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PLURALISM AND TRAGEDY
I
Isaiah Berlin, generally recognised as the author of the conception of ethical pluralism,[1] reflected upon his contribution to this idea (in an interview given to me in 1991) in the following way:
“I cannot believe I am the first person to have said that some ultimate values are incompatible. Maybe I am; but it’s rather like the first man who said ‘T- two plus two equals four.’ (...)… It seems so obvious to me.”[2]
Pluralism is an intermediary intermediate standpoint in ethics, situated between monism and relativism, and offering a unique description of ethical life. According to monism there is only one reasonable system of values, the same for all human beings. Different kinds of ethical relativism assume that all values are merely expressions of personal preferences or social conventions, varying from place to place. From a pluralist standpoint human values are objective and knowable, but they are irreducibly plural. They can be neither ranked in a comprehensive hierarchy nor reduced to a common measure that has universal binding force. What is more, some human aims and values may be incomparable incompatible and incommensurable. There exists no ultimate standard that would allow for rational resolution of collisions among them. As the conflict among values is inevitable, the idea of perfection (which presumes completeness) is logically incoherent, and total ethical harmony is beyond human reach. Charles Taylor commented upon Berlin’s contribution to this standpoint in the following way:
“Isaiah’s plurality thesis was not only a blow to various totalitarian theories of positive liberty, it was also deeply unsettling to the moral theories dominant in his own milieu. It is one of the paradoxes of our intellectual world, which will be increasingly discussed in the future, why this latter point was not realised. The bomb was planted in the academy, but somehow failed to go off.”[3]
The odds are that it was a bomb with a delayed ignition. The pluralist standpoint, only loosely sketched in Berlin’s writings, has been made more precise in more recent publications.[4] According to William A. Galston this view can be characterised by the following basic tenets:
“1. Value pluralism is not relativism. The distinction between good and bad, and between good and evil, is objective and rationally defensible.
2. Objective goods cannot be fully rank-ordered. This means that there is no common measure for all goods, which are qualitatively heterogeneous. It means that there is no summum bonum that is the chief good for all individuals. (...)…
3. Some goods are basic in the sense that they form part of any choiceworthy conception of a human life. (...)…
4. Beyond this parsimonious list of basic goods, there is a wide range of legitimate diversity – of individual conceptions of good lives, and also of public cultures and public purposes. (...)…
5. Value pluralism is distinguished from various forms of (...)… “monism.” A theory of value is monistic (...)… if it either (a) reduces goods to a common measure or (b) creates a comprehensive hierarchy or ordering among goods.”[5]
George Crowder articulates a different version of pluralism that stresses the tension inherent in the incommensurability thesis. In his view there are four basic components inherent in this theory:
“First, pluralists claim, that there are certain fundamental universal values, the enjoyment of which contributes to human flourishing. (...)… Second, the things that are valuable for human beings – including both universal and local values – are plural or several. (...)… The third component of pluralism is the most distinctive. This is that values are not only plural but may be radically so: they may be incommensurable with one another. (...)… For the value pluralist, no basic value is inherently more important or authoritative or weightier than any other, and none embraces or summarises all other values. (...)… Fourth, these plural and incommensurable values may in particular cases come into conflict with one another. That is, they may be incompatible or mutually exclusive, such that one is realisable only at the cost of sacrificing or curtailing another (...)….”[6]
Isaiah Berlin found it difficult to assume sole credit for initiating the new pluralist direction in ethics:
“I cannot believe that I am the first person to think of something so obvious as to say that some ultimate values conflict with others.”[7]
Nevertheless, it was his reflection work that “has helped spark what may now be regarded as a full-fledged value-pluralist movement in contemporary moral philosophy.”[8] Moreover, pluralism is a movement within which “contrary standpoints and schools have already emerged.”[9]
II
On Crowder’s interpretation the central implication of the pluralist outlook is that problematic choice is the necessary consequence of conflict among incommensurables.[10] Both he and John Gray have investigated the subject of value conflicts. Gray singles out three levels at which we can experience clashes of aims and values: 1. within any morality or code of conduct -– among ultimate values (e.g. between liberty and equality), 2. within complex values themselves (e.g. between freedom “from” and freedom “to”), and 3. among whole ways and styles of life (e.g. represented by different cultural forms).[11] Crowder points to two principal sources of value conflict. First, the ability of human beings to realise different values is limited by empirical circumstances. Given the laws of physics it is impossible to be at the library and at the beach simultaneously. Second, some clashes arise from the very nature of the values concerned. A life of independent, unencumbered self-reliance necessarily excludes a life dedicated to a large family and marital intimacy.[12]
A crucial question arises – is it possible to make rational choices in situations of value-conflict? This issue has given rise to two opposing standpoints within the pluralist movement. The first one, sometimes (rather misleadingly) labelled “tragic pluralism,” questions the rational solubility of all conflicts. According to this outlook situations occur in which reason encounters an impassable barrier -– incommensurability of the ultimate values which people pursue for their own sake. The only way out of such a stalemate would be to make a radical, arbitrary choice, which implies some necessary loss. Versions of this standpoint are represented not only by Isaiah Berlin, but also by Stuart Hampshire, Joseph Raz and John Gray.[13]
Other adherents of pluralism, labelled “benign,” express greater optimism about the possibility of integrating rival values, even though they recognise the inevitability of tragic loss. Thomas Nagel adopts this point of view when he advocates “the search for higher-order values, or for methods that permit the conflicts to be resolved.”[14] Taylor entertains similar hopes: “It always makes sense to work toward a condition in which two cherished goods can be combined, or at least traded off at a higher level (...)…. Such adjudication and balance are possible if we approach value pluralism in an Aristotelian framework.”[15] It seems that such optimistic expectations, which were expressed at a conference convened by the New York Institute for the Humanities in the fall of 1998 to mark the first anniversary of Berlin’s death, were fulfilled four years later. Crowder, in his Liberalism and Value Pluralism, put forward the thesis that it is possible to choose rationally among conflicting values. In Crowder’s view pluralism implies two kinds of guidelines -– particularist and universalist – capable of guiding rational choice among plural values. The former makes rational choice possible by attention to the context in which it is taken. The latter advocates the application of a set of universal principles, which according to Crowder are implicit in pluralism itself.[16]
Despite these differences, both approaches within value pluralism share an important feature – “they take value conflict seriously.”[17] Both recognise the phenomenon of the incommensurability of values, as well as the fact that the unavoidable loss inherent in making a “radical” or a “hard” choice can never be fully compensated [for]. Thus, conflicts of values and the choices made among them sometimes have a tragic dimension. Of the whole spectrum of problems tackled by the contributors to the pluralist standpoint in ethics, let us now concentrate on what is considered the tragic element of value pluralism. In particular, let us analyse the opposing positions represented by Berlin and a Polish philosopher, Ryszard Legutko. According to Berlin the phenomenon of the tragic is best understood from the pluralist standpoint in ethics, while in Legutko’s view pluralism is actually an anti-tragic conception, and it is only the monistic perspective that allows to understand the losses inherent in value conflicts as human tragedies.
