For more than a decade, large sections of the western world were increasingly shocked by the news coming from Hungary. Muslim migrants were the unwelcome other for Viktor Orbán in the summer of 2015 – and their ensuing vilification helped him win successive parliamentary elections. His campaign in 2026 demonized Volodymyr Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen in equal measure. The extreme nationalist values espoused by his government were repellent to the moderate conservatives who formed a majority in the European parliament. How did this come about, in a country that had been for so long the poster child of post-socialist transition? Did the ugly abuse of power by Fidesz reflect a coarsening of morals generally in Hungarian society? If kin, friends and neighbours continued to love and help each other as they had always done, how did one account for the rise of illiberalism and the visceral hatred of others in the public sphere?
Hungary is an extreme case, but moral foundations are also under scrutiny in many other countries. What is the moral dimension of liberal democracy? Few scholars are better qualified to provide answers than Steven Lukes, whose studies have straddled philosophy and historically informed qualitative social science for over six decades. In this short but magisterial book (which might have been titled The Universality of Morals), he also engages with the work of those who consider their science to be harder, even “natural”. The stakes are high. Are morals the defining feature of our species? How did they evolve? Can they be historicized? How (if at all) do they vary between cultures? Lukes sheds light on these and other familiar questions. But throughout the book (and most explicitly in its coda) he is also interested in the polarizations of the contemporary world and what can be done to mitigate them and avert new atrocities.
Much depends on how one defines “moral(s)” – an awkward question indeed, because – as Lukes shows – the semantics of key terms vary considerably even within and between the largest European languages. The moral may not qualify as a “pan-cultural natural kind” because it only becomes distinguishable from the merely conventional in large societies with formalized educational and legal institutions [218, n. 14]. Lukes proposes a hierarchy of moral seriousness comprising four levels. Many diverse cultural practices are best viewed as conventions, including fashions that may be quite ephemeral. Some (such as cuisines) are consolidated as enduring customs. When more normativity is added, we reach the layer of mores: correct observance of the rules really does matter. The fourth and highest level is that of values, ideas about (what is to count as) good and bad in the “central things of life”. Lukes is an optimistic liberal advocate of the view that cultural diversity in values narrows as one moves up this hierarchy [174–175].
How are morals to be investigated? Lukes devotes his first substantial chapter to the problem of demarcation. As a category, morality does not refer to a specific domain of life. It is pervasive, and no single discipline or subdiscipline can claim priority. The anthropologists of “everyday ethics” insist that all human activity is based on the critical reflection of individual agents: but even they need to specify when, for example, routine economic practices are clearly conforming to some moral code and when moral aspects are deactivated. It is futile to “debunk” or “unmask” the moral, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to do in their different ways. Each had has his own moral vantage point (Lukes is unsympathetic to both).
Perhaps science can offer answers. Cross-cultural psychologists have joined behavioural economists to investigate whether some cultures are more disposed than others to display generosity. The best-known application of game theory in these experiments is the “ultimatum game”. Results “in the field” with hunter-gatherer communities differ from those obtained in campus laboratories with middle-class students. The extent to which non-western societies have been exposed to modern money and markets accounts for some of the variation (and in the western cases, students of economics might differ from others in their year). But Lukes is unimpressed by anonymous experiments that presuppose a deep “inner self” with enduring dispositions and intuitions. Rather, the propensity to practise generosity or to value equality varies according to the information one has about the setting and background of the other players. A contextualized, comparativist, relational approach is called for.
The experiments of moral philosophers (e.g. Philippa Foot’s trolley scenario) and social psychologists are similarly flawed (though Darley and Batson’s “Good Samaritan Study” at Princeton turned up instructive detail pertaining to “situational” factors [98]). Lukes criticizes “armchair snares,” but also sociologists’ reliance on questionnaires for comparative analysis (as in the standardized World Values Survey). Controversies in the biological sciences receive more attention. Monkeys are not happy when they receive only meagre payoffs, but they are at best “proto-moral”. None of our close primate relatives have anything resembling the human penchant for equality. While Frans de Waal has argued for evolutionary continuities, Lukes is persuaded by the arguments of Michael Tomasello (and before him Lev Vygotsky): Homo sapiens, with its unique linguistic ability to realise shared intentionality, represents a qualitative leap in the co-evolution of genes and culture, enabling the “uniquely human sense of self–other equivalence” ([61], citing Tomasello).
