593315 research-article2015

AASXXX10.1177/0095399715593315Administration & SocietyTalisse

Administration & Society OnlineFirst, published on June 29, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0095399715593315

Article

Value Pluralism: A Philosophical Clarification

Administration & Society 1­–13 © The Author(s) 2015 DOI: 10.1177/0095399715593315 aas.sagepub.com

Robert B. Talisse1

Abstract Patrick Overeem and Jelle Verhoef pose a serious challenge to Hendrik Wagenaar and Michael Spicer, both of whom attempt to derive prescriptive conclusions for public administration from value pluralism (VP). Wagenaar and Spicer have responded with puzzlement, adding the counter-charge that Overeem and Verhoef have misinterpreted their views. Indeed, there is misinterpretation afoot, but the culprits are Wagenaar and Spicer. Although they both claim to have adopted VP, neither demonstrates an adequate grasp of that position. Consequently, they miss the force of Overeem and Verhoef’s arguments, and their responses introduce new confusions. Keywords value pluralism, Isaiah Berlin, moral philosophy

Patrick Overeem and Jelle Verhoef (2014) pose a serious challenge to Hendrik Wagenaar (1999, 2011) and Michael Spicer (2001, 2010), both of whom attempt to derive prescriptive conclusions for public administration from value pluralism (VP). Wagenaar (2014) and Spicer (2014) have responded with puzzlement, adding the counter-charge that Overeem and Verhoef have misinterpreted their views. Indeed, there is misinterpretation afoot, but the

1Vanderbilt

University, Nashville, TN, USA

Corresponding Author: Robert B. Talisse, Vanderbilt University, 111 Furman Hall, Nashville, TN 37240, USA. Email: [email protected]

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culprits are Wagenaar and Spicer. Although they both claim to have adopted VP, neither demonstrates an adequate grasp of that position. Consequently, they miss the force of Overeem and Verhoef’s arguments and their responses introduce new confusions. In this commentary, I aim to clarify matters regarding VP. I suspect that once the concepts are properly formulated, the present dispute will be resolved in the direction indicated by Overeem and Verhoef. VP as proposed by Berlin and his contemporary followers indeed has no prescriptive implications. Consequently, Wagenaar and Spicer are wrong. I begin by identifying what VP is. To this end, I develop a contrast between VP and its primary philosophical rival, value monism (VM). Then I present three diversity theses; I argue that VP is equivalent to none of these, but rather is a distinct thesis about the nature of value that offers an explanation of various forms of diversity. With this conceptual work in place, I will develop an argument similar to the one offered by Overeem and Verhoef for the view that VP is prescriptively barren. I close with some general remarks regarding Wagenaar’s and Spicer’s response essays.

What VP Is As the present debate concerns the views associated with Berlin and contemporary Berlinians such as John Kekes, by “value pluralism,” I will henceforth mean the Berlinian version, and in explicating it, I will rely primarily on Berlin’s writings, although my depiction of VP will apply equally well to the contemporary Berlinians.1 Now, one way to achieve the requisite clarity is to contrast VP with its rival, VM. Before turning to the contrast, however, three remarks are in order. First, in calling VP and VM rivals, I do not mean that the value monist must deny everything that the value pluralist asserts. There is considerable overlap among them regarding, say, the badness of lying and the importance of liberty. VP and VM are rivals in the following strict sense: VP asserts a distinctive claim about the nature of value that the value monist must deny. VP and VM are opposed views about the nature of value; they need not disagree over what is of value. Second, VP and VM nonetheless share key underlying commitments. Most importantly, they are both objectivist views about value; they both assert that the facts about value are objective and universal, independent of what any person, group, or epoch may hold them to be. VP and VM are allied in opposing non-objectivist views about value, including relativism, nihilism, and skepticism. Although they are rivals, VP and VM are close neighbors in the conceptual space of moral theory.

