Idea Transcript
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Liberalism and the Berlinian Paradox (“Le pluralism libéral et sés critiques”) Lucas Petroni* University of São Paulo (Brazil) [FIRST DRAFT] In this brief speech on moral pluralism and political liberalism I would like to address the famous argument advanced by Isaiah Berlin concerning the (inherent) clash of values. At first sight seems like a normative argument and could be stated in one phrase by Berlin’s dictum: “what is clear is that values can clash – that is why civilizations are
incompatible” 1. It is true (a clear truth perhaps) that the range of things that we, as human beings, give value are vast and in itself contradictory. One way to characterize the main goal of Berlin’s philosophy – including his aesthetical and epistemological efforts – is his persistence in arguing for a “pluralistic” worldview in which many conflicting answers for the same problems are the only justification offered by philosophy that we can expect. Moral pluralism in this sense should be contrasted with “monistic” accounts which state that we already have– or we will have in the long run – one correct way to deal with our normative crucial questions. One important class of “illegitimated” theorizing by these criteria would be recent attempts to provide our societies with general principles of justice (political or socioeconomic ones) even if these theories are taken by granted moral pluralism and political liberalism2. Under this argument we should be skeptics about “theories” of justice.
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M.A. researcher of the Faculty of Letters, Philosophy and Human Science (USP). I would like to acknowledge the Department of Political Science for the institutional help and financial support to this work. 1 PL p. 10. 2 It is worth contrasting Berlin’s pluralism with the pluralist account of values that we find in Max Weber. Both depart from the pluralism of values to argue about skepticism when it comes to general normative principles, and both authors have been considered the forefathers of XX century liberal theory. Notwithstand these similarities, Weber’s work bears upon a “nietzschian” flavor that is completely absent in Berlin’s. As I shall argue value incommensurability to Berlin is objective – so it is an objective truth -‐ rather than caused by a clash of subjective perspectives or attachments of personal commitments. As John Rawls once said “the differences between Berlin’s and Weber’s views are marked […] I believe that Weber’s view rest on a form of value skepticism and voluntarism. Political tragedies arises from the conflict of subjective commitments and resolute wills” (Rawls 2001 p. 155 fn. 29). Roughly, my criticism of agonistic foundations of liberalism does apply also to Weber, as it does to
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2 The reasons why I have chosen Berlin’s argument are two: First, Berlin has shown that political theory could not drive away from classical problems settled by political philosophy neither could we avoid the stringent problem of how to justify political decisions. His celebrated defenses of political theory, especially in pieces as “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” and “Two Concepts of Liberty”, make sense only when framed against his argument of moral pluralism. Since then this concept has played an important role in the whole field of practical philosophy and its influence can be identified in the works of Bernard Williams, John Gray, Michael Walzer, and John Rawls (who was a former Berlin student in Oxford). In several important ways the thought of Isaiah Berlin has influenced analytical philosophy for decades and so has his skeptical challenges. Despite this generalize picture of Berlin’s theory, I will try to discuss with you today a rather modest question: does this kind of moral skepticism entailed by Berlin’s argument is sound all the way down? What kind of political liberalism does it support? My first aim (1) is to present an analysis of the moral pluralism argument looking for its normative elements-‐ especially what is entangled by it. I shall call it agonistic pluralism3 and I hope that this label can help us to identity a family of related political liberalisms with its same features. I intend to present the structure of Berlin’s argument of moral pluralism through two basic epistemic premises: a principle of value objectivity, and a principle of value incommensurability. Together they enable Berlin to criticize the rationalistic grounds of western moral reasoning by exposing the “failure of the utopian projects”. After that (2), I will try to build the argument by trying to access the conceptual soundness of agonistic pluralism. Specifically, I would like to expose a paradox (or at least a serious inconclusiveness) between its epistemic premises and its normative conclusions. Does moral pluralism, even in its “agonistic” account, could cut off general principles of justice? It brings up two related problems concerning the concept and the practice of tolerance. Finally (3) I would like to discuss the recent attempts to build liberal theory on agonistic bases through the works of John Gray and Richard Rorty. Despite their political and theoretical divergences both represent one important branch of political liberalism option today. In fact we could classify different political liberalism due to the place moral pluralism occupy into the theory. I would like to conclude my presentation addressing a rival concept of political liberalism found in egalitarian standards. Authors as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon have showed us a new and interesting way to match many “nietzschian” accounts of liberalism -‐ for instance as stated by the French philosopher Gerard Lebrun ([1981] 2001). 3 The name comes from Gray 1993 (a). The first section of my paper relies on Gray’s studies on Berlin. However, I do not share Gray’s conclusions extract from this interpretation – as discussed in section (2). The main reason for rejecting Gray’s conclusions is the same one against the impossibility of any kind of moral theory or general conception of justice.
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3 the moral pluralism assumptions with the claims of social justice giving a egalitarian foundation to the principle of toleration.
