Conclusion/Bringing it together/Pluralism 27/02/18

Kymlicka 1990

Introduction (Ch1)

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).

Fitzpatrick, Bengtsson & Watts 2014
Rights to Housing: Reviewing the Terrain and Exploring a Way Forward

p12
From a philosophical perspective, this challenge to the coherence of absolutist human rights can be traced back to the concept of value pluralism, most closely associated with Isaiah Berlin:... the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. (Berlin 1969, 214) Conflicts between values of this kind are evident in the housing policy sphere, with – for instance – social housing allocations seeking to fulfil the competing objectives of meeting housing need, rewarding desert, accommodating individual freedom of choice and sustaining “balanced” communities.

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. #

Me on theories 3b

  • Drawing out need, desert, equality and rights as key and sometimes competing principles of distribution with different priorities
    
  • Appeal of each points to moral pluralism in intuitive understanding of distributive justice
    
  • Can therefore expect to find this in homelessness policies
  • However, relative weight given to principles is indicative of broader normative allegiances. Identifying these leanings within policy is a way in to exploring how internally consistent their normative priorities are, and whether they are defensible according to any of the moral frameworks discussed

Desert
Feldman & Skow 2016

Feldman Skow 2016
Given that no one has the capacity to ensure that everyone lives a healthy and productive life, we may conclude that in this case no distributor is mentioned precisely because no one is qualified to be a distributor


n social and political contexts we often find philosophers assuming that citizens deserve certain rights from the government of their country

Desert and Utility


According to a natural extension of the view that Sidgwick mentioned, a claim to the effect that someone deserves something, D, in virtue of his possession of some feature, DB, is justified by pointing out that giving the person D in virtue of his possession of DB would have high utility.
While there surely are some cases in which giving someone what he deserves would have high utility, this link between desert and utility is just as frequently absent. To see this, consider a case in which a very popular person has engaged in some bad behavior for which he deserves punishment – but suppose in addition that no one believes he is guilty. If he were punished for having done the nasty deed, there would be an outpouring of anger from all of the popular person’s fans and friends who think he has been framed. If our interest were in producing an outcome with high utility, we would have to refrain from punishing him. But in spite of that, since in fact he did do the nasty deed, he does deserve the punishment

Miller 1999

19: Justice sometimes requires that people should receive benefits in proportion to their deserts, and sometimes that they should receive equal benefits.


19: ...we must continue to think of social justice as something applied within national political communities, and understand global justice differently

Nagel

Fragmentation of Value 1979

5 fundamental types of value giving rise to practical conflicts 129

  • specific obligations
  • constraints on action deriving from general rights
  • utility
  • perfectionist ends of values; the intrinsic value of certain achievements or creations
  • 130 commitment to one's own projects or undertakings

Incommensurability 131-132


I do not believe that the source of value is unitary - displaying apparent multiplicity only in its applica- tion to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings
...Think for example of the contrast between perfectionist and utilitarian values. They are formally different, for the latter takes into account the number of people whose interests are affected, and the former does not.

Broad types of value 133


This great division between personal and impersonal, or
between agent-centered and outcome-centered, or subjective and objective reasons, is so basic that it renders implausible any reductive unification of ethics - let alone of practical reasoning in general. The formal differences among these types of reasons correspond to deep differences in their sources. We appreciate the force of impersonal reasons when we detach from our personal situation and our special relations to others
...The two motives come from two different points of view, both important, but fundamentally irreducible to a common basis


134...My general point is that the formal differences among types of reason reflect differences of a fundamental nature in their sources, and that this rules out a certain kind of solution to conflicts among these types.

Ethical reasonings from multiple standpoints 134


The capacity to view the world simultaneously from the point of view of one's relations to others, from the point of view of one's life extended through time, from the point of view of everyone at once, and finally from the detached viewpoint described as the view sub specie aeternitatis is one of the marks of human


...Briefly, I contend that there can be good judgment without total justification, either explicit or implicit.


136: We are familiar with this fragmentation of understanding and
method when it comes to belief, but we tend to resist it in the case of decision. Yet it is as irrational to despair of systematic ethics because one cannot find a completely general account of what should be done as it would be to give up scientific research because there is no general method of arriving at true beliefs. I

134-135
The fact that one cannot say why a certain decision is the correct one, given a particular balance of conflicting reasons, does not mean that the claim to correctness is meaningless. Provided one has taken the process of practical justification as far as it will go in the course of arriving at the conflict, one may be able to proceed without further justification, but without irrationality either. What makes this possible is judgment - essentially the faculty Aristotle described as practical wisdom, which reveals itself over time in individual decisions rather than in the enunciation of general principles.

