Value, Conflict, and Order

Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory

Edward Hall

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226718453
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Is the purpose of political philosophy to articulate the moral values that political regimes would realize in a virtually perfect world and show what that implies for the way we should behave toward one another? That model of political philosophy, driven by an effort to draw a picture of an ideal political society, is familiar from the approach of John Rawls and others. Or is political philosophy more useful if it takes the world as it is, acknowledging the existence of various morally non-ideal political realities, and asks how people can live together nonetheless?

The latter approach is advocated by "realist" thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. In Value, Conflict, and Order, Edward Hall builds on the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in order to establish a political realist's theory of politics for the twenty-first century. The realist approach, Hall argues, helps us make sense of the nature of moral and political conflict, the ethics of compromising with adversaries and opponents, and the character of political legitimacy. In an era when democratic political systems all over the world are riven by conflict over values and interests, Hall's conception is bracing and timely.

PART ONE

Isaiah Berlin

1

Pluralism, Relativism, and the Human Horizon

Value pluralism is widely regarded to be Isaiah Berlin’s “master idea.”1 However, working out precisely what Berlin’s value pluralism consists of and grasping the implications that it has for moral and political theory are far from straightforward because Berlin refrained from offering a detailed, systematic account of the position. In this chapter, I employ the question “Is value pluralism a species of moral relativism?” as a vehicle for working out the central elements of the view. This is not merely due to the intrinsic interest of working out whether Berlin is a relativist and, if he is, deciding whether this is a “bad thing.” Instead, I do so because this has two salutary results. First, examining how Berlin’s value pluralism is distinct from versions of moral relativism requires philosophical reconstruction of his scattered remarks and arguments and elucidates many significant features of his thought that are still underappreciated. Second, realists are often accused of endorsing a kind of moral relativism by their opponents.2 These critics allege that because realists deny the priority of morality to politics, they are unable to articulate any robust evaluative criteria that we can employ to assess the vagaries of real politics. The argument of this chapter shows that this line of criticism is inapt when directed at realists of a value pluralist stripe, provided they follow Berlin in endorsing some account of the minimum content of natural law.

I begin by examining the central theses of value pluralism. I then distinguish three different lines of argument that Berlin develops to support his claim that pluralism is not a species of relativism: his commitment to an empirically verifiable version of natural law, his claims about the “human horizon,” and his view that some outlooks rest on obvious empirical falsehoods. In analyzing these claims, I argue that Berlin’s invocation of the human horizon is extraneous to the issue at hand and that if pluralists want to reject relativism, they must focus on the minimum content of natural law and the basic needs and interests it highlights, rather than considerations about “normal” human behavior or mutual intelligibility. I also highlight some tensions in Berlin’s claim that value pluralism is compatible with a belief in the objectivity of values.

Pluralism

Under the influence of Kant and Collingwood, Berlin held that one of the central purposes of philosophy is to examine the concepts and categories that mediate our experience of the world (CC, 10–11). He agrees with Kant that some of these concepts and categories are “permanent and unalterable” but holds that others, most notably the moral and aesthetic, vary a great deal across time and place. Berlin insists that thinking about moral and political concepts in this way—unearthing the implicit presuppositions of people’s ways of making sense of the world and uncovering shifts in these concepts and categories—is one of the essential tasks of moral and political philosophy.

This is worth highlighting because Berlin’s work is chiefly concerned with uncovering and examining the most basic presuppositions of the central tradition of Western political theory. As is well known, he claims that these presuppositions have not only distorted our experience in philosophically significant ways but also had harrowing political effects. Berlin diagnoses the central tradition of Western political and moral thought as monistic. Monism approaches ethics and politics rationalistically, holding that the domain of value is, at heart, a “harmonious whole” (PIRA, 54). What is meant by this is not immediately apparent, but the basic idea is that although we often talk about different values—freedom, equality, justice, kindness, efficiency, beauty, and so on—monists hold that these can, in the end, be either reduced to or regulated by a supreme value (e.g., utility) or principle of morality (e.g., the categorical imperative), or combined and realized without remainder in concrete circumstances. In this sense, monism holds that all the different values that constitute “the all-embracing idea of human society” can coexist (PIRA, 54). By thinking in this way, Berlin claims, monists embrace a “jigsaw puzzle” view, according to which, since it is possible for all genuine values to fit with another, the central task of ethics and politics is merely “to arrange the fragments . . . in the unique way in which they compose the total pattern that is the answer to all our wants and perplexities” (L, 292). On this view, then, conflict and tragedy are not “intrinsic to human life” (CTH, 196).