1. The structure of agonistic pluralism The core of Isaiah Berlin’s philosophy rests on the idea that a philosophia perennis
is impossible because not every value are necessarily compatible with each other (DU p.8). The conception that human values are true and many – and because of that -‐ they clash against each other has been called agonistic pluralism4. As Berlin famously summarizes this view: the notion of a perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent; I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss. Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of the leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-‐induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human (PI p. 11). For this paper purposes I will define agonistic pluralism as an argument in which there are
a finite set of objective values, i. e. capable of being recognized as such for everyone, even though they are incommensurable among them. To understand Berlin’s argument we should pay attention to at least two main premises. The first one is the principle of value objectivity. The second one is the principle of value incommensurability. To state each of them separately is crucial to evaluate both the argument’s cogency and its practical implications. I think that these two premises can give us support to understand Berlin’s proposition that we are doomed to choose and every choice may entails an irreparable loss. (a) Objectivity
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Gray 1993(a).
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True values are objectivity-‐bearers. “There is a world of objective values. By this I
mean those ends that men pursue fake for their own sake, to which other things are means” (PI p.9). Contrasting with this picture of moral world we could think on, for instance, “emotivism” for which moral decisions are made, in the end, by subjective preferences or volitions. “Ought-‐sentences” would be a matter of personal, or cultural, or historical, taste. This kind of theory in Berlin’s account would be just a sophisticated version of relativism5. In fact the ingenuity of agonistic pluralism relies upon the dissociation between skepticism and subjectivism. Take for instance the argument of “moral diversity” as stated by John Mackie: it is such a plain fact that people disagree so hard about morality (even within closed social groups) that we could hardly expect that moral claims would have an “objective” source6. Rather, if moral agents need to grasp true values, or if they need to choose between them, it is because they are coercive upon their lives values. Given that nobody can “make them up” we can say that in one important sense they exist independently of individual intentionality. Furthermore, it means that agonistic pluralism must be distinguished from “vulgar” kinds of relativism because Berlin knows exactly how inconsistent conceptual relativism is. Take for instance Bernard Williams’ characterization of cultural relativism7. It is made of two contradictory propositions: (i) something is right, or is valued by S, where S is a particular society, and (ii) it is wrong, or should not be valued to judge or to interfere in local believes. Note that while (i) is a relative proposition, (ii) is universal. Even if values are culture-‐specific the principle of culture toleration is not.
The main reason why Berlin avoid (and argue against) moral relativism rests on
his methodological commitment to interpretation as a way to achieve knowledge. “Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand […] the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. Even though sometimes different cultures could see one another as unacceptable, “they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one can communicate” (PI p.9). The legitimacy of interpretation as a method for human knowledge will be shared by authors as Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer8. Agonistic pluralism is 5
Berlin sets up the difference by means of the formula “”I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said’. That is relativism” (PI p.9 the emphasis is mine). 6 Mackie (1977). 7 Williams 1982. Williams sets vulgar relativism apart from what he calls “appraisal relativism”. For Williams, moral predicaments between distinct moral cultures are meaningful only when we face actual options, it is that the criterion would be settled by the values actually shared by a given culture. Agonistic pluralism cannot be well framed in neither of them.
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5 contrary both to subjectivist theories of values and to cultural relativism. As we will see, if the argument’s conclusion ends up leading us to a kind of moral skepticism it is not because of its subjectivist’s premises.
(b) Incommensurability
From the fact that values have an objective nature one cannot infers that they
inevitably clashed. Berlin needs to provide another principle, the principle of incommensurability, through which he shows us that some values are impossible to be harmonized, or even that every value is potentially conflicting with each other. An analogy with another kind of incommensurability principle could be helpful here. Thomas Khun has famously stated that there are a plenty of epistemic values appraised by the scientific community but at some occasions -‐ i. e. in paradigm-‐shifts occasions – different values became incommensurable. So simplicity, for instance, could be more important than achieving unexpected results to hold scientists down to old theories, but at the same time the new empirical gains brought by the new theory would be certainly attractive to new generations of researchers. The point is that both sides can assume that simplicity and “unexpectancy” are epistemic values although they do not dismiss the difficult (but rational) choice between them. What we are facing here are trade-‐offs of values and this, according to Khun, is completely different from skepticism concerning epistemic values in
general: “[w]hat I am denying then is neither the existence of good reasons nor that these reasons are of the sort usually described. I am, however, insisting that such reasons constitute values to be used in making choices rather than rules of choice” (Kuhn 2003 p. 195). The same theoretical problem could be answered differently by two scientists equally rational and motivated to find out the best theory. It happens that they need to choose between values, and being incommensurate is the reason why they need to choose. So we could say that for Kuhn’s philosophy of science every scientific revolution implies a “clash” of (epistemic) values. By analogy this is the way I believe Berlin’s statements concerning the “clash” of values should be taken. Consider two contrasting forms of life, for example a public life full of grandiosity and a modesty private life9. Suppose that I have chosen to pursue a politically engaged life 8
See for example Walzer’s definition of “complex egalitarianism”: “My own claim is that we cannot distribute goods to men and women until we understand what the goods mean, what parts they play, how they are created, and how they are valued, among those same men and women. Distributions flow out of and are relative to social meanings” (Walzer 1983). For Taylor’s methodological considerations, see Taylor 1985. 9 This example overlaps Berlin’s famous interpretation of Machiavelli as “agonistic thinker”: the Christian morality is incompatible with the “ruthless pursuit of power”, but neither of them should be
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6 and because of that I had chosen to hold an important office in my political community. For me, being a well-‐renowned authority is better than being merely an activist. But the same does not happen concerning the other value in contrast: the security of a familiar life. I cannot say that being an authority is always better than enjoying a happy and flourishing familiar life in the same way as I said that is always better being an authority than a grassroots activist. The only way to really understand the meaning of my personal choices is to understand the kinds of values that I have to give up. This conception of value-‐ incommensurability is explored by Joseph Raz. In a process of moral choice, two values, A
and B, are incommensurate if it is not the case that A is better than B or B is better than A and at the same time A and B are not equally appraised. What Raz has in mind is to grasp the difference between value-‐incommensurability and the related (but different) concepts of value-‐equivalence, and value-‐incommunicability. A and B are equivalent when they value the same and are incommunicative when they cannot be evaluated by the same agent. On the contrary, a typical incommensurable situation happen when the possibility of relative judgments between A and B is closed off even though it is acceptable that despite not being the same they are both important. As Raz stated, “incomparability does not ensure equality of merit and demerit. It does not mean indifference. It marks the inability of reason to guide our action, not the insignificance of our choice” (Raz 1986 p. 334). According to this definition of value-‐incommensurability, there is any solution to our moral life that avoid some sort of choice. Nor could we conceive an impartial principle of decision to help us.
