Value pluralism

Based on Wikipedia: Value pluralism

Here is a deeply uncomfortable truth: two people can make completely opposite moral choices, and both can be right.

Not "right for them" in some wishy-washy relativistic sense. Actually, genuinely, objectively right. This is the radical claim at the heart of value pluralism, and it challenges almost everything we instinctively believe about ethics.

The Nun and the Mother

Consider a woman choosing between becoming a nun and becoming a mother. These paths are fundamentally incompatible. The contemplative life of religious devotion, with its silence, celibacy, and withdrawal from worldly concerns, cannot be combined with the chaos, intimacy, and constant engagement of raising children. You must choose.

Now, here is the question that haunts moral philosophy: which choice is better?

Most of us instinctively believe there must be an answer. Maybe devotion to God ranks higher than devotion to family. Maybe the continuation of human life through children is more fundamental than spiritual practice. Maybe personal fulfillment, or social contribution, or some other measure provides the tiebreaker. Surely, if we think hard enough, we can figure out which life is objectively superior.

Value pluralism says no. There is no answer. Not because morality is subjective or relative, but because both choices genuinely embody real, objective goods that cannot be ranked against each other. The life of the nun and the life of the mother each achieve something genuinely valuable, and there exists no cosmic scale on which to weigh them.

The Difference from Relativism

This is not moral relativism, though it is easy to confuse the two.

Moral relativism claims that values are created by cultures or individuals, that nothing is truly right or wrong except as defined by some group or person. If your culture says human sacrifice is good, then for your culture, it is good. There are no objective moral facts, only preferences and social constructions.

Value pluralism rejects this entirely. It holds that values are real and objective. The goodness of compassion is not a matter of opinion. The wrongness of cruelty is not culturally constructed. These are facts about the moral universe, as real as mathematical truths.

The pluralist claim is different and stranger: multiple objective values exist, they genuinely conflict, and no meta-principle exists to resolve the conflict. Think of it like asking whether the number seven is greater than the color blue. The question is not merely difficult. It is incoherent. Seven and blue are both real things, but they cannot be compared along a single dimension.

Similarly, liberty and equality are both genuine goods. But when they conflict, as they often do, there is no higher principle that tells us which should win. Both are truly valuable. The conflict is real and sometimes tragic.

The Opposition: Moral Monism

To understand value pluralism, you need to understand what it opposes. Moral monism is the view that all values can ultimately be reduced to, or measured against, a single supreme value.

Utilitarianism is perhaps the most famous example. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill argued that all moral questions could be answered by a single principle: maximize happiness and minimize suffering. Every ethical dilemma, from whether to lie to whether to go to war, could theoretically be resolved by calculating which action produces the greatest good for the greatest number.

Kantian ethics offers a different monism. For Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative provides a single test for all moral action: act only according to principles you could will to be universal laws. Rights-based theories often work similarly, grounding everything in a single foundational principle like human dignity or autonomy.

The appeal of monism is obvious. It promises to solve moral dilemmas. It offers a procedure, a decision mechanism, a way to determine the right answer when values seem to conflict. The utilitarian can, in principle, calculate. The Kantian can, in principle, universalize. Either way, you get an answer.

Value pluralism denies that any such reduction works. The attempt to squeeze all values through a single metric inevitably distorts or destroys some of them. Happiness is not reducible to a single measurable quantity. Human goods are genuinely diverse and cannot all be expressed in the same currency.

Isaiah Berlin and the Birth of Modern Pluralism

The twentieth-century philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin is most responsible for bringing value pluralism to prominence. Born in Riga in 1909, Berlin witnessed the Russian Revolution as a child and spent his career at Oxford exploring the ideas that had shaped modern politics and society.

Berlin was haunted by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, he believed, grew partly from monist thinking. When you believe that one supreme value exists, whether racial purity, historical progress, or the classless society, you can justify any atrocity in its service. The deaths become regrettable but necessary steps toward the ultimate good.

Pluralism, for Berlin, was not merely a philosophical position but a safeguard against fanaticism. If multiple genuine goods exist that cannot be ranked, then no ideology can claim absolute authority. No cause justifies unlimited sacrifice. The recognition that we must sometimes choose between genuinely valuable but incompatible goods breeds humility and tolerance.

