A new piece by me was just published by the Cosmos Institute, on the topic of pluralism. I really enjoyed writing this piece, and it brings together a lot of my recent thinking, so I thought I’d alert you to it. In fact, it’s probably the clearest statement yet of The Rebecca View of Liberalism...
Here’s a little extract, from near the beginning:
My simple response is that these criticisms often depend on a mistaken understanding of the kind of pluralism that’s baked into liberalism. That the mistake here is that liberals shouldn’t be conceived as supporting “anything goes,” but something more like “many things go,” instead. In other words, that the use of “plural” here does not signal “every” or “any,” but “more than one.” And that it’s not any old “more than one,” either. It’s not just that “many” is smaller than “every” or “any,” that is — it’s that the “many” in question is bounded in a particular, principled way. Indeed, that there are many such “manys” for the liberal to consider!
I’m going to argue for this “bounded pluralism” approach mainly by discussing some examples of it at work within liberalism. It’s a descriptive claim that I’m seeking to convince you of, after all — the claim that liberalism is better sloganized as “many things go” than “anything goes.” But, along the way, I’ll also try to convince you of the value of such an approach.
And one more extract, from near the end:
But I worry, nonetheless, that the search for the “correct” moral theory over-prioritizes a tight kind of moralism that tells us we can only act correctly when we have much more information than, typically, we have access to, and that also biases us toward thinking that ‘moral correctness’ is always the goal.
This worry betrays my optimism about the human capacity to navigate the infinite options of the everyday without committing wrong. It speaks to a desire to be left free to trust one’s own instincts, and to innovate behaviorally in pursuit of the good — or at least in pursuit of avoiding the bad — in the belief that, as humans, we generally have reliable awareness about whether the choices we face are morally serious or not. If I am deciding whether to go to the swimming pool or the bookstore, and all other things are equal, then there is no morally right answer, per se. And if you are deciding how to spend the day with your toddler, then just because there are some bad and wrong options — playing with matches! — that doesn’t mean there aren’t infinite reasonable, or even good, options. This seems straightforward to me. But more relevantly, I think it’s a useful example of the pervasive potential of bounded pluralism.
You can find the whole thing here, on the Cosmos Substack, where you can also see their excellent choice of accompanying artwork..