(c) Moral Skepticism
The main conclusion so far is that (true) values cannot be subsumed to one
another (objectivity) nor we hope to find a criterion of priority or systematization among them (incommensurability). Even rational and reflected solutions of moral predicaments cannot avoid a grain of the irrationality of choice. If it is a true that we face moral trade-‐ offs, any attempt to dismiss them would rise skeptical suspicious. This set up stringent constrains on general conceptions of morality. Let’s take a classical moral trade-‐off as the clash between the rival claims of equality and liberty. Agonistic pluralism tells us that it is impossible to show that there is only one right relation between this two values concerning the organization of our political life. We know that both of them exist and are important, but how to combine them is something completely contingent. Every attempt stated as the final moral truth. The first task of political philosophy is to recognize the potentials clash among them. See his essay “The Originality of Machiavelli”.
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7 to harmonize the parties under a single conception represent in fact a sort of moral hoax in which we coercively turn a single value into the only moral possibility. “Monistic” theories of human values (as Marxism and Utilitarianism) are morally wrong for Berlin because they are conceptually impossible.
This conclusion raises a claim of moral skepticism concerning normative general
principles. Ronald Dworkin (2007) has defined two clusters of skeptical arguments against cognitivists accounts of moral reasoning, i. e. if moral propositions have truth-‐or-‐ falsehood ontology. In the first set he placed those theories that are skeptical about the very possibility of assuming truth or falsehood to our moral discourse. This general views are called “external skepticism” because they try to evaluate the nature of moral reasoning from the outside – normally from a physicalist point of view. The second kind is called “internal” skepticism and its strategy is to show that in spite of our capacity to produce meaningful propositions in the moral sphere, there is an indeterminacy concerning the rights ways of set general principles up in that dimension. We cannot ground our judgments because values are not as objective or indisputable as empirical data. Clearly Berlin’s argument cannot be placed under the label of “external” skepticism due to its objectivistic premises (strong ones as a matter of fact), what brings it to the “internal” label. However I do not think that agonistic pluralism fits well here too. It is skeptical only against “monistic” solutions not about the nature of the values per se. It is neither skeptical about the worth of the struggle for bring these values up. However we can use the label loosely to characterized agonistic pluralism conclusions. One way to see the argument in action is showing Berlin’s criticism against “utopian projects”. Utopian projects are moral theories that frame ideally a conception of good life for a political community. Every formulation of these utopian scenarios rests on what we could call “the monistic fallacy”: if A is a human good and B is a human good, so A and B are to be logical consistent (cf. DU p. 24-‐25). But as we have already shown agonistic pluralism denies the very possibility of monism’s conceptual soundness. Marxist and utilitarian projects are the usual targets here. But even those “regulative ideals” so easily assumed by Kantians or soft-‐headed reformists, would be denied by the moral skepticism. The assumption that universal principles are worthwhile, even if they fall short of the ideal, would carry the fallacy too. Different demands presented into the same piece of constitution would lead to morally unsolvable cases when they appeal to different fundamental values. Public dignity and freedom of expression, for instance, could not be harmonized through a general conception of justice, considering that each claim is grounded in a different value. To say that is always morally right assuring people’s right to expression even if they could harm minorities, would be the same as giving foundational 7
8 priority to liberty over fraternity, or maybe to individual rights against communal goals, and so forth. To use a formulation that has been offered by Kolakowski, utopian phrases are self-‐defeating (“equality thorough an enlighten vanguard” or “fraternity via strength”) once they try to reduce one value into another10. The only kind of intellectual help that philosophers and political authors could offer are refined interpretations of our common history, exploring the many possibilities of combined values and teaching us how we can live in a pluralistic world. In essence these are the same aims of moral theory that one finds in Williams, Walzer, Gray, Rorty and Lebrun11.
2. The role of “negative” liberty
How Berlin can justify his normative premises? 12 Or to put it slightly different, in
which epistemic basis can we state the objectivity and the incommensurability of values? I believe that the only way to grasp it is analyzing the role that our faculty of choice assumes in his work. Berlin’s conception of liberty, or more specifically, negative liberty, works as the moral criterion we have been looking for. To do that it is necessary first to cope with Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958 TCL). I would like to avoid the vast bibliography concerning what it really states or whether Berlin’s historical picture is accurate or not, to focus on a more interesting task: to determine what the conception implies normatively. Berlin’s definition of liberty, as a human feature, is not different from that
minimalist definition offered by Hobbes when he says that a free man is absent from impediments to do what he wants (Hobbes [1651] 1996 cap. 21, cf. TCL p. 195 n.1). 10
Kolakowski 1981 p. 240. However, Kolakowski himself sets up a distinction that I accept between “constitutive” and “regulative” uses of the utopian ideas that is completely absent in Berlin’s critique.
