Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-Ideal - )

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Amy Gutmann

HUMAN beings know only a disharmonious moral universe. This is now a widely accepted idea. What is widely disputed is the value of our trying to use the powers of reason and purposeful action to create a society that captures all that is morally good. Isaiah Berlin gave great intellectual prominence to this dispute, and not only because he criticized what he called the pursuit of the ideal--a pursuit premised on the idea that an ideal society can bring everything good in its wake, if only human beings are wise enough to discern it and good enough to create it. Berlin also eloquently argued that there is a morally defensible way of living with moral conflicts in our lives. In this essay, I examine what that morally defensible way might be, taking my cues from Berlin's writings when possible and branching beyond them when necessary to respond to some significant challenges not directly addressed by Berlin.

I begin with the most well-elaborated part of Berlin's argument, his critique of the pursuit of the ideal, but quickly move on to the relatively neglected question of what can be said positively in defense of a plurality of societies that are morally imperfect. I defend Berlin's particular kind of value pluralism, liberal pluralism, but argue that he does not succeed in defending liberal pluralism, as he sometimes seeks to do, largely on conceptual grounds. I defend liberal pluralism on substantive grounds, drawing upon the strongest of Berlin's arguments, but leaving the weakest behind. I then show that liberal pluralism is defensible against a prominent critique by John Gray (1996), who argues against Berlin in favor of a non-liberal version of value pluralism.

In conclusion, I argue that liberal pluralism should support multiple standards for morally evaluating societies. Standards of both decency and justice have important parts to play in our practical judgment, and the most defensible conception of liberal pluralism will not force us to choose between the two.

Looking for Less than the Ideal

In principle and practice, Berlin suggested, the pursuit of the ideal is morally treacherous. In principle, it is dangerous because it denies that even the best ways of individual and social life entail the sacrifice of some moral values. In practice, the greatest political injustices--call them evils--have been perpetrated under the banner of a single "Great Good": the only path to salvation; the final solution; a classless society in no need of a state; the preservation of the nation above all else (Berlin, 1991a). In addition, the means that can be justified in the name of achieving any ultimate end, even if the end itself is not illusory, are themselves treacherous. Inquisitions, holocausts, class purges, and cultural revolutions--some of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by some human beings--have flown under the banner of the pursuit of the ideal (Berlin, 1991a: 48).

If we keep in mind that a completely harmonious moral universe is beyond our reach, Berlin's critique of the pursuit of the ideal still leaves open the question of why we should not at least strive to create a society that minimizes moral sacrifice. Suppose we do our best in pursuing the ideal. We can still settle for the non-ideal, realizing that it is a second-best settlement. Berlin rejects this way of thinking, which might be called the perspective of ideal philosophizing. (Plato after all did not argue that anyone could actually create the ideal society. He nonetheless thought it worthwhile to imagine what the ideal society would be.) Berlin's rejection is not by way of logical refutation, but rather of psychological implausibility: in politics, people cannot long proclaim themselves in pursuit of the ideal without believing--or urging others to believe--the ideal to be realizable. Once enough people believe this, they will be willing to pay an exorbitant price to realize the ideal.

By contrast, Berlin argues that the best we should hope for is one among several non-ideal societies that are decent and not beyond human reach. All decent societies, he suggests, entail sacrificing some valuable moral goods to others. For Berlin, the necessity of such sacrifice is a truth of what has come to be called value pluralism. Consequentially, it is important that people understand this truth in order to help avoid some (if not all) of the worst atrocities known to humankind.

The most general claim of value pluralism is that some valuable goods and ways of life--a heroic life and a contemplative life, for example--are incompatible.(1) Most conceptions of value pluralism, Berlin's included, incorporate another more controversial claim: the value of some incompatible goods and ways of life cannot be compared and ranked by a common measure, at least not in the all-things-considered sense. This claim is captured by saying that the goods or ways of life are incommensurable. A heroic and a contemplative life are incommensurable if they are not fully comparable by a common measure. Part of the value (or the value of parts) of the two ways of life--their lawfulness, say--may be comparable by a common measure--of lawfulness. But if there is no common measure (such as utility) that actually enables us to fully compare and thereby fully rank their total value, then we may say that they are incommensurable.(2)