DRAFT

Value Pluralism and Monotheistic Commitment

This essay examines the longstanding suspicion that value-pluralism is intrinsically incompatible with monotheistic commitment. Many philosophers also take value-pluralism to be a necessary condition for political liberalism, so that the charge of incompatibility carries a special force, since taken together the two claims entail the inconsistency of monotheistic commitment with political liberalism. Having set out value-pluralism expounded in the thought of Isaiah Berlin, by far its most influential contemporary champion, this paper raises two central objections to the doctrine. It then examines ways to refine the doctrine, but concludes that there is no reason to suppose that the doctrine so refined is incompatible with monotheistic theories of value. If value-pluralism is a necessary condition for political liberalism, that is a condition that monotheists can readily accept.  

Isaiah Berlin’s persistent and nuanced advocacy of value-pluralism has done as much to

shape political liberalism as any other idea in recent decades. Needless to say, the basic

insight that the ends human beings pursue are irreducibly diverse, that no one single

value can serve as the universal benchmark for every other, and that there are moral

scenarios to which no rational decision-procedure can adequately resolve, are not

original to Berlin. The problems posed by the brute fact of anthropological diversity –

cultural, religious, ideological – can be traced to the very beginnings of European

thought. Yet for all its antique pedigree, the perceived significance of value-pluralism

has fluctuated with the contingencies of historical change. We should not be surprised,

for instance, to find the idea expressed with much greater frequency and force in, say,

Machiavelli’s Discorsi, or Montaigne’s Des Cannibales, or Montesquieu’s Lettres

Persanes, writings composed during the dawn and heyday of European exploration and

expansionism, than those texts that emerged from the comparatively settled and unified

world of the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval period. But if Berlin was not the first

to investigate the problem of plural and apparently irreconcilable theories of value, he

was the first thinker of the modern age to claim that it was a problem to which no

solution could be found, and the first to press this conclusion into the service of a case

DRAFT  

2

for liberalism as the model of political association best suited to accommodating value-

pluralism as an objective feature of reality.1

Since a good deal of attention has been devoted in recent years to the contested

connection between value-pluralism and political liberalism, I do not propose to rehearse

the arguments of that debate.2 For the purposes of the present argument, I shall assume

that value-pluralism is a constitutive doctrine of political liberalism, in order to

concentrate attention on the claim that value-pluralism is incompatible with

monotheistic commitment. Crudely put, if value-pluralism is true, monotheistic belief is

false; and once it is further granted that value-pluralism is an indispensable ingredient of

liberalism, the conclusion that traditional monotheists cannot consistently avow political

liberalism appears inescapable.

The argument of this article will proceed as follows: Section I sets out the central

objection that value-pluralism is intrinsically inconsistent with monotheistic

commitment; Section II briefly outlines the central features of Berlin’s account of value-

pluralism; Section III identifies and evaluates the central philosophical difficulties that

confront the doctrine before proposing a refinement that permits a more convincing

formulation of the charge of inconsistency. Section IV examines the reformulated

charge and concludes that there are no special reasons for supposing it to be true. If

value-pluralism is indissolubly wedded to political liberalism, that in itself is no reason

for monotheists attracted to political liberalism to reject it.

                                                                                                               1 Since Berlin’s first formulation of the doctrine, a burgeoning literature has been devoted to value-pluralism as a concept, most notably by Nagel 1979; Williams 1981; Hampshire 1983; Walzer 1984; Nussbaum 1986; Larmore 1987; Kekes 1993; Gray 1995; Hampshire 1999; and Galston 2005. 2 See in particular the series of illuminating exchanges in Crowder 1994, Berlin & Williams 1994, and Crowder 1996 (conveniently summarised in Crowder 2007). See also Galston 2002 and Galston 2005. For John Gray’s well-known rejection of the claim that liberalism and value-pluralism are conceptually conjunct in favour of an alternative ‘agonistic liberalism’ or ‘post-liberalism,’ see in particular Gray 2000a.

DRAFT  

3

I. The Inconsistency Charge The idea that a basic conceptual conformity exists between the structure of one’s theory

of value – ‘monist’ or ‘pluralist’ – and the structure of one’s wider metaphysical

framework has a degree of intuitive force. It is not surprising, then, to find those who

have championed Berlin’s doctrine of value-pluralism citing it as grounds for rejecting

monotheism, a metaphysical system widely considered to be paradigmatically monist.

