Pluralism and Liberal Politics

Robert Talisse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136635496
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In this book, Robert Talisse critically examines the moral and political implications of pluralism, the view that our best moral thinking is indeterminate and that moral conflict is an inescapable feature of the human condition. Through a careful engagement with the work of William James, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and their contemporary followers, Talisse distinguishes two broad types of moral pluralism: metaphysical and epistemic. After arguing that metaphysical pluralism does not offer a compelling account of value and thus cannot ground a viable conception of liberal politics, Talisse proposes and defends a distinctive variety of epistemic pluralism.

According to this view, certain value conflicts are at present undecidable rather than intrinsic. Consequently, epistemic pluralism countenances the possibility that further argumentation, enhanced reflection, or the acquisition of more information could yield rational resolutions to the kinds of value conflicts that metaphysical pluralists deem irresolvable as such. Talisse's epistemic pluralism hence prescribes a politics in which deep value conflicts are to be addressed by ongoing argumentation and free engagement among citizens; the epistemic pluralist thus sees liberal democracy is the proper political response to ongoing moral disagreement.

1Introduction

Pluralism and Political Theory

SEARCHING FOR PLURALISM

Halos and Smears

One of my main aims in this book is to subject several views that claim the name pluralism to philosophical criticism. Although I will eventually present a positive thesis about how we should understand value and liberalism, a sizeable portion of the book is devoted to the negative claim that we should decline to accept pluralism in its most distinctive varieties. I have come to learn in the course of developing my views on this matter that people tend to assume that in not embracing pluralism, one thereby commits to something pernicious, such as a view which values conformity, despises diversity, prizes orderliness, demands consensus, shuns difference, squelches discord, stifles creativity, and disables spontaneity. In the minds of many, pluralism is intrinsically tied to tolerance, open-mindedness, diversity, civility, and many other good things. The suggestion that we should resist pluralism, then, is taken as a call for rejecting tolerance, imposing homogeneity, and closing minds. The typical response to such a suggestion is understandably hostile and indignant. Arguments against pluralism are heard as arguments in favor of intolerance and conformism. Who would want to defend such things? Not I. Accordingly, I have learned to tread lightly. Before beginning in earnest, then, I must dispel the view that those who caution against adopting pluralism thereby adopt such pernicious views.

For simplicity's sake, let us say that those who associate the rejection of pluralism with the embracing of intolerance and conformism employ what we shall call the indignant inference. In the course of trying to tread lightly in discussions of pluralism, I have also learned that a certain commonsensical response to the indignant inference is doomed to fail. As I trust you have noticed, the indignant inference is plainly invalid. Even if one were to grant that pluralism is intrinsically tied to tolerance, open-mindedness, and the rest, the inference from the rejection of pluralism to the adoption of intolerance and conformism is a simple case of the fallacy of denying the antecedent. To explain, that pluralism entails that we must be tolerant—at present I am assuming for the sake of argument that it does have this entailment, not affirming that it does—does not imply that those who reject pluralism must also reject the idea that we must be tolerant. Consider an analogous example. Immanuel Kant famously argued that we are each bound to respect the dignity of every other person. Those who reject Kantian moral theory are not thereby committed to the rejection of the idea that we must respect the dignity of each person. Various forms of indirect utilitarianism hold precisely this, even though they uniformly reject Kantianism. Similarly, one can reject pluralism and yet still affirm the good of tolerance, open-mindedness, spontaneity, individuality, diversity, and all the rest.

The indignant inference is so obviously invalid that it is difficult to account for its prevalence. More importantly, I have discovered that swift demonstrations of the invalidity of the inference do little to defuse the sense that denying pluralism involves embracing something pernicious. Consequently, my strong suspicion is that those who associate the rejection of pluralism with intolerance and conformism invoke something more than the indignant inference. The rejection of pluralism is met with indignation, all right, but the thought, I suspect, is not so much that since pluralism has admirable entailments, those who reject it must also reject its entailments. Rather, the indignation derives from the thought that pluralism is a term that one should embrace. One should prize the label of pluralism; one should want to describe one's views as pluralistic. Consequently, it is thought that rejecting pluralism is a tactical error so egregious that only one who holds pernicious views could commit it.

