Can a universal conception of humanity respect cultural diversity?

Human identity, morality, and social organization emerge through relational and developmental processes that take different forms across cultures. Any conception of humanity claiming broad relevance must therefore account for this diversity without treating it as deviation from a single cultural norm. Cross-cultural and historical comparison tests whether universal claims remain valid beyond Western and highly modernized societies[1].

Conceptions of personhood differ substantially. Many Western traditions emphasize individual autonomy, while African communitarian traditions often understand persons through community, reciprocity, and care[2]. Confucian traditions emphasize moral development through social roles and relational obligations[3], while Buddhist perspectives frequently interpret identity as a process without a permanent essence[4]. These traditions provide different responses to shared questions about agency, development, responsibility, and meaning.

Several non-Western traditions support the idea that identity is relational, interpretative, and dynamic rather than an unchanging substance. Such comparisons must remain modest. Traditions do not speak with one voice, and concepts translated as relationality, autonomy, harmony, or personhood may perform different roles in different languages and practices. Convergence should therefore be treated as a question for further inquiry rather than as proof that diverse traditions already contain the same anthropology. Responsible comparison requires attention to internal disagreement, historical change, unequal power in knowledge production, and the interpretations of people who inhabit the traditions concerned.

Relationality does not automatically produce equality. It can support reciprocity and solidarity, but it can also be institutionalized through hierarchical roles and one-sided dependence. Equal worth cannot therefore be derived from relationality alone. It must be explicitly grounded in shared vulnerability, developmental potential, mutual dependence, and the rejection of empirically indefensible rankings of humanity.

Because identities and moral orientations always develop within particular symbolic and institutional contexts, universality cannot mean imposing the substantive values of one tradition on everyone else. Defensible universality must be procedural and dialogical. It emerges through mutually corrective engagement among different traditions, with equality of participation and epistemic inclusion as necessary conditions.

Extreme historical circumstances reveal the fragility and ambivalence of human moral capacities. War, genocide, severe inequality, ecological disruption, and authoritarian rule can weaken empathy and redirect moral commitments toward violence and exclusion[5]. Yet disasters and crises can also intensify cooperation, care, solidarity, and altruism when formal institutions fail[6]. Human beings possess capacities for both moral growth and regression, depending partly on social, material, cultural, and institutional conditions.

Developmental potential therefore does not guarantee moral progress. It can be realized in constructive or destructive directions. Empathy and responsibility are not permanently secured characteristics but vulnerable capacities that institutions can strengthen or undermine. Institutions that limit concentrated power, provide security, and protect pluralism are consequently not merely political preferences; they are conditions that support human moral development.

Power must be treated as a constitutive element of anthropology. Conceptions of humanity have historically been used to legitimize social arrangements: rationalist models have supported individualistic and market-centred systems, biological accounts have justified hierarchy, and relational models can promote conformity, paternalistic care, or rigid social roles. Emphasizing development is especially dangerous when dominant institutions claim the authority to define what proper development should mean.

Autonomy depends on access to resources, education, security, recognition, and participation[7]. It is relational and structural because institutions determine whether individuals possess meaningful opportunities to interpret and shape their lives. Equal worth must therefore be accompanied by analysis of how institutions produce unequal dependencies and restrict developmental opportunities.

Institutions may facilitate development but may not command it. Legitimate development must be participatory and reflexive, with individuals acting as co-authors of norms rather than objects of institutional intervention. Freedom includes both protection from coercion and a genuine capacity for self-interpretation and life formation within supportive institutional conditions.

Scientific convergence must also be examined critically. Knowledge production is historically connected to geopolitical and cultural power, and Western institutions have long dominated definitions of rationality, normality, progress, and humanity. Interdisciplinarity cannot therefore consists merely of combining established academic disciplines. It must examine whose knowledge is included, who can participate in research, and which experiences remain marginalized.

Scientific knowledge remains essential because of its methodological controls and capacity for correction, but it is not the exclusive source of anthropological understanding. Lived experience, local knowledge, and cultural traditions can deepen concepts such as vulnerability, relationality, meaning, and intergenerational responsibility[8]. Universal validity consequently depends on continued intercultural and interdisciplinary correction and on an active effort to identify epistemic blind spots[9].

Empirical robustness requires testable implications. Several analytical concepts connect relational-processual anthropology to research and institutional evaluation[10]:

• Developable autonomy can be assessed through education, social security, political participation, and legal protection.

• Relational interdependence can be examined through care systems, labor relations, social cohesion, and networks of dependency.

• Institutional conditions of freedom include access to basic services, protection from arbitrary power, and democratic participation.

• Epistemic inclusiveness concerns representation, access to knowledge infrastructures, and opportunities to participate in public deliberation.

• Ecological limits connect human development to sustainability, health, and justice between generations.

These concepts do not reduce human complexity to isolated variables. They structure empirical comparison and allow discrepancies between theory and reality to prompt revision rather than being dismissed as exceptions.

The resulting conception of humanity is reflexive, integrative, and open to correction. Identity is dynamic, narrative, and multiple without being tied to one culturally preferred model of self. Embodiment and biological conditioning create probabilistic possibilities and limitations without determining outcomes or legitimizing hierarchy. Autonomy is a gradual, relational capacity that grows where institutions protect choice and self-interpretation while respecting anti-paternalistic limits.

Relationality includes structural interconnection and can generate both cooperation and unequal power. Moral development remains possible but institutionally fragile, particularly under conditions of insecurity, humiliation, exclusion, and concentrated power. Meaning develops through dialogue, culture, and intergenerational relationships, while universal principles are legitimate only when formed through inclusive and revisable procedures.

Human development is ultimately co-evolutionary: biological, cultural, technological, and ecological processes continuously influence one another[11]. These processes follow multiple historical trajectories and cannot establish a hierarchy of cultures or human beings. Cross-cultural diversity, historical crisis, power analysis, empirical testing, and epistemic criticism therefore strengthen the process-based framework by making it more realistic, pluralistic, and resistant to domination.

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(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

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[1] Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–253, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224; Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?”

[2] Ifeanyi A. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” in African Philosophy: An Introduction, 3rd ed., ed. Richard A. Wright (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 171–181; Thaddeus Metz, A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and beyond the Continent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198748960.001.0001.

[3] Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011); Confucius, Analects, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).

[4] Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016).

[5] Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.”

[6] John Drury, Chris Cocking, and Steve Reicher, “Everyone for Themselves? A Comparative Study of Crowd Solidarity among Emergency Survivors,” British Journal of Social Psychology 48, no. 3 (2009): 487–506, https://doi.org/10.1348/014466608X357893; John Drury, Chris Cocking, and Steve Reicher, “The Nature of Collective Resilience,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 27, no. 1 (2009): 66–95, https://doi.org/10.1177/028072700902700104.

[7] Sen, Development as Freedom; Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy.

[8] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Longino, Science as Social Knowledge.

[9] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014).

[10] Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?”; Lawlor, Tilling, and Davey Smith, “Triangulation in Aetiological Epidemiology.” Because the chapter does not itself report a comparative empirical study, consider changing “testing” in the title to “examination” or “assessment.”

[11] Laland, Odling-Smee, and Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome”; Boyd and Richerson, Not by Genes Alone; Fuentes et al., “AAPA Statement on Race and Racism.”