We can refer to this as the Inconsistency Charge. The Anglophone philosopher Stuart

Hampshire formulates the Inconsistency Charge as follows:

In the Christian era, we have confused ourselves by allowing our imaginations to gallop along two contrary paths. The first is the path of the monotheists, one God, creator, and arbiter. Obviously if one God, only one morality – His law and the falsity of moral pluralism therefore. The other is the path trodden by Herodotus: the historical consciousness, glorying in the variety of ways of life and in the imagination of them. This glory was associated with the pagan polytheism which could respect many tutelary gods, each in his or her particular place. Sacredness and reverence were diffused, and the contrast between the Athenians and Spartans, in their ideals of humanity, was a glory to both of them.3

Hampshire commits a fallacy to which we shall return in Section III, namely that a

normative thesis about the structure of value could ever be grounded in the factual

diversity of evaluative practices of a culture. An even sharper formulation of the

Inconsistency Charge in an essay by Henry Hardy:

Whether we are concerned with Christianity or Islam, Judaism … anyone convinced of the truth of pluralism must in consistency hold that, unless such creeds can accommodate themselves to pluralism without a denial of their essential natures, they cannot be regarded as full participants in the pluralist enterprise of tolerant co-existence … To my mind such an accommodation is indeed impossible, since it is such a deeply ingrained assumption of the world religions that they offer a definitive answer, a uniquely true vision of God and man’s proper relationship to him: indeed, this is a central purpose of the whole exercise.4

                                                                                                               3 Hampshire 1999, 47. 4 Hardy 2007, 290. For detailed discussion and critique of Hardy’s argument, see Galston 2007.

DRAFT  

4

Hardy illustrates in passing a paradox at the heart of liberal pluralism, a paradox that

recalls Locke’s alleged prohibitions against Catholics and atheists from participation in

civic life in A Letter Concerning Toleration, namely that value-pluralism must treat

value-monism as false – at least if it is to avoid a slide towards outright relativism – and

as therefore intrinsically inhospitable to forms of political association that uphold its

opposite. Hardy is quick to conclude that monotheism is so antithetical to value-

pluralism that those who endorse the latter should hope for the eventual disappearance

of systems of belief that oppose it:

My point is that it is not consistent for a pluralist to regard as straightforward contributions to the diversity of human value-systems that he acknowledges – and perhaps welcomes – approaches to life which are ineradicably non-pluralist in their central thrust. Monisms, in a word, are not suitable long-term components of a plurality, and while we must not suppress them, it is right for pluralists to hope that they will wither away.5

As it is framed in the foregoing passages, I suggest that the Inconsistency Charge may

disquiet monotheists who take seriously the thought that human beings can and do

pursue diverse and possibly incommensurate ends, and who are reluctant to traffic in

straightforward solutions that overlook the painful reality of everyday moral conflict.

Before these can be adequately evaluated, however, we must first scrutinise we the

correct construal of value-pluralism as it is understood by both thinkers more fully in

view. Notoriously, the doctrine admits of distinct – even conflicting – interpretations,

only some of which give the Inconsistency Charge a degree of plausibility.

II. What is Value-Pluralism?

                                                                                                               5 Hardy 2007, 288.

DRAFT  

5

Much effort has been expended on analysing and evaluating his position,6 and in

particular the precise nature of the connection between value-pluralism and political

liberalism.7 For Berlin presents his readers with at least three significant interpretative

hurdles. First, none of his writings is devoted exclusively to value-pluralism: very few

of them offer much in the way of a systematic treatment. Second, the clearest accounts

he provides generally occur as part of his treatment of a historical thinker, which means

that it is often difficult to distinguish his own position from that of his subject. At one

point, for instance, he appears to argue for value-pluralism by affirming Herder’s

relativism as ‘a species of ethical or epistemological subjectivism, as the term has very

often been understood,’ concluding that Herder offers us a position that Berlin himself

seems tacitly to endorse, namely that of ‘objective pluralism, free from any taint of

subjectivism.’8 Finally, many of the arguments he advances in support of value-

pluralism are frustratingly oblique, relying as they do on the negative case for value-

monism as an implicit endorsement of its opposite.

Still, notwithstanding these hermeneutical difficulties, value-pluralism can be stated

quite straightforwardly. The first thing to note is that value-pluralism must amount to

more than the bland thesis that values are irreducibly plural. That, I take it, is a trivially

true inference from moral experience that few value-monists would deny. What

distinguishes value-pluralism from value-monism are the altogether different claims that

(i) axiomatic values are plural and (ii) that these axiomatic values cannot be understood

in terms of each other. Negatively put, there is no single foundational value to which

                                                                                                               6 For considered assessments of Berlin’s shifting formulations of value-pluralism, see e.g. Lukes 1994, Gray 1996, esp. 74-110; and Gray 2000b, 34-68. On the anti-utopian thrust of Berlin’s argument for value-pluralism, see Crowder 2002, 78-102. Other insightful treatments of Berlin’s account can be found in Anderson 1992; Crowder 2004, 125-47; Galston 2002, 48-61; and Kekes 1993, 53-98. 7 See note 3 above. 8 Berlin 1997, 390, note 1.

DRAFT  

6

every other value can be reduced.

