Judith Shklar was uncomfortable grounding liberalism on a “summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive” since she believed that monistic impulses are fundamentally incompatible with an individual's freedom, and by extension a political community's freedom, to chose its own ends. She also insisted that positive goods make for necessarily precarious foundations since they are subject to endless contestation and violence. And yet, eager to prevail over relativity and unthinking acquiescence to culture and tradition (read: eager unequivocally to condemn Nazism and regimes that resemble it), Shklar wanted to identify a moral minimum that was incontrovertible. Instead of assuming a more conventional liberal posture and positing an abstract summum bonum like justice or equality, she reflected instead on human psychology and experience and identified a universal aversion to cruelty, a summum malum “which all of us know and would avoid if only we could.”