Worried by the populist wave that doesn’t seem about to slow down, proponents of liberal democracy are trying to find a stance from which our (relatively) well-established liberal and democratic political morality can be convincingly defended. In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks tries one that I haven’t seen explicitly defended until now by connecting liberal democracy to value pluralism. Referring to the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Brooks opposes value pluralism to “monism” and interprets the former as much as a moral view as a political ethos:
“Today, monism takes the form of those on the left or right who see all political conflicts as good and evil fights between the oppressors and the oppressed. The left describes these conflicts as the colonizer versus the colonized. The Trumpian right describes these conflicts as the coastal elites, globalists or cultural Marxists. But both sides hold up the illusion that we can solve our problems if we just crush the bad people.
We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The right question is what balance do we need to strike in these circumstances? (…)
Pluralism is a creed that induces humility (even among us pundits, who are resistant to the virtue). A pluralist never believes that he is in possession of the truth, and that all others live in error. The pluralist is slow to assert certainty, knowing that even those people who strenuously denounce him are probably partially right. “I am bored by reading people who are allies,” Berlin once confessed.”
What I like about this article is that it expresses very clearly the kind of moderation that characterizes liberal politics, as I have explained in a recent post. If you believe in value pluralism, you must acknowledge that many conflicts between competing values and goals cannot be fully rationally settled. It’s not that nobody is right or wrong, but rather that to determine which normative considerations should prevail in a specific situation is not given in advance by broad principles. Value pluralism is however more than the truism what we should do depends on the circumstances. It is a general view about the nature of the normative world and its implications with respect to the way “forms of life” relate to each other within a single society or culture, but also between different societies and cultures. It leads to the kind of commitment that Brooks describes in his article, i.e., to refrain from dogmatically affirming that some master value should always prevail and trump all other considerations about how to live together.
That said, invoking value pluralism to confront populists is not without risk, especially when the latter are “conservative nationalists” that appeal to the particular values of their culture, their way of life, and their history. To start with, the idea of value pluralism remains too vague and open to too many interpretations to have a real persuasive strength in public debates. Readers of Berlin all agree that Berlin’s own account of the idea, in part because it is scattered through many writings, is not always consistent and far from being systematic. As it happens, it is not easy to synthesize what Berlin said on the subject, I’ll not attempt to do it here. More fundamentally, the link between value pluralism and liberalism (or liberal democracy), which Berlin himself asserted, is not so straightforward. I will focus on this point for the rest of this post.
In his book on Isaiah Berlin as well as in many other writings, the philosopher John Gray disputes the thesis that value pluralism entails liberalism or provides any particular justification for a form or another of liberal political morality.[1] Gray’s argument builds on his own interpretation of Berlinian value pluralism. According to Gray, value pluralism as conceived by Berlin emerges at three different levels: (i) within any particular political morality or code of conduct; (ii) within each particular good or value (e.g., equality, freedom); (iii) between “cultural forms,”, leading to “cultural pluralism.” In Berlin’s writings, the move from value pluralism to liberalism is made based on two related sets of considerations. The first set is related to the fundamental (and indeed existential) necessity for human beings to make choices. This gives (negative) freedom (i.e., the fact of not being interfered with one’s choices) a particular status because the realization of human nature cannot be complete without a modicum of freedom. More generally, Berlin identifies (combining metaphysical and anthropological claims) a common human framework where to identify someone as a (wo)man is to ascribe to him universal properties and values. This common core of values entails that value pluralism does not mean that “anything goes.” It is in the nature of a human person to be required to make choices and to affirm one’s individuality through choice-making. It is within this framework that the conflicts between values are formed and settled.
The second set of considerations largely follows from the first. If there is no intrinsic or objective hierarchy of values, no master values, and if values are essentially incommensurable, then no one has any natural authority to impose any particular combination of values ruling the lives of everyone else. In particular, political authority cannot be grounded in any claim that some values systematically trump others. If political authority can be asserted, it must be in accordance with value pluralism, which presumably entails recognizing the common human framework and the necessity to leave human beings free to define themselves through their choices among competing values. Curtailing freedom of choice means negating value pluralism.
