Two concepts of liberal pluralism

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 121-146

  Crowder, George ^a  

^a FLINDERS UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Autonomy; Diversity; Exit; Liberalism; Toleration; Value pluralism; William Galston

Indexed keywords

EID: 34147157958     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591706297642     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Chandran Kukathas, "Are There Any Cultural Rights?," Political Theory 20 (1992): 105-39;
2. Will Kymlicka, "The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas," Political Theory 20 (1992): 140-46.
3. See also Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
4. idem, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
5. idem, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 8;
6. and Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
7. Rawls's "political" approach is set out in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University, 1993)
8. and notably supported by Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 6,
9. and by Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
10. idem, Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard, 2006).
11. "Comprehensive" liberals include Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship,
12. and Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986);
13. idem, "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective," in Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
14. See, in particular, Isaiah Berlin, "Introduction," and "Two Essays on Liberty," in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
15. idem, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990);
16. idem, "My Intellectual Path," in The Power of Ideas, ed. H. Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). I shall refer to this view as either value pluralism or pluralism interchangeably.
17. See Berlin, ibid.; Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, "Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply," Political Studies 42 (1994): 306-9;
18. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 2;
19. Henry S. Richardson, Practical Reasoning about Final Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
20. Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997).
21. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
22. William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
23. idem, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): referenced hereafter, in both text and notes, as LP and PLP, respectively.
24. I shall not argue here for the truth of value pluralism, since this is common ground between Galston and me. For arguments in favour of a pluralist view of morality, see the references in notes 3-6 above; also John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
25. and George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), chap. 2.
26. Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," Ethics 105 (1995): 516-34;
27. revised in Liberal Pluralism, chap. 2.
28. Leslie Green, "Internal Minorities and Their Rights," in W. Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 270.
29. Susan Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. J. Cohen, M. Howard, and M. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
30. Kukathas, Liberal Archipelago, 103-14.
31. Ibid., 113.
32. For a leading account of obstacles to exit beyond simple coercion, see Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 150-51.
33. Susan Okin, '"Mistresses of Their Own Destiny': Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit," Ethics 112 (2002): 205-30, at 222.
34. Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 534.
35. David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 71-77.
36. Ibid., 98.
37. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 40.
38. Versions of this distinction can be found in Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18, 104-8;
39. Harry Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 80-82;
40. and Rob Reich, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002), 95, 102.
41. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 94-100.
42. Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 51.
43. Richardson, Practical Reasoning about Final Ends, sec. 22.
44. Johnston, Idea of a Liberal Theory, 98.
45. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 81.
46. Okin, "'Mistresses of Their Own Destiny.'" 226-27.
47. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1970).
48. Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polonowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 295-96.
49. On this point I adopt Nussbaum's neo-Aristotelian account of plural universals as components of the human good in preference to the view of moral universals given by Berlin, who stresses a "quasi-empirical" notion of shared human values as those goods that have, in fact, been valued by most societies over long stretches of time. Compare Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, chap. 2,
50. with Berlin, Liberty, 45,
51. and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992), 37.
52. Bernard Williams, "Introduction" to I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. H. Hardy (London: Hogarth, 1978), xvii.
53. See John Gray, who argues that authoritarian regimes are compatible with value pluralism as long as their claims to validity are only local rather than universalist: Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 151-52.
54. This does not, of course, mean that these goods are measurably equal, or otherwise commensurable, only that they are equally to be respected or "equally ultimate,"
55. in Berlin's phrase: Liberty, 213.
56. Williams, "Introduction," xvii.
57. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 57 note.
58. Gray, Isaiah Berlin;
59. idem, Two Faces of Liberalism; also Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
60. For a more detailed critique of Gray, see George Crowder, "Gray and the Politics of Pluralism," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9 (2006): 171-88. Gray replies at 325-39.
61. Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, 126-27;
62. idem, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 135-36.
63. Isaiah Berlin, "Pursuit of the Ideal," 11; idem, "Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought," in Crooked Timber of Humanity, 80.
64. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 63.
65. Emily Gill, Becoming Free: Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2001), 37.
66. The claim that there is a link between pluralism and personal autonomy is also made by Raz, but his argument moves in the opposite direction: if we assume the value of personal autonomy, then there must be "a variety of [desirable] options to choose from," hence a plurality of goods: Morality of Freedom, 398.
67. In contrast with Raz's argument from the value of autonomy to the fact of pluralism, I argue from the "fact" of pluralism to the value of autonomy. For a critical discussion of Raz's argument on this point, see Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, 202-5.
68. See John Kekes, who writes that in the absence of practical reasoning, our choices among incommensurable goods would be arbitrary, incoherent, and perhaps self-defeating, in danger of creating lives that "are too scattered. ... In such lives there are many values, but between their favorable evaluation and realization come the distractions of other values whose realization also recedes for the same reason": The Morality of Pluralism, 97-98.
69. Martha Nussbaum argues, similarly, that practical reasoning occupies a place "of special importance" among the plural human capabilities she identifies, since it serves to "organize and suffuse all the others, making their pursuit truly human": Women and Human Development, 82.
70. Kekes, Morality of Pluralism; idem, Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
71. idem, A Case for Conservatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
72. Gray has also supported this view sometimes, as when he writes that "judgements of the relative importance of such goods appeal to their role in a specific way of life": "Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company," in Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, ed. M. Baghramian and A. Ingram (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 98.
73. On this point liberal pluralists agree with political liberals such as Rawls and Larmore. However, the two schools differ in their accounts of the sources of reasonable disagreement, political liberals regarding the value-pluralist view as resting on a comprehensive theory of the good, and therefore as too controversial to ground a liberalism that aspires to appeal to non-liberals and nonpluralists: see Larmore, Morals of Modernity, chap. 7.
74. For value-pluralist replies to this objection, see Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, chap. 7;
75. idem, Isaiah Berlin, 159-61; Galston, LP chap. 4.
76. Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Liberty, 214.
77. Ibid., 215.
78. I leave open the question of whether the liberal state is entitled to promote not only personal autonomy but also a range of "civic" or "democractic" virtues, as advocated, for example, by Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),
79. and Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
80. For a discussion of distinctively "value-pluralist virtues," see Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, chap. 8.
81. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in A. Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 66.
82. Williams, "Introduction," xviii.
83. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 170-72.