Advantages of the approach 137


Two dangers can be avoided if this idea of noncomprehensive systematization is kept in mind. One is the danger of romantic defeatism, which abandons rational theory because it inevitably leaves many problems unsolved. The other is the danger of exclusionary overrationalization, which bars as irrelevant or empty all considerations that cannot be brought within the scope of a general system admitting explicity defensible conclusions.

Practical application in policy 138-139


With regard to practical implications, it seems to me that the fragmentation of effort and of results that is theoretically to be expected in the domain of value has implications for the strategy to be used in applying these results to practical decisions, especially questions of public policy. The lack of a general theory of value should not be an obstacle to the employment of those areas of understanding that do exist; and we know more than is generally appreciated. The lack of a general theory leads too easily to a false dichotomy: either fall back entirely on the unsystematic intuitive judgment of whoever has to make a decision, or else cook up a unified but artificial system like cost-benefit analysis,3 which will grind out decisions on any problem presented to it. (Such systems may be useful if their claims and scope of operation are less ambitious.) What is needed instead is a mixed strategy, combining systematic results where these are applicable with less systematic judgment to fill in the gaps.


...What we need most is a method of breaking up or analyzing
practical problems to say what evaluative principles apply, and how. This is not a method of decision. Perhaps in special cases it would yield a decision, but more usually it would simply indicate the points at which different kinds of ethical considera- tions needed to be introduced to supply the basis for a respons- ible and intelligent decision.

Consensus 140


...within most serious disciplines there is agreement about what is controversial and what is not.


...We need a comparable consensus about what important ethical and evaluative questions have to be considered if a policy decision is to be made responsibly. This is not the same thing as "a consensus in ethics. It means only that there are certain aspects of any problem that most people who work in ethics and value theory would agree should be considered, and can be profession- ally considered in such a way that whoever is going to make the decision will be exposed to the relevant ideas currently available.


140-141 One needs a method of insuring that where relevant understanding exists, it is made available, and where there is an aspect of the problem that no one understands very well, this is understood too.


...a general position on the ways in which ethics is relevant to policy could probably be agreed on by a wide range of ethical theorists, from relativists to utilitarians to Kantians.
Radical disagreement about the basis of ethics is compatible with substantial agree- ment about what the important factors are in real life.
If this consensus, which I believe already exists among ethical theorists, were to gain wider acceptance among the public and those who make policy, then the extensive but fragmented understanding that we possess in this area could be put to better use than it is now.
...Ethics is not being recommended as a decision procedure, but as an essential resource for making decisions

Graham et al 2011
Mapping the moral domain #

Practical conflicts 128


conflict between values which are incomparable for reasons apart from uncertainty about the facts. There can be cases where, even if one is fairly sure about the outcomes of alternative courses of action, or about their probability distribu- tions, and even though one knows how to distinguish the pros and cons, one is nevertheless unable to bring them together in a single evaluative judgment, even to the extent of finding them evenly balanced. An even balance requires comparable quan- tities


129
...each seems right for reasons that appear decisive and sufficient, arbitrariness means the lack of reasons where reasons are needed, since either choice will mean acting against some reasons without being able to claim that they are outweighed

Fitzpatrick


2008 Applied Ethics and Social Problems


Ch5

Preface 1979

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

Incommensurability of value
p88-89 virtuism draws repeated attention to the indeterminacy of the moral field, the matters of judgement and fallibility that the calculus of utilitarians and the moral imperatives of Kantians risk ignoring. This is certainly the case with applied ethics, where knowing the right thing to do is rarely a question of applying formulae and (p.89) commandments.


p 89 Quite simply, each of the above theories offers indispensable insights into ethics while there remain genuine incommensurabilities between them.
...philosophies, they are not being unwarranted here either. Most consequentialists, Kantians and virtuists do not deny that their rivals’ principles are valuable, simply that they are wrong to treat them as essential, wrong to start from where they start


p90 ...while there are significant points of agreement here, the deontology of the one and the teleology of the other pull in opposing directions.