In theoretical terms, monism thus promises the possibility of rational inquiry uncovering a “total answer” of how human beings should live that solves “all questions, both of theory and of practice, once and for all” (L, 292). That is, monism offers the possibility of a description of “an ideal universe—a Utopia, if you like—which is simply that described by all true answers to all serious questions,” and, saliently, even if we cannot hope to realize this utopia for practical reasons, it can function as an “ideal in terms of which we can measure off our own present imperfections” (RR, 22; see also AC, 68, and CTH, 6).

Rather than seeing value as “one big thing” (RT, 22), Berlin endorses a position now referred to as “value pluralism.” The principal claim of value pluralism is reasonably straightforward: that there are many different values of intrinsic worth. Thus, different values are not merely means toward, or subservient to, more fundamental values or principles in the way that monist views suggest but must be understood in their own terms. Moreover, Berlin continually stresses that values are potentially incompatible and can conflict. Different values often cannot be achieved in concert, even in ideal circumstances, as the pursuit of some values conflicts with the pursuit of others. As Berlin puts it, “neither political equality nor efficient organisation nor social justice is compatible with more than a modicum of individual liberty,” and “justice and generosity, public and private loyalties, the demands of genius and the claims of society can conflict violently with each other” (L, 213). This also suggests, in a way that is less immediately clear, that we can recognize different kinds of value (or, if one prefers, spheres of value), such as the moral, economic, and aesthetic, and that no one subset of values, such as the moral, necessarily trumps other kinds.

Developing these points, followers of Berlin hold that the values and virtues realized in different “styles of life,” such as those associated with a life of action and a life of contemplation, are incompatible if “they cannot normally be exemplified in the same life.”3 Consequently, when an individual or group pursues a course of action in order to achieve some end, this often requires them to forgo other ends that a different course of action would realize. The implication is clear: “not all good things are compatible, still less the ideals of mankind” (L, 213).

Significantly, Berlin does not merely hold that values can conflict but also stresses that they are often incommensurable. Thus, conflicts between values cannot always be resolved by an uncontroversial rational standard, such as the conclusions of a particular ethical theory or decision procedure, or by agreement on a supreme principle or highest value, such as utility or rights. Put another way, there is no “infallible measuring rod” or “single universal overarching standard” (AC, 69–70) that we can appeal to in order to resolve value conflict in every case.4 Thus, Berlinian pluralists deny that any particular value is overriding in the face of value conflict.5

For Berlin, and for those who endorse his claims about the plural nature of value, including Hampshire and Williams, there are many intrinsically valuable ends of human existence and styles of life that individuals can rationally pursue, but these often conflict with each other, with the result that there is no best life or set of ends on which we all have reason to settle.

The plurality and conflict of which Berlin speaks occurs at three levels.6 First, at the level of goods and values. Berlin famously described liberty as having both negative (“How many doors are open?”) and positive (“Who is master?”) elements that do not cohere but are each ultimate values in their own right (L, 212). Hence, Berlinians insist that values are often “internally complex and can be inherently pluralistic, containing conflicting elements.”7

Second, pluralism and conflict occur within what Berlin at one point calls a network of values, which he glosses as a “coherent vision of life” involving “patterns of behaviour and feeling and disposition and ideals . . . entire structures, entire ways of life, in which the values or ends or motives are interconnected in particular ways” (A, 207–8).8 (I prefer the term outlook to the more cumbersome network of values and will employ it hereafter.) The point is that every outlook orders different values and ends in a particular way, but because values are multiple, potentially incompatible, and incommensurable, such ordering inevitably constrains the claims of some values in the pursuit of practical congruity. Consider liberalism with its commitment to freedom and equality (and many other values besides). If freedom and equality are intrinsically valuable, potentially conflicting, and incommensurable, then liberals must find a way of living with the tension between the intrinsic claims of these values, rather than imagining that such a tension does not exist or revising their understanding of these values in order to fool themselves into thinking that it does not exist.9