III
In an article published in Critical Review in 1994[18] Ryszard Legutko fiercely criticises the commonly accepted thesis that value-pluralism most best reveals the tragic dimension of the human condition. The polemic he initiated has continued.
As Legutko’s arguments seemed to be crucially important, I reported them to Isaiah Berlin, who criticised them in a letter to me dated June 28, 1997.[19] Legutko answered a year later in two texts published in Polish.[20] This did not mark the end of the disagreement, however. In 2002 George Crowder joined the discussion. Since it is likely that the polemic will remain lively, it is worth reconstructing its course hitherto.
Legutko put forward the thesis that pluralism is entirely devoid of tragic features. First, it ignores the religious dimension of the ultimate. Second, it lacks two ingredients essential for recognising tragedy: the notion of necessity and the notion of unity. When there is no impersonal necessity -– fate or a higher moral imperative – there is no tragedy.[21] There is also no tragedy when there is no sense of the unity of morality: “If it were possible to speak about the phenomenon of the tragic, one would have to assume not only that values have not only an objective character, but that they are also united so strongly – moreover,: objectively, or even, as in the tragedians,: metaphysically, i.e. - in the form of some general Justice -– that we must feel obliged to pursue the most important of them, even if they happen to be contradictory. Thus, the tragic assumes the conception of the objective unity of values and the necessity of an uncompromising pursuit of them, apart from our own preferences, even at the cost of suffering and ultimate sacrifice.”[22] In Legutko’s view, moral pluralism is inherently anti-tragic.[23] For example, in the light of value-pluralism, Antigone and Creon “are at best impractical doctrinaires, and at worst stubborn blockheads, unable to see that the only sensible solution for them was a compromise which, unaccountably, they refused to make.”[24] Contrary to Berlin’s thesis that the idea of incommensurability, which lends a tragic dimension to human choices, comes from the thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment, and that the Greeks were unable to identify it, Legutko firmly emphasises that it was precisely the ancients who discovered and interpreted the notion of the tragic. He contends that on the basisground of pluralism human choices – particularly those made among lower goods – are in fact trivial, not tragic; pluralism gives tragedy a frivolous interpretation. What is tragic – asks Legutko – in choosing between two clearly incommensurable values – becoming a priest or a soldier? The answer is that– such a dilemma is no more tragic than staying at home in the summer or going on a vacation.
Berlin’s epistolary reply is a record of his spontaneous reflections; thus, it does not constitute a text that fully satisfyies the demands of precision and coherence.[25] Its most important counter-arguments are expressed in the following passages: ***
“It is very well for him [R. Legutko] to say that a man can choose to be a priest or a soldier, and if he chooses one then he doesn’t regret the other – of course, there is nso agony here – as he says, I go for a walk or not. The agony comes in, and with it the tragedy (for this is what tragedy is about), when both values pull strongly at you; you are deeply committed to both, you want to realise them both, they are both values under which your life is lived; and when they clash you have to sacrifice one to the other, unless you can find a compromise which is not a complete satisfaction of your desires, but prevents acute pain, in short, prevents tragedy. That is the value of compromise.”[26]
It is significant that Legutko ignored the above crucial passage in his analyses. Berlin elaborated on the thnatureread of the tragic in the following way:
“The tragedy is for the Athenian audience, who presumably believe in both sets of values, both the unwritten laws, the eternal code which Antigone obeys, and Creon’s belief that the Sstate is the ultimate source of authority. (...)… whichever side wins, the loss of the other side is a source of pain to the audience, which believes in both these irreconcilables. This is tragic.”[27]
Legutko’s retort is bald and flat: “I find it difficult to argue this point, because this is exactly the stance which I myself took.”[28]
Crowder offers a different interpretation of the Creon–-Antigone conflict. In his view, thea tragic quality of certain human choices flows from the sense of loss that is an inescapable consequence of sacrificing one of the conflicting values. Such loss is in a sense absolute: it is not compensated by the gains in the rival value. It is in these -– typically pluralist -– terms that Crowder perceives the tragic dimension of the dilemma faced by Creon. He “must decide between upholding the laws of the Sstate in his political role, which oblige him to execute Antigone, and honouring the claims of family relationship in his role as Antigone’s uncle and prospective father-in-law. His decision in favour of the Sstate’s law does not blind him, at least at the end, to the absolute nature of the price for that decision.”[29]