ABSTRACT
A commitment to ‘thin universalism’ is a commitment to the possibility of universal principles. The thought is that there are at least some basic principles of political morality that apply everywhere, despite the wide variety of distinct accounts of the good life, of competing conceptions of just political organisation and of particular communities and cultures. Such universalism is ‘thin’ as a response to the challenge posed to the justification of universal principles by this moral and political pluralism. It is the recognition of this pluralism that leads Walzer away from what he refers to as a ‘thick’ coveringlaw universalism to his account of a thin reiterative universalism that accepts the inescapability of particular contexts (Chapter 1 of this volume). He understands the thickness of covering-law universalism to be dependent on a denial of pluralism, or at least on a denial that the existence of different communities, cultures and world views, each with their own values and understanding of morality, makes any significant difference to the justification of principles. Instead Walzer regards these particular contexts as constitutive of morality, value and identity; our ‘thick’ cultures and languages make us who we are and shape our self-understandings. Therefore, justification must take this basic pluralism seriously and any universal justification will exist in a possible ‘thin’ space of sympathetic overlap between ‘thick’ cultures. For Walzer, any universalism must accept the constraints imposed by pluralism and in doing so will find its justification both necessarily thin and also limited by, or tied to, the variety of thick particular moralities. As Walzer understands it, a thin universalism is never only thin, nor is it ever only universal, but always retains its links to thick and particular contexts each with its thick set of social understandings.1
