6 - Pluralist liberalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
PLURALISM AND CHOICE
None of the preceding attempts to deliver the liberal project overcomes the critic's objections, whose cumulative force is amplified by the fact of value pluralism. Given such worries, liberal theorists have increasingly sought to turn value pluralism to their advantage, arguing that it offers the best defense of the liberal state. As was the case with argument from autonomy, pluralist liberalism can be advanced in both universalist and particularist versions. I shall begin with the universalist attempt.
There are two main routes for the universalist defense. The first is to argue that value pluralism establishes the extraordinary importance of individual choice and that choice is widest and most powerfully protected in liberal regimes. The basic idea is famously expressed in Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Two passages reveal his line of reasoning:
The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon the freedom to choose; for if they had assurance that in some perfect state, realized by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it the central importance of the freedom to choose.
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- Modus Vivendi LiberalismTheory and Practice, pp. 99 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010