Critical and intuitive reasoning: the moral and the social


p90-91
First, there is a certain methodological similarity at work within all three philosophies. Following Sidgwick (1981, Bk. 4), who referred to common sense as ‘unconscious utilitarianism’, Hare’s (1981, p 190) consequentialism embraces what he calls a two-level theory. Reason has its limitations, he observes. We may apply the correct procedures incorrectly or it might be that the very procedures we apply are wrong...
...Moral thinking, according to Hare, embraces an intuitive level and a critical one. We cannot help being guided by intuitions, since these make the world manageable, but without critical thinking we may end up repeating our own versions of the mistakes committed by Aristotle and the Bible. That said, critical thinking requires the orientations of the intuitive (the sensible, the obvious, the everyday) if (p.91) it is to be practical. We therefore need to combine these levels as best we can – although it should be noted that Hare (1981, pp 44–6) did give some priority to the critical


There are similarities here with the methods of Rawls and MacIntyre (also Scanlon, 1998, pp 197–9).


...So Hare the consequentialist, Rawls the contractualist and MacIntyre the virtuist all treat the proximate, the consensual, the accepted, the intuitive as indispensable aspects of moral decision making. They each posit social environments as existing in some kind of comparative dynamic with critical reason, even though each offers alternative versions of what this means and what that dynamic implies. Yet the differences are less important than the fact that each is tying into modern conceptions of understanding, knowledge and reasoning as profoundly social rather than as, say, that fragment of forgotten eternity that is the soul (Plato, Christianity) or as the complex accumulation of sensory data (Aquinas, Locke).

Advocacy for social humanism


p94 for a venn diagram of right/good/virtue, inside that which is intuitive, inside social humanism


p92-93
Social humanism therefore offers an orientation to guide us in our moral intuitions. Assessing the long-term rationality of a course of action can make reference to the humanist’s goal of social justice (egalitarianism); weighing agency and structure, freedom and social/natural determinism, can assist us in developing a sociological imagination and applying this to social problems and ethical issues (compatibilism); and where moral intuitions conflict, a deliberative (p.93) process of open debate can help dispel inclinations to resolve them through dogmatic canons (intersubjectivism)

Hoggett


2006 Conflict and ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organisations

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,

Berlin
2002 Liberty

Introduction

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

Two Concepts of Liberty

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

Mendus 2002

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.

Impartiality in political philosophy


Section abstract
1: Impartialist political philosophy must show how and why the priority of impartial justice can be reconciled with a belief in the permanence of pluralism. Although the argument from epistemological abstinence explains the permanence of pluralism, it cannot explain why justice should have motivational priority. It delivers only, and at most, a modus vivendi defence of toleration. The way to attain a defence that is more than a modus vivendi is to ground political impartialism in moral impartialism.

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)

Pluralism and priority of justice


13: Since the aims of political philosophy depend upon the society it addresses, and since modern society is characterized by reasonable pluralism understood as both permanent and significant, the aims of political philosophy must be to arrive at principles of justice which acknowledge pluralism as both permanent and significant. Additionally, and crucially, a theory of justice must defend the priority of justice over comprehensive conceptions of the good.


18: Pluralism and priority are in tension with one another in political impartialism. However, if all that is true, then we will have to look elsewhere for an account of how the permanence of pluralism can be reconciled with the priority of justice

Conclusion


35: So impartial political philosophy, if it is to be more than a merely practical response to pluralism, must somehow secure the priority of justice without undermining the permanence of reasonable pluralism.


Epistemological abstinence is one attempt to address this problem. By requiring that we refrain from making judgements about conflicting yet reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the good, and by further requiring that we not commend justice as fairness on the grounds that it is true, epistemological abstinence takes seriously the permanence of reasonable pluralism in modern democratic societies.


46: In defending epistemological abstinence I argued that it has the advantage over scepticism in that it does not require us to undermine the agent's own comprehensive conception of the good, and for this reason it does not undermine the motivational power of that conception of the good in cases where the conception cannot be politically endorsed. But if abstinence succeeds as a support for pluralism by leaving motivation intact, then it cannot easily succeed as a support for priority, which requires that the motivation to pursue one's conception of the good be subordinated to the motivation to justice. So the very feature of epistemological abstinence which made it superior to scepticism (its ability not to undermine the agent's sense of certainty or conviction about his conception of the good) is also the feature which renders problematic its insistence on the priority of justice.

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.

