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Pluralism and the Value of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

John Kekes
John Kekes
Affiliation:
Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany
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Extract

As an initial approximation, pluralism may be understood as the combination of four theses. First, there are many incommensurable values whose realization is required for living a good life. Second, these values often conflict with each other, and, as a result, the realization of some excludes the realization of others. Third, there is no authoritative standard that could be appealed to to resolve such conflicts, because there is also a plurality of standards; consequently, no single standard would be always acceptable to all fully informed and reasonable people. Fourth, there are, nevertheless, reasonable ways of resolving conflicts among incommensurable values.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 44 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1994

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References

1 Annette Baier, Richard Brandt, Stuart Hampshire, Thomas Nagel, David Norton, Martha Nussbaum, Edmund Pincoffs, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Stocker, Peter Strawson, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Bernard Williams are all pluralists in some sense or another, although many deep disagreements divide them.

2 Hampshire, Stuart, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 172.Google Scholar

3 The distinction between overriding and conditional values is not the same as the distinction between absolute and prima facie values. Overriding values may be prima facie because they may be justifiably violated in any particular case provided that that is the best way of protecting the value in general.

4 Some classical versions of monism are those of Plato, Kant, and John Stuart Mill, among others; contemporary versions have been defended by Alan Donagan, Alan Gewirth, R. M. Hare, and others.

5 Some classical versions of relativism are those of Protagoras, Montaigne, Giambattista Vico, and Johann Gottfried Herder, among others; contemporary versions have been defended by Clifford Geertz, Gilbert Harman, Joseph Margolis, Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer, and others.

6 This distinction between primary and secondary values needs much more explanation than it is possible to provide here. For further explanation, see the author's Moral Tradition and Individuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 1, and Facing Evil (Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 3.Google Scholar

7 Such a case is attempted in the author's The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

8 For accounts of some of these controversies, see Glover, Jonathan, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar; Kluge, Eike-Henner, The Practice of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Labby, Daniel H., ed., Life or Death (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Steinbock, Bonnie, ed., Killing and Letting Die (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980).Google Scholar

9 Schweitzer, Albert, The Teaching of Reverence for Life, trans. , R. and Winston, C. (New York: Holt, Rineheart, and Winston, 1965), p. 26.Google Scholar

10 Lienhardt, Godfrey, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961)Google Scholar; page references to this book will be given in parentheses in the text below.

11 For a similar argument against relativism, see Bambrough, Renford, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1979).Google Scholar

12 This essay draws on material from chapters 3 and 7 of the author's The Morality of Pluralism.