What is Pluralism?

Volker Kaul, Ingrid Salvatore

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000725797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Is pluralism inherent to the human condition? Does it have its origins in the diversity of cultures? Are disagreements among individuals the same as disagreements among societies?

Focusing on these critical questions essential to the understanding of modern societies, this book traces the origins of pluralism in contemporary political thought and presents new, original interpretations of the idea by contemporary philosophers. The chapters in the volume bring clarity into an ongoing fractious debate and reveal the underlying roots and fissures in our understanding of a dynamic and contested idea. Drawing on the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and other major political philosophers, they delve into the different strands of the concept, their possible real-world political outcomes, and popular misconceptions.

A key text, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of politics, political theory and philosophy, and social theory.

PART I
Epistemic pluralism and democracy

1
FROM PLURALISM TO LIBERALISM

The long way around

Robert B. Talisse

Ever since Isaiah Berlin popularized the doctrine, pluralists have tended to maintain that pluralism provides a compelling and direct justification of an especially attractive form of liberalism.¹ Their thought seems to be that if, as pluralism asserts, it is a conceptual truth that objective goods can collide and exclude each other, then no single value perspective could encompass all of the legitimate goods that a human life or institution could manifest. From this it is alleged to follow that political institutions are fundamentally disordered when they aspire to orient human lives towards some purported all-embracing ideal. Liberalism is then identified as that social order which rejects the imposition of such an orientation, recognizes the inescapability of value collision, and accommodates the resulting need for individuals to choose among objectively good, but nonetheless excluding, options. Hence, it is held that pluralism justifies liberalism.²

Call this the intuitive argument. It is admittedly intuitive; indeed, many find it positively attractive. To be sure, the argument as presented is but a sketch. Some might call it sketchy. Nonetheless, the prevailing thought among pluralists is that a properly nuanced version of the intuitive argument is almost surely correct.

Alas, the intuitive argument cannot succeed. There could be no entailment from pluralism to liberalism of the kind envisioned. In this chapter, I begin by explaining why this is so in the first section. Then, in the second section, I explore a less direct, and perhaps less intuitive, argument for liberal political commitments from pluralist premises. This indirect argument employs mediating epistemological and psychological claims that, in the end, do not supply an entailment from pluralism to liberalism but at best a strong reason for plural-ists to embrace liberalism. So, pluralists can indeed think their way into liberal political commitments, but the deliberative route is not immediate or deductive; they must take the long way around, as it were. In the concluding section, I tie up some loose threads concerning the different varieties of pluralism. I should affirm straightaway that the question of whether the resulting case for liberalism compares favorably with non-pluralist liberal arguments will not be examined here. I aim to offer an argument for abandoning the dominant strategy among pluralists for justifying liberalism, and a sketch of a more complicated strategy that might take its place.

The intuitive argument and why it must fail

To show why the intuitive argument cannot succeed, it is necessary to begin by diagnosing its intuitiveness, and this calls for a disambiguation among popular and philosophical senses of the term pluralism. My contention is that much of the appeal of the intuitive argument derives from the term itself.

Pluralism often functions in the vernacular as shorthand for an admirable family of commitments, including anti-dogmatism, open-mindedness, non-conformism, inclusiveness, and so on. To simplify, let’s say that pluralism in this popular sense is the positive commitment to diversity; it is not only the recognition but also the appreciation the multiplicity of values, projects, and ways of life to which people devote themselves. Notice that popular pluralism has a decidedly second-order flavor; it is not a view about what is good but rather the view that we should acknowledge, perhaps celebrate (or at least not begrudge), the diversity of views of the good. We are to recognize that the lives of monks, reformers, homemakers, poets, and actuaries can all manifest their distinctive values; moreover, we are to regard it as a good thing (or at least not a bad thing) that some live lives of solitary contemplation, others devote themselves to political activism, and still others to make art, raise families, and do business. To be sure, the actuary and the poet may disagree over many moral questions, from the meaning of life to tax policy. But pluralism in the popular sense does not work at this level of moral disagreement. Rather, popular pluralism takes itself to stand above the fray of everyday moral dispute, taking no stance on many of the issues over which people divide. It is rather a view that affirms the multiplicity of moral perspectives from which such disputes arise and counsels all to live and let live. Popular pluralism is therefore not only tolerant and open; it is in addition irenic and conciliatory. Hence its appeal.

