Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily asks, “does pluralism imply relativism, and thus (or otherwise) undermine liberalism’s universal pretensions?”
A great many of us today are ‘value pluralists.’ We believe that humans live by many legitimate ethical values and choices: to join the Resistance or care for a sick mother, to adopt a baby or make one, to support socialism or capitalism. Value pluralism entails that often there are no objective grounds for showing one human value superior to another, i.e., that there can be multiple right answers to a single ethical question. Value pluralism also implies that some values may be incommensurate with others, perhaps even making tragic conflict unavoidable-for instance, pro-life vs. pro-choice values, theocratic vs. secular values, warrior vs. monkish values. Often, conflicts of values are manifest even within a person. Whitman wrote, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’
I think it is safe to say that a pluralism of values is an empirical fact and a central aspect of the human condition-there simply are many conceptions of ‘the good life’ that cannot be objectively ranked.
[…]Contrast value pluralism with ‘ethical monism’—the view that every ethical question has one legitimate answer that is part of one superior moral system (such as utilitarianism, a moral law of God, or an ethics derived from Reason). If value pluralism is empirically true, then ethical monism is false and can be critiqued on empirical grounds. Note that ethical monism is an asymptotic state, that is, no one is a pure ethical monist but many are lured by the asymptote. Call them monist fundamentalists.
Read the full essay here.