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you don't have universal principles to appeal to in any event. the claim "x is wrong" is the implicit conclusion to an argument. that argument can appeal to any number of registers of evidence organized according to the rules that shape the particular language game you're playing. the argument can be either compelling or not. it can and often will include some rhetoric of universality. that too will in the end be either compelling or not. the matter will be decided by the resonance of that argument with the patterns of binding social prohibitions within which the interlocutors work in their every day lives. that's how such things go.
the notion of universal principles is a device that one can appeal to. it's not logic itself. logic is a procedure for organizing information. its a (set of) tool(s).
there's an argument i read somewhere that if there really were universal principles there'd be no need for an ethics because everyone would recognize the validity of the prohibition and that would be that. because the principle would be, you know, universal. because that's what universal means, yes?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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