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Third, VP is a minority position. Contemporary ethicists who are objectivists tend toward VM, and even among those who resist VM, very few opt for the Berlinian alternative; indeed, many those who are attracted to pluralism about value distance themselves from Berlin’s doctrines. In other words, dyed-in-the-wool Berlinians are scarce among ethicists. Now, the unpopularity of VP is not conclusive evidence that it is false. In calling attention to the fact that VP is a minority view, I mean only to suggest that the more strident claims that Berlin makes about the dangers of VM are only so much hot air. To be more specific, Berlin’s (2002) claims that VM leads to authoritarian politics (p. 212), that only value pluralists can fully respect the value of negative liberty (p. 214), or that monism is symptomatic of “moral and political immaturity” (p. 217) simply are overblown. The most stalwart defenders of liberty, individuality, and diversity in the tradition—Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Ronald Dworkin, to name a few—are value monists. Now, it may be the case that the tyrants of the world have also tended to be value monists, but that fact obviously does not entail that VM explains, much less causes, their tyrannical behavior. Tyranny is explained by the tyrants’ values, not their conception of the nature of value. With these preliminaries in place, we can lay down the general claim that whatever VP is, it must be something that value monists must deny. Now we proceed with the contrast. It appears intuitive to think that monism in any domain is the claim that there is only one thing in that domain. Alas, philosophical matters are not that simple. Few philosophers have flatly denied that there are many things. Even those metaphysicians who, such as Parmenides and Spinoza, hold that “all is one” nonetheless countenance the many appearances or modes of the one, or else distinguish the real one from the illusory many. However, if there is a distinction to be drawn between the one and its manifestations—or the real and the illusory—there must be in some sense more than one thing. In metaphysics, simple-minded monism is a non-starter, a view decisively refuted by the plain fact that it takes three words to formulate the thesis that all is one. Yet some metaphysicians endorse monism, so we should infer that their view is not simplistic. Sophisticated metaphysical monists carefully delineate what is to count as a “thing”; monism, they say, holds that although there is one thing, it has many properties, aspects, and attributes. As the present debate concerns values rather than general metaphysics, we need not survey these details. Still, the general lesson applies. Like his counterpart metaphysician, the value monist does not espouse the simplistic thesis that there is but one good thing to which all must conform. The claim is rather that goodness is a univocal property, that all good things owe their value to a single goodness-making

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ingredient. Monists disagree among themselves about what that ingredient is, how it is detected, how it could be measured, and so on. These details need not detain us. Utilitarianism is a familiar theory that is unabashedly monistic about value; we can take it as paradigmatic of VM. Utilitarianism is value monistic because it holds that pleasure (alternatively: happiness, satisfaction, utility) is the only intrinsic good. Thus, the utilitarian claims that for anything of value, it either is a quantity of pleasure or a source of pleasure. Although utilitarianism is a variety of VM, it is not committed to the simplistic view that there is only one good thing. Utilitarians have no difficulty recognizing that items as diverse as chocolate bars, freedom, jokes, rainforests, solidarity, and symphonies are all good. The utilitarian claims that their value resides in their capacity to produce what is intrinsically good, namely, pleasure. When there is a moral difference between valuable things, it is a difference in the quantities of pleasure they produce. Framing utilitarianism in this way reveals the most distinctive feature of VM. Holding that there is but one intrinsic good, all VMs affirm commensurabilism. This is the thesis that for any two things of value, it is necessary that either one is better than the other, or else they are equally good. Commensurabilism is clearly essential to VM; if there is but one intrinsic good, then the moral differences that exist between valuable things can be only differences in quantity or degree of that good. Furthermore, commensurabilism affirms that any conflict between valuable things (actions, institutions, policies, practices, and so on) is necessarily subject to a unique and singular rational resolution. Again, the commensurabilist holds that if A and B are both of value, the moral choice between them must be rationally determinate. According to the utilitarian variety of VM, one should choose the option that produces the greatest overall quantity of pleasure, and should it turn out that A and B produce equal overall pleasure, the choice between them is morally neutral. Of course, the utilitarian can acknowledge that in real life, our information and deliberations are greatly constrained; she can thus countenance cases of conflicting values where the best we can do is seek a compromise, or choose on the basis of an educated guess, or defer to a fair procedure for deciding which to choose. That is, the utilitarian can countenance the prevalence of value conflicts that are undecidable for us, given our limitations. The utilitarian’s commensurabilism, however, holds that, regardless of what we could know or discover, for any two things of value, it necessarily is the case that either one is better than the other, or else they are equally valuable. Commensurabilism is the sine qua non of VM. What, then, is VP? The answer is obvious. Simply put, the sine qua non of VP is incommensurabilism, the thesis that there is at least one pair of values, neither of which is better than