Yet Berlin himself declined credit for originating value pluralism. He pointed instead to the Victorian jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, who had written decades earlier about conflicts between "inconsistent forms of good" where reasonable people might disagree without either being simply wrong.

Stephen's words are worth quoting:

There are differences which can neither be left unsettled nor be settled without a struggle, and a real one, but in regard to which the struggle is rather between inconsistent forms of good than between good and evil. In cases of this sort no one need see an occasion for anything more than a good-tempered trial of strength and skill, except those narrow-minded fanatics whose minds are incapable of taking in more than one idea at a time.

Notice the key insight: the conflict is not between good and evil but between good and good. And notice the diagnosis of fanaticism: it comes from minds "incapable of taking in more than one idea at a time." The pluralist holds multiple ideas in tension.

William James and the Pragmatic Tradition

The American philosopher William James, influenced by Stephen, developed similar themes in his own distinctive way. In an 1891 lecture on "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," James argued that no single abstract principle could provide what he called "a scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale" for ranking all moral values.

James was a pragmatist, skeptical of grand theoretical systems and attentive to the messiness of actual experience. His pluralism grew from this temperament. Real moral life, he observed, was not like mathematics. You could not derive the right answer from first principles. You had to muddle through, weighing incommensurable considerations, making judgment calls that no algorithm could replicate.

This pragmatic strand of pluralism has continued to influence American thought. The social psychologist Philip Tetlock, known for his research on expert judgment and forecasting, identifies with value pluralism and has studied how people navigate conflicts between competing values in political reasoning.

Ancient Roots

While Berlin and James gave value pluralism its modern form, the underlying insight is ancient. Plato, in a dialogue called the Statesman, observed that although the aim may be "to promote not a part of virtue but the whole," the different parts of virtue "may be at war with one another."

Think about courage and prudence. Both are virtues. But courage sometimes demands that we take risks that prudence would counsel against. The courageous soldier charges into danger. The prudent person calculates odds and conserves resources. When should we be brave and when should we be careful? There is no formula. The virtues themselves conflict.

Kant, despite his reputation as a systematizer, acknowledged what he called "a conflict of duties." Even within his rigorous moral framework, situations arose where duties pulled in opposite directions, and something had to give.

The sociologist Max Weber captured this with his concept of "polytheism," meaning not literal belief in multiple gods but the recognition that multiple ultimate values compete for our allegiance, each with legitimate claims, none able to vanquish the others definitively.

Nietzsche's Radical Version

Friedrich Nietzsche pushed pluralism in a more radical direction. While Berlin and James accepted that genuine values exist objectively, Nietzsche questioned whether any values could be truly grounded. His famous project of the "revaluation of all values" suggested that individuals should create their own values rather than accepting inherited ones.

The person who succeeds in this self-creation becomes what Nietzsche called the Übermensch, sometimes translated as "overman" or "superman," meaning someone who transcends conventional morality to live by their own self-created code.

Is this still value pluralism? Scholars debate the question. Nietzsche seems to accept that different individuals might create genuinely valid but incompatible value systems. But his emphasis on creation rather than discovery, on will rather than reason, sets him apart from Berlin's more traditional pluralism. Where Berlin saw objective goods that tragically conflict, Nietzsche saw an opportunity for radical self-assertion.

The Critics Strike Back

Value pluralism has not gone unchallenged. Its critics argue that it either proves too much or too little, that it collapses into relativism despite its protestations, or that it provides no practical guidance for actual moral decisions.

The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, considered one of the most influential American legal scholars of the twentieth century, attacked pluralism from a liberal monist position. Dworkin sought to ground political liberalism in a single principle of equal concern and respect for all persons. He argued that pluralism could not adequately address what philosophers call the "equality of what?" debate, meaning questions about what exactly should be distributed equally in a just society.

If values are truly incommensurable, Dworkin worried, then we cannot make principled choices between them. We are left with arbitrary preferences dressed up as moral judgments. Better, he argued, to find a single master principle that can adjudicate conflicts.

Alan Brown pressed a different objection. He argued that Berlin simply ignored the obvious fact that values are commensurable after all. They can be compared by their varying contributions toward human flourishing or "the human good." Freedom, equality, creativity, and efficiency are not ends in themselves but are valued for their consequences, for what they contribute to good human lives. Once we recognize this, we have a common currency for comparison.