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Cf. for instance Gray 1993 (a) p. 292; Rorty 1995 p. 587-‐588 ; Lebrun 1981 pp. 115-‐119.
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We could contrast the argument of normative pluralism for moral theory with a general argument that Berlin usually access philosophical arguments overall. Against logical positivism, for instance, we could not “reconstruct” the objective world thought a minimal set of basic, or atomic, statements. There is not – as assumed by logical positivism – a genuinely type of sentence – declarative statements for example -‐ from which we can derive all the rest of meaningful propositions. Even “deflationary” projects as the ordinary language analysis do it better because it assumes that ordinary statements are the real human statements from which everything is derived. Also here, Berlin is struggling against the belief that “all propositions must in principle be either translatable into, or at any rate in some way connected with, the approved type of sentences (which alone fully reflect ‘the structure of reality’), or else suffer from defects which must either be explained away or palliated by special logical ‘treatment’, or, if they prove too recalcitrant, removed with their owners beyond logical pale” (LT p. 79). From the existence of an objective reality (physical and moral) it does not implies that we hold a unique way to square it down. There are many (and conflicting) possibilities to do that.
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9 Thence the essay was not aiming for the metaphysical meaning of liberty or even questioning the place of personal liberty as a condition of possibility for a meaningful life. It addresses a different question: historically liberty has assumed a value in our societies and despite its centrality it has a double (and misleading) meaning. One way to grasp the difference according to Berlin is paying attention to the kind of answer each interpretation give to the problem of coercion. Famously, negative liberty is defined as a moral elbow room, a space where the agents are free from intervention of states or communities and positive liberty as a desire to be a subject not an object, the desire to lead my own life autonomously13.
If we had accepted the agonistic pluralism account of the value’s nature, we could
have understood the two senses of liberty as two distinct (objective and incommensurate) values: freedom for coercion and rational self-‐government. We can appraise both, however hardly ever could we avoid choosing between them. The problem of legitimacy of human rights offers us an example of predicament that Berlin is drag our attention to. What would be its plausibility if they depended only on the effective choice of those affected by them? Those who work with the promotion of human rights cannot count with effective consentient of those who are helped by them. On the contrary, they often claim that those rights are the moral conditions through which valuable choices are made. Once at the limit even an educational system (for those reluctant students perhaps) would not be justified if the effective consciousness of empirical agents is the sole ground of moral evaluation. This is the reason why other values will clash with (negative) liberty. As well perceived by Berlin himself: Liberty could not be the only aim of men, but at the same time “nothing is gained by a confusion of terms” (TCL p. 197). However, hardly is it the whole story. The human faculty for choosing -‐ to exercise its “negative” liberty -‐ is a precondition to any context of value trade-‐off. To better understand the conception of negative liberty and realize how it should be assumed beforehand as a universal precondition of the values themselves, we have to set up a distinction between liberty’s definition on one hand, and liberty’s criterion of validity on the other:
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We can summarized this difference respectively through the questions “what is the area within which the subject – a person is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be without interference by other people?” and “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (TCL p. 194).
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Definition: Liberty (Negative) is a discretion to act according to individuals
desires, without suffering the interference of others other than the agent itself during the process. (ii)
Criterion of Validity: the only way to decide what counts as interference should
be judged by the agent’s own point of view. So according to the berlinian definition of negative liberty, its value is in danger if and only if (i) X’s liberty is bound to be restricted and (ii) X believe that it is the case that his liberty is restricted. In other words: liberty here refers to the own believes that X hs concerning his own liberty.
On this account every action of enforcement is potentially coercive from the agent
point of view. However there is a kind of coercion that , despite its conflict with liberty, has the appearance of a deeper freedom appealing to the “true” essence of human beings. Even though our empirical selves could resist, the argument goes, there is “an occult entity – their latent rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is believed by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self of which the poor empirical self […] may know nothing” (TCL p. 205). So once we accept this characterization of liberty as an objective value we ought to concede that there is an important conceptual distinction between threatening X’s liberty simpliciter (for the purpose of other value as equality or fraternity) and threatening X’s liberty because it is better to X to do it (on the name of a deeper “I”) in such a way that at the end there is no violation at all!. Berlin has called this rhetorical device rationalism’s “magic transformation” due to how it reduces value’s incommensurability to only one easy solution. “It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for my good […] it is another that if it is my good, than I am not being coerced” (TCP p. 205). In fact, to understand Berlin’s skepticism against normative principles and “utopian projects” in general we should pay attention to the way he frames the value of liberty. If it is the very possibility to choose our ideas of good and a meaningful life, and if this possibility is an objective value shared by any group of human beings, then normative reasoning should avoid concealing particular choices and preferences in the kingdom of ends through a dubious theory of a split self: part empirical and conscious, part rational and unconscious. Assuming that liberty of conscience and the protection of people’s own decisions is taken for granted, it is barely improbable that someone could state a moral principle, or any set of them, that would satisfied the highly demanded requirements of negative liberty.