Berlin on pluralism


p17: As Isaiah Berlin has often reminded us, to assimilate distinct political ideals to one another is not only to court confusion but to obscure the need for choices that involve some sacrifice of one value, which might be justice itself, in the name of others - democracy, individuality or social harmony.

Miller's pluralism


244: ...different principles are used in different social contexts. This explanation was confirmed by looking at empirical studies of people's beliefs about social justice. A theory of justice has to do more than simply report popular beliefs, however: it must also show that the principles in question are philosophically coherent and can be welded together to form a cohesive whole. My claim is that a theory of justice combining principles of need, desert, and equality can meet these conditions.

Daniels 2016
Reflective equilibrium

As a methodology in practical ethics

Background and types

1: Many of us, perhaps all of us, have examined our moral judgments about a particular issue by looking for their coherence with our beliefs about similar cases and our beliefs about a broader range of moral and factual issues. In this everyday practice, we have sought “reflective equilibrium” among these various beliefs as a way of clarifying for ourselves just what we ought to do.


3: The method of reflective equilibrium consists in working back and forth among our considered judgments (some say our “intuitions,” though Rawls (1971), the namer of the method, avoided the term “intuitions ”in this context) about particular instances or cases, the principles or rules that we believe govern them, and the theoretical considerations that we believe bear on accepting these considered judgments, principles, or rules, revising any of these elements wherever necessary in order to achieve an acceptable coherence among them. The method succeeds and we achieve reflective equilibrium when we arrive at an acceptable coherence among these beliefs. An acceptable coherence requires that our beliefs not only be consistent with each other (a weak requirement), but that some of these beliefs provide support or provide a best explanation for others.


4: ...we are expected to revise our beliefs at all levels as we work back and forth among them and subject them to various criticisms...


12: says, to be of interest to moral philosophy, a reflective equilibrium should seek what results from challenging existing beliefs by arguments and implications that derive from the panoply of developed positions in moral and political philosophy (Rawls A Theory of Justice 2nd Edition, 1999, p. 43).

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.

Criticisms


9: Critics of Rawls's theory and his method of reflective equilibrium, especially utilitarians, challenge the prominence the method gives to moral judgments or intuitions.

Narrow vs wide


11: To the extent that we focus solely on particular cases and a group of principles that apply to them, and to the extent that we are not subjecting the views we encounter to extensive criticism from alternative moral perspectives, we are seeking only narrow reflective equilibrium.


12: Rawls's proposal is that we can determine what principles of justice we ought to adopt, on full reflection, and be persuaded that our choices are justifiable to ourselves and others, only if we broaden the circle of beliefs that must cohere. Indeed, we should be willing to test our beliefs against developed moral theories of various types, obviously not all such views (as Arras 2007, Strong (2010) comment, Kelly and McGrath 2010), or we would never arrive at a conclusion, but at least against some leading alternatives.


.13: ...In a wide reflective equilibrium, for example, we broaden the field of relevant moral and non-moral beliefs (including general social theory) to include an account of the conditions under which it would be fair for reasonable people to choose among competing principles, as well as evidence that the resulting principles constitute a feasible or stable conception of justice, that is, that people could sustain their commitment to such principles.


20: In sum, even though pluralism requires that we refrain from appealing to comprehensive world views in certain areas of political deliberation with others, wide reflective equilibrium remains at the center of Rawls account of individual moral deliberation about justice. It survives as the coherentist account of “full justification” he defends.
4.

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

Lukes 2008

CH4: CULTURES AND VALUES
Value pluralism

  • Berlin & Weber
    [summary of Berlin]
    89: The same doctrine was no less dramatically expressed by Max Weber, for whom, in our disenchanted modern world, 'the ultimate possibel atittudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be broguth to a final conclusion.' Ethics, unlike science, does not yield conclusions on which we can expect to converge.
    ...And, Weber says, not tot recognize the significance of this value pluralism for politics ir to be 'a political infant'.
    Both thinkers suggest that values involve human goals and answers to Tolstoy's question 'What shall we do and how shall we live?' Both suggest that they can be ultimate and thus irreducible: in at least some, perhaps many, cases, they cannot be reduced to one another or (90) subsmued under some over-arching value, such as 'utility' or the welfare or happines of all.
    90: ...Sometimes values are incommensurable and so cannot be ranked higher or lower, or indeed equivalent or equal, on some scale or according to some common metric.