For a moral understanding on intercultural common values it is convenient to have a shared point of view with respect to the moral and the ethical.

In brief, the moral refers to those patterns of human behavior which are conditioned by free adopted social guidelines (customs, usages, norms and rules), given that the basic interest of individuals and groups is to adhere to these guidelines in order to further their existence and identity as social subjects. The ethical refers to the ability to reflect upon and argue over the moral guidelines of human
behavior, as well as to act having taken them into account.

The first concept stresses the voluntary nature of action; the second remember us that one must take responsibility for one´s actions, the justification being found in chosen relevant guidelines. Thus, it is possible to find people with different moral standards who nevertheless share the same ethical way of justifying their moral stance. Aside, we can conversely see other people behaving into a similar morality but in disagreement when it is coming time to discuss the principles and consequences of their acts. It is essential to admit that a pluralist society must understand itself in terms of this second perspective, it is to say, that of ethics of responsibility. Such an understanding can only be consolidated if it is achieved independently of deep personal morals, even though its very purpose is to ensure this in the midst of moral diversity.

Granted that the concern is to develop some intercultural ethics principles not any theoretical justification would be equally sustainable. For a start, we should probably leave aside the question of whether ethics is born out of our “cultural heritage” or, differently, consisting of an entire part of “human nature”. It would be better to assume that ethics derives from the predispositions of human mind (taking into account both biological and cultural elements) toward thinking and acting according to such a kind of social behavior. That allows us to avoid, in the one hand, the relativism attached to the first option, which impedes interculturality, and, in the other hand, the reductionism joined to the second option, which renders ethics meaningless.

A theoretical assumption consistent with the aims of interculturality could be that of ethical cognitivism. Its basic premises are: 1) The principles and laws of morality are not unknowable, just otherwise within the limits of human knowledge; 2) ethical laws and principles can be justified cognitively; 3) this justification depends on general faculties of human knowledge (including the representational and perceptual aspects of cognition in general), as well as the processes of acquiring and rebuilding information (i.e. criticism); 4) cognition and information processing are basically universal in nature; 5) therefore, ethical cognitivism is compatible with an universalist ethics, but at the same time is sensitive to the particularities of a culture. Philosophers belonging to this trend would be such as Socrates, Spinoza, Kant (interpreted as criticist of morals), Piaget, Kohlberg, Hare, Tugendhat, Morin, Changeux…

Excluded from this theoretical perspective are all the other conceptions of ethics. There are, however, two distinct kinds of these. 1) On the one hand stands ethical “naturalism” in a wide sense, which argues that ethical premises depend upon knowledge of the natural world. Here one should include ethical naturalism as such --which today forms part of sociobiology and the neurosciences--, embracing philosophers as Aristotle, Hobbes, D´Holbach, Spencer, B. Williams, Ph. Foot, Bunge,… In parallel must be also included emotivism, involving thinkers as Hume, Ayer, Stevenson, Gilligan, Singer,… 2) But there are also, by way of contrast, “non-naturalist” approaches, such as decisionism, which argue that ethical premises are independent of natural knowledge (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, as well as pragmatism, historicism, contemporary communitarianism…), or, as in the case of transcendentalism, that ethical premises are to be found, in one sense or another, outside the mind or human nature because they “transcend” experience. The extent of the latter is such that it includes at least three types of theoretical justification of ethics, the theological or mystical (Augustine, Aquinas, Maritain, Wittgenstein, Küng, Lévinas,…), the metaphysical (including authors as different as the transcendental Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Rawls, even Habermas, Apel,…), and the intuitionist one: Moore, Ross, Prichard, Scheler, Jonas,…

All the above-mentioned “non-cognitivist” conceptions of ethics are, for the reasons indicated, largely incompatible with a truly intercultural universalist ethics. Some emphasize the “content” of knowledge whilst others stress that which they believe to be “independent” of it. And they all assume that ethical principles and ideas are “not always” justifiable cognitively. On the other hand, ethical cognitivism starts from the notion that ideas and principles can always be justified according to the bases of knowledge. Thus, emphasis is placed on knowledge itself, as well as on its processes and methods (reflection and critical examination included within), an emphasis that is much more favourable to intercultural universalism.

However, cognitivism as it is understood here is not the same as the traditional rationalist conception of it. Human cognition consists of representational and abstract processes (including “reason”) as well as perceptual and symbolic ones, what in philosophy are generally known as, respectively, ”intellectual” and emotional or “sensitive” domains. In other words, what we are referring to here is a full, integrated cognition, not partial, which integrates the two kinds of mental processes. Therefore, it is consistent with the contributions of neurosciences and with what is known as “interconnectionist theory” of mind.

Finally, let me remind that morality, in spite of its solely concern for persons, does not only include human beings. It is managed by human also in favor of all other beings in the cosmos: animal and not animal, living beings or merely objects, existing in the present or in other times, past and future. Then, a description of morality could be in my view: a settlement of human actions and attitudes considered appropriated in relation to all beings to which we have a meaningful relationship. The discussion about what does it mean “appropriated”, for example good, right, honorable, correct, fair, useful, prudent, wise, even though as human, discloses just the starting point of ethics, it is to say, the start of common and philosophical reflection about morality.