SOURCE: "Absolute Virtue a Delusion," in New York Herald Tribune Books, Vol. 8, No. 42, June 26, 1932, p. 3.

In the following review of Ethical Relativity, Benedict agrees with Westermarck's thesis that no universals for morality exist, and asserts that tolerance and discrimination are worthy substitutes.

No one in our generation has done more to take ethics out of the realm of fantasy than the venerable Professor Westermarck. With the publication, years ago, of his History of the Moral Ideas he put forward with full documentation his essential conclusion. It is a criticism of the theory of the still, small voice of conscience and its validity, the voice Kant said was the human claim on divinity, and which school after school of ethics has made the arbiter of absolute and cosmic Right. Westermarck, approaching the problem from the angle of his vast collections of anthropological contradictions, was not so sanguine. As he...