Value pluralism

John Gray writes about value pluralism in Two Faces of Liberalism. I found it quite helpful in understanding this perspective better. Here is an attempt to summarize some of the points from the second chapter—Plural Values.

What is value pluralism? It’s the idea that some values are incommensurable and that it is not always possible to compare them systematically and meaningfully. Gray takes the example of justice vs. friendship. For instance, how to reason about a situation where helping your friend requires dishonoring a contractual agreement with a business. Or, at a societal level: is a country with a just legal system and poor citizens better than one in which people are better off but where the justice system is massively corrupt? There are different frameworks for resolving such questions.

Hedonism. Utilitarians take a much more optimistic approach when it comes to incommensurability. The hedonistic flavor argues that most values can, in fact, be compared. To benchmark, we simply look at the total happiness/well-being that follows the various options and pick the one with the highest level. But even with perfect knowledge of all mental states, how could we possibly compare very different sensations? Take something as trivial as choosing a movie. Is it a better experience to watch something thrilling, funny, or beautiful and sad?

Value hierarchies. One way out that does not give up on consequentialism is to assign a hierarchy of values. According to John Stuart Mill, only someone with experience of different types of pleasures can identify the “higher values” that trump the lower ones. Mill writes:

If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.

In other words, simply optimizing for pleasure, as the hedonists prescribe, is too primitive. For example, poetry and philosophizing are more valuable than good food and sex. Gray remarks:

One flaw in Mill’s account is his Victorian view of the higher faculties. He takes for granted that the higher human faculties are intellectual and moral rather than physical and sensuous. In identifying the higher human faculties with the intellect and the moral emotions, he is in a long tradition, of which Aristotle is a notably early exemplar; but those who have cultivated the pleasure of the body and the senses may differ from Aristotle and Mill on this point.

Deontology. Deontologists, on the other hand, navigate around some of these conflicts by focusing less on comparing outcomes and more on the principles that ought to guide our actions. Gray writes:

Theories of rights seek to suppress the reality of conflicts of value in a different way. Kantian theorists deny that the right action can ever contain wrong. For them, morality consists in a set of composable injunctions.

Like Mill’s utilitarianism, Kantian ethics ascribe infinitely more weight to the value of justice than some lower form of pleasure. But to avoid value conflicts, it is tempting to increase consistency by removing rights that introduce conflicting claims. Consider, for instance, a moral theory that demands loyalty to your parents. What if your parents are criminals and being loyal to them means committing crimes and acting unjustly towards others? To resolve this, we could either drop the maxim of justice or the one about loyalty. That may have the effect of watering down moral frameworks until a point where they consist only of very abstract principles that may not be of much practical use anyways.

Relativism. Another way to deal with incommensurable values is to assume that they are all contextual and deeply embedded in tradition and culture. Justice may be a higher value in some cultures, whereas other cultures may deem loyalty more important. This view rejects any attempt to reason objectively about such matters. It’s not just that some cultures have arrived at different conclusions about what good morality consists of but that any reasoning and comparison itself takes place within a context. Universal values are impossible.

Subjectivism. Yet another way is to put more emphasis on personal preferences. When in doubt, follow your intuition. What you feel is right is what is right.

Gray, and other value pluralists, reject all the above approaches because, in their view, the problem is that each of them attempts to ascribe a single verdict—right or wrong—to each action. Gray gives the following example:

When a British wartime minister sacked his entire typing pool discovering that one of them (he did not now which) was leaking information to the enemy, he admitted that he was doing something horribly unfair. He declared that he was inflicting a lifelong injustice on all but one of the typists, but that he believed it to be the right action in the circumstances, despite the fact that it contained irreparable wrong.

Despite their seemingly opposed views of moral reasoning, Kantian accounts of rights and utilitarian theories are at one in purporting to resolve dilemmas such as that of the British minister in ways to incur no loss. [..]. From the standpoint of Kantian and utilitarian theory, the minister was merely confused. Either he did the right thing and committed no wrong, or what he did was simply wrong. From a value-pluralist standpoint, by contrast, the minister was admirably responsive to the irreconcilable ethical demands of the situation.

A far as I understand, value pluralists acknowledge the existence of incommensurable values and do not attempt to bend their moral theories to avoid them. They instead accept that, in some situations, there are no right or wrong actions and that, in general, we should not expect to be able to derive a complete ordering scheme. But the fact that there are actions and outcomes for which an apple-to-apple comparison is an impossible doe not imply there are no comparable values or that even incommensurable values are not universal. I find it quite convincing.