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Summary In ethics, a pluralist view is one that assumes that more than one principle or value provides the foundation for a certain ethical domain: in morality; in value theory (including but not restricted to moral theory); in politics; in aesthetics, and so on. Pluralism as such contrasts with monism, the view that there is only one basic principle or value in such domains. Monist views in moral theory include utilitarianism, divine command theory, and Kant's moral theory at least on some readings. Hedonism is a monist view in value theory: only pleasure is valuable for its own sake. Pluralist views include, for example, Ross's deontology and 18th c. ethical rationalism (Clarke, Price) whereby there are several basic, irreducible, duties; so-called 'ideal utilitarianism', whereby there are many goods besides pleasure that require to be promoted; so-called 'objective list' theories of well-being, whereby different elements (pleasure, knowledge, achievement, personal relationships etc.) compose a person's well-being; and some versions of virtue ethics - on which there is no single master virtue but different and possibly diverging ones (say, benevolence and justice). In the political area, Rawls's two principles of justice provide another example of pluralism, in this minimal sense outlined. Key questions under consideration include the arguments for and against pluralism (within one or more of these areas), how a pluralist view ought to deal with conflicts between heterogeneous principles or values, and whether some sort of unification of different values can be achieved without slipping into monism.
Key works Ross 1930 is a milestone for the elaboration of pluralist views both in morality and value theory. Bernard Williams provides arguments against monism based on the notion of rational regret, in his 'Ethical Consistency' (in Williams 1973). An important book-length defense of pluralism and its practical viability is Stocker 1989. Another defense is given by Nagel in 'The Fragmentation of Value' (in Nagel 1979). Hurka 1996 replies to some of the arguments for pluralism. Swanton 2003 provides a model for a pluralist virtue ethics based on the idea of different appropriate responses to value irreducible to one single kind of attitude. Similar points are raised, mainly against monism of a consequentialist sort, in Anderson 1993. In the political area, but still relevant to the overall debate on ethical pluralism, the classic is Berlin 2002. Hurka 2011 is an accessible statement of a working value theory that is at least pluralistic in spirit.
Introductions Mason 2008, Heathwood 2015, Schroeder 2008,
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  1. Beneficent Intelligence: A Capability Approach to Modeling Benefit, Assistance, and Associated Moral Failures through AI Systems.Alex John London & Hoda Heidari - manuscript
    The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders' ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally (...)
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  2. Dimensions of Value.Brian Hedden & Daniel Muñoz - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Value pluralists believe in multiple dimensions of value. What does betterness along a dimension have to do with being better overall? Any systematic answer begins with the Strong Pareto principle: one thing is overall better than another if it is better along one dimension and at least as good along all others. We defend Strong Pareto from recent counterexamples and use our discussion to develop a novel view of dimensions of value, one which puts Strong Pareto on firmer footing. We (...)
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  3. Multidimensional Concepts and Disparate Scale Types.Brian Hedden & Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Philosophical Review.
    Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...)
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  4. Machine morality, moral progress, and the looming environmental disaster.Ben Kenward & Thomas Sinclair - forthcoming - Cognitive Computation and Systems.
    The creation of artificial moral systems requires us to make difficult choices about which of varying human value sets should be instantiated. The industry-standard approach is to seek and encode moral consensus. Here we argue, based on evidence from empirical psychology, that encoding current moral consensus risks reinforcing current norms, and thus inhibiting moral progress. However, so do efforts to encode progressive norms. Machine ethics is thus caught between a rock and a hard place. The problem is particularly acute when (...)
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  5. Metaethical Experientialism.Andrew Y. Lee - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    I develop and defend metaethical experientialism, the thesis that phenomenal facts explain certain kinds of value facts. I argue, for example, that anyone who knows what it’s like to feel extreme pain is in a position to know that that kind of experience is bad. I argue that metaethical experientialism yields genuine counterexamples to the principle that no ethical conclusion can be derived from purely descriptive premises. I also discuss the prospects for a pluralistic metaethics, whereby different metaethical theories hold (...)
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  6. Well-being and Pluralism.Polly Mitchell & Anna Alexandrova - forthcoming - Journal of Happiness Studies.