To put the matter in a slightly different way, certain philosophical terms come with a built-in halo. One employs words like inclusion, participation, empowerment, liberation, and diversity only when describing the institutions, ideals, events, or policies one intends to praise and commend to others. Yet the force of such terms is not merely recommendatory; it is justificatory as well. For example, to succeed at attaching the description inclusive to a practice or institution is to be well on the way towards justifying it. Opponents of practices popularly characterized as, say, inclusive typically have the burden of showing how the practice in question is, indeed, not inclusive, or at least not properly so. It is difficult to find cases in which opponents of a purportedly inclusive practice assert that inclusion is undesirable or objectionable. This is because almost no one opposes inclusiveness, and nearly no one condemns diversity. Very few would inveigh against the ideals of empowerment and participation. Similarly, we use the word liberate in cases in which we want to convey the judgment that whatever has been released had been wrongly held. Accordingly, we speak of hostages being liberated, but when a known serial murderer is let off on a technicality, we say only that he has been released.

Such is the power of halo terms. They serve to describe how things stand in a way which embeds, often covertly, a positive moral judgment. When we disagree in such cases, we disagree over what should count as inclusive, what kind of diversity is desirable, what contributes to empowerment, what form participation should take, and who deserves to be imprisoned. As arguments about these matters are notoriously thorny, halo terms are handy instruments for evading controversy and building consensus or at least the appearance thereof.

We can also identify terms that perform a correlative service. For example, to describe a principle as narrow is often to express one's disapproval of the principle; it is to say that the principle is insufficiently broad. In many cases, to say that a rule is rigid is also to assert that is ought to be more flexible. To call a policy exclusionary is not merely to state the fact that the policy applies only to a sub-group within a broader whole; it is to assert that the policy excludes those who ought to be included. When we wish to speak of an institution or policy that properly applies only to some, we call it exclusive rather than exclusionary. Similarly, to say of an institution that it disadvantages some is not simply to describe its effects, it is to say that the institution apportions to some less than they deserve. The phenomenon is so common that I leave it to the reader to formulate further examples.

Call these smear terms. They serve to describe how things stand in a way which embeds a negative judgment. As with halo terms, when one succeeds in describing a policy, principle, event, or institution with smear terms, one has made significant progress in condemning it. No one would want to defend an exclusionary policy or a narrow principle. In defending a principle or policy that has been successfully described as narrow or exclusionary, one has the double burden of, first, defending the principle or policy and, second, showing that the smear term does not really apply to it. This is a tall order, especially in real-life dialectical contexts in which concision is at a premium and nuance is easily lost.

Consequently, it is easy to see why the deployment of halo and smear terms is so widespread in political discourse. They open to us a shortcut by which we can avoid substantive philosophical controversy. In fact, they allow us to avert attention away from the very fact of philosophical controversy. Again, to succeed in characterizing a certain military operation as an act of liberation is to implicitly deny that there is any philosophical controversy to be engaged. And once one has succeeded in characterizing an institution as exclusionary, one has already closed the moral argument concerning the desirability of such an institution. Who would want to take up the position that some act of liberation was a bad thing? Who would want to defend an exclusionary institution?

These are commonplace observations about how language sometimes works. Drawing on considerations of this kind, there has come into currency a cynical view according to which all disputes over policies, practices, norms, institutions, and such are really merely competitions among opposed parties for control over the vocabulary that will be used to describe the phenomena in question. From this there is derived a stronger and still more cynical view according to which all there is to inclusion, liberation, and disadvantage is the entrenched habit among a given population of using such terms. In other words, according to this stronger cynicism, a practice is inclusive just to the degree that some population uses that term to describe it as such, and a military action results in the liberation of a group of people only if a sufficiently numerous population says so.

