Abstract

Any view stressing the relevance of the engaged perspective for value realism must face the fact of diversity of moral views. There is significant intercultural diversity in people’s beliefs about values. Skeptics like Mackie argue that the diversity results from there being nothing for people to know, or at least nothing they can know. In this chapter I try to show that engaged value realism is compatible with universal, unrestricted validity of values. In 6.1 and 6.2 I discuss various possible ways of facing the intercultural diversity of value-convictions. Then I discuss in more detail the central question of whether the validity of some evaluative considerations should be restricted to cultural communities in some relativistic fashion (6.3 and 6.4). The chapter ends with some clarifications concerning universality and validity, as well as the nature of internal criticism (6.5 and 6.6).