This central claim largely exhausts what is constitutive of value-pluralism. But it turns

out that Berlin’s commentators attribute a number of other distinctive features. George

Crowder has claimed, for instance, that Berlin’s formulation can be broken down into

four distinct sub-theses:

A. Values are universal;

B. Values are irreducibly plural;

C. Values are in conflict; and

D. Values are incommensurable.9

We have already noted the indispensability of (B). Crowder is correct to note,

moreover, that Berlin himself insists on (A) by claiming that value-pluralism is to be

distinguished from relativism on the basis of the objectivity it attributes to values. On

closer inspection, however, it turns out that Berlin’s construal of the universality and

objective status of values is not at all obvious and will require closer scrutiny in Section

III. But for Berlin and subsequent champions of the doctrine, its definitive components

are (C) and (D).10

In the case of (C), if conflict between values is not a logical corollary of the claim that

more than one value is axiomatic, then it is at the very least an obvious practical

consequence. Human beings are cognitively limited evaluative agents. If there are

several basic values, there is no fully rational procedure for deciding between them, and

therefore no reason to suppose that any two communities or individuals will always

                                                                                                               9 Crowder 2004, 132ff. 10 This sub-thesis is discussed in more detail in Section IV below.

DRAFT  

7

reach an informed agreement that one basic value is consistently to be preferred over all

others. Indeed if doctrine is true, there is no reason to expect a single individual to

pursue one and the same basic value. But it is difficult to see how the claim in sub-

thesis (C) that values intrinsically conflict is an essential feature of value-pluralism, for

it may be that values are both irreducibly plural and yet capable of being ranked.

Finally, the claim that there is more than one axiomatic value also implies the truth of

sub-thesis (D): if values are irreducibly plural, there is no single value in terms of which

every other value can be measured. Conversely, if values are pervasively fungible, it is

tempting to infer that there is indeed a single one axiomatic value – the categorical

imperative, say, or a utilitarian maxim – for measuring, comparing, or analyzing values.

III. Two Objections to Value-Pluralism With the central ingredients of Berlin’s doctrine in place, we are now in a position to

consider two puzzling and problematic implications of endorsing it as it stands before

formulating a version of Berlin’s thesis that resists these implications. The first concern

is that value-pluralism is a doctrine that straightforwardly equivocates between what we

might term ‘anthropological’ or ‘cultural’ value-pluralism and ‘metaethical’ value-

pluralism – that is to say, a thesis about the objective structure of the normative domain.

The second worry is that even if value-pluralism can be defended as an objective thesis,

it is not at all obvious that sub-thesis (D) above is plausible – that is, it is not clear that

fundamental values cannot be weighed against each other in moral decision-making.

Let us consider each of these two charges in turn.

i) Value-Pluralism and the Problem of Objectivity

DRAFT  

8

To defend value-pluralism against accusations of relativism, Berlin begins by

distinguishing ‘relativism about facts’ from ‘relativism about values.’ He recognises

that relativism is self-refuting: it is, he writes, ‘a doctrine according to which the

judgement of a man or a group … is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which

determines its truth or falsehood.’11 But in the case of values, he implies that ‘the

interpretation and evaluation of past attitudes and cultures’ is indeed a form of

relativism, but that it is not an objectionable one. The thought seems to be that the

diversity of values exemplified intra-culturally or inter-culturally has an objective

footing because they are – as a factual anthropological or sociological matter –

differences on questions of value are, he notes, ‘not mere psychological, but objective

facts.’12

So Berlin insists that value-pluralism takes values to be universal and objective.13 This

basic claim is, indeed, indispensable if value-pluralism is to defend itself against the

charge of relativism. The objective status of values, he notes, is the only rational

alternative to the view that values are the ‘arbitrary creations of men’s subjective

fancies.’14 With language like that, one might be tempted to think that Berlin subscribed

to the view that what secures the objectivity of values is their independence from the

moral judgments. But it turns out that all that objectively delimits the scope of possible

values is the common outlook that human beings are capable of sharing simply in virtue

of being human beings:

                                                                                                               11 Berlin 1990b, 80. 12 Ibid. 13 At one point, however, he holds that the claim values are objective amounts to the view that values are ‘ends that men pursue for their own sakes, to which other things are means’ (Berlin 1990a, 11). But this is not at all what most moral philosophers would understand by the claim that values are objective; in the wake of the influential arguments advanced in Korsgaard 1983, ‘intrinsic’ is the more common adjective for characterising non-instrumental ends. 14 Berlin 2000, 12.

DRAFT  

9

[V]alues are objective – that is to say, their nature, the pursuit of them, is part of what it is to be a human being, and this is an objective given. The fact that men are men and women are women and not dogs or cats or tables or chairs is an objective fact; and part of this objective fact is that there are certain values, and only those values, which men, while remaining men, can pursue.15

On this view, what underwrites the objectivity of values is not their independence from

human beings, but precisely the opposite: values are objective in virtue of the fact that

they are ends that are capable in principle of being pursued by any human being.

