found in the Book of Isaiah:^{50Is 19,20b-25. Cf. Nation, p. 514.}

The immediate context of the parallel text in the Book of Amos (9,7) makes it clear that the purpose of this verse is to rebuke the Israelites for their pride. We may take the above text as serving the same function. The Israelites are proud of themselves as being the elected, the chosen people of God. They have the law and the covenant, and they know God. By contrast, the Gentiles are excluded from the commonwealth; they do not know God and are hopeless. The prophets, however, reprimand the Israelites by pointing out that they are no better than the Gentiles whom they despise. Yes, they know the law, but they do not keep the law. Their conduct is not noticeably better than the Gentiles. They might even commit crimes that are abhorred by the Gentiles themselves. After all, Israel is not all that special. God is the creator of all, and He attends to all peoples. The Egyptians will cry to the Lord because of oppression. And the Lord will send them a saviour, even a great one, to deliver them from suffering. The Lord will make a covenant with them, and they will serve the Lord. The Egyptians will enter into an intimate relationship with God just as the Israelites. Not only will the Egyptians be called but also the Assyrians. In that day, Israel will be but the third with Egyptians and Assyrians.

What inference can we draw from all these? The inference can be drawn from them is—that there is not only one single mediator or representative of God on earth but many. How should we then interpret the historical event of Israel’s exodus? From the covering-law universalist perspective, it is made, Walzer says, “pivotal” in a universal history, “as if all humanity, though not present at the sea or the mountain, had at least been represented there.”^{51Nation, p. 514.} It was done once and for all. The experience and the consequences of the Exodus belong to all. There is no need for other peoples to reiterate the process of liberation. Or if they wish, they can imitate the Exodus with insignificant deviance. Another view, Walzer suggests, takes Israel’s exodus as “exemplary.” It is pivotal only in the particular history of Israel. As for other peoples, it serves just as an example after which they can, if need be, repeat in their own ways. There is no obligation for them to repeat it. If they see it good to reiterate it, there is no requirement for them to do it in exactly the same way as the Israelites. Voluntary reiteration makes a big difference from compulsory imitation. Instead of one universal history, we will have a series of histories. All peoples can find values in their own particular history and live a meaningful life.

Possibly, believers of monotheism might find it not so easy to contemplate reiterative universalism. The two above-mentioned fragments, indeed, only spring up occasionally in a history overshadowed by the covering-law universalism. They suggest an alternative possibility. But they are quickly discarded, repressed, and forgotten. Ironically, what seems unlikely to man is a lively possibility to the all-mighty God, who is active in human history and compassionate about human suffering. We do not have a single reason to restrict a god who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-merciful to bestow special favour on one nation and to mandate all the rest of the peoples to follow the path of the chosen one. But if this is the case, it would only be made possible by coercing the non-elected, either by God himself or through the chosen nation. Is God not evenhanded and merciful to all men everywhere? Let us hear the following message from the prophet Jeremiah:^{52Jer 18,7-10. Cf. Nation, p. 516.}

Obviously God is fair to all nations. He recognizes them one by one and deals with them individually, whether in punishing them or in blessing them.

Yet the covering-law universalists might argue, though God institutes or permits the multiplicity of nations on earth, would it not be possible that God judges every one of them by the same standard?^{53The separation of humankind, according to the Bible, is an act of God. “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth (Gn 11,6-9, RSV).”} Is God’s “voice” not always the same? Is it not the case that the phrase “evil in my sight” refers to one set of evil acts? Though many nations are there, and many liberations might exist, it is still possible that one single set of universal laws covers them all. Walzer, however, thinks it unlikely for two reasons. First, if God makes a particular covenant with each nation separately and blesses each differently, it makes better sense to suggest that he also holds each nation to its own standard. Each nation will then have a unique set of laws, though some evil acts in the sets of laws will most likely overlap. Second, even if there is only one set of evil acts like that of murder, betrayal, and oppression, it is still more probable that there are multiple sets of good, for good is not simply the opposite of evil. We find it relatively simpler to define an evil act such as murder, and to prescribe the prohibition of “Thou shall not kill.” But it takes endless expositions and papers to elaborate the commandment “Love thy neighbour.” Love comes in various modes and in different intensity. It is always possible to have different kinds of love for the neighbour. That is why Jesus instructed his disciples to love their neighbour as themselves. “In either of these views,” Walzer concludes, “God is himself a reiterative universalist, governing and constraining but not overruling the diversity of humankind.”^{54Nation, p. 516.}

The fourth biblical fragment quoted by Walzer is the most daring one. It challenges the faith of monotheism:^{55Mi 4,4-5. Cf. Nation, pp. 516-518.}

The last sentence of the above text from the Book of Micah plainly states that each nation will follow its own god. It implies a plurality in the divinity—not that there are three persons within the godhead, but that there are other gods besides Yahweh, as many as the number of nations are. We are not told of their order or hierarchy. Possibly they have different rankings according to their capability. But nevertheless they can maintain a certain balance of power and make peace among themselves in heaven or heavens so that each of them can recruit his own rank and file on earth. Perhaps, the plurality on earth is best explained and justified by a plurality in heaven. This interpretation, Walzer points out, is completely unwarranted in Judaism, which can never accommodate any gods other than Yahweh. Why does this verse appear in the Hebrew Bible? A common response is to attribute the verse to the survival of some earlier belief that each people had its own god when the world was still in the stage of polytheism. After the ancient Jews had advanced to the stage of monotheism, they dropped and repressed such belief. But this answer does not satisfactorily explain the survival. The successive monotheist editors would have easily erased this heretical verse from the holy book. Why did they preserve and incorporate it in the course of editing until it gained a permanent place in the final text? Walzer hints that the verse is not a survival of early polytheistic belief. The first verse (4,4) and the second verse (4,5) are connected by the Hebrew conjunction כִּי, which indicates that they are parallel verses. Together, they constitute a complete sentence. The word כִּי can denote a causal relationship “for.” If that is the case, then the happy “sitting” in the first has to be the consequence of the plural “walking” in the second. All people sit peacefully, everyone under his vine or fig tree, because all people walk, every one of them, in the name of his god. Walzer conjectures that this is the meaning of Micah. Pluralism inspires tolerance, and tolerance makes for peace. “How many of us,” Walzer asks, “will sit quietly under our vines and fig trees once the agents of the first universalism go to work, making sure that everyone is properly covered by the covering law?”^{56Nation, p. 517.}

