How then, if at all, might the protagonists of one of these traditions hope to defeat the claims of any of its rivals? A necessary first step would be for them to come to understand what it is to think in the terms pre- scribed by that particular rival tradition, to learn how to think as if one were a convinced adherent of that rival tradition. To do this requires the exercise of a capacity for philosophical imagination that is often lacking. A second step is to identify, from the standpoint of the adherents of that rival tradition, its crucially important unresolved issues and unsolved problems - unresolved and unsolved by the standards of that tradition which now confront those adherents and to enquire how progress might be made in moving towards their resolution and solution. It is when, in spite of systematic enquiry, issues and problems that are of crucial impor- tance to some tradition remain unresolved and unsolved that a question arises about it, namely, just why it is that progress in this area is no longer being made. Is it perhaps because that tradition lacks the resources to ad- dress those issues and solve those problems and is unable to acquire them so long as it remains faithful to its own standard and presuppositions? Is it perhaps that constraints imposed by those standards and deriving from those presuppositions themselves prevent the formulation or reformula- tion of those issues and problems so that they can be adequately addressed and solved? And, if the answer to those two questions is ‘Yes’, is it perhaps the case that it is only from the standpoint of some rival tradition that this predicament can be understood and from the resources of that same rival tradition that the means of overcoming this predicament can be found?

When the adherents of a tradition are able through such acts of imagi- nation and questioning to interrogate some particular rival tradition, it is always possible that they may be able to conclude, indeed that they may be compelled to conclude, that it is only from the standpoint of their own tradition that the difficulties of that rival tradition can be adequately un- derstood and overcome. It is only if the central theses of their own tradi- tion are true and its arguments sound, that this rival tradition can be expected to encounter just those difficulties that it has encountered and that its lack of conceptual, normative, and other resources to deal with these difficulties can be explained. So it is possible for one such tradition to defeat another in respect of the adequacy of its claims to truth and to rational justification, even though there are no neutral standards available by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine which tradition is superior to which.

Yet, just because are no such neutral standards, the protagonists of a de feated tradition may not recognize, and may not be able to recognize, that such a defeat has occurred. They may well recognize that they confront problems of their own to which no fully satisfactory solution has as yet been advanced, but it may be that nothing compels them to go any further than this. They will still take themselves to have excellent reasons for re- jecting any invitation to adopt the standpoint of any other rival and in- compatible tradition, even in imagination, for if the basic principles that they now assert are true and rationally justified, as they take them to be, then those assertions advanced by adherents of rival traditions that are in- compatible with their own must be false and must lack rational justifica- tion. So they will continue - perhaps indefinitely - to defend their own positions and to proceed with their own enquiries, unable to recognize that those enquiries are in fact condemned to sterility and frustration.

It is of course important that for very, very long periods of time rival traditions of moral enquiry may coexist, as Thomistic Aristotelianism, Madhyamaka Buddhism, and modern European and North American utilitarianism have coexisted, without any one of them having had occa- sion to take the claims of its rivals seriously, let alone having conducted the kind of enquiry that might issue in one of these traditions suffering ra- tional defeat at the hands of another. And it is also true that such an en- quiry may not in fact lead to any definitive outcome, so that the issues dividing those rival traditions may remain undecided. Yet what matters most is that such issues can on occasion be decided, and this in a way that makes it evident that the claims of such rival traditions from the outset presuppose the falsity of relativism. As do I and as must any serious en- quirer.