ABSTRACT

The word “pluralism” has many meanings in political theory, but this chapter will focus on only one of these-namely, “value pluralism” or “moral pluralism,” an idea whose explicit formulation is owed principally to Isaiah Berlin. (Berlin’s most substantial formulations of value pluralism are found in Berlin 1990, 2000, and 2002, but see also the references in “Further reading” below.)

The core idea is that human values are irreducibly plural, frequently in conflict, andcrucially-sometimes “incommensurable” with one another. When values are incommensurable they are radically distinct, sharing no common measure and subject to no ranking or trade-off relation that applies in all cases. For example, if liberty and equality are incommensurable, they are intrinsically different considerations. Conflicts among liberty and equality then cannot be resolved by any single rule that measures them against one another in terms of a common denominator (e.g. utility), or that arranges them in an absolute hierarchy such that liberty always overrides equality or vice versa, or that trades them off according, for example, to market demand. Rather, conflicts among such incommensurables seem to leave us with hard choices-hard both in the sense that any decision will result in some degree of absolute loss in terms of the value foregone, and in the sense that there can be no one convenient rule that will tell us what to do every time.