Giving normative priority to actual preferences and self-‐awareness is a clever way
to block off utopian thinking. Hardly ever people are willing to confront antagonist moral 10
11 reasoning with an open-‐minded stance especially when these arguments upset the whole practices and valuable choices made by us14. The burden of proof against our actual desires and beliefs is on the side of utopias. However attractive this picture is it inevitably will turn down any normative principle that clash with the contents of negative liberty even though purely regulative ones. Take for instance an egalitarian conception of justice strongly committed with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Taking our societies as they are it is almost impossible that this redistribution -‐ maybe supported by the value of equality – could be accepted. Actual political agents will certainly antagonize with it, seeing it as an infringement of their liberty. Although agonistic pluralism would grant the legitimacy of redistribution per se it remains as a way of coercion. Any attempt to avoid this conclusion would mean to “bypass” the “real” citizens with their actual desires, beliefs and fears. There are no normative principles that could avoid the priority of real politics15. Stated as it is agonistic pluralism cannot avoid taking every moral generalization or principle as coercive as a terrifying dystopia. Once we assume individual rights as the priority of people’s actual decisions it would be barely impossible that someone could state a moral principle, or any set of them, that would not be coercive in some instance. Philosophical liberalism as a general set of regulative principles for the evaluation of social institutions is undermined by agonistic pluralism as an impossible goal. Its ideal of consensual consentient between equals is just one more utopian temptation16.
3. Liberalism and the “Berlinian Paradox” If my crude interpretation of the argument so far has got the point I can see one possible flaw in agonistic’s argument. This problem, in my view, is so decisive that it leads agonistic pluralism towards a dead-‐end. I suggest calling it “the Berlinian Paradox” – to highlight how it is transmitted to other kinds of agonistic reasoning in political theory. Before exploring the paradox I intend to state briefly what are the political commitments supported by an agonistic account of values. Although the self-‐effacing nature of politics in Berlin’s work, it is quite easy to assume that his opinions match with what we could call a “classical” liberalism and a commitment to a free and pluralistic society: 14
One could add: especially when they are favored by status quo.
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Priority in the sense argued by Walzer (1981) and Rorty (1991). I shall return to this question later.
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For the definition of philosophical liberalism that I have in mind here, see Waldron 1987.
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12 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 […] It is truer, because it does, at least, recognize the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another (TCL p. 241). We might grasp what a pluralistic society mean through the institutional background necessary to assure (the truth) that human goals are many. Individual rights as freedom of speech and conscience, liberty of association and the rule of law are the usual liberal tools to get it17. Consequentially in a pluralistic society the main institutional framework works by a principle of toleration concerning different opinions and styles of life, respecting the ethical decisions made by the individuals. Liberalism -‐ as a political theory concerned with legal protection of individual choices -‐ seems almost as a natural conclusion of agonistic pluralism. Negative liberty entails the priority of right over good.
The Berlinian paradox arises when one pose the question: why should we struggle
for that kind of society? Why are pluralistic societies essentially better than monistic ones? Taking the last as de facto possibility in human historic what kind of reason do we have to favor a de jure pluralistic society against the facts? Perhaps because they count with a true picture of human values, or because only in these kind of societies all the agonistic predicaments could be appraised. Actually relying upon their premises it is hard not to state the moral truth of value pluralism. We have to conceive moral pluralism as an objective truth -‐ just like liberty and equality are also objective true values for Berlin. It would be impossible to conceive a human society in which moral pluralism (de facto) does not occur. The fact that it is not always recognized or estimated equally would be a historical contingency that we can only lament and try to avoid. Arguing for agonistic pluralism is to carry through liberalism or liberal institutions against all sort of hostile forms of life, whether secularized or not. Far from being an exaggerated interpretation, Berlin keep telling us, perhaps due to his historical context, how the very possibility of political theory depends on a pluralistic framework, and how we should strive to protect it against the temptation of monistic thoughts18.
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Nevertheless we should note that the effective participation on the main political decision-‐process conceived in the political rights is more controversial due to the argument. It is possible to conceive pluralism without participation. The only thing we need is an affective principle of toleration. 18 For example, “Unless political philosophy is confined to the analysis of concepts or expressions, it can be pursued consistently only in a pluralistic, or potentially pluralistic, society […] rigid monism is compatible with philosophical analysis only in theory” (PTSE p. 150).
