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On There Being Some Limits to Morality*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2009
Extract
It is doubtful that our age can lay claim to having formulated a significant moral ideal, but perhaps the most promising candidate is the ideal of pluralism. It involves rejection of the destructive quest for a summum bonum, and the growing recognition that the legitimate ends of life are many, that there is a wide variety of good and admirable lives, and that there is no blueprint drawn in heaven which would provide those who gained access to it with the knowledge of how to live well.
The implications of pluralism are many, and some of them are subversive of widely accepted values. The aim of this essay is to discuss one unsettling consequence of pluralism. Pluralism is a thesis about values, and it is part of this thesis that many values are incommensurable and conflicting. It is usual to interpret the plurality of incommensurable values, and the conflicts thereby produced, as obtaining within morality. Incommensurability is taken to hold between moral values, and the resulting conflicts are regarded as moral. Much has been written about this, and I do not propose to add to it. My interest is in discussing pluralism as it affects a particular type of conflict between moral and nonmoral values.
Since it will be central to the discussion, I must now indicate what I mean by “moral” and “nonmoral” values. All values derive from benefits and harms to sentient beings, but I shall ignore other sentient beings here and concentrate on benefits and harms for human beings.
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- Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992
References
1 See, for instance, Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Hampshire, Stuart, Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, “The Fragmentation of Values”, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Williams, Bernard, “Conflicts of Values”, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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