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the other, that are not equally good. Incommensurabilism hence entails that there could be value conflicts that admit of no singular rational resolution; it further holds that there could be particular goods that are intrinsically in conflict with other goods, such that any gain in one necessarily results in a loss of the other. Berlin (1990) held that it is in the “essence” of equality and liberty to “collide” with each other in this way (p. 12); they are in “perpetual rivalry” (Berlin, 2002, p. 216) and “clash irreconcilably” (Berlin, 2002, p. 42). Hence, VP countenances value conflicts that are impossible to ameliorate, conflicts that cannot be resolved without violating objective goods and betraying objective obligations. It is important to stress this last point. VP is not committed simply to the view that in this morally messy and resource-limited world, there is no way to avoid value conflict; the value pluralist is not claiming merely that one cannot please all of the people all of the time and so must engage in peace-keeping operations. All objectivists about value—including value monists—claim this much. Rather, the distinctive claim of VP is that there are certain value conflicts that are impossible to ameliorate, conflicts that not even an all-knowing and resource-unlimited God could resolve without wrongdoing. Crucially, VP contends that this impossibility is not empirical but built into the very fabric of the values; it is, Berlin (2002) claims, a “necessary, not a contingent truth” (p. 215). To explain, when incommensurable values clash, one value must be betrayed, and because the good of every value is, according to VP, objective, there is no way to respond to the clash without doing wrong. VP hence countenances tragic conflicts, cases where even morally flawless actors must bring about “irreparable [moral] loss” (Berlin, 1990, p. 12). One additional aspect of VP should be mentioned. If, as VP contends, there is at least one pair of objective but incommensurable values, then the classical ideal of the “good life,” a life that is morally self-sufficient and lacking nothing, is not only difficult to achieve, but impossible to achieve. In fact, Berlin (2002) calls the very idea of a single life manifesting all goods “incoherent” and a “formal contradiction” (p. 213). According to VP, every life, institution, and society—indeed, every possible being—is by necessity morally flawed. We now tie these points together. VP’s distinctive commitment is incommensurabilism. This is what divides VP and VM. Consequently, despite what Spicer (2014, p. 4) and Wagenaar (2014, p. 3) think, VP is not merely the claim that values can clash, nor is it the thesis that in practice such conflicts are unavoidable and sometimes intractable. To repeat, every objectivist about value holds this. VP rather is the claim that values are irreducibly many, and thus that certain conflicts are intrinsic to the values themselves, and therefore