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Following the argument we can state that moral pluralism supports liberal
institutions, it gives us general and strong reasons turn down coercive ways of living. Otherwise moral pluralism itself would be just that: a culture-‐specific experience allowed by contingent historical developments in which the values and its organization are nothing more than subjective creations. This “non-‐foundational” route bump into the late statement that if a pluralistic society should be promoted and certain institutional schemes are necessary, against the countless possible cultural experience, then the reason why we should strive for it was that pluralistic societies are better than monistic ones and they are better just because they recognize the true value of personal liberty. In spite of a mere exposition of epistemic premises, the agonistic argument established a normative criterion to political theory, a general principle to favor one kind of society among others. This paradox can be summarized as follow: (P1): Moral pluralism is true (or, it is the case that values can clash) (P2): One cannot state effectively that (P1) unless the recognition and promotion (institutionally) of a particular kind of society – pluralistic – in which a specific value – negative liberty – is granted. (C): There are in fact societies that are different from (P2), probably because they denied (P1) (it is not the case that values can clash), and so are illegitimate from agonistic pluralism’s point of view. Suppose that now we do not want to accept (C)’s validity maybe because it is at odd with the openness of agonistic pluralism, maybe because it sounds “monistic” enough to support just one kind of political arrangement where negative liberty (individual rights) have priority over other values (there are no general normative principles). Therefore we would like to recognize negative liberty as one value among others, perhaps stating something as: (P3): Moral pluralism is true for us (or, it is the case that values can clash in societies where negative liberty has some priority over other values). So,
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14 (C’): There are in fact societies that are different from (P2), probably because they denied (P1) (it is not the case that values can clash), but they are just one more human possibility among many -‐ equally legitimated -‐ others. As soon as we add (P3) -‐ trying to avoid the uneasy (C) -‐ we upset the whole argument because we had already concluded in the first section that agonistic pluralism as an account of moral pluralism was not a cultural-‐specific argument. It has absolute foundations. It implies that we ought to assume that (P1) is false, perhaps reframing it as something like: (P1’): Moral pluralism is true for S, where S is already a pluralistic society. This result obliges us to express serious misgivings about the most original element of Berlin’s argument, i. e. its objectivity. We can no longer take moral pluralism as a moral
truth about the world19. A tragic choice has to make agonistic pluralism: unless one secludes the true account of moral pluralism to pluralistic societies (hence: liberal), and committing itself with cultural and historic relativism about values, he cannot avoid to stand for general normative prescriptions or ideals against non-‐liberal ways of life. If it is so, at least the priority of individual rights and the institutionalization of tolerance take up the form of general principles of justice.
4. Varieties of political liberalism
I lack time (or maybe skills) to sum up the types of philosophical foundations to
liberalism available in the contemporary debate. Nevertheless any variety of liberalism invariably has to deal with moral pluralism and, more specifically, with the hard task of giving a normative ground to the principle of tolerance. As Rawls said in Political
Liberalism, moral pluralism “is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy” (Rawls 2005 p. 36). One possible way to establish that is trying to contrast the kinds of normative foundation (and the practical consequences derived from that) that the concept
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“[I]f value-‐pluralisms is correct, then these are truths, correct moral beliefs about the world […] it is a species of moral realism, which we shall call objective pluralism” (Gray 1995 p. 71).
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15 of tolerance acquires20. Why should I constrain myself or what gives authority to states when I am obliged to comply with a rule that I cannot accept due to moral reasons. For example, if we are tempt to conceive society as a composition of self-‐interested parties trying to impose their desires (whether moral or not) upon each other, moral pluralism is seemed as a “second-‐best” result -‐ and toleration collapse into a modus vivendi. Values are only shared desires and tolerance itself is not a normative concept but a maxim of prudence. Justice is a profitable contract capable of getting mutual protection.
It is easy to see that what Isaiah Berlin had in mind when he thought about moral
pluralism was something different. Also it is difficult to extract a precise political theory from Berlin’s works even though he is often thought as a classical liberal. There is a conceptual contradiction between the skeptical element of agonistic pluralism and its normative requirements. However, one of the paradox’s horns has led us to a non-‐ foundational interpretation of agonistic liberalism where far from being a predicament, skepticism is a solution. This radical interpretation finds its way through the works of self-‐ conceived non-‐foundational authors in moral theory as John Gray, Michael Waltzer, Bernard Williams and (in a neopragmatic fashion) Richard Rorty21. Commonly they shared (i) an agonistic account of moral pluralism, (ii) a strong skepticism concerning moral theory, and (iii) an explicit commitment to liberalism as a valuable practice or form of life. Nevertheless their differences, each of them express itself against foundational or “philosophical” accounts of political theory. Liberal and democratic institutions such as toleration, civic rights and democratic participation are appraised as shared practices not just because they express deep moral principles. Political liberalism here is a practical solution to a moral skepticism concerning moral pluralism.
To evaluate the soundness of the views present in my paper I would like to track
the berlinian paradox down into the main arguments of two theories of political liberalism: the “agonistic liberalism” of John Gray, and the “postmodern (bourgeoise) liberalism” of Richard Rorty. At the end, I’ll make an attempt to deal with the moral pluralism argument from a different perspective.
(a) Agonistic Liberalism
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In my work in progress I am pursuing to establish four types of philosophical foundations each of them related with a particular branch of liberal theory: (i) agonistic/non-‐foundational liberalism, (ii) neo-‐ hobbesian liberalism, (iii) perfectionist liberalism and (iv) egalitarian liberalism. Only the last two varieties are expect to find out a explicitly normative principle to support their theories. In the end of this paper I shall try to sketch an egalitarian answer to the agonistic pluralist conclusion. 21 For example: Gray (1993, 1995(a)), Walzer (1981, 1985), Williams (1985, [1996] 2009) and Rorty (1983, 1991). Other important thinker when it comes to this field in the Brazilian academic world is the political work of the French philosopher Gerard Lebrun ([1984] 2003).
