¹ See, e.g., Hector Tobar and Claudia Kolker, “Hate Crimes Against Latinos on Rise, Study Finds; Civil Rights: A report by National Group Details Litany of Assaults and Harassment Especially Against Immigrants. Police Abuse also Examined,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1999; Rob McDonald, “Bias Against Disabled on Rise in State; Report Highlights Recent Hate Crimes in Spokane,” The Spokesman-Review, June 25, 1999, p. B1; Michael Coit, “Campus Hate Crimes on Rise Countywide,” The Daily News of Los Angeles, May 5, 1999, p. N1; Marianne Costantinou, “Big Jump reported in Anti-Gay Violence; Advocacy Group finds More Assaults, Doubling of Murders,” San Francisco Examiner, April 6, 1999, p. A1; Rick Steelhammer, “Jim Crowe Jr. Alive and Well,” The Charleston Gazette, March 27, 1999, p. 1A; Seema Mehta, “Hate Crimes Reported on the Rise in O.C.; Prejudice: Authorities are Baffled by the Increase in 1998, Particularly Given the Expected Decrease in Los Angeles County,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1999, Metro, Pt. B, p. 1; Ron Csillag, “Anti-Semitic Incidents, Hate crimes on the Rise,” Canadian Jewish News, March 4, 1999; Martin A. Lee, “The World; Europe: With Times Tough, Facism Coming Back,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1997, p. M2. In addition to the above are the reports of numerous atrocities against ethnic Albanians, including rapes, torture, and murders, that are only now coming into the light from Kosovo.

² For a good introduction to cultural relativism and its pitfalls, see James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), chap. 2.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Plato, for example, saw the ideal city as one in which each citizen did that for which he was naturally suited and specially trained, including having specially trained philosophers rule the city because they understood the form of the good. Plato, Republic, bk. 5, p. 473c–d. Aristotle recognized that human beings were both rational and social animals that needed the company of others. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.1253a2. Consequently, in the Politics, he sees the state as the place to foster and complete the self-sufficient lives of its citizens (1.2.1252b32ff).

⁵ Conventionalists, like sociologist William Graham Sumner, hold that moral principles are valid only with respect to a given culture or society (Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, p. 17, note 2). Subjectivists, like David Hume and Charles L. Stevenson, argue that individual feelings determine the truth of a moral principle (ibid., pp. 35–40).

⁶ Ibid., pp. 28–29.

⁷ It is interesting to note that some of the scholarly debate over human rights abuses in the People’s Republic of China has concerned whether the Chinese have a different interpretation from the West of such fundamental questions as: Do people have an individual identity apart from their family or community? See Patrick Baert, “China Clings to Its View of Human Rights,” Agenee France Presse, December 8, 1998 (citing the official Chinese news agency Xinhau as saying that the Chinese people value collective human rights and family obligations over individual rights). But see Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “History and Debate Over Human Rights in China,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 1997, p. B4 (arguing that Chinese history records a greater attention to individual rights than is generally thought).

⁸ Alan Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

⁹ Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 13–14.

¹¹ Ibid., pp. 17–18.

¹² Ibid., p. 35.

¹³ Ibid., p. 39.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 40, 41–42.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 45–46.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 59–60.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 55–56.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 52.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 54.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 69–71.

²¹ Ibid., p. 73.

²² Ibid., pp. 81–82.

²³ Ibid., p. 83.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 84.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 85.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 94.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 95.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 98.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 101.

³¹ I want to pay particular note here to the fact that not all marriages involve commitments of fidelity between the spouses. In the bible, Abraham was allowed to take a second wife (Genesis 16:1–3). Mormons recognize polygamy. See Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of Latter-day Saints (New York: Knops, 1979), pp. 194– 205. Today, some individuals marry with the idea of having at least sexually open relationships. Willliam Macklin, “Menage a trois for 19 years, Three People have Shared a Union They Say is as Workable and Loving as Any Family. They’re Not the Only Ones,” Toronto Star, September 15, 1997, p. C8. So, it is important to determine what exactly is the marriage contract, whether a culturally acceptable view of marriage is coercive to one of the spouses as traditionally it was when women were subject to a double standard, and whether the state by making adultery criminal is interfering in a private relationship. Note, “Constitutional Barriers to Civil and Criminal Restrictions on Pre- and Extramarital Sex,” Harvard Law Review 104 (1991): 1660.

³² Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, pp. 111–12.

³³ Ibid., pp. 111–12.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 115.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 120–21.

³⁶ Nancy Beth Jackson, “Vital Signs: At Risk; From Gay Teen-Agers, A Cry for Help,” New York Times, 18 May 1999, p. F8, col. 5.

³⁷ See, e.g., Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue,” in Morality in Practice, ed. James P. Sterba (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997), pp. 553–58.

³⁸ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, p. 122.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 123.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 125.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 126.

⁴² Ibid., p. 128 citing Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 6.

⁴³ Plato’s idea is that each part of the self should do that for which it is best suited and nothing else. See Plato, Republic, bk. 4, p. 443d.

⁴⁴ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, p. 142.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 151.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 153.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 146–47.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 154–55.

⁵⁰ For a discussion of when state interference is appropriate see Vincent J. Samar, The Right to Privacy: Gays, Lesbians and the Constitution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 187–91.

⁵¹ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, pp. 155–56.

⁵² Ibid., p. 158.

⁵³ Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927).

⁵⁴ Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

⁵⁵ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, p. 169.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 173. The idea of supervenience is just this: “Properties of type A are supervenient on properties of type B if and only if two objects cannot differ with respect to their A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties.” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 778. In Gewirth’s case, A is the agent’s general valuation of her own purposes, just because B, they are her purposes. So no agent could completely disavow A, her purposes, without at the same time disavowing B, herself as the locus or source of those purposes. This does not mean that an agent could not change her mind about a particular purpose. In that case, she would be substituting one purpose for another and as such would still be purposive. It does mean that the agent cannot be purposive at all, without valuing her own dignity as the locus or source of those purposes. Only if the agent were for some reason to utterly hate herself, to wish, for example, that she never existed, would she be denying her own dignity. But even then, were she ever to act on that wish, even to intentionally engage it psychologically as a wish (where she actually had some control over the wish), she would be valuing herself insofar as she was valuing this wish as her wish. So, Gewirth is quite right that valuing one’s dignity is supervenient on valuing one’s purposes just because they are one’s purposes. It is not strictly deductive, since dignity and purposiveness are two different things. But it is a necessary supervenient insofar as you cannot have one without the other.

⁵⁷ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, pp. 169–70, note 8.

⁵⁸ In section 3 of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant shows that autonomy must be presupposed if one is going to have a moral system. Here Gewirth shows that the dignity of human beings must be presupposed if one is going to recognize value to their own purposive strivings. See Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), sec. 3.

⁵⁹ Ibid, p. 47, note 58. One sees a variation on Kant’s second version of the categorical imperative, “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”

⁶⁰ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, p. 177.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Ibid., p.182.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 186.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 189.

⁶⁵ Ibid., pp. 204–207, 208–209.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 199.

⁶⁷ Ibid., pp. 198–99.

⁶⁸ Ibid., pp. 202–203.

⁶⁹ Ibid., pp. 203–204.

⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 205–207.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 207.

⁷² Ibid., p. 210.

⁷³ Ibid.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 211.

⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 220–222.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 223.

⁷⁷ See Plato, Republic, bk. 4, p. 441e.

⁷⁸ Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment, p. 226.