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irremediable without moral wrongdoing. Importantly, the value pluralist holds these to be conceptual truths about the nature of value; the irreducibility of the plurality and the inevitability of conflicts are not due to empirical factors such as the scarcity of material and cognitive resources, or the practical pressures to make moral choices under uncertainty. That values are many, and that they irremediably conflict are understood by the value pluralist to be necessary, not contingent or empirical truths. The contrast, then, is this: VP must affirm, and VM must deny, incommensurabilism. Lest this seems a purely academic difference, now contrast VP with certain theses that are often mistakenly identified as VP. Consider, then, the following three diversity theses. a. Psychological Diversity. Human beings manifest a range of psychological temperaments such that different individuals will find value in different sensations, experiences, activities, practices, and goals. b. Sociological Diversity. Modern societies are home to individuals and groups that embrace a broad range of moral doctrines, systems, ideals, and practices, which sometimes conflict. c. Epistemological Diversity. Our best thinking about fundamental moral questions often is indeterminate, resulting in moral disagreement among reasonable, conscientious, and sincere agents that cannot at present be rationally resolved. There are other varieties of diversity that prevail in the modern world. And there is room for debate over what forms of diversity should be accommodated in our social order. However, these are not debates that concern the difference between VP and VM. The proof of this is simple. There is nothing in the diversity theses that requires incommensurabilism; therefore, there is nothing in them that a value monist must reject. In fact, it would be difficult to find a more devoted proponent of these theses than John Stuart Mill; however, as he is a utilitarian, he is a value monist. Thus, the diversity theses are not distinctive of VP. The term pluralism is often used to name the affirmation or approval of diversity. However, this usage is philosophically misguided. Again, all contemporary objectivists about value—value monists included—can happily embrace the facts of psychological, sociological, and epistemological diversity, and value monists can recognize the prevalence of value conflicts in modern societies; they can also maintain that many of these conflicts practically cannot be resolved. Consequently, VP is not simply an impressive name for the acceptance of diversity and conflict. Rather, VP is a thesis about the nature of value that purports to explain the moral diversity and conflict that

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prevails in the modern world. VP contends that the diversity theses are true because there are incommensurable objective values. Value monists need not deny the diversity theses; they rather offer explanations of other kinds. Again, what divides VP from VM is not a view about what is of value, but a view about the nature of value. So far, I have depicted VP in terms that Berlin and all contemporary Berlinians accept. If Wagenaar and Spicer do not recognize their commitments in this portrait, it is because they have not grasped what VP is.

The Barrenness of VP Now that VP has been articulated clearly, it can be shown that VP entails nothing about what we ought to do. It has long been a Berlinian aspiration to establish an entailment from VP to moral prescriptions of varying kinds. Berlin himself struggled to derive from VP the moral priority of negative liberty. More recent Berlinians such as William Galston (2002) and George Crowder (2002) have attempted to secure an implication from VP to liberal values more generally. Other Berlinians attempt to argue from VP to political conservatism (Kekes, 1998), and some have claimed that VP entails an antiliberal politics (Gray, 2000; Hampshire, 2000). However, the aspiration to secure an entailment from VP to any moral prescription is doomed. To see this, note what the Berlinians seek. They want an entailment from VP to some prescriptive conclusion. Recall the rudimentary logical point that entailment is different from consistency. Two propositions are consistent when it is possible for them to both be true at once in the same world. By contrast, Proposition B is entailed by Proposition A when A’s truth is sufficient for the truth of B; this relation of entailment is what is meant by the claim that B is an implication of A. The claim that VP has no prescriptive entailments thus is not the claim that VP is not consistent with any prescriptions. The claim rather is that the truth of VP is not sufficient for the truth of any prescription, that VP has no prescriptive implications. It is easy to demonstrate why any proposed entailment from VP to a moral prescription must fail. As VP is a thesis about the nature of value rather than one about what is of value, someone could with consistency be a value pluralist and a tyrant. Let us stipulate that the tyrannical value pluralist is someone who recognizes a plurality of objective incommensurable values, but holds (incorrectly) that things such as power, control, domination, hegemony, and the humiliation of others are the values. Our disagreement with such a value pluralist is not over the nature of value, but what is of value. As there is no inconsistency in the idea of a tyrant who embraces VP, there is no entailment from VP to liberal values. The argument generalizes. There is no inconsistency in combining VP

