Value Pluralism, Realism and Pessimism
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Value Pluralism, Realism and Pessimism Kei Hiruta1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Value pluralists see themselves as philosophical grown-ups. They profess to face reality as it is and accept resultant pessimism, while criticising their monist rivals for holding on to the naïve idea that the right, the good and the beautiful are ultimately harmonisable with each other. The aim of this essay is to challenge this selfimage of value pluralists. Notwithstanding its usefulness as a means of subverting monist dominance, I argue that the self-image has the downside of obscuring various theoretical positions that do not fall into either the pluralist or monist camp. Yet such positions do exist, as shown by my discussion of Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Near contemporaries of the pioneering value pluralist Isaiah Berlin, the pair, just like him, sought to be realistic about the lived experiences of political disasters and moral disorientation in the twentieth century. Moreover, they shared with Berlin a keen interest in real-world moral dilemmas, which seemed to them (as well as to Berlin) to have made traditional morality obsolete. But the three thinkers’ perspectives on ‘reality’ hardly converged, and neither Camus nor Arendt became a value pluralist as a result of their reflections on moral dilemmas. This, however, by no means indicates the pair’s immaturity. Rather, it shows that there is more than one way of observing fidelity to our actual experience and that value pluralists’ commitment to realism and resultant pessimism is not as uniquely mature as they would have us believe. Keywords Value pluralism · Moral dilemmas · Hannah Arendt · Isaiah Berlin · Albert Camus
* Kei Hiruta [email protected] 1
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Aarhus University, Høegh‑Guldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
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K. Hiruta
Introduction According to its proponents, value pluralism is a philosophy for grown-ups. While their monist rivals since Plato onwards have refused to face reality as it is and held on to the comforting thought that the right, the good and the beautiful are ultimately harmonisable with each other, pluralists profess to uphold ‘fidelity to our actual experience’ (Gray 2013, p. 98) and acknowledge that objective human values sometimes of necessity conflict with each other. On this account, the monist is a dreamer, a child and a naïve optimist; the pluralist, by contrast, is a realist, a responsible adult and a sensible pessimist. Widely recognised as the founder of the contemporary value pluralist movement in the Anglophone world (e.g. Galston 2002; Levy 2007; Müller 2012), Isaiah Berlin gave classic expression to this contrast when he characterised the rivalry between monism and pluralism in terms of progressing phases of maturity. On the one hand, he compared wishful monist thinking to ‘a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past’ (Berlin 2002, p. 217). On the other hand, he approvingly described his own pluralist po
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