Pluralism on earth does not necessarily require pluralism in heaven. It needs only a plurality of God’s name on earth: “every one in the name of his god.” The names are different but they all refer to the same God. As there are many names for the same Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, why can’t other people invent their own names for God? God creates men and women in his own image, and every one of them becomes a different individual. How is this creative aspect of the imago dei reflected in human activity? Authors like to write their own books, painters their own paintings, philosophers their own accounts of the good, and theologians their own names of God. “What human beings have in common,” Walzer writes, “is just this creative power, which is not the power to do the same thing in the same way but the power to do many different things in different ways: divine omnipotence (dimly) reflected, distributed, and particularized.”^{57Nation, p. 518.} If God is the creator and he makes man in his own image, he should be happy with the plurality human beings produce, shouldn’t he? Even though not every book is readable, nor every picture beautiful, nor every ethic good, nor every name appropriate, God has to put up with these as he clearly knows that no human creation is perfect as his is not perfect too, at least from the perspective of human beings. After all, human beings are only his particularized images.

2. Philosophical argument

In the Western tradition, humanity is taken as everywhere the same, and thus men and women are put under the same moral law. However, philosophers are not so ignorant as to be unaware of cultural differences. In order to account for the differences, the universal law is said to be adapted to particular circumstances, and consequently cultural differences can be perceived as variations of the single law. The philosophers’ aim is to maximize commonalities (at least conceptually) and to minimize differences. This singular universalist way of thinking, Walzer opines, will unavoidably stifle cultural creativity and national autonomy. He does not believe that the lessening of control over creativity will inevitably lead to a state of chaos. He tries to propose an alternative model, one that consists of a core morality which can be differently elaborated in different cultures.^{58M. Walzer, Moral Minimalism, in Thick and Thin. Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame, IN – London, 1994, 1-19, p.4.} For him, the idea of elaboration is better than that of adaptation because it takes into consideration human creativity as well as practicality. Moreover it comes closer to the diversity that both anthropology and comparative history have revealed. Since the idea of reiterative universalism is developed gradually over a long period of time, a historical approach may best clarify Walzer’s position on the subject and explain some seeming contradictions in his conceptualization of universality and particularity. However it may appear to be somewhat repetitive as we attempt to present chronologically the variations of Walzer’s ideas.

a. A universalist particularism

Walzer published his first major ethical treatise Just and Unjust Wars in 1977. It has since been widely praised, even by the covering-law universalists. This is partly due to the fact that the book is a marvellous work and partly because the universalists are misled by its universalist overtones with the result that they overlook its particularist foundation. In fact, a tension between universality and particularity is hidden in the book. On the one hand, Walzer assumes that nations in the long history of conflict have developed some common rules of fighting, which can be expressed by the modern idea of rights. These commonalities are taken as the evidence of the existence of universal human values. Walzer, on the other hand, approaches war inductively by extracting general principles from historical cases. A historical event, however, is a particular incident. How can a particular event be universally relevant across time and space? How can his cited examples have universal significance? Like any other inductive method, Walzer’s argument is, at best, provisional. This problem may be dismissed, as many philosophers do, by asserting some commonly known moral principles, say human rights, as a priori universal truths. But Walzer chooses not to dismiss it lightly. He admits the limitation of his methodology, and states frankly that his argument is inconclusive.^{59M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars. A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, [New York, NY], Basic Books, 21992, p. xxviii.} All he attempts to do is to argue for a case. He states explicitly that the right to life and the right to liberty are two assumed universal truths. These assumptions appear to him to be the best way to interpret the morality in war. Nevertheless, he regards these rights as phenomenological rather than metaphysical truths—life and liberty are inviolable not because God has ordained them or they are intrinsically inalienable but because we human beings value them.

Apparently, the Wars is a defence of some universal truths about war: self-defence is always right, aggression is always wrong, killing non-combatants is always a crime, etc. Moreover, the first chapter is devoted to the refutation of realism and relativism. Is Walzer not a universalist? Ironically, he is frequently accused of being a relativist. One easy way to resolve this contradiction is to say that Walzer is both a universalist and a relativist. He is a universalist in international affairs such as war, but a relativist in other matters of morality. Before passing our final judgement, let us investigate some concrete evidence.

In the preface to the Wars, Walzer explains his approach to the morality of war as follows:^{60Wars, pp. xxix-xxx. Italics added.}

The morality of war that Walzer attempts to expound is the philosophical doctrine of human rights, or more specifically the right of life and the right of liberty. He will use the notion of rights, which seems to him to be the best ground, to understand the moral world of war. He will take the rights of life and of liberty as a hermeneutical key to interpret the morass of historical cases. Now, the doctrine of human rights is universal. Its claim is that it is applicable to every being who is recognized as human anytime and anywhere. It is a version of the covering-law universalism. Does Walzer accept the covering-law universalism?

It seems that Walzer does not accept the covering-law universalism, though he is defending the universality of morality in war. First of all, Walzer interprets the rights of life and liberty in a more limited scope than the universalists usually do. He refuses to apply these two rights to judge political arrangements either in his answer to critics or in the Spheres of Justice. Another point worthwhile to note is that Walzer qualifies life and liberty as if they were “something like absolute values.” That means they are, in fact, not absolute values, or they are seeming absolute values at best. Which option does he take? We are not explicitly told in the Wars, but the book’s multitude of historical examples drawn from diverse cultures and over a long period of time suggest that Walzer approaches the two rights from an empirical point of view. The phrase “something like absolute values” offers an important clue to interpreting Walzer’s absolutist tone in the book.

