p3
The left can argue that if you believe in equality, then you should support socialism; and the right can argue that if you believe in freedom, you should support capitalism. But there is no way to argue for equality over freedom, or freedom over equality, since these are foundational values, with no higher value or premiss that both sides can jointly appeal to.

Pluralism
...this explosion of potential ultimate values raises an obvious problem for the whole project of developing a single comprehensive theory of justice. If there are so many potential ultimate values, why should we continue to think that an adequate political theory can be based on just one of them? Surely the only sensible response to this plurality of proposed ultimate values is to give up the idea of developing a 'monistic' theory of justice. to subordinate all other values to a single overriding one seems almost fanatical.
A successful theory of justice, therefore, will have to accept bits and pieces from most of the existing theories.

Theories of justice and intuitions

p7
As for the criteria by which we judge success in the enterprise of political philosophy, I believe that the ultimate test of a theory of justice is that it cohere with, and help illuminate, our considered convictions of justice. If on reflection we share the intuition that slavery is unjust, then it is a powerful objection to a proposed theory of justice that it supports slavery. Conversely, if a theory of justice matches our considered intuitions, and structures them so as to bring out their internal logic, then we have a powerful argument in favour of that theory. It is of course possible that these intuitions are baseless, and the history of philosophy is full of attempts to defend theories without any appeal to our intuitive sense of right and wrong. But I do not believe that there is any other plausible way of proceeding. In any event, the fact is that we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, and it is natural, indeed unavoidable, that we try to work out its implications - that we seek to do 'what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social justice' (Rawls 1971: 21).

Reflective equilibrium - working from both ends

p67

• ...in deciding on the preferred description of the original position we 'work from both ends'. If the principles chosen in one version do not match our convictions of justice, then
  
  • we have a choice. We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we revise our existing judgements, for even the judgements we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgements and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgements duly pruned and adjusted. (Rawls 1971: 20)
    
    

p70

• As Rawls says, 'a conception of justice cannot be deduced from self-evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view' (1971: 21). He calls this 'reflective equilibrium', and that is his aim. His principles of justice are mutually supported by reflecting on the intuitions we appeal to in our everyday practices, and by reflecting on the nature of justice from an impartial perspective that is detached from our everyday positions. #

ix
These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

x
It is understandable that an attachment to certain standards
and methods should lead to a concentration on problems amenable to those methods. This can be a perfectly rational strategic choice. But it is often accompanied by a tendency to define the legitimate questions in terms of the available methods of solution.
...I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony.

x-xi
Often the problem has to be reformulated, because an adequate answer to the original formulation fails to make the sense of the problem disappear.

xi
What ties these views about philosophical practice together is
the assumption that to create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say

xii
It may be that some philosophical problems have no solutions.
I suspect this is true of the deepest and oldest of them. They show us the limits of our understanding. In that case such insight as we can achieve depends on maintaining a strong grasp of the problem instead of abandoning it, and coming to understand the failure of each new attempt at a solution, and of earlier attempts

xiii
I do not know whether it is more important to change the world or to understand it, but philosophy is best judged by its contribu- tion to the understanding, not to the course of events

176: the dual character of the public sector, not just as a means of delivery but also as an element of societal self-governance.
...First, there is the complexity of governance within pluralist societies
...Second, in addition to these reality based conflicts, it is the task of government to have to deal with the projections of its citizens

The value of bureaucracy

176: The original Weberian meaning of bureaucracy, as a particu- lar (and therefore unique) kind of moral institution, has become largely lost

177: I will argue that far from being a problem, public bureaucracies are a vital resource, the epitome of what Weber called substantive rationality (where ethical, aesthetic and spiritual considerations are not split off from technical ones) rather than instrumental rationality. As such it is perhaps the one place where questions of technique (‘what works’) and questions of value stand a chance of being integrated.

