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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2015
According to Isaiah Berlin's influential characterization, value monism holds that there are discoverable, axiomatic ethical principles from which all ethical knowledge may be derived, that ethical reasoning is algorithmic and mechanical, and that it seeks permanent, “final solutions” to all ethical conflicts. Berlin's account of monism oversimplifies and distorts the idea of monism and its relation to liberal values. There is a fundamentally distinct conception of monism, “asymptotic” monism, that is not only compatible with liberty and liberal toleration but is required by these values. I present this alternative through an exposition and defense of Immanuel Kant's monistic conception of ethics and public law, where it finds full expression. Berlin's warnings that monism tends to support political despotism ignore the distinctive character of Kant's asymptotic monism.
1 Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2 Berlin, Liberty, 60; Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Chatto and Windus, 2007), 263; Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 15–16; Berlin, The Power of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 8; Berlin, “Isaiah Berlin on Value Pluralism,” New York Review of Books 45, no. 8 (May 1998): 8Google Scholar.
3 Berlin, Power of Ideas, 214, 216, 217; George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 38–39.
4 Galston, William, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galston, “Value Pluralism,” in The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
5 Arneson, Richard, “Value Pluralism Does Not Support Liberalism,” San Diego Law Review 46, no. 4 (2009): 925–40Google Scholar; John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 145–51; Robert Talisse, Pluralism and Liberal Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Alex Zakaras, who argues that Berlin regards pluralism as a factor in an explanation of a person's acceptance of liberalism rather than a premise in a justification of liberalism, in Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill,” Review of Politics 75 (2013): 69–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Allen, John, “What's the Matter with Monism?,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2003): 472Google Scholar; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 130; Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 91.
7 John Allen's insightful essay describes a “continuum” of monistic theories whose tendency to support despotism ranges from weakest to strongest. Allen's continuum does not detect the categorical distinction between what I call in this paper axiomatic and asymptotic monistic frameworks. See Allen, “What's the Matter with Monism?,” 471. See also Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Stocker's conception of monism is not easy to grasp, but it falls within the axiomatic framework because it supposes that monism assumes a single master value, like pleasure, that can be grasped and even quantified. This master value defines, permeates, or otherwise characterizes all valuable instances (experiences, actions, etc.) the way whiteness might define, permeate, or characterize multiple cans or droplets of white paint (ibid., 244). Evaluative judgment, for Stocker's monist, is a matter of comparing the “amounts” of this master value that inhere in its instances (ibid., 169). Stocker seems to take hedonistic utilitarianism as a paradigm of monism (ibid., 185).
8 Berlin, Liberty, 215; Proper Study of Mankind, 263, 313, 321–22, 323–24, 425; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 15–16
9 I do not suppose that Kant is the only proponent of this alternative conception, but he is one of the first and certainly the most prominent thinker to articulate its relation to liberal values. As I argue elsewhere, there is an important affinity between Kant's and Ronald Dworkin's liberalism. See my “The Kantian Core of Law as Integrity,” Jurisprudence 6, no. 1 (2015): 45–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Michael Stocker, for instance, claims that the plurality of values is “obvious,” “the rule rather than the exception,” and “commonplace and unproblematic” and demands “an explanation of how any theorist could be a monist” (Plural and Conflicting Values, 168, 174, 175, 178, 200).
11 Talisse, Pluralism and Liberal Politics, 2, 5.
12 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 6:224. Kant's works are cited by volume and page number in the standard edition of Kant's works edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. All translations are from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant series, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Citations to the Critique of Pure Reason are by page in Kant's first (A) and/or second (B) editions.
13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Aviii, A645/B673, A652/B680, A663/B691.
14 Berlin, Liberty, 194–95, 199.
15 Ibid., 198–99.
16 This concern is stressed by Berlin in Liberty, 180–81, and more recently by Gustavsson, Gina in “The Psychological Dangers of Positive Liberty: Reconstructing a Neglected Undercurrent in Isaiah Berlin's ‘Two Concepts of Liberty,’” Review of Politics 76 (2014): 267–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Berlin, Liberty, 233–34; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 14; Proper Study of Mankind, 436.
18 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 141.
19 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 5–6; Liberty, 212–13; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 5–6; Power of Ideas, 5–7; Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy, “Isaiah Berlin,” section 4.1, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2014 edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/berlin/.
20 Berlin, Liberty, 43, 214; Proper Study of Mankind, 324.
21 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 20–21. For a useful survey of the varieties of monistic and coherence theories in ethics and law, see Kress, Kenneth, “Coherence and Formalism,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 16 (1993): 639Google Scholar.
22 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 263, 313, 321–22, 323–24; Liberty, 215; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 15–16.