    It is a commonly expressed sentiment that the science and philosophy of well-being would do well to learn from each other. Typically such calls identify mistakes and bad practices on both sides that would be remedied if scientists picked the right bit of philosophy and philosophers picked the right bit of science. We argue that the differences between philosophers and scientists thinking about well-being are more difficult to reconcile than such calls suggest, and that pluralism is central to this task. (...)
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  7. damage, flourishing, and two sides of morality.Adam Morton - forthcoming - Eshare: An Iranian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1).
    I explore how considerations about psychological damage connect with moral theories.
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  8. Hierarchy and Heterarchy in Ross's Theories of the Right and the Good.Anthony Skelton - forthcoming - In Robert Audi & David Phillips (eds.), The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross. Oxford University Press.
    In both The Right and the Good and The Foundations of Ethics, W. D. Ross maintains that any amount of the non-instrumental value of virtue outweighs any amount of the non-instrumental value of pleasure or avoidance of pain. The chapter raises two challenges to the status that Ross accords the value of virtue relative to the value of pleasure (pain). First, it argues that Ross fails to provide a good argument for thinking that virtue is always better than pleasure and (...)
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  9. Commonsense Morality and Contact with Value.Adam Lovett & Stefan Riedener - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1:1-21.
    There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact (...)
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  10. Death pluralism: a proposal.Gonzalo Díaz-Cobacho, Alberto Molina-Pérez & David Rodríguez-Arias - 2023 - Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 18 (1):1-12.
    The debate over the determination of death has been raging for more than fifty years. Since then, objections against the diagnosis of brain death from family members of those diagnosed as dead-have been increasing and are causing some countries to take novel steps to accommodate people’s beliefs and preferences in the determination of death. This, coupled with criticism by some academics of the brain death criterion, raises some questions about the issues surrounding the determination of death. In this paper, we (...)
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  11. The Value of Knowledge and Other Epistemic Standings: A Case for Epistemic Pluralism.Guido Melchior - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):1829-1847.
    In epistemology, the concept of knowledge is of distinctive interest. This fact is also reflected in the discussion of epistemic value, which focuses to a large extend on the value problem of knowledge. This discussion suggests that knowledge has an outstanding value among epistemic standings because its value exceeds the value of its constitutive parts. I will argue that the value of knowledge is not outstanding by presenting epistemic standings of checking, transferring knowledge, and proving in court, whose values exceed (...)
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  12. The Viciousness of Envy.Timothy Perrine - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):2171-2194.
    Across time and cultures, envy is widely regarded as a vice. This paper provides a theory of viciousness that explains why envy is a vice. First, it sketches an account of the trait of envy, utilizing some of the social psychology literature on social comparisons. Second, it considers some theories of vices—including Neo-Aristotelian, Kant’s, and Driver’s consequentialism—and briefly argues that they are not adequate in general or with regard to envy. Lastly it articulates a theory of viciousness on which a (...)
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  13. Well-Being as Need Satisfaction.Marlowe Fardell - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3).
    This paper presents a new analysis of the concept of non-instrumental need, and, using it, demonstrates how a need-satisfaction theory of well-being is much more plausible than might otherwise be supposed. Its thesis is that in at least some contexts of evaluation a central part of some persons’ well-being consists in their satisfying certain “personal needs”. Unlike common conceptions of other non-instrumental needs, which make those out to be moralised, universal, and minimal, personal needs are expansive and particular to particular (...)
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  14. Are all practical reasons based on value?Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17:27-53.
    According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the relevant (...)
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  15. Why Should LGBTQI Marriage Be Legalized.Yang Pachankis - 2022 - Academia Letters 4 (5157).
    Traditional paradigm on marriage equality focused on a humanitarian appeal and was set as a path dependency model on marriage equality for the suppressed regions. However, such gender based focus has largely neglected the multilateral movements underlying the macro- political-economic structures that shaped law as a power political means. Consequentially, LGBTQI existence became marginalized from the public consciousness with structural realist state hierarchies that further undermines the fundamental freedoms of the LGBTQI popula- tion. This makes the question on LGBTQI equal (...)
