Book Reviews: The Practice of Value: JOSEPH RAZ (with Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin & Bernard Williams), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2003

One route via which many are led to cultural relativism is its apparent connection to the common enough thought that our values are the products of specific social and historical conditions. The line of reasoning is that if values are socially contingent then they cannot have universal applicability, for how could such values apply outside of the context in which they first appeared? Thus, if one believes that values are socially contingent — and there is a lot of anthropological and historical material that would support such a thesis — then one must, on pain of irrationality, be a cultural relativist. In The Practice of Value, which is an edited transcript of his 2001 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, Joseph Raz denies any necessary connection between social contingency and relativism. The book, which consists of a very brief outline of Raz’s position, followed by insightful commentary from Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin and Bernard Williams, and finally a response to those comments from Raz himself, sees Raz developing a position he labels ‘Social Dependence without Relativism’. According to this view, one can acknowledge the social dependency of values without giving up on applying values beyond the cultural and historical milieux from which they have emerged. If Raz is correct, it would be of some considerable significance since, although it does not provide a refutation of the position, it would appear to undermine a great deal of the appeal of relativism.