The idea that the objectivity of values consists in their inter-subjective or cross-cultural

validity is, of course, a distinctively Kantian one. Indeed Berlin elsewhere willingly

invokes the language of ‘concept’ and ‘category’ as ‘everyday notions common to

mankind at large, related to the permanent interests of men as such.’16 This should not

be taken to imply that Berlin intended to associate value-pluralism with the wildly

implausible framework of transcendental idealism. But as we have seen, Berlin insists

that values are objective in the sense that they do not arise from the arbitrary whims of

human beings. If we take the claim to objectivity at face-value, though, the logic of his

position forces us to conclude that any arbitrary whim qualifies as an objective value,

provided it is an end that a human being could intelligibly pursue. In effect, the sense in

which values are objective is cast so wide that the term becomes functionally

meaningless. It is this kind of approach that accounts for those passages that may

unsettle even Berlin’s most dedicated admirers:

I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe that

                                                                                                                15 Ibid. 16 Berlin 1978a, 221. The idea also has roots in R.G. Collingwood’s appeal to the notion of the ‘absolute presuppositions’ central to any human inquiry (see Collingwood 1998, 34-48). Collingwood, it is worth noting, was the first to draw to Berlin’s attention the importance of Vico as a forerunner of value-pluralism.

DRAFT  

10

they are the only need of salvation … I do not regard the Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central, or that Nordic races alones are truly creative … I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.17

We should note that on a strict application of Berlin’s conception of objectivity, the fact

that the Nazi value-system was ‘totally misguided about the facts’ does nothing to

undermine the objectivity of the values the Nazis held. On Berlin’s view, the

‘objectivity’ of Nazi values is secured by the bare possibility that human beings could

believe them to be worth pursuing even if they are motivated to do so by a false

description of the world. To borrow a term from analytic philosophy, there did not need

to be any ‘truthmakers’ for Nazi anti-semitism – some part of reality with which a

statement about the inferiority of certain races needed to correspond – in order for the

values of the Nazi anti-semite to count as objective. The only relevant condition for a

value to qualify as objective is that some human beings could conceivably consider it to

be so.

ii) Value-Pluralism and Incommensurability

We have already seen that value-pluralism relies in part on the claim that bedrock values

are incommensurable. Incommensurability is a central ingredient in Berlin’s

formulation of the doctrine, but the ambiguities in his use of the notion obscure the role

it is supposed to play. Sometimes he intends it to mean the claim that given our

cognitive limitations, human beings are simply not capable of correctly commensurating

values. At other times he seem to intend something more robustly ontological than that.

Subjective incommensurability, it is claimed, does not reflect our cognitive limitations,

                                                                                                               17 Berlin 2000, 12-3.

DRAFT  

11

but rather a fundamental heterogeneity in the realm of value that exists independently of

our evaluative abilities. It is not that we are unable to answer the question of how best

to balance the claims of justice against the claims of mercy, but simply that there is no

intelligible answer to the question. The precise relationship between distinct values is

wholly indeterminate.

What are we to make of these two construals? The problem with subjective

incommensurability is not only that it is a trivially true feature of moral psychology, but

also that it tells us nothing about the ultimate structure of value. As an epistemic claim,

subjective incommensurability is consistent with both value-pluralism and value-

monism, so that the most it licenses is an agnostic stance towards the structure of the

axiological realm. Indeed some moral philosophers cite our epistemic inability to

reconcile different values as support for global scepticism about the existence of value.18

But there is a stronger and more interesting conception of incommensurability that

purports to describe what Thomas Nagel once labelled the ‘fragmentation of value.’19

This is no reason, as Nagel also notes,20 for us to adopt a spirit of ‘romantic defeatism’

when confronted with moral or evaluative dilemmas. Just as we are able to investigate

discrete domains in the natural sciences without a unified and systematic theory of the

whole of physical reality, so too are we able to engage successfully in practical

reasoning even in the absence of a comprehensive theory of value with which to resolve

every conflict between values.21 But unless or until such a theory is developed,

proponents of this stronger version of the incommensurability thesis insist that we are

                                                                                                               18 See, for instance, Williams 1978b, along with the response from Foot 1983. 19 Nagel 1979. 20 Nagel 1979, 137. 21 Nagel 1979, 137-8.

DRAFT  

12

confronted with choices between intrinsically valuable activities that no rational

decision-procedure could settle.