One can concede the claim that much of our public discourse over politics and morals is driven by competition among opposed parties for control of the words we will use to talk about the political and moral issues we must confront collectively. This concession, however, does not entail the further claim that there is nothing more to discussion of this kind than linguistic jockeying. As has been noted, the rhetorical power of halo and smear terms is considerable, and one does well to keep this fact in mind when discussing politics and morals. But there is a significant philosophical distance from this mundane observation to a view that would enjoin us to say that the Civil Rights movement in America was simply a case of successful public relations. In fact, it seems to me that the stronger view identified above is self-referentially incoherent. It presents a description of language as mere power play but must exempt itself from that very description. The stronger cynical view of language presents itself as not merely a move in the struggle for rhetorical power but as stating a plain fact about language as such. But the very idea of such plain facts is precisely what is disallowed by the view. Thus the stronger cynical view is self-defeating.

It may seem that the discussion has traveled a good distance away from the topic of pluralism. So let us regroup. I raised the discussion of halo and smear terms as a way of explaining why the indignant inference seems so widespread, despite its obvious invalidity. To be clear, here is the explanation: Pluralism is a halo term par excellence. Accordingly, to successfully characterize a view as pluralistic is, in many philosophical circles, to have made considerable progress in justifying it. It is often, though surely not always, the case that the negation of a halo term is itself a smear term. Empowerment and disempowerment are halo and smear terms, respectively, as are tolerant and intolerant. Pluralism is often taken to have its negation in monism, and, consequently, monism is commonly understood to name a position that opposes diversity, toleration, and inclusion and prizes sameness, conformity, consensus, orthodoxy, and exclusion. If in opposing pluralism, one necessarily embraces monism, and if monism is the kind of view I just described, then the common response to the very idea that we should reject pluralism is understandable.

However, as I emphasized above, halo and smear terms are employed precisely for the purpose of encouraging agreement without having to engage in philosophical argumentation. In this way, one employs halo and smear terms with a view towards averting or disavowing philosophical controversy. Our purposes at present are obviously quite different. We seek to engage in philosophical controversy, not avoid it. Our concern is not with the question of whether pluralism is a snappy and rhetorically advantageous label to attach to a philosophical view that we may favor; rather, we are presently concerned to identify the philosophical view—or, as the case may be, the family of views—which pluralism is, and to see whether pluralism is correct. This is to say that we are interested here in assessing pluralism as a philosophical position. In order to do this, we must first discern what pluralism is.

Pluralism as a Philosophical Position

With the preliminaries now out of the way, let us take matters up from the beginning. The title of this book, Pluralism and Liberal Politics, is highly descriptive and wholly unimaginative. The pages that follow address precisely what the title suggests. Although I shall propose and defend a positive thesis later in the book, my central thesis for the first several chapters is negative and twofold: (1) the most distinctive versions of pluralism should not be adopted and (2) adopting the most distinctive versions of pluralism makes for bad liberal politics. As we have already noted, a lot hangs on what one takes pluralism to be.

Leaving the halo uses of the term to the side, philosophers employ the term pluralism to name a wide variety of philosophical theses. In fact, there are positions that are called pluralist within several different areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and logical theory. Although a lot of what I have to say about the term pluralism will apply to its uses in these other areas, my main focus is on pluralism as a view in moral and political philosophy.

Even given the stipulation that I will be concerned with pluralism in moral and political philosophy, there is still need for qualification. There is a use of the term pluralism among political scientists and sociologists that I should like to set aside. Central figures in political theory use the term pluralism to name a certain conception of democratic politics, one which sees democracy not as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the peoples’ vote” (Schumpeter 1962: 269), but rather as a constant and ongoing negotiation among multiple and overlapping interest groups, with competing groups exerting pressure on elected officials well beyond Election Day. The pluralist in this sense rejects the view that democracy is rule by elected elites, holding instead that democracy is rule by competing minorities (Dahl 1956: 133). Accordingly, pluralism in this sense is sometimes called interest group pluralism or polyarchy (Dahl 1956). Interest group pluralism aspires to be a descriptive thesis about the operations of real-world democracies and is for this reason not a philosophical doctrine. Hence I set it aside. Our concern is with pluralism understood as a philosophical thesis about morals and politics.

