The authors own impression is that she believes that outsiders can in principle deliver perfectly good indictments. She mentioned something about how moral isolationism forbids us to form any opinions on these matters. Its ground for doing so is that we don’t understand them. Our efforts to do so will be much damaged if we are really deprived of our opinions about other societies, because these provide the range of comparison, the spectrum of alternatives against which we set what we want to understand.

            Moral isolationism would lay down a general ban on moral reasoning. This is the programme of immoralism and it carries a distressing logical difficulty. The author mentioned also that, immoralists like Niewtzsche are actually just a rather specialized sect of moralist. They cannot afford to put moralizing out of business than smugglers can afford to abolish customer regulations. The power of moral judgement for Mary is in fact not a luxury not a perverse indulgence of the self-righteous. It is said to be a necessity.

            Real moral scepticism is said that can lead only to inaction. Isolating barriers simply cannot arise here. The author also said that if we accept something as a serious moral truth about one culture, we can’t refuse to apply it. However, to other cultures as well, wherever circumstance admit it. If we refuse to do this, we just are not taking the other culture seriously.

            The universal predicament has been obscured by the fact that anthropologists used to concentrate largely on very small and remote cultures, which did not seem to have this problem.  The author mentioned also that if there were really an isolating barrier our own culture could never have been formed. The moral isolationist’s picture of separate, unmixable cultures is quite unreal.