Pluralism in this popular sense is attractive, but within the context of the intuitive argument, serious difficulties lurk. Concepts such as “inclusion,” “open-mindedness,” and “diversity” are notoriously ideal dependent: To be inclusive is to include everything that ought to be included, to appreciate diversity is to appreciate the multiplicity of things that should be appreciated, and to have an open-mind is to be open to those possibilities that are worthy of consideration. Although they are often appealed to as if they were strictly descriptive, the content of such concepts derives from the normative theory presupposed by the person employing them. Accordingly, liberal democrats and elitist oligarchs might both affirm the value of inclusiveness; they disagree about what ought to be included. The skeptical debunker and the astrologer both tout the virtue of open-mindedness; their dispute concerns the issue of what ought to be counted as evidence. Hence, the popular pluralist’s simple call for people to appreciate diversity, be inclusive, and retain an open mind is practically empty, and her call can do no reconciliatory work in the face of moral disagreement until she makes explicit her underlying value commitments. Consequently, if it is to avoid vacuity, popular pluralism must affirm a specific conception of diversity, inclusion, and open-mindedness and their value. But once the popular pluralist does that, her view becomes just one more debatable conception of what is of value, and popular pluralism forfeits its second-order character. Recall that this seemingly second-order and conciliatory feature was popular pluralism’s main selling point.

Popular pluralism is either vacuous or unstable; at best, it is a code word rather than a philosophical position. And in any case, when it functions as a code word, it invokes a series of moral and social commitments that are characteristic of liberal societies. Pluralism in the popular sense therefore is more an invocation of liberalism than an argument in its favor. No doubt part of the widespread appeal of the intuitive argument owes to the fact that it is often no more than an affirmation of liberal values cleverly disguised as a defense of them. If the intuitive argument is to be an argument at all, one needs to look beyond the popular sense of pluralism and towards pluralism as a philosophical thesis.

One way to get a grip on pluralism as a decidedly philosophical view is to examine its primary philosophical opposition. Pluralism is opposed to monism. Monism is the view that all valuable things are either instances of the one thing that is ultimately or intrinsically valuable or instruments towards attaining or producing instances or quantities of that one thing. To borrow Ronald Dworkin’s slogan, monism is the view that “value is one big thing” (2011: 1). Importantly, monism is not the claim that everyone should be the same or that there is but one way in which all should live. The monist need not embrace conformity, and she need not deny that there is rich diversity of good things; she asserts only that goodness in all of its instances is to be explained by reference to some one thing that is ultimately of value.

To see this, consider that a monist could claim that the toleration of moral difference is intrinsically good; similarly, a monist could hold that moral variety is itself that which is ultimately of value. I do not claim that either of these possible monist positions would be viable; I claim only that they are available in conceptual space and would be instances of monism that nonetheless reject conformity and homogeneity. But if one is looking for an actual monist view that can value human difference, consider John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill holds that utility is “the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions” (1978: 10) but then explains that as “progressive beings” (1978: 10) we produce the most utility when we each “[pursue] our own good in our own way” (1978: 12). According to Mill, then, there is the one ultimate value, but it can be realized in a variety of ways. Monism hence is not a one-size-fits-all conception of value; rather, it says that value is one-thing-that-comes-in-many-sizes.

For monism and pluralism to be opposing views, there must be some claim that one must assert that the other must deny. Now, the distinctive component of monism is the view that all goods are commensurable. On the simple utilitarian version, this means that for any two goods, it must be the case that one is better than the other, or else they are equally valuable.³ Of course, a utilitarian could hold that, with regard to certain pairs of values, informational and other limitations will make it impossible to discover the relative worth of the options. A monist could hold that certain value conflicts are undecidable by human agents, given their cognitive and other constraints. But even in cases of undecidability, monists must hold as a conceptual point that, among any two valuable things, either one is better than the other, or else they are equal in value. Commensurability follows from monism: If value is indeed one big thing, then differences among good things are never differences of kind. So, if there are differences among good things, they must be differences of degree. That’s the sine qua non of monism.