This second construal of incommensurability lends some support to the Inconsistency

Charge on the basis that it amounts to more than the routine observation that difficulties

arise when arbitrating between divergent sets of values. As Bernard Williams noted in a

discussion of Berlin’s position, the kind of incommensurability that motivates value-

pluralism is precisely the one that cannot be explained in terms of differences between

persons or cultures:

To read Berlin’s discussions of conflicts between values in the context of a debate about subjectivism is to mislocate them and to miss their special force. The debate about subjectivism is characteristically concerned with conflicts of values between persons or societies. What above all concerns Berlin, on the other hand, is the tension between conflicting values in one consciousness.22

But given that Berlin is himself persistently unclear about how we are to understand

incommensurability, his interpreters can be forgiven for overlooking the distinction

Williams underscores. The basic point, though, is well-taken: just as Berlin’s value-

pluralism must amount to more than the uninteresting claim that human beings value a

diversity of ends, the incommensurability thesis he invokes to support it is best

interpreted as a claim about the difficulties involved in a single individual’s response to

the conflicting demands of practical reason, evaluative scenarios in which the irreducible

diversity of options cannot be explained away in terms of inter-personal or inter-cultural

differences, occasions in which there are, as Williams puts it, ‘conflicting values in one

consciousness.’

IV. Revisiting the Inconsistency Charge

                                                                                                               22 Williams 1978a, xvii.

DRAFT  

13

We have now considered the two most serious objections to value-pluralism, to wit that

it equivocates over the objective status of plural values and that it steps illicitly across

the divide between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ without the metaphysical resources to justify it. In

light of the theoretical tensions uncovered in Berlin’s formulation of the doctrine in

Section III, we are now in a position to revisit the question of whether the Inconsistency

Charge presents a threat to monotheists who wish to endorse political liberalism.

i) Monotheistic Commitment and the Structure of Value

Monotheists antecedently committed to the objective compatibility of bedrock values

will be tempted, no doubt, to justify their commitment by noting that any monotheistic

axiology must ultimately be grounded in the evaluative activity of one rationally and

morally perfect being. It is difficult to deny the initial intuitive force of the thought that

there is a conceptual conformity between value-monism and monotheism – that is, the

thought Hampshire articulated so forcefully in the passage in Section I above

(‘Obviously if one God, only one morality – His law and the falsity of moral pluralism

therefore’). But it is not at all obvious, I suggest, that this intuition is true. To suppose

that it is would be to confuse a characteristic of the source of value in a monotheistic

framework with the structure of value in any such framework. Monotheists might well

argue that there is indeed a single ‘super-value’ against which every other value should

be correctly calibrated.23 Yet the case for this must be made on the basis of the alleged

supremacy of the super-value in question over all other values: whether or not the source

for all values is singular or plural is a separate question for which different arguments

would need to be advanced.                                                                                                                23 Theologically inflected versions of Joseph Fletcher’s situationism might qualify as an example of value-monism as Berlin describes it, as might certain soteriological schemes in which maximizing the opportunity for salvation is the single value against which every other should be measured. One obvious challenge for the situationist is the extent to which love can avoid the dangers of what Robert Adams has termed ‘an oppressive excess of high-mindedness’ – i.e. an abstract formalism that fails to be attuned to the concrete particularities of plural evaluative standpoints. For a helpful attempt to resolve this conundrum, see Adams 2002, 185-98.

DRAFT  

14

To illustrate the point, it is instructive to consider the example of Aquinas, whose

axiology blends two seemingly disparate theories of value channeled by the Aristotelian

and Platonic traditions. Whether or not Aristotle was a value-monist or a value-pluralist

is, of course, a highly contested question.24 On the one hand he seems to qualify as a

value-monist if his axiology is understood to be wedded to the cosmological picture

advanced in Metaphysics XII, according to which physical reality is unified by its

‘desire’ for a being described as thought thinking itself.25 On the other hand, the fact

that he takes the predicate ‘good’ to be logically attributive points in favour of the view

that he endorses a pluralist conception of value.

Attributive accounts of the good, as Peter Geach famously demonstrated,26 deny that the

good exists in isolation from its concrete instantiations in particular substances. Value

consists in the extent to which a value-property grounds the proper functionality of a

substance: the value of a knife consists in its capacity to cut; the value of a tree consists

in its ability to reproduce itself effectively; and so on. Attributivists hold that ‘there is

no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so.’27

The logical form of <x is a good y> (e.g. ‘Tony is a good carpenter’), it is claimed,

                                                                                                               24 There are passages in Aristotle that do support the view that he is a value-pluralist, most notably those in which he claims that the good consists in the activity of the soul in the pursuit of the ‘best and most perfect’ virtues that are the best and most perfect (Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1098a 16-7). Conversely, there is also textual evidence that Aristotle identifies happiness as an overarching ‘super-value’ (e.g. Eudemian Ethics II.1, 1219a 35-9). 25 Metaphysics XII, 1072b 20. 26 Geach 1956. 27 Geach 1956, 34. This is, of course, a characteristically Aristotelian position; it is the same move, for instance, that Aristotle makes against Plato on the question of universals. For a critique of Geach’s claim that the term ‘good’ can only be used in an attributivist sense, see Hampshire 1971, who invokes the counter-example of ‘good news,’ a phrase in which the term is used predicatively.