23 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 425.
24 Berlin, Liberty, 213.
25 Ibid., 65–66; Proper Study of Mankind, 323.
26 Berlin, Liberty, 213–14; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 3–5.
27 Berlin, Liberty, 62, 112; Proper Study of Mankind, 78, 262.
28 Berlin, Liberty, 8, 47; Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 73.
29 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 315.
30 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 4.
31 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 245, 332
32 Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 16; Liberty, 212.
33 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 334.
34 Berlin, Liberty, 43–44, 77–78, 80–81.
35 Ibid., 179, 180–81, 191–92, 195.
36 Ibid., x.
37 Ibid., 17; Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 17.
38 Berlin, Liberty, 214.
39 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 11, 238, 324.
40 Berlin, Liberty, 217.
41 Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 14; Proper Study of Mankind, 316; Liberty, 43.
42 Berlin, Liberty, 172.
43 Ibid., 45.
44 Ibid., 45–46.
45 Ibid., 46, 50, 271–72.
46 Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 12–13.
47 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising these objections.
48 Berlin, Liberty, 47.
49 Berlin, Isaiah and Williams, Bernard, “Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply,” Political Studies 41 (1994): 306–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Bernard Williams elsewhere attacks the assumption that two considerations cannot be rationally weighed against each other unless there is a common consideration in terms of which they can be compared. He writes that “this assumption is at once very powerful and utterly baseless. Quite apart from the ethical, aesthetic considerations can be weighed against economic ones (for instance) without being an application of them, and without their both being an example of a third kind of consideration” (Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], 17). But Williams provides no suggestion as to how such considerations could be “weighed,” or what it means to “weigh” them.
51 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 324. Alex Zakaras writes that what Berlin means by this remark “is not that conflicts between objective values must be settled without appeal to any reasons at all, but rather that there will often be no single, rationally correct solution” (“A Liberal Pluralism,” 72). But it is not clear what distinguishes “a reason” from a “rational solution” in this formulation. Since any rational solution must appeal to reasons that make the solution rationally intelligible, the claim that there is no single, rationally correct solution can be restated as the view that no single, undefeated reason supports one conflicting value over the other. But if that is the case—if reasons themselves are not dispositive—then how can appealing to “reasons” settle the conflict? Of course it is possible for an agent to simply pick one among several possible conflicting reasons to support her decision, but then the decision is not based on a reason at all; it is better described as a brute choice or a rationalization.
52 Berlin, Liberty, 43, 215; Crooked Timber of Humanity, 14.
53 Some pluralists defend the possibility of rational choice among incommensurables. Although I cannot address each of these arguments here, I would invite readers to consider whether these arguments do not also (as I argue in the text that Berlin does) surrender the distinctive claim of pluralism that value conflicts are permanent and irreconcilable and that some choices are necessarily tragic. For these arguments, see, for example, James Griffin's discussion of “super-scales” in Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 90; Michael Stocker's discussion of “higher-level synthesizing values” in Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values, 172; and Ruth Chang on “covering values” in Chang, Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
54 Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, 329, 77.
55 For this reading, see ibid., 259 and also Joshua Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought,” in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, ed. George Crowder and Henry Hardy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 109, 116.
56 Cherniss, “Berlin's Early Political Thought,” 109.
57 Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, 259.
58 See Zakaras, “A Liberal Pluralism,” 89; and “Isaiah Berlin's Cosmopolitan Ethics,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 502–4Google Scholar. Kant rejects empirical moral theory in virtually every major work he wrote on the subject. For a canonical statement, see Groundwork, 4:406–12.
59 For an excellent recent statement of this Kantian position, see Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 59–76, 81–100, and 133–53; and The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. the introduction and chap. 3.
60 Berlin's account of freedom thus omits the power so central to Kant's, namely Wille, the capacity of pure practical reason to give oneself a law of action. This power is not the liberty of indifference between given candidate courses of action. See Kant, Groundwork, 4:412 and section III of this paper.
61 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:409; Critique of Practical Reason, 5:32–33.
62 Kant, Groundwork, 4:402; Critique of Practical Reason, 5:19, 5:21.
63 See John Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Onora Nell, Acting on Principle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Christine Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 112.
64 Crowder, Isaiah Berlin, 139–41.
65 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A646/B676.
66 Ibid.
67 Otto Neurath, Philosophical Papers, 1913–1946, ed. R. S. Cohen and Marie Neurath (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 91–99.
68 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 3–4.
69 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bvii, A131/B169, A302/B359, A547/B575, A834/B862.