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16 John Gray defines its liberalism as “an application in political philosophy of the moral theory of value-‐pluralism” (Gray 1995(a) p. 69). However, at the same time, it shares the non-‐foundational interpretation of the berlinian paradox: “for us […] for whom the practice of autonomy is an essential part of the good life and for whom individualism and pluralism are an historical fate, a liberal civil society is one in which the richest diversity of forms of flourishing is most likely to be achieved. This result is avowedly culture-‐specific, and it is not meant to be universalized” (Gray 1997(b) p. 324 stress marks added). A liberal form of political organization with all the institutional background one requires is worth because it “has the advantage, for virtually all modern peoples, that in it epistemic freedoms are protected” (p. 324). However, without these epistemic advantages presented in liberal institutions, the very fact of moral pluralism would not be recognized as such. How come Gray could support at same time the moral contingency of liberal institutions and the necessary value of moral pluralism of which liberal institutions are the cognitive conditions of possibility? Gray typically answers this question with a cognitive distinction between a liberal philosophy on one hand – unbearable in face of agonistic pluralism – and a liberal tradition embedded into our modern institutions on the other. We should keep sustaining our institutions and, specially, the toleration present into the modern civil society (cf. p. 328).
The first problem with Gray’s account is the skepticism about the
“universalization” of liberal institutions. What reasons an ardent secular “monist” could find in a civil society full of religious practices and arguments? From his point of view our tradition is not enough perhaps because it allowed just this kind of reprehensible situation. For the atheist we would do better with a completely secularized public sphere. Obviously this reasoning will bring a political clash to the public life. How to avoid the
modus vivendi conclusion? Gray asks for the “moderation” of our demands on each other, and a peaceful recognition of differences (cf. Gray 1995(b) p. 30). In other words: he asks for a principle of toleration. But it cannot work out unless the parties -‐ or in our case the fanatic secularist -‐ recognized that moral pluralism itself is a moral truth and that it entails some normative priorities to be effective. Otherwise, from people’s point of view, the only way to settled down toleration is through a peaceful compromise between political forces (not moral values) that respect adversaries bargain’s power (not the possible value of their commitments).
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Besides this stability problem, agonistic liberalism has to cope with the
institutional conditions to incommensurability. Certainly a predictable problem it is once we realized what the moral truth of Berlin’s argument had entangled. If our historical institutions are settled up on universalistic principles, struggle for it implies struggle for some sort of universal claims concerning personal liberty, equal conditions and human dignity. Why should we value equal rights if only the existence of liberty is necessary to foster moral pluralism? A cast system or a deeply unjust society could be as “pluralistic” as a standard liberal democracy.
Both problems reflect, in my opinion, the predicament of the berlian paradox:
either we stand for the objectivity of moral pluralism and are prepared to give it a explicit normative foundation -‐ blaming the fanatic atheist for moral reasons -‐ or the argument collapse into a modus vivendi where even the moral pluralism itself is a contingent arrangement. The fact that many agonistic authors refer their arguments back to the Judith Shklar notion of “liberalism of fear” (Shklar 2004), reveals the tendency of this theory to coincide with a kind liberalism very akin to subjectivism about value and skepticism about moral pluralism as a normative (and not a prudential) concept. (b) Postmodern Liberalism […]
5. Conclusion
I would like to conclude my paper with a few appointments concerning the way
how I am inclined to conceive the relation between moral pluralism and political liberalism. They are quite general and insufficient to hold together a systematic view. How I understand it, agonistic pluralism is not the better ground for a liberal theory. The main reason why it is so it is because these theories do not construct a manageable principle of toleration.
As we already said, either as a skeptical or a normative conception, moral
pluralism is the essential part of any kind of political liberalism. However, the first thing to note is that we can defend moral pluralism as an objective and appraised concept and, at same time, reject its “agonistic” fashion. Once we realized the “overobjectification”22 on 22
Thomas Nagel drags our attention to the danger of giving too much objectivity to our values, as they are completely independent from human contexts (cf. Nagel 1979 pp. 162-‐163).
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18 Berlin’s account of values it becomes highly questionable how strong his notion of negative liberty is. The negative liberty’s criterion of justification states that only personal consciences can mark the boundaries of a non-‐coercive action. No one can be coerced without knowing it. If for material reasons the agents are unable to express coherently their real desires or the act of choice means almost nothing, liberty maintains its value. Even more problematic is the implication that, to stay with our previous example, anykind of redistribution, for example, is as coercive as the lack of means of living or the lost of other fundamental liberty as the rule of law. Dworkin has raised the right question when he asked why not define liberty as a “freedom to do whatever you like so long as you respect the moral rights, properly understood, of others”? (Dworkin 2006 p. 112 stress mark added). Does it make sense to attribute moral value to a notion according to that it is legitimate to prohibited public accepted rules of appropriation even in contexts of misery and depriving? It is not solely “to do whatever we want” what we value in a free life. Probably we should restate its criterion of justification in such a way that it were possible to include shared intuitions about the intrinsic value of human life and social cooperation. Rights are fundamental to liberalism and basic rights give us important forms of protection and control over our lives, but they need to be justified by shared standards to be a reasonable idea23. Secondly, moral skepticism it is a non sequitur on Berlin’s argument. As stated by
Thomas Scanlon, moral inquiry does not imply “a single unified set of substantive principles to which we can appeal to decide which things have [the] property [of moral wrongness]” (Scanlon 1992 p. 11). One thing is to turn down comprehensive ethical theories as a solution to political matters -‐ what was indeed a crucial role of Berlin’s works. Another is to show doubts about any normative principle. There is a fundamental distinction between the reasons used for justify publicly coercion and the reasons one can use to set the goals of his life. Mixing them into the general label of “values” implies to rely too much on the “agonistic” side of the problem. Under free institutions the individual ways of life are countless and, due to the nature of ethical choices, incommensurable. Pluralism in fact brings up moral trade-‐offs that cannot be solvable merely appealing to abstract moral theories. Although at same token some common ground should be required once we have stated pluralism (as such) as a normative principle for us. To recognized incommensurability is to recognize the normative priority to toleration and mutual respect. This leads us to my final point. It is not possible to state moral pluralism’s truth, i.
e. to recognize its objective truth, without some egalitarian metric concerning mutual 23
I am thinking, for example, in the kind of construction proposed by Thomas Scanlon (1975; 2003).
