Chapter 3 - The Consequences of Pluralism

Summary

THE LESSON OF THE LAST CHAPTER has been that if there is moral pluralism in our world, it is there because the concepts with which different groups make moral judgments are different from one another – perhaps radically so, perhaps in more mundane ways. This is not to say that our languages determine what we think; rather, it is our practices and the commitments they entail that shape our languages. As our commitments change, so too can the meanings of our words, or even the words we use themselves. One of the goals of this chapter is to think about the ways in which these changes can occur as we interact with one another.

Chapter 2 was motivated in large part by Liu Huaqiu's claim that the Chinese concept of rights differed from corresponding Western concepts. In order to know what to make of this claim, we needed to understand better what it means for concepts to differ from one another. We came to see concepts as emerging from relatively stable agreements in a community's norms, rather than as single, unchanging things that people had to share for communication to succeed. Concepts are more messy and complicated than Liu's formulation envisioned.