John W. Campbell, Jr. had his own notions of Utopia: a world in which social science worked. He had no doubt that we would some day have scientific penology and sociology.
Campbell paid lip service to cultural relativism, but in fact, he was pretty sure what the Good Society would look like. The original Campbell blurb to this story was:
"No one man—no one race—no one culture—can think up all the ideas that might be possible. So, for the Philosophical Corps, no culture should be wholly lost . . ."
Which was all very well, but just as Indiana Jones's blatant pot-hunting horrifies genuine archaeologists, real anthropologists aren't likely to approve of the Philosophical Corps, which has no compunctions about changing cultures it doesn't like.
It's a real dilemma, of course. A society that really believes that everything is relative is a society that won't have any defenders. People don't get killed for a standard of living. If you can't tell why your culture is better than your enemy's, you won't last long.
The relativistic dilemma haunts Nomenklatura who own the Soviet Union. Of course, they don't want the average Soviet citizen to think that the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are in any way moral equals, which is why all the propaganda, and why World War II is to this day known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. For that matter, it's why the Red Army's name got changed to "Army of the Soviet Union."
If you don't think you're right, you have little to fight for. On the other hand, a society that can't admit it's wrong will soon turn to persecutions of another kind. It's a moot point which is worse—to fall into the hands of the True Believer or the cynical Nomenklatura. Neither one believes in the Rule of Law, and without law, neither republic nor empire is endurable.