A second passage that deals directly with this subject is to be found in the argument against relativism. Hobbist relativism claims that moral knowledge “changes over time or varies among political communities” with the consequence that we do not really know what other people think. To refute the Hobbist relativism, Walzer writes:^{61Wars, p. 16.}

Two issues are at stake in Walzer’s defence against the Hobbist relativism. The first concerns cultural difference, and the second, temporal change of a particular culture. Walzer acknowledges that we can expect to find radical dichotomies both in the perception and in the understanding of morality between radically separate and dissimilar cultures. He admits that cultural difference is real enough, and that it cannot be dismissed or ignored. Cultural relativity is obvious; how Genghis Khan saw war is clearly different from the modern Westerners. It is unconvincing to deny cultural difference. Walzer, however, grants radical dichotomies only to radically separate and dissimilar cultures. This implies that for related cultures, we can always find similarities in morality. But in what matters and to what extent are related cultures similar? To Walzer, this question cannot be answered theoretically. We have to investigate the histories of different cultures and compare them. Since humanity is to a certain degree related, would it not be plausible to entertain a minimal core of morality that commonly exists in every culture? This, indeed, is a popular opinion in the West. Many philosophers take it for granted. Walzer is no exception. He assumes that the right to life and the right to liberty constitute the core of a minimal morality. His acceptance of this tenet, however, is not without reservation. He does not want to accept it a priori. Instead, he tries to demonstrate it through the historical cases he draws from different cultures. What he intends to do is argue for a case, not to present an absolute proof. This, perhaps, is what he means by “something like absolute values.”

Likewise, Walzer recognizes the change of morality over time within a particular culture, but unlike the first issue, he tackles this one directly. He thinks that while change in morality is real, the consequence of the change with respect to ordinary moral life and moral judgement of conduct has been exaggerated. Morality in a particular community is continuous, or in Walzer’s own words, remains “sufficiently whole” rather than discontinuous. Basically, we all share the same moral world with our ancestors. We act by studying the actions of those who preceded us. Even fundamental social and political transformations cannot deprive us of gaining access to the moral world of our ancestors. We can understand what they thought and how they perceived things. We consent to some basic values they defended though we may disagree on particular moral issues.

The treatment of the above two issues, namely cultural difference and temporal cultural change, confirms that Walzer, as he himself has claimed, is a consistent moral particularist. He emphasizes the continuity of a particular culture, and holds that we know right and wrong from studying the actions of our own ancestors. As for cultural difference, he refrains from giving it a definite theoretical account. He admits the possibility of radical dichotomies in radically separate cultures, but at the same time he recognizes commonalities between different cultures. In respect of war, he wants to forge a common morality, first of all for the Americans, and then as far as possible for the rest of the peoples.^{62Walzer makes it quite explicit that his book is aimed at his fellow Americans (Wars, pp. xxv,xxviii). But from the universalist tone he uses and the examples he draws from a diversity of cultures, we may infer that Walzer intends to reach beyond America.} He adopts the popular notion of minimal morality and proceeds to show that the right to life and the right to liberty are almost universal in human history. He believes that they are universal. But whether or not they are universal by themselves, he cannot say.

This methodology is based on a non-foundational approach to morality or what Walzer calls “practical morality”:^{63Wars, p. xxix. Italics added.}

Walzer’s practical morality consists in separating the moral world into superstructure and substructure. The superstructure is the existing morality we abide by: the tradition we inherit, the way we perceive morality, and the moral principles we invoke; whereas the substructure is the metaphysics or the systematic theoretical account of morality. We live in the superstructure. What we could clearly know and discuss is in the superstructure. The substructure is an “unending controversy.” Nobody can know for sure what the foundations are. Under such circumstances, Walzer thinks it prudent to separate practical morality from foundational morality. This is possible because actual moral life does not require the existence of a comprehensive ethical theory. In practice, we act by studying, either imitating or modifying, the actions of our ancestors, and this is a particularist practice. Practical morality, however, does not necessarily exclude universality. We have a diversity of cultures. If any value is universal, we must be able to find it in different cultures.

b. A particularist particularism

The book Spheres of Justice, published in 1983, is thoroughly particularist. It espouses a particularist standpoint, defends for the particularity of every political community, and argues for the distinctiveness of each sphere of goods. The immediate public response to this celebration of particularity is an outburst of hostility and harsh criticisms, which stands in stark contrast to the previous warmly-received work Just and Unjust Wars.^{64For their criticisms of Walzer, see R. Dworkin, To Each His Own, in The New York Review of Books, 14 April 1983, pp. 4-6; M. Walzer and R. Dworkin, ‘Spheres of Justice’. An Exchange, in The New York Review of Books, 21 July 1983, pp. 43-46; B. Barry, Social Criticism and Political Philosophy, in Liberty and Justice. Essays in Political Theory 2, Oxford, 1991, 9-22; Id., Spherical Justice and Global Injustice, in D. Miller & M. Walzer (eds.), Pluralism, Justice, and Equality, Oxford, 1995, 67-80; J. Cohen, Review of M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York, NY, 1983), in The Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986) 457-468; N. Daniels, Review of M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York, NY, 1983), in The Philosophical Review 94 (1985) 142-148.} Why is it so? Is there any significant difference between the two books? Has Walzer changed his philosophical stand? These are the questions that I want to reflect upon. To begin with, let us take a look at an often-quoted passage from the Preface of the Spheres:^{65Spheres, p. xiv.}