To understand this uniquely human faculty, Lukes turns to more familiar philosophical traditions, and is consciously Eurocentric. He agrees with Robert Bellah that innovative possibilities for “theoretic culture” and universalist critical analysis were pioneered by the philosophers of the Axial Age across the entire Eurasian landmass. But decisive progress came in the European Enlightenment, where Lukes himself has always been most comfortable. David Hume is his exemplar for the position that the “springs of human action and behaviour” are basically the same everywhere. Johann Gottfried Herder, by contrast, emphasized the “horizon” that belonging to a particular culture imposes on our sensibility, thought and actions. The two positions can and must be reconciled (Lukes concedes that both Hume and Herder were in fact more nuanced; he cites recent scholarship on Herder’s concept of Humanität). Adam Smith’s theorization of imaginative sympathy with the other (today even Germans call this empathy, though Herder wrote of Einfühlung) gives us the best handle on our ethical capabilities. Lukes follows Amartya Sen and more specifically Samuel Fleischacker’s interpretations of Smithian “empathy of projection”. One should heed “the man within the breast” and strive for cosmopolitan, “open partiality”. Unfortunately, no “outside” perspective is possible: there can be no impartial spectator, because every other human being is trapped in their own particular social context.
The contributions of Immanuel Kant are played down because his categorical imperative privileges an inner sense of duty over social context. A century later, the work of Émile Durkheim is praised – not so much for his collectivism as his perception of the centrality of the individual and freedom of thought in conditions of modernity. (Hans Joas has theorized this “sacralization of the person” in connection with human rights, though in his case it remains entirely compatible with belief in a Christian God.) Max Weber identified distinct “value spheres” and assumed that contradictions were bound to arise between them. His “bleak” prognoses were borne out in the later history of the 20th century. Chapter 4 scrutinizes morals in the Holocaust (and more briefly in the context of other mass atrocities). Lukes engages critically with Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman. Before reaching easy verdicts about perpetrators (including Schreibtisch perpetrators) and victims, it is essential to examine all the contextual evidence that historians can provide (and to recall that Nazis such as Himmler and Höß believed sincerely that their cause was justified). Lukes is especially interested in those who offer help to strangers, often at great personal risk. Drawing on an essay by Norman Geras, he finds that helpers explained their altruistic actions towards Jews in terms of a universal humanitarian imperative, rather than (as argued by Richard Rorty) some more specific personal or communitarian justification. This evidence is reassuring for liberals.
In the course of all this, Lukes engages with many more well-known philosophers, often quoting them at length. Just when you think he has veered away from his subject, you realize that almost everything has a legitimate place in Lukes’s catholic approach to morals. Sometimes he adds a personal touch. The “realistic pluralism” of Isaiah Berlin is illustrated by recalling a personal interview – but his “irenic vision of liberalism” [135] is ultimately found wanting. The “original position” postulated by John Rawls in his theory of justice is unacceptably abstract; Rawls conceded this deficiency to Lukes during a postprandial walk soon after the work’s publication.
But can any of these philosophers or scientists help to rescue a liberal, humanist stance in the USA of Donald Trump, or the Italy of Giorgia Meloni (Lukes taught philosophy in Italy for many years), or the UK of politicians such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage? In a coda, Lukes has penetrating remarks on how party polarization in the USA has been deepened by the spread of disinformation on social media. The echo chambers of Big Tech inhibit dialogue and undermine tolerance, while swathes of scientific knowledge produced in universities have been discredited. Lukes applauds experiments with deliberative democracy at the level of the town hall meeting, and also in small states such as Iceland and Ireland, while acknowledging the inadequacy of such “mini-public” solutions in larger, more complex states.
