Introduction

Abstract

Historically, the notion of evaluating culture according to objective, universal criteria was fairly uncontroversial, being implicit in elements of Platonic/Aristotelian and Enlightenment thought. A key method employed by these related schools was to step methodically outside of one’s community in order to ascertain ‘objective knowledge of what human beings are like — not knowledge of what Greeks or Frenchmen or Chinese are like, but of humanity as such’ — through enquiry into ‘“underlying structures”, or “culturally invariant factors”, or “biologically determined patterns”’ (Rorty 1991, 22). By identifying the nature and content of the human good, steps could be taken to promote human interests. The results of such enquiries were conceptions of well-being which laid the foundation for approaches which, in essence, evaluated culture.