The above passage can reasonably be regarded as the position statement of Walzer, in which he projects himself definitely out of the orbit of traditional philosophy. Walzer invokes Plato’s famous image of the cave in which the world of sense perception is compared to the world of thought. According to Plato, the world of sense perception is like a long deep cave completely shaded from sunlight and barely illuminated by a fire. Worse still, the prisoners of the cave are chained and can only see shadows cast directly in front of them. They take the shadows they see as the things themselves. This miserable situation is, in fact, the pre-condition of ordinary men and women. If they don’t escape from the world of sense, they can never see the thing in itself. This is a truly vivid, ingenious, inspiring parable. Innumerable philosophers have already trodden this path of cave escaping—once called detachment but now the term “impartiality” is preferred. Walzer, in contrast, chooses to stand in the cave. His reason seems to run like this: since few people can escape the cave, not even for a fleeting moment, and the enlightened philosophers, like the rest of the ordinary people, spend most of the time in the cave (that is, there is no real escape), it is not of much use proclaiming a justice that one can never see or understand, no matter how just and perfect it is. If there is justice on earth, any justice at all, it must be inside the cave already, hidden, perhaps. Thus, a philosopher’s task is to interpret what justice means in the world of shared meanings. It is unnecessary, and sometimes even undesirable, to discover or to invent a just society.^{66Cf. Interpretation, Chapter I. Three Paths in Moral Philosophy.}

Compare the Spheres with the Wars and we find that both are basically written from the same particularist standpoint. In the Wars, Walzer writes, “by and large we learn how to act among our contemporaries by studying the actions of those who have preceded us.” In the Spheres, he continues to develop this theme: this learning mechanism presupposes the historical continuity in a particular culture. We cannot understand our ancestors’ actions if we do not share (almost) the same moral world with them. One way of gaining access to the common moral world is through the shared understanding that a particular community has created as a collective enterprise. Since the shared understanding is moulded by many hands through numerous generations without a master scheme, we cannot expect to find in it a coherent moral world. That is the reason why we need wise men to interpret for us the hidden meaning. Thus from learning in the Wars to interpretation in the Spheres, we see Walzer’s progression and maturation. Nevertheless, both books stem from the same particularist root.

Why is it possible for the same particularism to develop into a universalist morality of war and a pluralistic distributive justice? This has something to do with Walzer’s empirical approach to morality. Morality in the first place is connected with a community. When we judge something to be right or wrong, we are implicitly referring to the community which lends us the moral language and concept we use. Since human history displays a spectrum of communities—some are closely related and some are totally separate, we can expect various kinds of moralities with different degrees of overlapping. If we carry out an empirical investigation, as Walzer has done in the Wars, we may conclude that there are certain common principles in the morality of war. We may also reach an opinion that no two communities possess the same mode of living, and hence every society has developed its own idea of social justice. Of course, Walzer has not carried out an extensive empirical research before he draws the conclusions that the morality of war is universal and that distributive justice is particular. There are other practical reasons that guide his decision. War, more often than not, is fought between different political communities. It is therefore an international affair. And being so, it is both necessary and desirable to reach a consensus about it. Survival and autonomy are two basic features of existence that we can expect human beings to show similar sentiment and to give similar judgement. As for distributive justice, it is chiefly concerned with a particular community: it is their own business, so to speak, and not that of anyone else. It is, for most of the time, both inappropriate and objectionable for outsiders to intervene. Very often, internal affairs are too complicated even for insiders to grasp comprehensively, let alone to find a proper solution. If this is so, how can an outsider tell the people of a community how to live? Surprisingly, some people do think they can. But what they actually do is to impose their own system, which they say is the best, on the community. Whether or not the new system will work has yet to be seen. But the things guaranteed are the disruption of the local culture and the alienation from the root of their existence. For practical reason, Walzer confines particularity and universality to their respective domains.

c. Prohibitions and the minimal code of morality

Walzer takes commonality and difference in morality as a matter of fact. He finds it unnecessary, and indeed fruitless, to provide a foundational explanation for them. On the whole Walzer keeps his maxim, but sometimes he is forced by his critics to defend his position theoretically. The earliest article that touches upon this issue is Three Paths in Moral Philosophy, which was originally delivered in the 1985 Tanner Lectures on Human Values.^{67This lecture is collected in Interpretation.} Since the purpose of the article is to defend his interpretative methodology, it has only a few pages on the issue of the minimal moral code.^{68Interpretation, pp. 23-25.} These limited passages nevertheless give us a glimpse into the early stage of Walzer’s thought on this matter.

In the article, Walzer tries to compare three common ways of doing moral philosophy, namely discovery, invention, and interpretation.^{69For a detailed discussion, see Chapter 3, §1. Interpretation and Representation.} A discoverer detaches himself from the world in order to seek out the hidden universal law, be it in heaven, in nature, or in man himself. An inventor, while denying all external authorities, ventures bravely into creating a new moral world. Walzer argues that these two ways are deceptive or misleading because they are either doing interpretative work in a disguised manner, or they will eventually be reduced to interpretation. To him, the most proper way of doing moral philosophy is interpretation. Yet to show why the paths of discovery and invention are possible, Walzer borrows the popular notion of the minimal moral code. He assumes that there exists a minimal moral code, which consists of prohibitions such as “murder, deception, betrayal, and gross cruelty.” (The list is probably not exhaustive; it serves only to exemplify the kinds of prohibitions.) He says, “Because they are minimal and universal … they can be represented as philosophical discoveries or inventions.” As to why being minimal and universal can be represented as philosophical discoveries or inventions, Walzer does not go on to elaborate. We can, however, find a clue to this question in his statement that minimal and universal prohibitions provide “a framework for any possible (moral) life.”^{70Interpretation, pp. 24-25.} It means that minimal prohibitions circumscribe a boundary on human behaviour. Beyond that, we cannot form a community. And without community, we cannot have moral life. For example, if we abolish the prohibition of murder—that is, we allow people to kill each other for whatever reason, it is very hard to imagine what kind of community we can still have. Discoverers or inventors pretend to discover or invent these minimal prohibitions (or the positive inversion of the prohibitions), and then elaborate them into their theories.