178: their being as, in Weber’s terms, a particular kind of moral institution in which principles of impartiality and fairness are paramount. But, as we shall see, what constitutes impartiality and what constitutes fairness is always and necessarily publicly contested

Bureaucracy as contested space, incommensurability of value

178: it is proposed here that we consider that public organizations are intimately concerned with the governance of societies in which value conflicts are inherent and irresolvable. Take, for example, liberty, equality and fraternity, the three guiding principles of western democracies since the storming of the Bastille. As MacIntyre (1985) points out, these values are incommensurable; for example, before long, as you push for equality you rub up against liberty (particularly economic freedom

...The tension between universalism and particularism is inherent and irresolvable (Thompson & Hoggett, 1996) but, as such, it is just one instance of the conflictual nature of public purpose. Radical pluralists argue that we live in an increasingly diverse society and that much of this diversity is incom- mensurable. Chantal Mouffe (1993) insists that ‘politics in a modern democ- racy must accept division and conflict as unavoidable, and the reconciliation of rival claims and conflicting interests can only be partial and provisional’ (p. 113)

...the commitment to universalism as embodied in the ethic of impartiality cannot be sustained given the strength of particularisms in an increasingly plural society. The problem for the public official is precisely that s/he must be both a universalist and a particularist at the same time. For a similar reason there are other value contradictions which the public official is required to enact every day
c.f. Mendus 2000 on conflict between ethic of care and ethic of justice

The role of the street level bureaucrat

185-186 ...My argument has been that it is the fate of the public official, broadly conceived to include all those whose job involves some degree of discretion within the welfare state, to have to contain the unresolved (and at times suppressed) value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society.

...186: There are two categories of dilemma which correspond to my two characterizations of government – as the embodiment of an inherently conflictual and an inherently alienated public. In the first, the public official seeks to act impartially (‘acting for the best’) in the face of competing claims (care versus justice, the individual case versus the greater good, consistency versus responsiveness, and so on). Susan Mendus (2000) notes that we are in the terrain not just of pluralism but also of the impossibility of harmonious reconciliation in which the agent is not exempt from the authority of the claim they choose to neglect.

And policy maker

188: Anyone who spends even a short time in such organizations cannot but be struck by the different views of the aims of the organization. It’s not just that the views of professionals will often differ to those of managers, service users and their advocates, nor even that many differences of view will exist within the ranks of the professionals them- selves but those who have the formal authority to define policy (politicians, senior civil servants, inspectors and regulators, academics) constantly change their views as well. Within the public sphere definitions of purpose are constantly and necessarily contested,

Incommensurability of value

42: negative and positive liberty are not the same thing. Both are ends in themselves. These ends may clash irreconcilably. When this happens, questions of choice and preference inevitably arise

...The simple point which I am concerned to make is that where ultimate values are irreconcilable, clear-cut solutions cannot, in principle, be found. To decide rationally in such situations is to decide in the light of general ideals, the overall pattern of life pursued by a man or a group or a society. If the claims of two (or more than two) types of liberty prove incompatible in a particular case, and if this is an instance of the clash of values at once absolute and incommensurable, it is better to face this intellectually uncomfortable fact than to ignore it, or automatically attribute it to some deficiency on our part which could be eliminated by an increase in skill or knowledge... or, what is worse still, suppress one of the competing values altogether by pretending that it is identical with its rival – and so end by distorting both.

p43: My thesis is... that, since some values may conflict intrinsically, the very notion that a pattern must in principle be discoverable in which they are all rendered harmonious is founded on a false a priori view of what the world is like.

Practical response

p43: If I am right in this, and the human condition is such that men cannot always avoid choices, they cannot avoid them not merely for the obvious reasons, which philosophers have seldom ignored, namely that there are many possible courses of action and forms of life worth living, and therefore to choose between them is part of being rational or capable of moral judgement; they cannot avoid choice for one central reason (which is, in the ordinary sense, conceptual, not empirical), namely that ends collide; that one cannot have everything
...the very concept of an ideal life, a life in which nothing of value need ever be lost or sacrificed, in which all rational (or virtuous, or otherwise legitimate) wishes must be capable of being truly satisfied – this classical vision is not merely Utopian, but incoherent.
The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament.

