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August 15, 2006
Modern Anglo-American moral and political theory has experienced the emergence of a value -pluralist movement which accepts that there is a plurality of equally final, equally reasonable goods and moral ends which are incompatible, incomparable, and incommensurable with one another. The modern idea of value pluralism as articulated by Isaiah Berlin restates in more analytical terms an idea that is clearly expressed in Max Weber's work, and earlier by Friedrich Nietzsche, who insisted upon the irreducible plurality of value spheres.
The problem of moral conflict and the fragmentation of moral value is at the centre of the work of contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams and John Rawls. For Berlin political philosophy arises in a world when value ends collide.
Value pluralism should not be confused with relativism---that in matters of morality there are no universals: ie., no available measure for the ranking of value and that there is no common measure nor summum bonum that is the good for all persons. Value pluralism holds that whilst there are some goods that are basic in the sense that they must form part of any reasonable human life there exists a wide range of a legitimate diversity of goods, purposes, and cultures.
Value pluralism is contrasted with all forms of monism in the sense of theories that reduce all values to either a common measure or attempt to create a comprehensive hierarchy. The clearest example of a monist theory is utilitarianism, which holds that utility, variously understood, is the only thing that is desirable for its own sake, all other goods being either subservient to utility or quantifiable in its terms.
The classical text for the modern Anglo-American value pluralist trend in political and moral philosophy is Isaiah Berlin's 'Two Concepts of Liberty'. In the concluding section of that essay --- entitled 'The One and the Many'---Berlin criticises:
....the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another.
According to Berlin this monist thinking is the basis for political authoritarianism. He shows this by highlighting the utopian link between monism and authoritarianism . Monism support the expectation that all genuine moral values must somehow fit together into a single harmonious system. From such a system, supposedly, we can in principle derive a single correct answer to any moral problem. This enables us to iron out all political conflicts and make possible a perfected society in which there will be universal agreement on a single way of life.
Berlin undercut monism with the idea of value pluralism, according to which basic human goods do not fit neatly together but are irreducibly multiple, frequently incompatible and incommensurable with one another. This is a world of moral conflict, disagreement and dilemma.That is pretty close to Weber's 'polytheism of values' such that one person's God is another person's devil. Is it not the case that we we live in a world of incommensurable values with the current war on terror?
Weber's understanding of value pluralism and disenchantment haunts modern political thought in that perfectionism, the assumption that it is good to live a coherent ethical life, that there is a substantive vision of such a life, and hold that both state and society should help people to achieve this---has been largely given up in secular liberal societies. In rejecting any final substantive understanding of the good, liberalism focuses on procedures that would allow free individuals pursue their versions of the good without interfering with the liberty of others. Thus western liberalism sidesteps the encounter with difference by relegating incommensurable values to the "private" realm.
Richard Madsen and Tracy B. Strong in the opening chapter of The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World state:
The United States contains the potentially divisive forces of ethical pluralism through a kind of liberal hegemony. Although many Americans are morally multilingual, drawing on a variety of ethical traditions to make major life decisions, their public lingua franca, as it were, is mainly based on some combination of classical and egalitarian liberalism. The major institutions of the United States are based on this liberal understanding and continuously reinforce it. Central to this institutional order are laws that separate church and state and that relegate many contentious ethical disagreements to the private realm, a secular public education system, and an occupational system that primarily rewards technical competence. Though constantly challenged, these arrangements have proven quite robust.
Liberal fundamentalists say that it is not possible, that "they"--the other--- have to become like "us" if they are to be fully modern, stable, and peaceful and live in a liberal democracy. These liberal fundamentalists tolerate only those forms of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity that relegate themselves to a private sphere, and they find a state based on Sharia--even if it was a fairly flexible form of Sharia-- intolerable in principle.
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