Walzer emphasizes that he comes to the idea of minimal and universal prohibitions empirically. The minimal code does not pre-exist in the Ideas, nor is it the given decree of God. Rather it gradually emerges from a long historical process of trial and error. Walzer believes that Hume too supports the same idea. In discussing the prohibition of theft, Hume writes that the rule “arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression and by our repeated experience of the inconvenience of violating it.”^{71D. HUME, quoted in Interpretation, p. 24.} The experience of inconvenience guides the peoples on earth to legislate all kinds of prohibitions. Some of these prohibitions are crucial to the survival of a community. If a community witlessly ignores the inconvenience of violating such prohibitions, it will extinguish. After a long trial and error process, all the existing communities have learnt to avoid the deadly inconvenience.

Another point that Walzer differs from the traditional view of the minimal code is the modification of “adaptation” to “elaboration.” Philosophers often take the minimal code as consisting of some universal principles, which are then adapted to different historical circumstances. Walzer thinks that this image is too “circumstantial and constrained.”^{72Moral Minimalism, p. 4.} He prefers to regard the core morality as providing the basic framework for creative elaboration into a thick moral culture. He says, “They [the prohibitions] provide a framework for any possible (moral) life, but only a framework, with all the substantive details still to be filled in before anyone could actually live in one way rather than another. It is not until the conversations become continuous and the understandings thicken that we get anything like a moral culture, with judgement, value, the goodness of persons and things realized in detail.”^{73Interpretation, p. 25.} This is certainly correct, for prohibitions are negative behavioural norms which prescribe nothing, and it is difficult to imagine how, by adapting the prohibitions, a complex moral culture can be developed. Prohibitions are nothing but warning signs. They tell us only what not to do but not what to do. We are left to our own imagination and creativity to construct a meaningful life.^{74For an elaborate discussion on the relation between prohibition and creativity, see R. Burggraeve, Prohibition and Taste. The Bipolarity in Christian Ethics, in Ethical Perspectives 1 (1994) 130-144.} Even so, we cannot and will not create idiosyncratic meanings. We are situated in a particular community at a particular time. Our language, ideas and perceptions are shaped by the tradition to which we belong and in which we grow up. There is no way to escape, nor does it necessary. The community and its narratives provide us with the means to explore the fullness of life.

d. Prescriptions and reiteration

In 1989, again at another Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Walzer tackled more seriously the issue of commonality and difference. This lecture was later published as Nation and Universe. The argument is Walzer’s first definitive statement in his continual effort to grasp this difficult subject. He recapitulates the ideas of the minimal code and creativity from the previous lecture, and looks at them afresh from a universalist perspective. He casts the minimal and universal prohibitions in the universalist terms and explores the ultimate universality that universalists can reasonably claim. The result is what he calls a “reiterative universalism” which can accommodate particularism. The readers, however, have to bear in mind that Walzer has not changed his standpoint; he is still a particularist. It is only Walzer’s way, and indeed one of his specialities, to understand his own position from his opponents’ perspective, and formulate the subsequent argument in their terminology.^{75He says, “I want to argue from within what I, and many others, have taken to be the opposing camp; I want to take my stand among the universalists and suggest that there is another universalism, a nonstandard variety, which encompasses and perhaps even helps to explain the appeal of moral particularism.” (Nation, p. 509.)}

The central idea of reiterative universalism is founded on some basic human needs. These needs are so fundamental to existence that no sensible person will object to their universality. Since these are related to the most instinctive impulses, they can easily be formulated in whatever language. Eating is one of such basic needs. No one would deny that it should be universal. Eating also carries with it some moral overtones. For example, people can use hunger strike as a means of demonstration. Under special circumstances, taking away surplus food without permission may not be morally condemned as a theft if the food is needed to sustain one’s life. Eating, however, is different from dining. Eating is a basic need but dining is a complicated system. It concerns the choice of food, the way of cooking, and the socially acceptable manners of dining on different occasions. There is one basic need of eating, but many different ways of dining. When a universal need is reiterated by different peoples, there will be pluralistic outcomes. Singular universalism and reiterative universalism have different ways to control the process. The former, according to Walzer, demands a “substantive imitation,” whereas the latter requires only a “procedural reiteration,” which is deemed to be a more balanced ethical view “governed as much by ideal as by practical considerations.”^{76Nation, p. 519; Moral Minimalism, p. 4.}

One way of elaborating the idea of the minimal code, as Walzer has done in the previous article, is to treat it as the basic framework for possible moral life. Another way is to regard it as consisting of some positive universal human values. Prohibitions are negative behavioural norms. They can, to some extent, be translated into positive attitudinal principles. For example, the prohibition “Thou shall not kill” may be rendered into “Thou shall respect life” or even “Love thy neighbour.” Every nation that accepts the norm of “respect” or “love” has to reiterate the principle in its historical context. Walzer suggests that justice is one of such positive values that call for reiteration, but actually it has its particularist dimension. To prove this, he builds up his argument from the universally accepted particularist values of autonomy and attachment.