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  16. Five problems for the moral consensus about sins.Mike Ashfield - 2021 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 90 (3):157-189.
    A number of Christian theologians and philosophers have been critical of overly moralizing approaches to the doctrine of sin, but nearly all Christian thinkers maintain that moral fault is necessary or sufficient for sin to obtain. Call this the “Moral Consensus.” I begin by clarifying the relevance of impurities to the biblical cataloguing of sins. I then present four extensional problems for the Moral Consensus on sin, based on the biblical catalogue of sins: (1) moral over-demandingness, (2) agential unfairness, (3) (...)
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  17. Species of Pluralism in Political Philosophy.Kyle Johannsen - 2021 - Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (3):491-506.
    The name ‘pluralism’ frequently rears its head in political philosophy, but theorists often have different things in mind when using the term. Whereas ‘reasonable pluralism’ refers to the fact of moral diversity among citizens of a liberal democracy, ‘value pluralism’ is a metaethical view about the structure of moral practical reasoning. In this paper, I argue that value pluralism is part of the best explanation for reasonable pluralism. However, I also argue that embracing this explanation is compatible with political liberalism’s (...)
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  18. 80,000 Hours for the Common Good: A Thomistic Appraisal of Effective Altruism.Ryan Miller - 2021 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 95.
    Effective Altruism is a rapidly growing and influential contemporary philosophical movement committed to updating utilitarianism in both theory and practice. The movement focuses on identifying urgent but neglected causes and inspiring supererogatory giving to meet the need. It also tries to build a broader coalition by adopting a more ecumenical approach to ethics which recognizes a wide range of values and moral constraints. These interesting developments distinguish Effective Altruism from the utilitarianism of the past in ways that invite cooperation and (...)
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  19. Value Conservatism and Its Challenge to Consequentialism.Reuben Sass - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (3):337-352.
    G.A. Cohen’s value conservatism entails that we ought to preserve some existing sources of value in lieu of more valuable replacements, thereby repudiating maximizing consequentialism. Cohen motivates value conservatism through illustrative cases. The consequentialist, however, can explain many Cohen-style cases by taking extrinsic properties, such as historical significance, to be sources of final value. Nevertheless, it may be intuitive that there’s stronger reason to preserve than to promote certain sources of value, especially historically significant things. This motivates an argument that (...)
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  20. Conspiracy theories and reasonable pluralism.Matej Cíbik & Pavol Hardoš - 2020 - European Journal of Political Theory 21 (3):147488511989923.
    The popularity of conspiracy theories poses a clear challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conspiracy theories undermine rational debate, spread dangerous falsehoods and threaten social co...
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  21. Coronavirus and value pluralism : a robust ethical perspective on a pandemic.Ignace Haaz - 2020 - Journal of Dharma 45 (2):261-280.
    The fear of the largely unknown consequences of being exposed to coronavirus should have brought a more dynamic interplay of beliefs and opinions for those who in the footsteps of J.S. Mill believe that the limits of power, which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual, is to prevent harm to others. It is surprising that not much debate or critical interaction has taken place on the choice of locking down most of the populace in 185 countries after (...)
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  22. Value Pluralism, Realism and Pessimism.Kei Hiruta - 2020 - Res Publica 26 (4):523-540.
    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 self-image 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 (...)
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  23. Social Choice or Collective Decision-making: What Is Politics All About?Thomas Mulligan - 2020 - In Volker Kaul & Ingrid Salvatore (eds.), What Is Pluralism? Abingdon, UK: pp. 48-61.
    Sometimes citizens disagree about political matters, but a decision must be made. We have two theoretical frameworks for resolving political disagreement. The first is the framework of social choice. In it, our goal is to treat parties to the dispute fairly, and there is no sense in which some are right and the others wrong. The second framework is that of collective decision-making. Here, we do believe that preferences are truth apt, and our moral consideration is owed not to those (...)
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  24. The Value of Chance and the Satisfaction of Claims.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (9):469-493.
    A new explanation for the fairness of lotteries is presented. The explanation draws on elements of John Broome's and Richard Bradley's accounts, but is distinct from both of them. I start with Broome's idea that the fairness of lotteries has something to do with satisfying claims in a way which is proportional to their strength. I present an intuitive explication of.