This objection has force. Much apparent incommensurability might dissolve if we specify carefully enough what we are really valuing and why. Perhaps the nun and the mother are both pursuing human flourishing, just in different forms, and perhaps we could in principle assess which form better achieves that deeper goal.

Charles Blattberg, who studied under Berlin himself, has criticized his teacher's pluralism on historical and interpretive grounds. Blattberg argues that Berlin misread the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, and that his political conclusions do not actually follow from his philosophical premises.

The deliberative democrat Robert Talisse has published several articles finding logical inconsistencies in the arguments of Berlin and his followers, including William Galston, who served as a policy advisor to President Bill Clinton and defended Berlinian pluralism in works like "Liberal Pluralism."

Living with Pluralism

What would it mean to actually live as a value pluralist?

First, it would mean accepting genuine tragedy as a permanent feature of moral life. Sometimes we must sacrifice one real good for another, and the loss is real. The mother who chose not to become a nun, or the nun who chose not to become a mother, has genuinely given up something valuable. This cannot be rationalized away by saying she made the "right" choice or the "better" choice. She made a choice between incommensurable goods, and something was lost.

Second, it would mean cultivating a certain kind of humility. If reasonable people can disagree about fundamental values without either being simply mistaken, then we should be slower to condemn those who weigh values differently than we do. The fanatic, recall, is the one "incapable of taking in more than one idea at a time."

Third, and perhaps most practically, it would mean rejecting the allure of simple solutions. Political ideologies that promise to resolve all conflicts by applying one supreme principle, whether liberty, equality, utility, or tradition, are not merely wrong but dangerous. They seduce us into thinking that hard choices are not really hard, that sacrifice can be avoided, that the apparent conflicts between values are illusions to be dispelled rather than tragedies to be navigated.

The pluralist recognizes that politics is tragic because values are plural. We cannot have everything. We cannot even want everything coherently, because the things worth wanting sometimes exclude each other. The best we can do is muddle through with wisdom, humility, and what Fitzjames Stephen called "goodwill to antagonists, and a determination to accept a fair defeat in good part and to make the best of it."

The Limits of Pluralism

Yet pluralism is not unlimited. It accepts that some things are simply wrong.

This distinguishes it sharply from relativism. The relativist cannot condemn anything that some culture somewhere has endorsed. If a society practices torture, the relativist can only say it is wrong "for us," not that it is wrong, period.

The pluralist has no such problem. While multiple genuine goods exist that cannot be ranked, not everything is a genuine good. Cruelty is not one value among others to be weighed against kindness. It is simply bad. The violation of vital human needs crosses a line that pluralism does not protect.

Where exactly this line falls is itself a difficult question. Berlin wrote of "vital human needs" without specifying them in detail. But the principle is clear: pluralism operates within limits set by basic human requirements. The conflict between the nun and the mother is a conflict between genuine goods. The conflict between the torturer and the humanitarian is not. That is simply a conflict between good and evil, and the pluralist takes sides.

Why It Matters

Value pluralism matters because it describes the world we actually live in.

We face genuine dilemmas that cannot be resolved by consulting a formula. Should we prioritize economic growth or environmental protection? Security or liberty? Tradition or progress? Community or individual autonomy? These are not pseudoconflicts to be dissolved by clearer thinking. They are real conflicts between real goods, and any choice we make involves real loss.

Recognizing this does not make the choices easier. If anything, it makes them harder by denying us the comfort of believing that one option is simply right. But it makes us wiser about what we are doing when we choose. We are not discovering a preexisting answer. We are making a decision in the face of genuine uncertainty about genuinely valuable but incompatible goods.

And perhaps that humility, that recognition of the tragic dimension of moral and political life, is itself valuable. It guards against the certainty that enables atrocity. It makes room for compromise and tolerance. It reminds us that those who disagree with us are not necessarily fools or villains but may simply be weighing genuine goods differently than we do.

In a world of confident ideologues, each convinced they have found the one true principle, value pluralism offers something different: not answers but wisdom about the limits of answers. Not peace but a certain kind of honorable struggle between "inconsistent forms of good." Not certainty but the recognition that certainty itself may be the most dangerous illusion of all.