The first category of universal values that have particularist implications includes “independence, inner direction, individualism, self-determination, self-government, freedom, and autonomy.” We may name them under the title of autonomy. On the individual level, it refers to the basic existential question of selfhood. Every man or woman wants to develop his or her own self. So, we value individualism, freedom, originality, authenticity, nonconformity, and so on. If every man or woman follows the principle of autonomy, we will have a world of many kinds. Individual autonomy is a universal concept, but its practical outcome is pluralistic. The desire for autonomy also manifests itself in a collective way as demand for independence, self-rule, or self-government. It can be formulated as a universal law like this: “Self-determination is the right of every people/nation.”^{77Nation, p. 518.} But what this law mandates is in contradiction with the prescription of covering-law universalism. Self-determination dictates that every people should have a right to form and to shape their common life according to their collective will. If all nations reiterate this universal law, the outcome will be a pluralistic world of diverse societies. History in fact shows that there are many ways of life. A universal covering law is inadequate to describe the pluralistic phenomenon. If we want the covering-law universalism to work, we will have to constrain self-determination by coercing a set of predetermined laws. But then coercion is exactly what self-determination opposes.^{78Self-determination, Walzer concedes, is not an absolute right. We may criticize a certain régime, and even intervene if it causes serious harm to other innocent parties. Thus he makes the following provision for self-determination: “Obviously, we can criticize each other’s work [the régime], urge that it be made more like our own, for example, but unless our lives and liberties (or those of other presumptively innocent men and women) are injured or threatened by it, we cannot forcibly interfere.” (Nation, p. 519.)}

Attachment is another category of universal values. “Love, loyalty, faithfulness, friendship, devotion, commitment, and patriotism,” all these are kinds of attachment.^{79Nation, p. 520.} They are universal values, but they are experienced differently. Since attachment is connected to a person’s experience, it is differentiated and particular. Though we can specify various kinds of attachment (love, friendship, familial relationships, patriotism, etc.), the description can only be general. For example, we may define love as a strong affection between two persons, which forms the basis for marriage. But it is absurd to write an instruction manual on love, and ask every pair of lovers to follow suit. Even if they did, the couple would not automatically experience love. Attachment is a universal value, but its enactment can take different forms, have different intensities and emotional tones, and entail different obligations. All these differences are the complex products of personalities and cultures.

Justice, another universal value, seems to be the one that most people would wish to defend: they want to concretize it as a universal principle, which can be used to reform every society. Justice is indeed universal, Walzer agrees. But autonomy and attachment have already determined the main patterns of distributions. If we want to uphold these two universal principles, it seems there will not be much room for a universal corrective principle of justice to manoeuvre. Either autonomy, attachment, and justice are universal and reiterative, or the first two oppose the last one. Suppose we give equal status to these three human values, then we will have to choose the first option. We have to see justice developing side by side with the working out of autonomy and attachment. All three of them are everywhere accepted, in Walzer’s words, “out of recognition of and respect for the human agents who create the moral world and who come, by virtue of that creativity, to have lives and countries of their own.” Justice is universal in its general conception but diversified in its implementations. We value creativity and wish to safeguard the freedom of human agents. We have made many universal laws to protect human agents. “Looking at the elaborated description, however,” Walzer observes, “we may well feel that we have made too much of agency—for the more we make of it, the less there is for it to make.” He asks, “Why should we value human agency if we are unwilling to give it any room for manoeuvre and invention?”^{80Nation, pp. 522-523.} It seems that we need to find a balance between creativity and protection.

Some contemporary philosophers have made such an attempt. Walzer purposely singles out Stuart Hampshire, for “he is equally sensitive to the claims of particular ways of life rooted in ‘local memories and local attachments’ and to the claims of a universal morality ‘arising from a shared humanity and an entirely general norm of reasonableness’.”^{81Nation, p. 523.} His theory would supposedly be a balanced account of creativity and protection, and of local cultures and universal human standards. Hampshire makes a distinction between affection and reason. The former is personal and particular whereas the latter belongs to everyone or to no one in particular. He then identifies “sexual morality and family relationships and the duties of friendship” to be in the sphere of affection.^{82S. Hampshire, quoted in Nation, p. 523.} It is right and proper for us to develop our own prohibitions and prescriptions in these areas. In this case, Hampshire must agree that autonomy and attachment are reiterative. Outside the sphere of affection, Hampshire opines, lie the “principles of right” and the “rules of distribution.”^{83Nation, p. 524.} These two belong to the realm of reason and thus are applicable everywhere. Justice, in Hampshire’s opinion, is universal but not reiterative. People everywhere will arrive at a similar (if not identical) set of principles of justice if they could be sufficiently detached and impartial, and use their reason properly.

Such a distinction, Walzer counters, does not make any practical sense. In reality, affection and reason rule the same terrain. For instance, in most societies the kinship system is also a system of distribution. It determines “who lives with whom, who sleeps with whom, who defers to whom, who has power over whom, who gives dowries to whom, and who inherits from whom.” If these rules are allowed to put into practice, they will already define a substantial shape of a distributive system. This is one of the reasons why inequality persists in virtually every society. There is in fact not much room left for manoeuvre by the reason of justice.

When the “license of distinctiveness” comes into conflict with the “principles of fairness,” Hampshire suggests that justice should take precedence over autonomy and attachment: no custom or convention should be allowed to violate the principles of fairness. What he actually proposes is to circumscribe cultural diversity within the limits of reason. Walzer thinks that the attractiveness of this proposal depends on “how limiting the limits are.” Unfortunately, he does not find any concrete and practical limits in Hampshire’s analogy of natural languages. And his conclusion is: “When we draw the critical line, there is nothing on the other side. Either the covering law covers everything—or better, only trivialities are reiterated: each people has its own folk dances—or everything is reiterated, and (partially) differentiated in the course of reiteration, including justice itself.”^{84Nation, pp. 524-526.}