DRAFT  

15

cannot be dissolved into <x is good> and <x is a y> (e.g. ‘Tony is good’ and ‘Tony is a

carpenter’).28

Whatever the merits of conceiving of value as logically, it is hard to deny that it is a

view that sits much more comfortably alongside a robustly pluralist axiology. Indeed it

implies that value is almost limitlessly fine-grained, since it holds that value is what it is

in virtue of the particular teleological structure or essence of the object to which a value-

predicate is applied. This is why Aristotelians typically urge that practical reasoning

depends on an evaluative analysis of the good in terms of the proper functioning of

human beings.29

Platonic axiologies, by contrast, tend to emphasise the overarching structural unity of the

good. Consider, for instance, the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates

declares that ‘the good is beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power,’

remonstrating with Glaucon that ‘you should not identify goodness with knowledge and

truth, otherwise you will be wrong: for all their value, it is even more valuable.’30 A

similar thought underpins the metaphysical scheme that later emerges in the Neoplatonic

tradition: Plotinus purports to show that the multiplicity of ideas at the intelligible level

and the sensible level emanate from an indivisible oneness that is ontologically ultimate.

                                                                                                               28 Attributive adjectives such as ‘good’ are typically contrasted with predicative adjectives such as ‘red.’ Predicative adjectives are not logically tied to the nouns they modify, so that one can substitute the noun that the predicative adjective is modifying and still apply the adjectively predicatively: so the noun can be removed from the statement <bananas are a yellow fruit> without undermining the strict logical implication that <bananas are yellow>. Attributive adjectives, by contrast, are linked to the generic nouns they modify, so that there is no strict entailment from <the Bank of England is a large building> to <the Bank of England is large>. 29 Nicomachean Ethics 1097b 24-25. 30 Republic 509b 8-10. Cf. Sophist 247e 3-4.

DRAFT  

16

Aquinas’s own metaphysical framework attempts to integrate an attributive theory of the

good within an overarching axiology that takes God to be a singular and metaphysically

simple source of every particular instance of goodness within the created order. It is

tempting to conclude that this position is vulnerable to the same objection against

Plotinus that we have just met: how can Aquinas reconcile the diversity of teleological

goods with the absolute singularity and simplicity of God’s nature? There are certainly

difficulties lurking here, but an important theoretical advantage of Aquinas’s position is

that it interposes a rigid ontological divide between creator and creature: where the

Neoplatonic picture takes unity to entail diversity, the Abrahamic doctrine of creatio ex

nihilo takes diversity to emerge from the perfect moral will of a perfectly free God. The

metaphysical picture Aquinas presents will, of course, be contested. But it is by no

means an unreasonable or incoherent position. Champions of the Inconsistency Charge

owe monotheists compelling reasons to suppose that plurality in the structure of value is

flatly inconsistent with the singular character of the source of value. this is a claim that

proponents of the Inconsistency Charge have consistently failed to substantiate.

ii) Monotheism and Incommensurability

I suggested earlier that if value-pluralism is to have any content as a thesis,

incommensurability between values must amount to more than the bare claim that we

are psychologically unable to reconcile values, but rather that bedrock values are

intrinsically incommensurable. Now one way of framing this stronger kind of

incommensurability is to formulate it as the claim that even a maximally rational,

evaluatively perfect being could not correctly rank bedrock values. Yet once the thesis

is stated this way, we can being to see what goes wrong with the objection that value-

pluralism (in the robust sense) is inconsistent with monotheistic commitment. For

monotheists, God is both a supremely rational being and a morally perfect one. But he

DRAFT  

17

is also evaluatively perfect. That is, he values everything that possesses value to the

exact degree of its value. If it is true that the justice required to pursue one course of

action objectively counts for less than the mercy that would flow from failing to pursue

it, God apprehends this to be so. If, on the other hand, there is no objective fact of the

matter – if the alternative courses of action are incommensurable in the strong sense

specified above – then there is nothing that even an evaluatively perfect being could

apprehend.

So at least one response available to the monotheist might be to point out that if values

are indeed objectively incommensurable, this is no more an objection to monotheistic

commitment than the fact that God cannot create a square triangle. If the limits of

logical possibility are fixed by the limits of what God can consistently think, there is no

reason to suppose that monotheists cannot avail themselves of an analogous thesis with

respect to value pluralism: perhaps the degree of compatibility between bedrock values

is a function of the degree of their commensurability with respect to God’s evaluative

activity.

But there is another defensive strategy available to monotheists faced with the problem

of objective incommensurability. This would begin by noting that the sources of moral

authority in each of the great monotheistic traditions are many and various: some

schools will accord priority to the authority of sacred texts over the deliverances of

religious experience; others will grant the authoritative status of sacred texts, but will

recognise an institution as the supreme interpretative authority. There is, in other words,

considerable scope for competing values within any single monotheistic tradition.

Moreover, monotheists often find themselves confronted with moral dilemmas about

which every existing theological source of moral guidance has nothing to say.