70 Ibid., A657–58/B685–86.
71 Ibid., A647/B675, A663/B691.
72 Ibid., Aviii, A645/B673, A652/B680, A663/B691.
73 I should stress that the analogy is not an identity. Although Kant holds that there is only a single faculty of reason, its use differs in the theoretical and practical domains. In the theoretical domain, reason seeks unity among perceptions that constitute the agent's representation of her environment and comprise the raw material of belief; in the practical domain, reason seeks unity among desires and inclinations that suggest possible responses to that environment and form the raw material of action. For a detailed account of the scope of the analogy between the theoretical and practical uses of reason, and an argument that reason's ideal of unity, which is a merely regulative principle in science, in fact constitutes practical knowledge, see Paul Guyer, “The Unity of Reason,” in Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
74 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:69–70.
75 Kant, Groundwork, 4:388.
76 Ibid.
77 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A662–63/B690–91.
78 Kant, Groundwork, 4:422–23; Critique of Pure Reason, A812/B840.
79 Kant, Groundwork, 4:412–13.
80 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:390.
81 Onora O'Neill, “Instituting Principles: Between Duty and Action,” in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays, ed. Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 344–46. Kant's dynamic account of moral concepts has important affinities to the interpretive theory of moral concepts defended by Ronald Dworkin. See Dworkin, “Do Values Conflict: A Hedgehog's Approach,” Arizona Law Review 43, no. 2 (2001): 251–59Google Scholar; “Value Pluralism,” in Justice in Robes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 157–89.
82 A more developed discussion of the ideas in the next five paragraphs appears in my “The Kantian Core of Law as Integrity,” 49–60.
83 Berlin, Liberty, 337.
84 Berlin, Proper Study of Mankind, 492–93; Liberty, 263, 270–71, 323.
85 Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173; Allen Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175–76.
86 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:29–30.
87 Ibid., 5:89.
88 Kant, Groundwork, 4:437, 4:416, 4:418; Metaphysics of Morals, 6:392.
89 Kant, Groundwork, 4:428.
90 Ibid., 4:429, 4:428, 4:435–36.
91 Ibid., 4:437; Critique of Practical Reason, 5:22.
92 Kant, Groundwork, 4:422.
93 Ibid., 4:434.
94 Ibid., 4:421, 4:402.
95 Ibid., 4:442, 4:461.
96 Ibid., 4:390, 4:432–33, 4:440.
97 Ibid., 4:432.
98 Ibid., 4:439.
99 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:219–20, 6:380.
100 The German word Recht has no precise English equivalent. It refers both to law and the more general idea of a legitimate public power. Mary Gregor and other recent translators have used the word “right,” rather than “justice” or “law,” which retains some of this ambiguity. Here I adopt Gregor's translation, but utilize an uppercase R to signify the special sense of the term “Right.”
101 Ibid., 6:205–6, 6:239–42, 6:380–83.
102 Ibid., 6:237.
103 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 8:350.
104 For a careful exposition of Kant's view that both the CI and the UPR derive from the fundamental value of humanity, see Paul Guyer, “Kant's Deductions of the Principles of Right” and “Kant's System of Duties,” both in Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 249–52. For an original account of the parallel relation between the CI and UPR defended here, see Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 366–73.
105 Berlin, Liberty, 181.
106 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 8:366.
107 Gustavsson, “Psychological Dangers of Positive Liberty.”
108 Berlin, Liberty, 199.
109 Gustavsson suggests that Kant's speculations that diminished civil freedom may indirectly and over time enhance citizens' capacity to think and act in accordance with reason comes close to an argument that coercion could be justified for the sake of positive self-mastery. See Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, 8:41–42, and Gustavsson, “Psychological Dangers of Positive Liberty,” 285. But speculating that coercion might tend to a good effect is not the same as justifying coercion in terms of that effect. As I argue in the text, Kant's justification of coercion is that it secures a system of equal juridical freedom whether or not it tends to enhance people's capacity to think and act autonomously.
110 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:281.
111 On this point, see Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 31–50.
112 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:232.
113 Ibid., 6:237.
114 Berlin, Liberty, 169.
115 For this example and lucid exegesis of Kant's position, see Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 16.
116 Arthur Ripstein, “Kantian Legal Philosophy,” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 393.
117 For a more developed recent account of the negative and positive aspects of juridical freedom, see B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Kant's Doctrine of Right: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 87.
118 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:446–47.
119 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:257.
120 Ibid., 6:266.
121 Ibid., 6:307.
122 Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” 8:297.
123 Ripstein, Force and Freedom, 214–15.
124 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:313.
125 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this question.
126 Ronald Dworkin's theory of law as integrity is an exemplar of this approach. See generally Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), particularly chaps. 6 and 7.
127 Berlin, Liberty, 216–17.
128 Ibid., 212.