Conflict and multiplicity of value

p48: One freedom may abort another; one freedom may obstruct or fail to create conditions which make other freedoms, or a larger degree of freedom, or freedom for other persons, possible; positive and negative freedom may collide; the freedom of the individual or the group may not be fully compatible with a full degree of participation in a common life, with its demands for co-operation, solidarity, fraternity. But beyond all these there is an acuter issue: the paramount need to satisfy the claims of other, no less ultimate, values: justice, happiness, love, the realisation of capacities to create new things and experiences and ideas, the discovery of the truth

Incommensurability of value, and need for practical compromise

172-173: Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or in peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’, individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind (p.173) of freedom ‘social’ or ‘economic’ – is increased. Yet it remains true that the freedom of some must at times be curtailed to secure the freedom of others. Upon what principle should this be done? If freedom is a sacred, untouchable value, there can be no such principle. One or other of these conflicting rules or principles must, at any rate in practice, yield: not always for reasons which can be clearly stated, let alone generalised into rules or universal maxims. Still, a practical compromise has to be found.

Value pluralism

212: One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals – justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another

(p.213)
But is this true? It is a commonplace that neither political equality nor efficient organisation nor social justice is compatible with more than a modicum of individual liberty, and certainly not with unrestricted laissez-faire; that justice and generosity, public and private loyalties, the demands of genius and the claims of society can conflict violently with each other. And it is no great way from that to the generalisation that not all good things are compatible, still less all the ideals of mankind.

214: ...it seems to me that the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realised is demonstrably false.

215: The extent of a man’s, or a people’s, liberty to choose to live as he or they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, it cannot be unlimited.

Pluralism and choice

216-217: Pluralism, with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive’ self- mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. To say that in some ultimate, all-reconciling yet realisable synthesis duty is interest, or individual freedom is pure democracy or an authoritarian State, is to throw a metaphysical blanket over either self- deceit or deliberate hypocrisy. It is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable (p.217)to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings.
In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human

Introduction: justice and pluralism

3: in Chapter 1, where I emphasize the demands imposed by two requirements of impartialist political philosophy: the permanence of pluralism and the priority of justice. I argue that these demands require a careful response, for if impartialist political philosophy is to show the priority of justice to be more than a modus vivendi, then it must have a moral foundation. However, if impartialist political philosophy is to acknowledge the permanence of pluralism, then that moral foundation cannot be one which implies acceptance of a specific comprehensive conception of the good

4: This book therefore takes seriously the impartialist desire to assert both the (moral) priority of impartial justice and the permanence of (moral) pluralism. It asks how impartiality can be accorded priority in a world characterized by its proliferation of different, yet reasonable, comprehensive conceptions of the good, and it suggests that that can be done by seeing impartialism as deriving both its moral and its motivational force from partial concerns themselves.

Political impartialism as equality

9: if impartialism generally is a way of reflecting commitment to the equality of all human beings, political impartialism is restricted in at least two, and arguably three, significant ways. First, it confines itself to questions of justice, where justice is only one value amongst others (it is only a part of morality, not the whole of it). By confining itself to questions of justice, political impartialism displays a restriction in subject matter. Second, political impartialism construes justice as being centrally concerned with the distribution of benefits and burdens by the state. It is not, or not primarily, concerned with the ways in which individuals behave towards one another, but rather with the principles on which society as a whole should operate. Political impartialism is therefore restricted in scope. Finally political impartialism focuses on questions of justification, not on questions of motivation. It is interested in the legitimacy of the principles adopted by society, not with the question of what moves individuals to act justly. So political impartialism is restricted in aim: it is concerned with justification, not with motivation.