D. Practical particularism

In his first attempt to explain the same and the other in morality, Walzer takes up the standpoint and the terminology of the universalists to show how particularity is at work within the framework of universalism. It is a commonly held opinion that morality consists of a core of minimal moral principles, which is adapted to different circumstances. The aim of Walzer’s argument is to downplay its circumstantial dependence and to take in the neglected dimension of human creativity. This formulation is not entirely satisfactory in at least two respects. To the readers, Walzer does not give an explicit explanation of universality and particularity in morality from his particularist viewpoint. This will inevitably leave a blank in his theory and the readers could only guess his position. To Walzer himself, he only discovers later that the popular minimalism could not account for the actual formation of morality. He says, “But both these descriptions [adaptation and Walzer’s elaboration] suggest mistakenly that the starting point for the development of morality is the same in every case. Men and women everywhere begin with some common idea or principle or set of ideas and principles, which they then work up in many different ways. They start thin, as it were, and thicken with age, as if in accordance with our deepest intuition about what it means to develop or mature.” “But,” he continues, “our intuition is wrong here. Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant….”^{85Moral Minimalism, p. 4.} The conception of morality as the ramifications of a minimal code is a speculative hypothesis without the support of historical evidence, and thus is incompatible with Walzer’s particularist approach. To make his argument more consistent, Walzer published an article titled Moral Minimalism in 1992.^{86Moral Minimalism is originally a paper presented in a conference and later published in W. R. Shea and A. Spadafora (eds.), From the Twilight of Probability. Ethics and Politics, Canton, MA, 1992, 3-14.} This paper deals with the issue of universality and particularity in the same practical way as the Wars and the Spheres. Walzer conceives the problem not as a theoretical one but as a practical, pressing issue. He perceives that there is currently a (nearly) universal demand for democracy and an even stronger struggle for cultural autonomy. “What are we to make of this?” he asks.^{87Thick, p. ix.} To answer this question, Walzer poses the issue as a moral experience arising from a real situation—the march in Prague.

1. A phenomenological analysis

1989 was an extraordinary year. People in the Eastern communist bloc suddenly began a courageous march to protest against their totalitarian governments. More surprisingly, the communist régimes fell one after the other. In that year, many Western television channels broadcast marches and protests almost everyday in the news programmes. Among the audience, Walzer was especially struck by the protest in Prague: people were marching onto the streets carrying signs such as “Truth” and “Justice.” “When I saw the picture,” Walzer recounts, “I knew immediately what the signs meant…. Not only that: I also recognized and acknowledged the values that the marchers were defending….” Walzer also assumes that everyone who saw the same picture would have the same feeling and response as he did. This experience puzzles Walzer, and he asks himself, “How could I penetrate so quickly and join so unreservedly in the language game or the power play of a distant demonstration?” He wonders, “The marchers shared a culture with which I was largely unfamiliar; they were responding to an experience I had never had. And yet, I could have walked comfortably in their midst. I could carry the same signs.”^{88Moral Minimalism, p. 1.} The march of Prague is undeniably a “universal moment.”^{89Thick, p. x.} How can Walzer explain this universal moment from his particularist viewpoint?

Walzer takes a phenomenological approach to this issue. The news footage of the march arouses resonance in almost everyone. This is caused not by the cracking down of the demonstration but by the signs carried by the protestors. They demand “Truth” and “Justice.” These words are simple moral terms. They are not demanding the political system like the one that we cherish and take pride in. Nor are they telling us stories of oppression. Yet, they are capable of creating such a strong sense of solidarity beyond the border. What kind of magical power do they possess? How do the moral terms function on such occasion? Most of us have some general knowledge of the wrongdoings of a communist régime: totalitarian system, corruption, manipulation, suppression, secret police, lying, labour camp, torture, etc. Though to what extent the government has abused the people we may not know. But when we see the Prague demonstrators marching with signs of “truth” and “justice,” we immediately understand what they demand: they ask for honest politicians; they demand an end to arbitrary arrests, partial law enforcement, and exclusive privileges for the party élite. All these we agree with them and we unreservedly endorse their demands.

Our endorsement is not merely cognitive but also imaginative. “We imaginatively join the march;” Walzer writes, “our endorsement is more vicarious than detached and speculative.” When Walzer saw the march in Prague, he was so sympathetic to their cause that he was drawn into the demonstration: he marched as one of the citizens of Prague protesting against injustice. Why is it so? Walzer gives the following explanation: “We too don’t want to be told lies; we too remember, or we have listened to stories about, tyranny and oppression.” These two factual statements, however, cannot adequately explain the intensity of personal and emotional involvement. I may sympathize with you but I am also fully occupied with my own responsibilities. After all, it is none of my business. Hence something more must have come into play here. Walzer discerns that he was projecting his past experiences of struggling against injustice into the march of Prague. He thought that the citizens of Prague were fighting for the same justice as the Americans had done. He says, “We give to ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ our own additional meanings; we allow them their full expressive range within our own culture.”^{90Moral Minimalism, pp. 8-9.} We see the signs of “truth” and “justice” in Prague, and we interpret the moral terms within our own milieu and according to our own experience. That is why we are so emotionally stirred, so eager to join the march. There are, in fact, two marches: one of the Czechs, and one of our own. But they appear to be one march in which the Czechs and we march side by side through the streets of Prague. The Czechs march for their cause, and we for our own. At a closer look, this single march again breaks down into two marches. Both parties join hands on special occasions, but for most of the time they march separately on their own.

2. Thick and thin now

Walzer conceptualizes the above phenomenological analysis by using the idea of thick and thin. He says, “Moral terms have minimal and maximal meanings; we can standardly give thin and thick accounts of them, and the two accounts are appropriate to different contexts, serve different purposes.”^{91Moral Minimalism, p. 2.} He suggests that the first access to morality is via moral language, which can be interpreted in a minimalist or a maximalist way. The minimalists seek out the thin account of a moral term and attempt to circumscribe as many as possible, if not all, men and women within their jurisdiction. Their ideal is to formulate a morality for the whole humanity. In contrast, the maximalists prefer a thick account. They are only interested in finding out what is the right thing for them to do. When the minimalists and the maximalists meet, they quarrel with each other. The first accuses the second of being relativist, and the second indicts the first for being absolutist. Walzer thinks that the contemporary debate on relativism and universalism can be resolved, or at least be put in a proper perspective, if we could grasp the fact that moral language allows for two poles of interpretation. We can abstract its general thin meaning, or we can dig into its culturally embedded thick meaning. Needless to say, there are still a number of choices in the middle. For simplicity’s sake, let us categorize them as thick and thin.