DRAFT  

18

iii) A Tu Quoque Objection

One irony that attends Berlin’s ongoing development and refinement of his value-

pluralism is that the doctrine begins to take on a paradoxically monist shape in his later

writings. Indeed he came eventually to identify a single basic source for values, which

he termed ‘common human nature.’ We are confronted – once again – with a doctrine

that has an obvious Kantian flavour. As recent scholarship has shown, the controlling

idea of what Kant labels as die gemeine Menschenvernunft, a core framework of

universal moral commitments.31 And, indeed, we have already seen that Berlin comes

close to endorsing the view that human beings a common categorical framework, and

one, moreover, with an evaluative dimension. The connection to Kant can be and has

been overplayed: Berlin himself expressly rejects the transcendental framework for its

reliance on the claim that categories can be applied a priori; and it is obvious enough

from his sharp forays into European intellectual history that he is resolutely empiricist in

his attentiveness to the contextual specificities of a philosophical idea.

Nevertheless, as John Gray has noted,32 Berlin’s formulation of value-pluralism does

come to be rooted in a set of ‘basic categories,’ which he claims exist not as the result of

inductive generalisations in the manner proposed by Hume – a thinker with whom, as

we have seen, Berlin is more in sympathy than Kant33 – but from close observation,

historical and anthropological, of the spectrum of evaluative attitudes that human beings

can possess. As Steven Lukes has observed, Berlin was forced to defend his doctrine

                                                                                                               31 See e.g. Louden 1992, 116-20. 32 Gray 1996, 103-4, quoting Berlin 1978b, 164. 33 See in particular Berlin 1980c for the alleged links between Hume and the figures of the Counter-Enlightenment.

DRAFT  

19

against the charges of relativism by conceding that value-pluralism should be

‘compatible with absolute, overriding, and universal value of liberty, the existence of a

common human nature, rational criticism, and the tractability of many but not all value

conflicts in public and private life.’34 To cast this point in the terms of his own well-

known allusion to the Greek lyric poet Archilochus,35 Berlin is a ‘fox’ (the pluralist who

‘knows many things’) who turns into a ‘hedgehog’ (the monist who ‘knows only one

thing’). There is, in the end, a single idée maîtresse in Berlin’s political philosophy,

namely liberty. Berlin’s increasingly unapologetic espousal of liberty as an overarching

value seriously compromises his commitment to the plurality of values.

Perhaps Berlin’s steady drift towards something that resembles value-monism should

not surprise us. For it seems plausible to suppose that value-pluralism cannot be

coherently stated without some recourse to a unifying normative framework – in

Berlin’s case, a framework supplied by a core commitment to freedom and other liberal

values, or else a bland formalism fixed by the range of goals it is possible for human

beings to pursue. But since this is so, we should also not be surprised if monotheists are

left unimpressed by the Inconsistency Charge. After all, the objection presupposes that

value-pluralism cannot have recourse to a singular, unifying framework. Yet it turns out

that Berlin’s position differs very little in its basic outlook from traditional monotheistic

approaches might be plural in structure, even if they share a common metaphysical

origin.

But monotheists can, I suggest, do better than this tu quoque response to the

Inconsistency Charge. For in his later thought, Berlin’s defended his doctrine against

charges of relativism by invoking a universal philosophical anthropology in which                                                                                                                34 Lukes 1994, 714. 35 Berlin 1953.

DRAFT  

20

freedom is the central and paramount value. Even if we were to grant that the value of

freedom is intrinsic to what Berlin labels the ‘common human horizon,’ this would

presuppose a substantive metaphysical commitment to the reality of human freedom,

one that many contemporary philosophers would not share. Value-systems that count

freedom as a basic, ultimate good must be grounded in a philosophical anthropology that

plausibly accommodates the premise that human beings do indeed possess freedom

some non-trivial sense.

Such a qualification rules out many points on the naturalistic spectrum, and a fortiori

any liberal models of political arrangement that tacitly rely on them. One cannot help

oneself to freedom as a political virtue and determinism as a metaphysical thesis without

making a considerably stronger case for their compatibility than Berlin himself provides.

Crudely put, the claim that freedom is a basic human value presupposes that human

beings are free. But if the underlying metaphysical story is that freedom is an illusion

that arises (say) in virtue of the adaptive value it confers, one cannot meaningfully treat

it as a source of value in the robust sense required to block the descent into relativism.

If it is claimed that freedom is a basic good – or, indeed, the basic good – then a

philosophical anthropology that presupposes determinism will not do.36

V. Conclusion The Inconsistency Charge presupposes cultural value-pluralism. It therefore fails as an

objection: either it is a trivially true statement about the diversity of values that are

actually pursued, or it dissolves into the kind of ethical relativism that it was supposed to

avoid. If the Inconsistency Charge is to qualify as a convincing objection, its supporters

must specify that value-pluralism describes a genuine fragmentation of the axiological                                                                                                                36 Ironically, few have spelled out the problematic implications of a deterministic outlook with greater force and clarity than Berlin himself in “Historical Inevitability” (Berlin 1954), in which he sets out the practical incoherence of the Marx’s philosophy of history.