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  25. Democracy as Intellectual Taste? Pluralism in Democratic Theory.Pavel Dufek - 2018 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 30 (3-4):219-255.
    The normative and metanormative pluralism that figures among core self-descriptions of democratic theory, which seems incompatible with democratic theorists’ practical ambitions, may stem from the internal logic of research traditions in the social sciences and humanities and in the conceptual structure of political theory itself. One way to deal productively with intradisciplinary diversity is to appeal to the idea of a meta-consensus; another is to appeal to the argument from cognitive diversity that fuels recent debates on epistemic democracy. For different (...)
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  26. Can Modus Vivendi Save Liberalism from Moralism? A Critical Assessment of John Gray’s Political Realism.Rossi Enzo - 2018 - In John Horton, Manon Westphal & Ulrich Willems (eds.), The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 95-109.
    This chapter assesses John Gray’s modus vivendi-based justification for liberalism. I argue that his approach is preferable to the more orthodox deontological or teleological justificatory strategies, at least because of the way it can deal with the problem of diversity. But then I show how that is not good news for liberalism, for grounding liberal political authority in a modus vivendi undermines liberalism’s aspiration to occupy a privileged normative position vis-à-vis other kinds of regimes. So modus vivendi can save liberalism (...)
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  27. Public Reason, Compromise within Consensus, and Legitimacy.Chong-Ming Lim - 2018 - In Manuel Knoll, Stephen Snyder & Nurdane Şimsek (eds.), New Perspectives on Distributive Justice: Deep Disagreements, Pluralism, and the Problem of Consensus. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. pp. 225-242.
    A central idea of public reason liberalism is that the exercise of political power is legitimate when supported only by reasons which all citizens accept. Public reason serves as a necessary standard for evaluating the legitimacy of political decisions. In this paper, I examine the directive to employ public reason from the citizens’ perspective. I suggest that employing public reason potentially involves them engaging in different types of compromise. I consider how acknowledging these compromises sheds light on public reason liberalism. (...)
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  28. Diversity, Stability, and Social Contract Theory.Michael Moehler - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3285-3301.
    The topic of moral diversity is not only prevalent in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is also practically relevant. Moral diversity, however, poses a significant challenge for moral theory building. John Thrasher, in his discussion of public reason theory, which includes social contract theory, argues that if one seriously considers the goal of moral constructivism and considerations of representation and stability, then moral diversity poses an insurmountable problem for most public reason theories. I agree with Thrasher that moral diversity (...)
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  29. Sacrificing Value.Lisa Tessman - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3):376-398.
    ABSTRACTWhen is sacrifice – and particularly self-sacrifice – called for? This question turns out to be difficult to answer, for it tends to arise when values conflict, and hence the answer to it depends on how conflicts of values are to be resolved. If values are constructed, and if there is no single right way to construct them or prioritize them when they conflict, though there are identifiable ways in which the construction of values can go wrong, we may be (...)
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  30. Hard Choices.Ruth Chang - 2017 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (1):1-21.
    What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new way of thinking about what (...)
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  31. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.Kieran Setiya - 2017 - Princeton University Press.
    Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of adulthood and middle age, showing (...)
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  32. When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible.Lisa Tessman - 2017 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    In this accessible yet throught-provoking work, Lisa Tessman takes us through gripping examples of the impossible demands of morality -- some epic, and others quotidian -- whose central predicament is: How do we make decisions when morality demands we do something that we cannot?
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  33. Retrospection.Kieran Setiya - 2016 - Philosophers' Imprint 16.
    Argues from the rationality of nostalgia, affirmation, and regret to a principle of ‘specificity’: it can be rational to respond more strongly to facts that provide us with reasons than to the fact that such reasons exist.
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  34. Two Kinds of Value Pluralism.Miles Tucker - 2016 - Utilitas 28 (3):333-346.
    I argue that there are two distinct views called ‘value pluralism’ in contemporary axiology, but that these positions have not been properly distinguished. The first kind of pluralism, weak pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they say that there are many things that are valuable. It is also the kind of pluralism that philosophers like Moore, Brentano and Chisholm were interested in. The second kind of pluralism, strong pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they (...)