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with any particular menu of what is of value; thus, VP entails no view about what is valuable, and therefore VP has no prescriptive entailments. VP is prescriptively barren. This result can be derived by appeal to the error of trying to derive an ought from an is. This is how Overeem and Verhoef aptly characterize it. The fact that there are many objective and incommensurable values entails nothing about what one should value, and so entails nothing about what one should do. To derive a prescription, one must conjoin VP with an additional premise. In fact, Berlin implicitly recognizes this. In his famous argument from VP to negative liberty, Berlin reasons from the truth of VP to the inevitability of conflicts among incommensurable values. He then affirms that human beings must choose among such values. Next, he observes that we place “immense value on the freedom to choose” (Berlin, 2002, p. 214). And this, he claims, demonstrates that politically we must be entitled to choose for ourselves. However, in claiming that we immensely value the freedom to choose, Berlin has introduced a psychological premise, a statement that is not part of VP itself. He must do so, because VP itself has no prescriptive implications. Still, even with the added psychological premise, Berlin’s argument fails. It does not follow from the fact that we immensely value the freedom to choose that the state must permit us to choose. To secure his intended conclusion, Berlin needs an explicitly prescriptive premise, namely, that the state must provide that which we immensely value. The trouble is that the force of Berlin’s prescriptive conclusion depends not on VP, but on the added premise about what the state must provide. VP does no work in the argument. Of course, none of this suggests that VP is false. Indeed, all of Spicer’s and Wagenaar’s claims about public administration are consistent with VP. However, again, consistency is a strikingly weak logical relation. The real difficulty for Spicer and Wagenaar is that nothing they say about public administration has to be rejected by a value monist. Thus, their claim that VP provides a distinctive ground for their views regarding public administration is false.

The Failed Responses of Spicer and Wagenaar I close with remarks concerning Spicer’s and Wagenaar’s responses to Overeem and Verhoef. Overeem and Verhoef argue for two central claims. First, they argue that Wagenaar and Spicer do not use a univocal conception of VP, and thus never fully recognize what VP distinctively asserts. Second, drawing on the fact that Wagenaar and Spicer take themselves to be using a Berlinian construal of VP, they argue that VP so understood does not have the

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prescriptive implications that Wagenaar and Spicer claim. It would be difficult to improve on Overeem and Verhoef’s arguments. I find the character of Wagenaar’s and Spicer’s responses disappointing. To explain, I once heard a philosopher make a candid remark about Ronald Dworkin; she said something like, “Ronnie’s problem is that he thinks his views are never criticized, but only misunderstood.” This strikes me as incorrect about Dworkin, but Spicer’s and Wagenaar’s responses called the remark to mind. I am not sure what to make of the quickness with which Spicer and Wagenaar simply declare that they have been misinterpreted, especially given that so much of what they assert in their replies only confirms Overeem and Verhoef’s critique. For example, Wagenaar’s (2014) cases of Joanna and Judy (pp. 1-2) contain nothing that exemplifies VP. As Overeem and Verhoef make clear, VP is not simply the claim that we inevitably confront value conflicts that cannot be practically resolved. No value monist needs to deny that. VP instead asserts that some value conflicts are intrinsic to the values themselves. Alas, what renders the conflicts in Wagenaar’s cases intractable is nothing intrinsic to the values, but the empirical constraints under which Joanna and Judy are operating. Were there more time, different laws, or more abundant resources, neither dilemma would obtain. That is, the value conflicts Wagenaar offers as cases that his position is uniquely equipped to handle are not cases of the kind of value conflict that VP distinctively countenances. VP adds nothing at all to Wagenaar’s analysis here, and his proposed approach to these cases involves nothing that a utilitarian would have to reject. That he thinks he is responding to Overeem and Verhoef’s critique only amplifies their central point: Wagenaar does not understand what VP is. This is further supported by the fact that when Wagenaar discusses the philosophical roots of his view, he mishandles things. Wagenaar claims to draw primarily from the work of one Berlinian in particular, John Kekes . However, the Kekes citation that Wagenaar (2014, p. 3) provides (pp. 3-4) actually has Kekes making a point that opposes Wagenaar. In the passage cited, Kekes (1993, p. 10) claims that VP is an evaluative position because it begins from a conception of a good human life; the prescriptive content of Kekes’ position, then, derives from this underlying conception of the good life, which, according to Kekes, is not entailed by VP. The passage hence agrees that VP is prescriptively barren. Furthermore, when Wagenaar cites Kekes as claiming that values conflict when “the realization of one entirely or partly excludes the realization of the other” (1993, p. 19), he takes Kekes to be describing “the empirical world” (2014, p. 5). Wagenaar is wrong. In that passage, Kekes is explicitly stating a conceptual truth that VP affirms, not stating an empirical fact.