DRAFT  

21

realm, in which discrete values compete for the attention of finite agents. Value-

pluralism must qualify, in other words, as a species of moral realism if it is to be

interesting and plausible.

Analysed this way, Berlin’s doctrine is consistent with, and may even derive some

dialectical support from, the phenomenology of indecision between values. But it is

then unclear why value-pluralism should cause trouble for the monotheist. For

monotheistic traditions underscore more than most that the capacity of human beings for

complete moral knowledge is finite. Christian theology – particularly in the Western

tradition – has adopted a singularly sanguine and clear-eyed view of our fragmentary

and fallen grasp of moral truths.

And if, in the end, our evaluative paralysis does reflect objective incommensurability

between values, this is no basis for objecting to a monotheistic theory of value. It is

entirely consistent with the truth of such a theory that although it entails a commitment

to an axiological realm that is ultimately unified, that realm may be refracted in ways

that lay claims on practical reasoning that are in chronic and irreconcilable conflict. In

other words, even the most credible formulation of value-pluralism gives us no reason to

suppose that the Inconsistency Charge succeeds. So if it transpires that value-pluralism

is a necessary condition for adopting political liberalism, that is a condition that

monotheists could readily accept.37

                                                                                                               37 [acknowledgments]

DRAFT  

22

Bibliography Adams, Robert, Finite and Infinite Goods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Anderson, Perry, “The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin.” In A Zone of Engagement. London: Verso, 1992, 230-51. Audi, Robert, “Ethical Naturalism as a Challenge to Theological Ethics.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 34 (2014), 21-39. Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1953. _____ “Historical Inevitability.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 [1954], 41-117. _____ “Two Conceptions of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 [1958], 118-72. _____ Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: Hogarth Press, 1976. _____ “Is a Philosophy of History Possible?” In Philosophy of History and Action, edited by Yirmiaku Yovel. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978a, 219-40. _____ Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy. London: Hogarth Press, 1978b. _____ “The Originality of Machiavelli.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980a, 33-100. _____ “Montesquieu.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980b, 130-61. _____ “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980c, 162-87. _____ “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” In The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990a, 1- 19. _____ “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought.” In The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990b, 70-90. _____ “Herder and the Enlightenment.” In The Proper Study of Mankind. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997, 359-435.

DRAFT  

23

_____ “My Intellectual Path.” In The Power of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000, 1-23. _____ “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life.” In Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 218-51. _____ “The Idea of Freedom.” In Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, edited by Henry Hardy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006, 112-94. Berlin, Isaiah, and Williams, Bernard, “Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply.” In Political Studies 42 (1994), 306-9. Cherniss, Joshua L., A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Collingwood, R.G., An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Crowder, George, “Pluralism and Liberalism.” In Political Studies 42 (1994), 293-305. _____ “Communication: Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism,’” Political Studies 44 (1996), 649-50. _____ Liberalism and Value Pluralism. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. _____ Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. _____ “Value Pluralism and Liberalism: Berlin and Beyond.” In The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, edited by George Crowder and Henry Hardy. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, 207-30. _____ “Value Pluralism and Monotheism,” Politics and Religion 7 (2014), 818-40. Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Foot, Philippa, “Moral Realism and Moral Dilemmas.” In Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 379-98 Galston, William, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. _____ The Practice of Liberal Pluralism Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. _____ “Must Value Pluralism and Religious Belief Collide?” In The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, edited by George Crowder and Henry Hardy. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007. Gray, John, Enlightenment’s Wake (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). _____ Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of his Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

DRAFT  

24

_____ “Where Liberals and Pluralists Part Company.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6 (1998), 17-36. _____ “Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy.” Political Studies 48 (2000a), 323–33. _____ The Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000b). Hampshire, Stuart, “Ethics: A Defence of Aristotle.” In Freedom of Mind and Other Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). _____ Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). _____ Justice and Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). Hardy, Henry, “Taking Pluralism Seriously.” In The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, edited by George Crowder and Henry Hardy (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), 279-92. Kekes, John, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press: 1993). Korsgaard, Christine, “Two Distinctions in Goodness.” Philosophical Review 92 (1983), 169-195. Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ______ The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Louden, Robert, “Gemeine Menschenvernunft and Ta Endoxa.” In Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Lukes, Steven, “The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin.” Social Research 61(3) (1994), 687-717. MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1981). Nagel, Thomas, “The Fragmentation of Value.” In Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ______ “Pluralism and Coherence.” In The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert B. Silver (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 105-11. Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

DRAFT  

25

Taylor, Charles, “Plurality of Goods.” In The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert B. Silver (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 113-21. Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Williams, Bernard, “Introduction to Isaiah Berlin.” In Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy (London: Hogarth Press, 1978a). ______ “Ethical Consistency,” in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978b), 166-86. ______ “Conflicts of Values” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 71-82.