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  35. To Infer Liberalism from Value Pluralism.Jinzhou3 Ye - 2016 - Ethical Perspectives 23 (4):663-688.
    Robert Talisse charges as doomed the Berlinian effort to infer liberal politics from value pluralism, based on the observation that it unavoidably vio- lates Hume’s law and that the two in fact clash in their basic logic. In arriving at this diagnosis, however, Talisse relies on several problematic assumptions about practical reasoning as well as about value pluralism and liberalism. As a result, he fails to appreciate the practical nature of practical reasoning and also fails to see the negative aspects (...)
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  36. Persons and value: a thesis in population axiology.Simon Beard - 2015 - Dissertation,
    My thesis demonstrates that, despite a number of impossibility results, a satisfactory and coherent theory of population ethics is possible. It achieves this by exposing and undermining certain key assumptions that relate to the nature of welfare and personal identity. I analyse a range of arguments against the possibility of producing a satisfactory population axiology that have been proposed by Derek Parfit, Larry Temkin, Tyler Cowen and Gustaf Arrhenius. I conclude that these results pose a real and significant challenge. However, (...)
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  37. Healthcare for Unique Individuals: What We Can Learn from Santayana.Michael Brodrick - 2015 - Overheard in Seville 33 (33):45-55.
  38. Value Pluralism, Diversity and Liberalism.George Crowder - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (3):549-564.
    Few would disagree that contemporary society is characterized by ‘pluralism’, but what this means is widely disputed. Among the many senses of pluralism current in contemporary political theory, ‘value pluralism’ is one of the most keenly contested. The classic account is found in Isaiah Berlin, who sees basic human values as irreducibly multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes incommensurable with one another.Berlin’s pluralist views are scattered throughout his work, but major statements include the Introduction and last section of ‘Two Concepts of (...)
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  39. Fighting Fair: The Ecology of Honor in Humans and Animals.Dan Demetriou - 2015 - In Jonathan Crane (ed.), Beastly Morality. Columbia University Press. pp. 123-154.
    This essay distinguishes between honor-typical and authoritarian behavior in humans and animals. Whereas authoritarianism concerns hierarchies coordinated by control and obedience, honor concerns rankings of prestige determined by fair contests. Honor-typical behavior is identifiable in non-human species, and is to be expected in polygynous species with non-resource-based mating systems. This picture lends further support to an increasingly popular psychological theory that sees morality as constituted by a variety of moral systems. If moral cognition is pluralistic in this way, then the (...)
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  40. Monism and Pluralism about Value.Chris Heathwood - 2015 - In Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Value Theory. Oxford University Press. pp. 136-157.
    This essay discusses monism and pluralism about two related evaluative notions: welfare, or what makes people better off, and value simpliciter, or what makes the world better. These are stipulatively referred to as 'axiological value'. Axiological value property monists hold that one of these notions is reducible to the other (or else eliminable), while axiological value property pluralists deny this. Substantive monists about axiological value hold that there is just one basic kind of thing that makes our lives or the (...)
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  41. The Limits of Liberal Tolerance.Thomas Mulligan - 2015 - Public Affairs Quarterly 29 (3):277-295.
    Political philosophy has seen vibrant debate over the connection, if any, between liberalism and pluralism. Some philosophers, following Isaiah Berlin, reckon a close connection between the two concepts. Others--most notably John Gray--believe that liberalism and pluralism are incompatible. In this essay, I argue that the puzzle can be solved by distinguishing the responsibilities of liberal states to their peoples from the responsibilities of liberal states to other states. There is an entailment from pluralism to liberalism, and it in turn implies (...)
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  42. Perfectionist Liberalisms and the Challenge of Pluralism.Mats Volberg - 2015 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 8:113-127.
    Based on Steven Wall's work I take perfectionism in political philosophy to include two components: the objective good and the non-neutral state. Some perfectionist theories aim to be liberal. But given the objective good component perfectionism seems to be unable to accommodate the commitment to value pluralism found in liberalism, this is what I call the challenge of pluralism. The perfectionist reply is to claim that their objective good can also be plural and thus there is no conflict. My aim (...)