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19 respect or toleration. Some theories as the neo-‐hobbesian accounts of liberalism try to do that through a subjectivist standard: any preference or desire counts and pluralism, as was already said, is a second-‐best equilibrium. Even for this kind of theory liberty is not enough to support toleration. Personally, I intend to favor another form o liberal thought. One thought in which toleration, as a condition to political legitimacy, rests on egalitarian bases24. It is true that this egalitarian foundations shall bind up the scope of acceptable or reasonable arrange of values. But at same time it has the moral strength to assure the distinction, proposed by Thomas Nagel, between personal ethical truths, on one side, and public justifiability on the other (Nagel 1987). If every citizen should conceive itself as a free and equal individual they can treat each other as moral persons able to offer (public) reasons for their actions. This is my interpretation of what John Rawls has called the moral “duty of civility” embedded in the ideal of tolerance25.
Works of Isaiah Berlin: LT: “Logical Translation”, in: Concepts and Categorie: Philosophical Essays. Oxford Press 1978. PT: “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”, in: Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. Oxford Press 1978. DUIW : “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West”, in The Crooked Timber of Mankind:
Chapters in The History of Ideas. New York: Vintage Books 1992 TCL : “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in: The Proper Study of Mankind: an Anthology of Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997. PI: “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, in: The Proper Study of Mankind: an Anthology of Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997.
Bibliography: DWORKIN; R. 1976 Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Press. . 2006 “Moral Pluralism”, in Justice in Robes, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Press.
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This is in my view how John Rawls has tried to settle the question in Political Liberalism. See for example Rawls interpretation of public reason as an “ideal of democratic citizenship”, (2005) pp. 216-‐220. 25
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20 GRAY; J. 1993(a) “Berlin’s Agonistic Pluralism”, in: Post-‐Liberalism: Studies in Political
Thought, London: Routledge. . 1993(b) “What is Dead and What is Living in Liberalism?”, in: Post-‐Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, London Routledge. . 1995 “Agonistic Liberalism”, in: Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the
Close of the Modern Age London: Routledge Press pp. 65 – 87. HOBBES; T. [1651] 1996 Leviathan, TUCK; R. (ed.) Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. KOLAKOWSKI; L. 1981 “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered”, in: The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values pp. 229-‐247. KUHN; T. 2003 O Caminho desde A Estrutura, São Paulo: Ed. UNESP. LEBRUN; G. [1984] 2001 O que é Poder? São Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense. Coleção Primeiros Passos. MACKIE, J. L. 1977 Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong London: Penguin Books. NAGEL; T. 1979 “The Limits of Objectivity”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. . 1987 “Moral conflict and Political Legitimacy” in: Philosophy and Public Affair, vol. 16, n. 3. pp. 215-‐240. RAWLS, J. 2005 Political Liberalism (expanded edition), New York: Columbia Press. RORTY; R. 1983 “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”, in: The Journal of Philosophy vol. 80, n. 10. . 1991 “The Priority of Democracy over Philosophy”, in: RORTY, R. Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers , Cambridge: Cambridge Press. SHKLAR; J. 2004 “The liberalism of Fear”, in: YOUNG; S. P. (ed.) Political Liberalism:
variations on a theme. Albany: State University of New York Press pp. 149-‐166. SCANLON; T. 1975 “Preferences and Urgency”, in: The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72, n. 19, pp. 655-‐669.
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21 . 1992 “The Aims and Authority of Moral Theory”, in: Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 12, n. 1, pp. 1-‐ 23. . 2003 “Contractualism and Utilitarianism”, in: SCANLON, T. The Difficulty of Tolerance, Cambridge: Cambridge Press. TAYLOR; C. 1985 “Interpretation and the sciences of man”, in: Philosophy and the Human
Sciences: philosophical papers II Cambridge: Cambridge Press, pp. 15-‐57. WALDRON; J. 1987 “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism”, in: The Philosophical
Quarterly vol. 37, n. 147, pp. 127-‐150. WALZER; M. 1981 “Philosophy and Democracy”, in: Political Theory vol. 9 n. 3. pp. 379-‐ 399. . 1983 “Spheres of justice: An exchange”, in: The New York Review of Books, 21 de Julho. . 1985 Interpretation and Social Criticism, in: The Tanner Lecture of Human Values. WILLIAMS; B. 1982 “The Truth in Relativism”, in: MEILAND & KRAUSZ (ed.) Relativism:
Cognitive and Moral, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press. . 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy Abingdon: Routledge Press. . [1996] 2009 “Tolerância: uma questão moral ou política?”, in: Novos Estudos Cebrap 84 pp. 47–58.
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