Nomocratic Pluralism by Kenneth B. McIntyre

Author:Kenneth B. McIntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030533908
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Gray’s “strong pluralism” is characterized by an extreme incommensurability of values, and Gray argues that this means that there is no rational way to make judgments among such values or among commitments, plans, projects, or among ways of life. He writes that incommensurable goods “cannot be ranked,” and that incommensurability “means that no…comparative judgments are possible.”16 For Gray, the difficulties associated with making judgments between different cultural systems is the single most important political problem of the contemporary Western world. However, as I argued in Chapter 3, the incommensurability of values does not necessarily lead to a radical subjectivism of the type that Gray often suggests it does. Incommensurability only suggests that all values cannot be reduced to a single metric without emptying the variety of values of their actual meaningfulness in human lives. For example, one can buy sex, but one cannot buy love or friendship, so one might conclude that sex and friendship are not completely commensurable. That does not make decisions concerning whether one should sleep with one’s friends or with one’s friends’ spouses beyond the scope of reasonable choice. Nor does it even mean that the value of sex itself can be made completely manifest in terms of monetary exchange.17 Further, as we have seen, the problems associated with incommensurability are more often than not overcome by the set of circumstances in which decisions are made, including considerations of both impersonal/impartial and personal duties, the consequences to others of one’s actions, and one’s personal commitments and projects. And comparisons can be made according to some specific quality in which the comparison is made. Gray suggests that the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Beckett are non-comparable (a term that he uses synonymously with incommensurable). However, Richard Halpern has just published a work which compares the three playwrights (among others) in terms of the connection between tragedy and political economy.18 So, Gray has exaggerated the irrationality which any account of incommensurability must admit. Further, he does not offer an account of the character of practical reason, and, as I argued in Chapter 4, without such an account, value pluralism tends to slide into subjectivism and relativism. Gray’s emphasis on radical incommensurability and conflict is the direct result of his focus on the problem of plural monisms instead of on the implications of the acceptance of value pluralism.19

From this account of “strong” value pluralism, Gray derives his account of political life, which he calls modus vivendi pluralism. Gray’s version of modus vivendi is rather sketchy, but, given his claim that radical incommensurability makes rational judgments about value difficult if not impossible, the sketchiness is not necessarily its primary weakness. First, Gray claims that, since values are plural, conflict with each other, and are incommensurable, there is no single argument about the structure of the political community that could possibly be acceptable to all members of the community, and, thus, the fact of value pluralism itself destroys the credibility of monistic versions of liberalism. According to Gray, liberalism offers a

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