Contested Terrain: Pluralism and the Good

Abstract

Est, there can be no serious question that we live in a world marked by a plurality of moral perspectives. There is profound disagreement regarding the morality of euthanasia, abortion, embryo research, and the use of neocortical (or higher brain centers) oriented definitions of death. Even if we conceded that many (perhaps even most) individuals wish through political structures to realize such societal goals as liberty, equality, security, and prosperity, there is still a dramatic disagreement about how to rank these goals or integrate our concerns regarding them. Individuals and groups disagree regarding their vision of a good society and of good health care. There is a real pluralism with regard to many, if not most, important ethical and bioethical issues. For example, whether embryo research is viewed with moral horror or as a promising technique will depend on the moral community or vision within which the question is considered. Pluralism and relativism are indisputable sociocultural realities. Second, there appears to be no philosophical deliverance from much of the pluralism and relativism that constitutes our contemporary condition. We cannot identify a particular understanding of a hypothetical decisionmaker, an ideal observer, a rational decisionmaker, rational preferences, or the proper ranking of consequences such as liberty, equality, security, and prosperity without begging the fundamental question: How do we establish in general secular terms a particular moral viewpoint as generally morally canonical? To identify the correct moral sense (or ranking of values), we need already to have a guiding moral sense (or ranking of values). The serious question is thus not whether we should accept a circumstance stance of pronounced pluralism in which moral relativism appears triumphant, but whether any other choice can be defended in general secular moral terms. This is an intellectual question, for we must recognize that the religiously or politically passionate may out of frustration abandon the niceties of rational argument and resort to the use of coercive force, including the coercive force of a political majority. Our central cultural challenge is to establish in general secular terms a commonly acknowledgeable basis for moral constraints on our actions. The modem as opposed to the medieval moral assumption was that we can through rational argument secure a secular surrogate for the Christian God, and through rational argument alone justify the general lineaments of Western morality. If anything characterizes the post-modern period, it is the loss of this pretense. As Alasdair Maclntyre has observed, we are left with conflicting moral intuitions and conclusions severed from the particular moral communities and arguments that originally supported them. There is only one deliverance from nihilism, unconstrained relativism, and pluralism, when moral strangers (individuals who do not participate in a common moral vision) meet in a noncoercive society. If they cannot appeal to God or reason to provide a secular deliverance, then they must rely on what is implicit in the practice of secular ethics as the commitment to resolving moral controversies without a primary appeal to force: mutual respect in the process of negotiating points of collaboration. …