The Idea of Hyperpluralism and Pluralism in East Asia

Abstract

Citizens will disagree with one another on a variety of issues in a well-ordered liberal democracy. More often than not, these disagreements are motivated by citizens’ endorsement of a plurality of comprehensive doctrines that may conflict with one another. It will be recalled that the central problem for modern political theory, according to Rawls, is:Therefore, the entire project of political liberalism is motivated by the need to understand and accommodate pluralism. The kind of pluralism Rawls has in mind is reasonable in nature. Unlike pluralism as such, reasonable pluralism is the necessary outcome of human reason under burdens of judgment and enduring free institutions. From a political perspective, the kind of pluralism that is worth of being accommodated by a well-ordered liberal democracy must reflect the reasonable nature of its citizens and their comprehensive doctrines. As Chap. 3 has demonstrated, the domain of the political draws its “source materials” from the public conception of morality that provide values and commitments that are shared among reasonable citizens and justifiable without appealing to the traditionally ontological character of morality. These publicly moral values and commitments guide the transformation from pluralism as such to reasonable pluralism. For instance, comprehensive doctrines that endorse slavery and racism have no place in a well-ordered liberal democracy where citizens’ rational pursuits of self-interest subordinate to the willingness to abide by fair terms of social cooperation and recognize the burdens of judgment. But as Chap. 4 has made clear, disagreements run deep, even in the domain of the political. Although a case can be made for political liberalism’s asymmetrical treatment of the right and the good by distinguishing between foundational and justificatory disagreements, justificatory disagreements are still disagreements. In an ideal world, reasonable citizens are able to put away their differences so long as their disagreements are over how and which shared political values and commitments are prioritized, hence justificatory, rather than over how and which ethical values and commitments based on their comprehensive doctrines are to be preferred because they are true. But one might argue that the idea of reasonable pluralism is somewhat idealized. In the actual world, societies are populated by people who endorse a plurality of comprehensive doctrines, such as Roman Catholicism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, and Confucianism. As Alessandro Ferrara has pointed out, the difficulty is that some of the basic constitutional essentials—the idea of equality among all citizens, gender equality, the idea of the citizen as a self-authenticating source of valid claims, freedom of conscience, the consequent ban on apostasy, etc.—could become highly problematical at least for some of the more traditional citizens. This condition is what Ferrara calls “hyperpluralism,” which refers to “the presence on the ground of cultural differences that exceed the range of traditions Rawls sought to reconcile within Political Liberalism, and of comprehensive conceptions that are only partially reasonable, display an only partial acceptance of the burdens of judgment or make their adherents endorse only a subset of the constitutional essentials.” Is the idea of reasonable pluralism too ideal to be useful? How should political liberalism defend itself against the claim that disagreements in a non-ideal world are simply too radical to be addressed by the political liberal project? In this chapter, I will confront this third challenge against political liberalism by defending Ferrara’s recent proposal to accommodate hyperpluralism with what he calls multivariate polity by interpreting his strategy as a layered approach to broaden the scope of political liberalism and strengthen its capacity to deal with pluralism. Then, I will argue that although the idea of hyperpluralism is intended to capture the socio-political condition of mature liberal democracies, it is also applicable to the attitudes toward emerging liberal and democratic institutions in East Asia. Finally, in preparation for the next three chapters where I focus on the relationship between political Confucianism and liberal democracy in East Asia, I will briefly examine what pluralism means in an East Asian context and critically engage with two recent attempts to bridge political Confucianism with liberal democracy that fall short in taking pluralism seriously.