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  43. 2014 Rockefeller Prize Winner: Four Strikes for Pluralist Liberalism (And Two Cheers for Classical Liberalism).Vaughn Bryan Baltzly - 2014 - Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (3):315-333.
    The pluralist liberal defends a conception of liberal politics grounded in the thesis of value pluralism. Since he argues from a particular metaphysical thesis – value pluralism – to a particular understanding of politics – liberalism – his account will feature two separable, but interrelated, components: a distinctive justification of liberalism, and a conception of politics with distinctive content. The particular flavor of liberalism to which the pluralist is led is a species of what I term “accommodationism” – an understanding (...)
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  44. A New Problem with the Capabilities Approach.Thom Brooks - 2014 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 20:100-106.
    Martha Nussbaum’s “influential capabilities approach” offers us a powerful, universal standard of justice. The approach builds off of pioneering work by Amartya Sen in economic development. Much of the contemporary interest in the capabilities approach has focused upon how we might spell out a list of precisely which capabilities must be made universally available and protected, a list that Sen has not provided himself. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities is arguably the most successful attempt at defining these capabilities. In this paper, (...)
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  45. Moral Pluralism and Conflict.Ferrell Jason - 2014 - Journal of Political Science 42.
    Institutions have often been characterized as responses to conflict, and assumptions about the nature of conflict have frequently determined the structure and scope of political activity. Two prevalent interpretations of conflict portray it as either a conflict of interest or a competition for resources. Yet there is another view of conflict that regards it in terms of a contest of values, something that raises a different set of questions and issues. These issues involve concerns about the incommensurability and incompatibility of (...)
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  46. Moral Coherence and Principle Pluralism.Patricia Marino - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (6):727-749.
    This paper develops and defends a conception of moral coherence that is suitable for use in contexts of principle pluralism. I argue that, as they are traditionally understood, coherence methods stack the deck against pluralist theories, by incorporating norms such as systematicity—that the principles of a theory should be as few and as simple as possible. I develop and defend an alternative, minimal, conception of coherence that focuses instead on consistency. It has been suggested that consistency in this context should (...)
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  47. A Moorean View of the Value of Lives.Kris McDaniel - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):23-46.
    Can we understand being valuable for in terms of being valuable? Three different kinds of puzzle cases suggest that the answer is negative. In what follows, I articulate a positive answer to this question, carefully present the three puzzle cases, and then explain how a friend of the positive answer can successfully respond to them. This response requires us to distinguish different kinds of value bearers, rather than different kinds of value, and to hold that among the value bearers are (...)
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  48. The Bearers of Value in Environmental Ethics.Katie McShane - 2014 - In Avram Hiller, Ramona Ilea & Leonard Kahn (eds.), Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics. Routledge. pp. 17-34.
    I argue that different approaches to environmental ethics can be traced to different ways of thinking about value. In particular, it can be traced to different understandings of what kinds of things are the primary bearers of value and different views about how we should respond to that value. These different ways of thinking about value are thought to have their origins in consequentialism and Kantianism, respectively. I briefly describe these theoretical differences and consider how they lead to different approaches (...)
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  49. The Scope of Instrumental Morality.Michael Moehler - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):431-451.
    In The Order of Public Reason (2011a), Gerald Gaus rejects the instrumental approach to morality as a viable account of social morality. Gaus' rejection of the instrumental approach to morality, and his own moral theory, raise important foundational questions concerning the adequate scope of instrumental morality. In this article, I address some of these questions and I argue that Gaus' rejection of the instrumental approach to morality stems primarily from a common but inadequate application of this approach. The scope of (...)
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  50. Animal Ethics and Politics Beyond the Social Contract.Alan Reynolds - 2014 - Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 9 (3):208-222.
    Alan Reynolds: This paper is divided into three sections. First, I describe the wide plurality of views on issues of animal ethics, showing that our disagreements here are deep and profound. This fact of reasonable pluralism about animal ethics presents a political problem. According to the dominant liberal tradition of political philosophy, it is impermissible for one faction of people to impose its values upon another faction of people who reasonably reject those values. Instead, we are obligated to justify our (...)
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