Is it possible, contra Lukes, that the values of Trump voters in the Midwest really are deeply, intractably different from those of liberal New Yorkers (where Lukes has lived in recent decades)? The evolutionary scientist Jonathan Haidt has argued that liberals “lack the full range of moral tastes” [64]. Hence, they have trouble recognizing how conservative values such as national pride and traditional patriarchal gender roles might contribute to group selection. Liberals tend to attribute such values to ideologies in need of debunking, sustained only by the power of oligarchs in the media and elsewhere. But the more sophisticated liberal will want to dig deeper to account for values, including those judged repugnant. A few social scientists (Arlie Russell Hochschild is singled out by Lukes) have made a serious effort to build “empathy bridges”. But by and large the anthropologists of “everyday ethics” have not had much to say about reactionary populism. Their focus on reflective individuals leads them to neglect the moods and sensibilities of communities, let alone analyse their causes.
If “understanding other cultures” in remote locations of the Global South was a puzzle for Oxford philosophers in Lukes’s student days, today the challenge facing liberals is hermeneutic understanding of diverse world views within their own societies. Lukes states boldly: evaluation and attention to the values and self-presentation of non-liberal others are no substitute for explanatory models that probe causes and consequences of which actors may be entirely unaware. This is the hoary agenda of an older social science, from which many sociologists and anthropologists have been retreating in the last half-century. As Lukes points out, science itself is hardly a “natural kind” [45]. He is sympathetic to feminist “standpoint theory”. If impartiality and objectivity are unattainable, if social reality is always contextual and contingent, perhaps we should prefer the standpoints and insights of marginal but progressive groups that have the great virtue of “catalyzing counter-narratives” [173, quoting Alison Wylie]. But are the citizens of Louisiana and Kentucky studied by Hochschild, the people who gave Trump his majority, ready for the moral standpoint of New York feminists?
Lukes is committed to a broad-church humanist naturalism, “an ontology that is materialist but not physicalist” [46]. In his Conclusions, he refers briefly to “the grievances of the disadvantaged”. An additional chapter elaborating on objective material aspects (e.g. declining real wages for large sections of the population) would have been welcome. Lukes might have added the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to his 18th-century pantheon: Rousseau anticipated Smith’s theorization of “sympathy”, but unlike Smith, he attached high value to equality.
Lukes (who notes that the humanist relativism of Isaiah Berlin was shaped by his lifelong antipathy to communism) might also have delved deeper into Marx and Marxism. I am writing this review in Hungary, a country I have known well since the era of one-party rule under János Kádár. For liberals, Kádár is the antithesis of a moralische Instanz. He was handed the reins of power by the USSR during the revolution of 1956, and was complicit in the executions that followed its suppression. But for the next thirty years he ruled in such a way as to permit the great majority of the population to lead better lives. Kádár himself was born in poverty, and he lived modestly to the end of his life. He was hardly a righteous leader. But when Hungarian voters look at the leaders they have elected democratically since 1990, many of them find much to admire in János Kádár, from his personal puritanism to the economic pragmatism he embraced (reluctantly, given his own moral values) in order to bring prosperity to the masses. Nowadays, Budapest liberals deplore entrenched conservative values in their country. They conclude that their populist rednecks must be the deluded victims of Orbán’s propaganda. But this view from Budapest (like the equivalent view from New York) makes everything too simple. Account must be taken of the effects, material and immaterial, of decades of post-socialist marginalization, some of which actually intensified following admission to the EU.
The liberal assumption used to be that universal values of tolerance and Humanität would flourish in conditions of greater material equality. But inequality has greatly increased in the last half-century, both within and between states. Orbán lost in the elections of April 2026, but until capitalist political economy is transformed globally, populist nationalism will not go away. The liberal nightmare, only half uncovered by Lukes in his chapter on atrocities, is that human beings have recourse to universalist justifications for altruistic, solidary action only when the Holocaust is already upon them.