Pluralism in the modern world

11: the pluralism of the modern world has two distinctive features: it is, Rawls says, both permanent and significant.

12: ...he cites the burdens of judgement as sources of irreconcilable, yet reasonable, disagreement and concludes: ‘different conceptions of the world can reasonably be elaborated from different standpoints and diversity arises in part from our distinct perspectives’ (Rawls 1993: 58). In short, we cannot expect diversity to disappear, and indeed we should not consider its continued existence a disaster.

...So, while modernity is characterized by its proliferation of different and conflicting conceptions of the good, and while this poses a problem of political justice, we should not attempt to resolve the problem by removing the pluralism, since pluralism is the natural outcome of the operation of reason under conditions of freedom. This, then, is the first significant feature of pluralism. In conditions of modernity, pluralism is permanent

The second feature of pluralism is that, in the modern world, it has a significance which, in other times, it lacked. This, Rawls says, is because in modernity ‘belief matters’, and it matters much more than it once did.
13: ...This, then, is the second significant feature of pluralism: it reflects the importance attached to individual belief as a means, indeed the means, to salvation

14 "A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines." (Rawls 1993: xvi)

Empirical evidence of pluralism in moral judgment

367: Cross-cultural research on moral judgment has revealed that Turiel’s definition of the moral domain works well among edu- cated and politically liberal Westerners, for whom harmless of- fenses are rarely condemned, even when they are disgusting or disrespectful (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993).1 However, research on people in India (Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987), people of lower social class in Brazil and the United States (Haidt et al., 1993), and conservatives in the United States (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Jensen, 1998) has revealed moral considerations beyond the individual-based concerns of harm and fairness, involving concerns about spiritual purity and degradation (even for acts that involve no harm), concerns about proper hierarchical role fulfillment, and moral expectations of loyalty to the local or national group.

Multiple moral 'foundations'

368: Haidt and Graham (2007) expanded the theory and modified the
names of the foundations to become: Harm/Care, Fairness/ Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/ Sanctity. Harm and Fairness generally correspond to Shweder et al.’s (1997) ethics of autonomy; Ingroup and Authority generally correspond to the ethics of community; and Purity generally cor- responds to the ethics of divinity.

Political leanings correlate with different moral priorities

379: liberals value Harm and Fairness concerns more than conservatives, whereas conservatives value Ingroup, Au- thority, and Purity concerns more than liberals.

Coherence

3: The method of reflective equilibrium has been advocated as a coherence account of justification (as contrasted with an account of truth) in several areas of inquiry, including inductive and deductive logic as well as both theoretical and applied philosophy.

4: For example, a moral principle or moral judgment about a particular case (or, alternatively, a rule of inductive or deductive inference or a particular inference) would be justified if it cohered with the rest of our beliefs about right action (or correct inferences) on due reflection and after appropriate revisions throughout our system of beliefs.

29: In thinking about the course of right action in a particular case, we often appeal to reasons and principles that are notoriously general and lack the kind of specificity that make them suitable to govern the case at hand without committing us to implications we cannot accept in other contexts. This requires that we refine or specify the reasons and principles if we are to provide appropriate justifications for what we do and appropriate guidance for related cases. Philosophers who have focused attention on the importance of specification have drawn on the method of reflective equilibrium for their insights into the problem.

30: ...how these theories apply to specific cases. Others argue that we may disagree about many aspects of general theory but still agree on principles, and the hard work of practical ethics consists in fitting sometimes conflicting principles to particular cases. Still others argue that we must begin our philosophical work with detailed understanding of the texture and specificity of a case, avoiding the temptation to intrude general principles or theories into the analysis.

A grasp of the method of wide reflective equilibrium suggests a way around this exclusionary nature of this debate. Wide reflective equilibrium shows us the complex structure of justification in ethics and political philosophy, revealing many connections among our component beliefs. At the same time, there are many different types of ethical analysis and normative