The foundations of morality have preoccupied philosophers since antiquity. Flickering insistently at the sidelines has been the threat of relativism, troubling in its suggestion that norms are the contingent constructions of men, mercurial through time and space, and each as real as the next. Daunted by this sceptical prospect, theorists have cast about for ways in which they might demonstrate that right and wrong are absolutes, true for ever and for everyone. One particularly fraught response has been to gird morality to the pristine depths of human nature, to claim that our knowledge of good and evil is innate. At this, the sceptic has merely laughed, asking how it could possibly be the case that one universal and immutable morality is etched into our souls, when moral beliefs and practices are palpably different at different times and places. Daniel Carey’s brilliant and scholarly book explores the ways in which the challenge of diversity, and the related debate about innateness, was treated by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. He thereby makes an innovative and important contribution to enlightenment histori- ography; resisting the trend to ‘totalise’ the movement, he reveals that alongside and interwoven with the well-known commitment ‘to establishing uniformity in mankind’, were a complex set of negoti- ations with the nagging fact of human multiplicity (2).