As Gray notes, the kind of liberalism that results from the endorsement of Berlinian value pluralism is significantly different from the kind of “political liberalism” promoted by Rawls and other moral/political philosophers who acknowledge the pluralistic character of liberal societies. Berlin’s liberalism is “agonistic” in the sense that it refrains from claiming that specific liberal values are superior or the only ones to be justified because they cannot be compared with other values. However, we already see the fragility of the argument. If values and goods are incommensurable and cannot be rationally ranked, on what basis can you affirm the superiority of liberal political morality over other political moralities? In particular, Gray notes that as long as illiberal regimes do not make universalist claims about the authority of their values and ways of life, they don’t seem to go against value pluralism. They can just make a particularist claim: their way of life has a particular value in the specific context in which it evolves, without making any comparison with alternative, liberal ways of life. The argument can then go even further. If value pluralism is true, then presumably the diversity of ways and forms of life is valuable in itself. The diversity of forms of life is just the concrete expression of the fact that values are incommensurable. If values are incommensurable, then there is no rational argument that supports the idea that some forms of life should be privileged. Tolerating diversity is, quite the contrary, the acknowledgment that there is no such rational argument.
We now see why appealing to value pluralism to defend liberalism against populism can be perilous when populism takes the form of national conservatism. A core idea on which national conservatives rely (whether this is fact-based is another story) is that liberal values tend to be destructive of traditional ways of life, especially those tied to national and religious values. Not only is liberal political morality giving a certain priority to negative freedom over other competing values, something which is not entailed by (though not contrary to) value pluralism. The priority of negative freedom, so the populists argue, is foremost basically inimical to many ways of life. If liberal values can be justified, it is only within the forms of life that already acknowledge their importance. Outside these forms of life, negative freedom cannot have any special status. Quite the contrary, there are good reasons within illiberal forms of life to grant priority to other values, such as loyalty toward the nation and paying due respect to the authority of the leader. If “agonistic liberalism” can be an outcome of value pluralism, it cannot not the only possible one.
Gray argues that this reading is ultimately the correct interpretation of Berlin’s thought, pace Berlin’s own writings. I think that Gray reaches this conclusion only because he makes Berlin a far more historicist thinker than Berlin has ever been. Indeed, it is not clear at all that Berlin would have agreed with the idea that value pluralism applies to the cultural level, that is I don’t think that Berlin would have endorsed what Gray calls “cultural pluralism.” Cultural pluralism as Gray characterizes it implies that cultures and ways of life, not only individual values, are incommensurable. It follows that cultures cannot be compared from a point of view that transcends cultural particularism. The problem with such a view is that it turns pluralism into a form of relativism, while Berlin (and Gray for that matter) was careful in distinguishing the two. As an interpretation of Berlin’s thought, I think that Gray’s reading is not correct, or at least very idiosyncratic, and clearly not shared by other specialists.
Still, the interpretation issue notwithstanding, there may still be a tension between value pluralism and liberalism. There are several possibilities to strengthen the connection, but all of them require making some value commitment that, in a way, contradicts the idea of value pluralism. My view is that value pluralism can plausibly lead to the justification of liberal political morality if we commit to normative individualism. Normative individualism implies that value is not located in cultures or forms of life but in their expression through individual behavior. In his historicist reinterpretation of Berlin, Gray contends that the importance that Berlin gives to choice-making as part of the common human framework should not be understood too narrowly. Choices are not necessarily the expression of individuality but rather the instantiation of cultural forms and identities. Choice-making is not an act of self-creation as Berlin (who on this is very Millian) explicitly views it but rather embodies a complete cultural matrix. If we want to avoid Gray’s anti-liberal conclusion, we have to resist this key step in the reasoning. Whatever the causes of an individual’s choices, we must understand as the expression of this individual’s autonomy and freedom.
Forms of life that negate individual autonomy and freedom are problematic not because they contradict value pluralism per se, but because they resist normative individualism. The road from value pluralism to liberalism must thus pass by normative individualism. The result is not entirely satisfactory, however. Individual autonomy and freedom are valuable in so far as individuals have the capacity to exert them. A liberal state is therefore committed to enhancing this capacity, as argued by Joseph Raz.[2] But this seems to be true only within a society that already endorses liberal forms of life and accepts normative individualism.
Ultimately, I concur with Brooks that value pluralism is undoubtedly part of the liberal political ethos of moderation that distinguishes it from populist politics. There is however no clear-cut connection between value pluralism and liberalism without the endorsement of normative individualism. And, at least for the national conservative type of populists, this may be precisely what is at stake.
[1] John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 1996 [2020]).
[2] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press, 1986).