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Spicer does somewhat better than Wagenaar in addressing Overeem and Verhoef. However, he, too, fumbles the argument in a way that further confirms the critique. Consider his response to the charge that attempts to derive prescriptions from VP commit an is/ought error. Spicer here confuses this point for one about facts and values (2014, p. 2), which he later conflates with a point about the empirical and the normative (p. 6). The fact/value distinction is not at issue in the charge that the attempted inference commits an is/ ought error. It is true that there are many cases where the fact/value distinction is not clear-cut. The standard cases involve what are called “thick concepts,” which are concepts that have both evaluative and descriptive content. For example, when one claims that Ann is courageous, one not only states a purported fact but also offers a normative assessment of Ann. This is an obvious point that no one denies. However, that the fact/value distinction is sometimes not clear-cut does not entail that there is no such distinction, and that some concepts are thick suggests nothing at all about cases where no such concepts are in use. More directly, the insight about thick concepts says nothing about what inferences are warranted, and Overeem and Verhoef’s argument concerns an inference, not a concept. That facts and values sometimes “blend” (Spicer, 2014, p. 3) is irrelevant. To address the charge that he has committed an is/ ought error, Spicer would need to show how VP could entail moral prescriptions. He makes no such attempt. In fact, the language Spicer uses in his essay suggests that he does not even understand the issue. He claims that VP and his preferred view of politics are “congenial” (p. 5), that his argument attempts to “connect” VP to politics (p. 6), and that he appeals to VP to “come up with” prescriptions (p. 8). Thus, Spicer seems to acknowledge that VP does not entail his prescriptions, but is merely consistent with them. However, he also refers to the “normative implications” of VP for public administration (p. 6). One can only conclude that Spicer is confused. To repeat, Overeem and Verhoef’s critique concerns entailment, not consistency. As VP has no prescriptive implications, it is no surprise that it is consistent with any prescription. Indeed, one can appeal to VP to “come up with” any prescription whatever. That is Overeem and Verhoef’s point. Although neither Spicer nor Wagenaar actually addresses the philosophical content of Overeem and Verhoef’s criticisms, they nonetheless offer misguided diagnoses purporting to explain how Overeem and Verhoef miss the mark. Both Spicer and Wagenaar seem to think that one can deflect a philosophical objection by ascending to metaphilosophical abstractions. And both seem to think that some kind of pragmatism renders their views invulnerable to criticism. Wagenaar, who calls himself a Deweyan, defers to David Hildebrand’s (2003) way of marking a distinction between a “theoretical starting point”