Still, even when considered from this limited perspective of moral and political philosophy, the range of theses associated with pluralism is quite broad. Philosophers use the term to describe views ranging from the trivial claim that people have different beliefs about what is of value and thus lead different kinds of life, to the more substantive claim that the highest values are incommensurable and consequently human life is unavoidably and irredeemably tragic. In between these two poles, there are several distinct philosophical views, which claim the name pluralism. Some of these are almost certainly true, others are intuitively appealing but philosophically controversial, and still others are suspicious.

It will come as no surprise that among the views, which claim the name pluralism, those which are almost certainly true also tend to be views that propose little by way of philosophical substance. To say, for example, that pluralism is the thesis that moral agents disagree about questions of value is to define the term in a way that makes pluralism obviously true but philosophically trivial. No one would deny that there is disagreement about value among moral agents. The slightly modified definition of pluralism as the thesis that there is disagreement over values among prima facie rational moral agents is more interesting philosophically, but, again, pluralism so understood is a thesis that many philosophers would find it difficult to deny. Prima facie rational moral agents might disagree over questions of value simply because their moral beliefs are based upon radically different (and divergent) sets of evidence. One might then propose the stronger view that pluralism is the thesis that disagreement over values is possible among ultima facie rational moral agents; this would mean that moral agents properly attending to all relevant and available considerations could yet disagree about questions of value. Moral disagreement, then, would not be always diagnosable as a failure of rationality or lack of knowledge on the part of at least one of the disputants. Pluralism is thus rendered a philosophically interesting thesis, a view that is surely worth talking about. A still more interesting thesis, which claims the name pluralism, holds that disagreement about values among ultima facie rational moral agents is not only possible but inevitable. Again, this kind of view is worth exploring. Some take a further step in this direction and hold the pluralism is the thesis that the inevitability of moral disagreement among ultima facie rational moral agents is due to the fact that some objective values are of such a nature as to be in conflict with other objective values. Others go further still to add that pluralism is the thesis that inevitable conflict among objective values entails that we all have a moral duty to be tolerant and to support a liberal political order.

Pluralism in any of these latter few senses is philosophically weighty, to say the least. I also think that the weighty varieties of pluralism are difficult to defend philosophically. But my point at present is not to launch into an argument against this or that variety of pluralism; it is rather to say that when it is cast as a philosophically interesting thesis, pluralism is philosophically controversial. Unsurprisingly, the more philosophically interesting pluralism becomes, the more philosophically controversial it is.

It should be emphasized that getting a clear view of pluralism as a philosophical position is not a matter of simple stipulation or arbitrary police work on behalf of terminological tidiness. The issue is not one merely of specifying how I shall understand the term for the purposes of this book. The task is itself philosophical. The objective is to make clear what kinds of views are plausibly considered pluralist. Of course, one is free to attach the label “pluralism” to whatever view one likes, just as one can concoct some special sense of the term empiricist and use it to describe the views of Plato. But to use the term empiricist in this way would be to abuse the term. One is certainly free to do that but to use the term in this way would ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Pluralism and Liberal Politics
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Pluralism and Political Theory
• 2 Two Metaphysical Pluralists: Berlin and James
• 3 Classical Pragmatism and Pluralism
• 4 From Pluralism to Politics: Four Neo-Berlinian Proposals
• 5 Value Pluralism as an Account of Value
• 6 Towards a New Pragmatist Political Theory
• 7 Can (Political) Liberals Take Their Own Side in an Argument?
• 8 Religion and Politics
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index