From this it is clear that pluralism is not simply the claim that many things are of value. Nor it is merely the popular pluralist claim that we should embrace value difference. Philosophical pluralism holds that goods are irreducibly many, that there are differences in kind among values, and that some goods are incommensurable with others. Pluralism, then, is the view that there could be two goods that are not equally valuable, when neither is better than the other. This is to say that incommensurablism is the sine qua non of pluralism.⁴

One direct implication of pluralism is that there could be conflicts among values that do not admit of a uniquely rational resolution. When goods are incommensurable, there is no answer concerning which one trumps, and no easy way to establish a third value by means of which to adjudicate the conflict; thus when one must choose between them, there is no uniquely rational moral perspective from which one could decide which is best. Pluralism holds that moral theory runs out, and we sometimes confront tragic choices. But it is worth repeating that, according to the pluralist, the inescapability of tragic choices is not due to contingent limitations of human cognition, agency, or other resources. We inevitably face tragic conflicts because of the structure of value. That is, according to the pluralist, there are goods that are intrinsically in conflict with other goods. Berlin held that it is in the “essence” of certain values to “collide” in this way (1990: 12); he affirmed that some values are in “perpetual rivalry” (2002: 216) and “clash irreconcilably” (2002: 42). Hence, the pluralist countenances value conflicts that are impossible to ameliorate, conflicts that cannot be resolved without violating objective goods and betraying objective obligations. This, Berlin claims, is a “necessary, not a contingent truth” (2002: 215) about value. Accordingly, “The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament” (2002: 43), and ours is a world of “irreparable [moral] loss” (1990: 12).⁵

We now have a clear view of what philosophical pluralism is. George Crowder summarizes it nicely as the view according to which there are objective values that are (1) universal, (2) plural, (3) incommensurable, and (4) in conflict with other objective values (2002: 45). For our present purposes, it is best to focus on the rejection of commensurabilism, which is the monist’s central contention. Put positively, then, pluralism must affirm (whereas monism must deny) that there are incommensurable goods.

Once clearly identified, it is not difficult to show that the intuitive argument cannot succeed. To be blunt: The intuitive argument fails because it attempts to derive a conclusion about what is of value from a thesis about value’s structure. As we have seen, pluralism is a thesis strictly about the structure of value; it is not clear how it could entail a conclusion regarding what political arrangement is to be valued. In fact, one suspects that pluralism entails no prescriptive content whatsoever; it is, one might say, prescriptively barren.⁶ But one need not argue for this broader thesis to defeat the intuitive argument. All that is necessary is to show that pluralism is consistent with anti-liberal political commitments. This suffices to defeat the supposed entailment from pluralism to liberalism.

It seems that someone could with consistency be both a pluralist and a tyrant. Imagine a tyrant who recognizes a plurality of objective incommensurable values but holds (incorrectly, we might add) that things such as power, control, domination, hegemony, conformity, stability, cruelty, and the humiliation of others are the values. He recognizes that there are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• What is pluralism? An introduction
• PART I Epistemic pluralism and democracy
• 1 From pluralism to liberalism: the long way around
• 2 Pluralism and deliberation
• 3 Social choice or collective decision-making: what is politics all about?
• 4 Liberalism, pluralism, and a third way
• PART II Political pluralism and reasonable consensus
• 5 Sideways at the entrance of the cave: a pluralist footnote to Plato
• 6 Pluralism and the possibility of a liberal political consensus
• 7 Modus vivendi liberalism, practice dependence and political legitimacy
• 8 A pluralist model of democracy
• 9 Rawls, religion, and the clash of civilizations
• PART III Cultures, religions, and politics
• 10 The practice of liberty
• 11 Sharing a conception of justice, sharing a conception of the good: liberalism as a pluralist theory vs. pluralism as a non-liberal theory
• 12 Pluralism and solidarity: non-authoritarian reasoning and non-fundamentalist attitude
• 13 Populism, liberalism and nationalism
• Index