2014 Rockefeller Prize Winner: Four Strikes for Pluralist Liberalism (And Two Cheers for Classical Liberalism)

Abstract

Value Pluralism is the view, perhaps most famously associated with Isaiah Berlin, that at its most fundamental level, human value is irreducibly heterogeneous. On this account, rival conceptions of life’s meaning and value – both religious and secular – are thought to represent equally valid, though mutually incompatible, modes of genuine human flourishing. Such divergent values are said to be incommensurable – we cannot compare the worth of one to another, as they do not reduce to any common value, nor is there any common currency in terms of which their relative magnitudes can be expressed. Recently, several authors have turned to the theory of value pluralism in hopes that it might provide a fruitful basis upon which to defend a conception of liberal politics. Representative of this trend are three books that I’ll draw upon for purposes of this paper: George Crowder’s Liberalism and Value Pluralism (2002), William Galston’s Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (2002), and Galston’s The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (2004). Galston uses the phrase liberal pluralism to refer to the conception of liberalism drawn from value pluralism, while Crowder prefers pluralist liberalism; I shall use the latter formulation to refer to this view. The pluralist liberal argues from a particular metaphysical thesis – value pluralism – to a particular vision of politics – liberalism. Accordingly, his account will feature two separable, but interrelated, components: a distinctive justification of liberalism, and a conception of politics with distinctive content. I argue that the pluralist liberal’s case is hampered by four difficulties. Two of these difficulties challenge the justification of liberalism in terms of value pluralism, and two of them plague the particular understanding of liberalism to which the pluralist is led.