ABSTRACT
The notion of multiculturalism describes a vague and widespread doctrine grounded on a few interrelated principles. Firstly, that national, ethnic and other social groups tend to have a distinctive culture of their own. Secondly, that these cultures and subcultures include systems of values which cannot be ranked, for the reason that values cannot be grounded objectively. Thirdly, that endorsing multiculturalism would imply endorsing value relativism, and reciprocally. The relativistic-culturalist views are also at the origin of an important contemporary intellectual, philosophical, and sociological movement, namely communitarianism, which illustrates directly the relation between relativism and multiculturalism. A culturalist theory would provide an explanation of many of the observations more easily than a naturalistic one: people do not live in the same culture as Madame de Sevigne, hence the values are different. In other words, people are facing a dilemma: James Wilson's naturalistic theory fails to explain many observations, while culturalist theories provide truncated explanations.