Third, conflict and incommensurability also apply between different outlooks. Outlooks differ according to the goods and values they promote or abhor, as well as by how they rank values. Consequently, distinct outlooks may pursue incommensurably valuable bundles of goods. In his work on Herder and Vico, Berlin stresses the realization that “more than one equally authentic, equally developed culture was possible, and that such cultures could be widely heterogeneous, could, indeed, be incompatible and incommensurable.” This in turn entails a “genuine pluralism, and an explicit refutation of the belief that man everywhere, at all times, possessed an identical nature which, in its quest for self-fulfillment, sought after the same ends” (TCE, 164; for further statements, see TCE, 168, 176–77, and AC, 12). Subsequently, Berlin claims that the concept of an ideal state is incoherent: because realizing some values necessarily involves the forgoing or sacrificing of others, “the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera” (L, 213). This is one of the reasons why, for Berlin, tragedy is intrinsic to human life (CTH, 203). Significantly, this suggests that it is futile to grade different outlooks according to a transhistorical or perennial vision of how different values must coalesce (CTH, 68). Just as there is no one best life for man, there is no ideal form of society; in terms of value, each cultural, political, moral, and religious way of life has its own distinctive advantages and costs.

This points to a further element of Berlin’s thought that readers and critics alike tend to overlook, or at least downplay, that I refer to as the mutual dependence condition. The basic idea is that historical and philosophical reflection reveals that the valuable elements of different outlooks cannot be freely combined and that it is often the case that the different constitutive features of an outlook are inexorably intertwined. As a crude example, we cannot isolate a favorable attitude toward samurai bravery from unfavorable attitudes toward tsujigiri, strict honor codes, and the hierarchical social relations that underpinned the samurai way of life.

According to the mutual dependence condition, the objectionable features of an outlook may be indispensable presuppositions of those features we praise. Pluralists who share Berlin’s historical sensibility therefore stress that value is often not independent of disvalue, that virtue often coexists with vice, and that in many outlooks the bad may be a condition of the good. Consequently, they claim that life is tragic not only because values often conflict and are incommensurable, with the result that we cannot hope to achieve all good things at once, but also because justice, virtue, and value may be dependent on injustice, vice, and disvalue.10

As Stuart Hampshire notes, this historically informed style of thinking understands that such outlooks—which Hampshire calls ways of life—are “totalities of customs, attitudes, beliefs, institutions, which are interconnected and mutually dependent in patterns that are sometimes evident and sometimes subtle and concealed. One cannot easily abstract the activity or practice from its setting in a complete way of life, and make one-to-one comparisons between activities and practices which are part of different ways of life” (MC, 6). To this end, Hampshire endorses what he refers to as the “no-shopping principle”: the claim that we cannot “pick and choose” aspects or elements of one outlook and combine them with aspects or elements of another outlook because the coherence of outlooks “comes from their distinct histories” (MC, 148). Value pluralists who endorse this consequently hold that trying to amalgamate the admirable features of different outlooks is an error because it is likely to be the case that they cannot, as a matter of empirical realism, be combined while retaining their vitality (AC, 124).11 In some cases, the very attempt to do so can have terrifying political results.12

This way of thinking about value therefore repudiates a (pseudo-Hegelian) view of historical progress that holds that “nothing that is of permanent value need be lost irretrievably, for in some form it is preserved in the next higher stage” (AC, 123). Berlin insists that when some historical changes occur, “gains in one respect necessarily entail losses in another,” and that, as a result, “some valuable forms of experience are doomed to disappearance, not always to be replaced by something necessarily more valuable than themselves” (AC, 123–24). Consider the distinction Berlin makes in his essay on Machiavelli between pagan morality and Christian morality. One does not have to be a full-blooded Nietzschean to believe that while the move from the former to the latter brings with it significant gains and benefits, it also imposes equally real losses to the values of pagan morality—“courage, vigour, fortitude and adversity, public achievement, order, discipline” (AC, 45).

Reasons for Pluralism

The last section cleared conceptual ground in order to outline the central features of the value pluralist position. In this section, I ask why value pluralists maintain we ought to endorse the above claims about the normative domain.

Two different kinds of considerations that Berlin isolates are relevant in this examination: historical and philosophical. Berlin emphasiz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• part one   Isaiah Berlin
• part two   Stuart Hampshire
• part three   Bernard Williams
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index