A thousand words cannot begin to state a thousand disagreements, or even to summarize the wealth of subtle arguments that provoked them, and so you will just have to read this engaging and audacious book for yourself.

William Talbott's theme is moral justification in general and that of universal human rights in particular. He emphatically rejects what he calls the Truth (or “top down”) Model of moral justification, which by leaving morality hostage to the existence of self-evident truths ends up encouraging skepticism and moral relativism. He is friendlier to inductivism (or a “bottom up”) model of justification, but finally rests his case on a version of moral equilibrium theory. This he attractively presents as a kind of ongoing dialectic between top-down and top-up approaches to morality. In this he recalls Plato's Socrates, although the resemblance entirely eludes him.

While his debt to John Rawls does not elude him, Talbott is highly dissatisfied with the latter's eventual descent into Rortyism. He offers a scathing critique of the “extreme metaphysical modesty” of “political liberalism”: “[N]othing in (Rawls's) account rules out the possibility that the most extremely intolerant … moral and political views could be true.” Talbott emphatically rejects such bloodless “excuse me” liberalism: “Probably the most implausible claim I have made in this book is the following. With no special equipment other than what is acquired through biological evolution and no special training other than the moral training most people receive in their culture, human beings have the ability to discern universal moral truths. We do this by being able to make reliable judgments about the rightness or wrongness of particular cases that are true universally—that is, true from any point of view” (p. 187).

Moderation in all things, including modesty. Talbott describes his own position as “epistemically modest” but “metaphysically ambitious.” Arguing forcefully that epistemic modesty need not imply relativism (nor metaphysical ambition “moral imperialism”), he follows the early Rawls (but in his own distinctive manner) in seeking to achieve a synthesis of a purified (or expurgated) Kant and an equally purified Mill. He argues that both nonconsequentialist and consequentialist moral thinking equally support his conclusions.

Talbott is bent on doing a lot with a little. While it might seem that the question of his title should read “Whether There Are Universal Human Rights”—first things first—he tries to show that to answer this question is also to answer that of which rights these are. Proclaiming his faith in “an ongoing historical-social process of moral discovery of universal moral principles” (p. 34), he declares that “even if we are not in a position to articulate the fundamental principles of morality … building on past successes, we can discern enough of their shape to understand why, in combination with what we know about human beings and human societies, they will require that certain basic human rights be universally respected” (p. 35). These prove to be the rights appropriate to autonomous beings (where autonomy is understood nonmetaphysically again in terms reminiscent of Rawls).

It takes Talbott a brisk nine pages to dispose of the objection that universalism in human rights amounts to “cultural imperialism,” and to skewer the cultural relativism underlying this objection as ultimately self-contradictory and evincing a lack of self-knowledge. Here, making ingenious use of the example of (a highly stylized) Bartolomé de Las Casas—slaveholder turned manumitter, priest, and tireless champion of the rights of the Indians—the author promotes a paradigm of moral education. His purpose is to establish that there is such a thing as a universal moral outlook into which human beings of all cultures are capable of emerging—and which as such refutes the notion that the norms of any culture are immune from rational criticism.

Talbott offers a lengthy discussion of patriarchalism, this in keeping with his view that the emancipation of women offers the crucial paradigm of moral progress through historical evolution. Here, however, he falls into preaching to the converted. Taking gender equality so completely for granted as he does, he simply dismisses or parodies older views to the contrary, as well as contemporary reservations about the decline of the family.

Skeptical readers will find Talbott's history of moral progress much too triumphalist, as well as too obviously partisan. Those familiar with New York Times editorials will find no surprises in his expansive enumeration of the basic human rights or in his moral positions generally. An allegedly cosmic moral standpoint that so resoundingly and without exception affirms the current opinions of the left wing of the Democratic Party cannot but evoke some suspicion.

Not surprisingly, then, Talbott displays a tin ear in matters of religion, which never figures in his argument except as an outworn example of top-down moral reasoning. Like the author himself, I am leery of moral coercion; otherwise I would sentence him to hard time rereading Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, to say nothing of Plato, his version of whom fails to rise to the level of a straw man.

Although Talbott strives to be up-to-date in canvassing debates within philosophy departments, his optimism about human reason indeed harkens back to Kant and Mill. As he seems largely impervious to criticisms of the emptiness and degradation of contemporary life, so does he to that self-destruction of modern rationalism that poses the biggest theoretical obstacle to his project. While he scorns Richard Rorty's moral emotivism and scores some effective points against it, he cannot really be said to meet the post-Nietzschean challenge to the hegemony of the liberal worldview.

This book deserves a wide readership. Whatever one's thousand disagreements with it (and yours will doubtless differ from mine), it is a fascinating exercise in ambitious liberal minimalism. By this I mean that it is not yet another lame attempt to promote a liberalism without universal rational foundations, but rather an effort to supply these as parsimoniously as possible. Whatever our doubts about the feasibility of this project, we are beholden to Talbott for undertaking it, and can all benefit from wrestling with the ingenuity with which he prosecutes it.