The march of Prague can serve both as an illustration and as a test case for Walzer’s proposal. First of all, this march is a thin moral case. Both the demand of the marchers and the response of the audience hinge on a thin interpretation of moral language. Whether they were conscious of it or not, the marchers couched their protest in the simple moral terms of “truth” and “justice.” These words are the basic components of a moral language which can be found almost in every society. They are essentially associated with some negative experience of manipulation or oppression. Nobody wants to be deceived and nobody wants to be repressed, not even liars and tyrants. We find deception and repression universally condemned. The words “truth” and “justice,” understood thinly, are the negation of these heinous policies.

But how truth and justice are to be implemented is constrained by the cultural and historical context. Since there are no pre-existent definitions of truth and justice, we have to elaborate the ideas creatively in response to our concrete situations. After many years of struggle for truth and justice, we have accumulated a body of events and meanings that are associated with these moral terms. Owing to the complexity of their formation, they allow for different interpretations. Indeed members of a society often disagree with each other, and may even quarrel fiercely over various nuances of the terms. Nevertheless, they comprehend each other’s argument for they are using the same moral language and interpreting the same shared understandings. In other words, they are arguing what “justice” should justly mean to them. This is what Walzer means by the thick meaning of a moral term. Thick meaning is culturally bounded, and outsiders naturally find it hard to penetrate. The marchers of Prague want to elicit the widest support both within and without the country, so they choose these thin moral words. If we confront them with the concrete question of what they want the society to be, several versions might come up. They would have different opinions about which parts of the system should be kept and which parts should be abolished, and to what extent changes should be made. These arguments will become a dividing force among them, and will be too subtle for outsiders to understand. Had the marchers couched their demand in thick moral language, the scale of the demonstration would be much smaller and the resonance much diminished.

Distributive justice is a maximalist morality thickly rooted in tradition. Though we can give a minimalist version of distributive justice like Rawls’s two principles of justice, any adequate account of the distributive process cannot escape moral maximization. Walzer characterizes moral maximalism by the following features: (1) “idiomatic in its language,” (2) “particularist in its cultural reference,” and (3) “circumstantial” in the two senses of “historically dependent and factually detailed.”^{92Thick, p. 21.} These are the basic characteristics of distributive justice. I cannot think of any practical description of distribution which could do without any one of them.

To take an example from Walzer, the ancient Greek distributive maxim requires that we ought “to give every man his due” (τὴν ὀφειλήν τινι ἀποδιδόναι).^{93Cf. Thick, pp. 21-22.} This apparent universal maxim is obviously an idiom. It is written in a specific language and in a peculiar style. Strangers to Greek culture would probably find it unintelligible. Even when it is translated, it is only a readable but incomprehensible phrase. The English reader can understand this maxim only because the English translation has become an English idiom. More importantly, we are not expected to extract meaning from the phrase alone. Standing on its own, the phrase can yield a wide range of meanings that result in conflicting statements. For instance, the word “man” can be a Greek male citizen, a male, a female, or a human being. If we take it as a male, then women are excluded. To understand a maxim properly, we have to interpret it within its own cultural context. In this case, it is the Greek culture, or more broadly, the European culture. Only in this perspective can we substitute our speculation with the social meaning of this maxim. Social meaning is manifestly circumstantial; it is both historically dependent and factually detailed. The Greek maxim epitomizes a highly hierarchical and sexist world in which there is no clear distinction between social status and moral virtue. Everyone is graded from top down. Generally, the higher one is in the social rank, the more due he or she should receive, and the lower, the less. When this maxim is incorporated into the Christianity-tinted Justinian’s Code, it is interpreted as an egalitarian distributive principle that “every man should be rewarded or punished after his desert.” Contrary to the maxim’s original intent, this new interpretation is subversive to any hierarchical régime. If office is to be distributed according to desert, what is the use of rank or blood? No wonder after Lord Polonius tells Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s play, that he will use the actors according to their desert, Hamlet breaks into exclamation: “God’s bodikins, man, much better; use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping!” And his advice to Polonius is: “Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.”^{94W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, II. ii. 561-565, ed. H. Jenkins, London, 1982.}

Walzer warns his readers that he is not talking about two moralities as if people were carrying two sets of standards in their heads—one to appeal for international support, and one for domestic affairs. “Rather,” he says, “minimalist meanings are embedded in the maximal morality, expressed in the same idiom, sharing the same (historical/cultural/religious/political) orientation. Minimalism is liberated from its embeddedness and appears independently, in varying degrees of thinness, only in the course of a personal or social crisis or a political confrontation….”^{95Moral Minimalism, p. 3.} In other words, there is, for each people, only one thick morality which reveals itself in different degrees of thinness according to different circumstances. Hence moral interpretation is circumstantial, and moral discourse should be evaluated on the basis of its appropriateness. As to the choice between a thick and a thin account, it all depends on our assessment of the situation and our purpose. Thus it can be said that relativism and universalism, if put in the perspective of thick and thin, could both be either right or wrong. The judgement depends largely on the moral subject that is being discussed. If the morality at stake deserves a thick account like distributive justice, then the relativists are on the right side. Otherwise, it may be the universalists who are in the right. It is just a pity that both universalists and relativists want to universalize their own viewpoint so as to apply it in every situation. The idea of thick and thin can resolve not only the seeming conflict between relativism and universalism, it can also explain satisfactorily the notions of particularity and universality in Walzer’s theory. It unites them into a coherent whole. Consequently, the universalist morality of war and the particularist distributive justice can be accommodated comfortably in the framework of thick and thin.