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(TSP) and a “practical starting point” (PSP), claiming for the latter for himself, and apparently tarring Overeem and Verhoef with the former. However, Wagenaar does not realize that the very distinction he is wielding is a theoretical rather than a practical one. That is, to draw the distinction between the TSP and the PSP is to adopt the TSP; thus, in relying on the distinction to deflect criticism, Wagenaar abandons his own professed conception of philosophy. Furthermore, Wagenaar seems similarly oblivious to the fact that VP is the product of moral theorists (including Berlin, Gray, and Kekes) who all incline strongly to anti-pragmatism. It is no wonder that Berlinians are anti-pragmatists. VP is fundamentally a metaphysical doctrine about the relations that obtain among values, whereas pragmatism is an anti-metaphysical program. Strictly speaking, a pragmatist should reject VP, not because pragmatists should embrace VM, but rather because pragmatists should decline to take any view about value commensurability. On a properly pragmatist view, values are not objects, and so cannot bear relations of commensurability (or incommensurability) to each other. Moreover, it obviously runs contrary to Deweyan pragmatism to affirm, as value pluralists must, that there are value conflicts that are intrinsically invulnerable to amelioration by means of experimental intelligence. With respect to pragmatism and the consequent metaphilosophical categories, Wagenaar is decidedly muddled. To call this “theoretical confusion” is an understatement. Spicer unfortunately takes a similarly confused metaphilosophical strategy. He claims that he and his critics use different “philosophical approaches” (p. 8), casting the difference in terms of Rorty’s distinction between “systematic” and “edifying” philosophy (pp. 8-9). This occasions the same problem raised against Wagenaar. The Rortyan distinction is itself a piece of systematic philosophy; thus, in relying on that distinction to deflect the criticism, Spicer has betrayed his own professed view of how philosophy should be approached. Furthermore, VP is clearly an instance of what Rorty would call systematic philosophy. No one interested in neo-pragmatist edification should embrace value incommensurability. In fact, Rortyan pragmatists should reject any theory whatsoever about the nature of value, as the central plank of Rorty’s (1989) neo-pragmatism is the denial that anything has a nature. Like Wagenaar, Spicer does not have sufficient command of the philosophical materials he is attempting to wield. Consequently, the entire enterprise is a mess. Here is a constructive suggestion. Wagenaar and Spicer should consider simply stipulating that by “value pluralism” they mean only the facts of moral diversity and unavoidable value conflict that prevail in modern liberal societies. This saves their views from the criticism of Overeem and Verhoef. However, this maneuver also evacuates all of the Berlinianism from their views, and embraces the fact that everything they say is consistent with VM.

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Indeed, the resulting views would have little if any philosophical content, and so, alas, Spicer and Wagenaar would no longer be able to associate their ideas with enduring philosophical concepts and figures. However, at least they would have a far less confused conception of public administration, and this would better serve their professed practical objectives. In any case, for the time being, they should consider leaving the moral philosophy to the professionals, or to those in their field—like Overeem and Verhoef—who have more than a novice’s grasp of the issues. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note 1.

Contemporary Berlinians—whose ranks include John Gray, John Kekes, William Galston, and George Crowder—adopt value pluralism (VP) as Berlin articulated it, departing from Berlin only on certain political issues. The field of contemporary Berlinianism is well surveyed in Overeem and Verhoef’s (2014) article, and I will not duplicate that work here.

References Berlin, I. (1990). The crooked timber of humanity. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Berlin, I. (2002). Liberty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Crowder, G. (2002). Liberalism and value pluralism. London, England: Continuum Books. Galston, W. (2002). Liberal pluralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gray, J. (2000). Two faces of liberalism. New York, NY: The New Press. Hampshire, S. (2000). Justice is conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hildebrand, D. (2003). Beyond realism & antirealism: John Dewey and the neopragmatists. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Kekes, J. (1993). The morality of pluralism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kekes, J. (1998). A case for conservatism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Overeem, P., & Verhoef, J. (2014). Moral dilemmas, theoretical confusion: Value pluralism and its supposed implications for public administration. Administration & Society, 46, 986-1009. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Spicer, P. (2001). Value pluralism and its implications for American public administration. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 23, 507-528. Spicer, P. (2010). In defense of politics in public administration: A value pluralist perspective. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Spicer, P. (2014). In defense of value pluralism in public administration. Administration & Society, 46, 1010-1019. Wagenaar, H. C. (1999). Value pluralism in public administration. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 21, 441-449. Wagenaar, H. C. (2011). Meaning in action: Interpretation and dialogue in policy analysis. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Wagenaar, H. C. (2014). The necessity of value pluralism in administrative practice: A reply to Overeem. Administration & Society, 46, 1020-1028.

Author Biography Robert B. Talisse is Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Political Science, and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in social and political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and political problems relating to moral disagreement.

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