Absolute cultural relativism legitimates genocide, sexism, and abusive power relations. Ethical universalism need not be tied to European world views or imperial domination. He bases his ethics in a concern for human suffering and asserts that obligations or responsibilities transcend cultural differences and national identity. Again, the same contradictory claims. There are allegedly no universal values or modes of knowledge, yet the truth of this assertion is made for all cultures.
Postmodernism universalizes cultures into insularity.
It generalizes its own skepticism which is its dogmatic epistemological preoccupation. It instantiates the imperialism of relativism. It gives no philosophical or social place to political responsibility or ethical values. In this mode of discourse and inaction, we can only engage in involuted descriptions or in the articulating of ephemeral world pictures which are lost in themselves or at best captured in paralyzed discourses. Action in this mode is as valuable or as hopelessly tragic as inaction.