Where pluralists and liberals part company

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 17-36

  Gray, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Ethics; Incommensurability; Liberalism; Modus vivendi; Pluralism

Indexed keywords

EID: 0001581965     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/096725598342172     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 170.
2. John Kekes is one of the few who has done so. See John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
3. In earlier writings of my own I developed an historicist argument for the near-universal legitimacy of liberal institutions which appealed to strong value-pluralism. See my book, Post-liberalism: Studies in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 322-6. I think now that this argument establishes a good deal less than I hoped for it.
4. See James Griffin, Wellbeing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), for a careful statement of weak pluralism about the human good. Michael Stocker's Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) should also be consulted.
5. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 15, sections 97, 99.
6. For an account of a universal minimum morality which deserves wider discussion, see Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1989).
7. The claim that incommensurability entails a breakdown in transitivity seems to be made by Joseph Raz in his book, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 325: The test of incommensurability is failure of transitivity'
8. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 327.
9. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 162.
10. I have commented on the anti-political character of Rawls's 'political' liberalism in my book, Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), ch. 3.
11. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, and Ethics in the Public Domain, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
12. H. L. A. Hart, 'Rawls on Liberty and its Priority', in N. Daniels (ed.) Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
13. I develop an early version of this argument in my book, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), ch. 9, pp. 141-6.
14. See my book, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Postscript.
15. I have argued for modus vivendi between communities in Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), chs 8 and 9.
16. Bernard Williams, Introduction to Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. xviii
17. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 61.