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Coping with the Many-Coloured Dome: Pluralism and Practical Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Keith Graham
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Extract

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.

(Shelley)

At its widest, ‘pluralism’ signifies simply the variety of life, the teeming multitude of forms and entities, the many different properties that living beings manifest. Life is not everywhere the same but impressively differentiated, and without it eternity would be all of a piece, uniform. That is enough for life to stain the white radiance of eternity. But within the multiplicity of specifically human life there are not merely differences. There are tensions, oppositions, conflicts. In contemporary philosophical debate ‘pluralism’ then comes to signify one problematic aspect of this. Groups of people have perhaps always subscribed to very different values, and in consequence favoured very different forms of behaviour from one another, at least on a global scale. But the groups are no longer geographically separated: we live in distinct but overlapping cultures, and get in one another's way to a far greater extent than previously. Shelley's ordered image of the dome may then seem inappropriate, and it may seem unnecessary for death to trample it to fragments. Life is already fragmented, and the practical problem facing us as living creatures is to go beyond the fragments, to achieve at least a modus vivendi in the light of all our differences and incompatibilities even if not the orderliness and cohesion of a dome. Somehow, we have to live together. That is a practical problem which confronts us at every level, as members of families, neighbourhoods, departments, countries and increasingly simply as members of a world-wide human race.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 40 , March 1996 , pp. 135 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1996

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References

1 For Rawls this is an important strand in explaining the fact of reasonable disagreement. People's total experience in modern society varies enormously in the light of different offices and positions, the division of labour, the many social groups. That variation itself then importantly influences how they assess evidence and weigh values (Rawls, 1993, p. 57).

2 I therefore reject as irrational the rational choice theory which ‘just tells us to do what will best promote our aims, whatever they are’ (Elster, 1986, p. 22; italics added). For a recent systematic attempt to establish the possibility of rational criticism of aims, see Nozick, 1993, pp. 139–2.

3 They also indicate that a portion of our practical reasoning is irreducibly plural rather than singular: the question that confronts us is not ‘what shall I do?’ but ‘what shall we do?’ For further elaboration of collective practical deliberation see Graham, 1986a, pp. 108–2, Graham, 1987 and Graham, 1992, pp. 27–2.

4 Suppose that this description applies to me, but that I receive a very favourable level of income support via the Civil List. Then the description does not carry an escape-interest automatically.

5 But couldn't I, say, conceive the aim of swimming the Atlantic, even though I knew it was impossible, because in that way I would succeed in swimming further than I would otherwise? My inclination is to say that my aim is to pretend to swim the Atlantic, and that aiming to pretend to do something or to fantasise doing it is not irrational in the same way as aiming to do it simpliciter if I know that I cannot.

6 I would not endorse the way Gewirth operates such an assessment, however. He argues that freedom and well-being are such prerequisites, and that any culture must be judged according to the degree to which it provides rights to them. He acknowledges that assessment according to provision of individual rights may seem a culturally parochial criterion, but it is, more importantly, question-begging to suppose that a moral demand of a community could never trump the moral right of an individual.

7 Kekes (1994, p. 50) makes a similar point.

8 E.g. Van Parijs, 1995.

9 ‘Men made clothes for thousands of years, under the compulsion of the need for clothing, without a single man ever becoming a tailor’ (Marx, 1976, p. 133). For the nature and the significance of a slide of this kind, see Graham, 1992, pp. 65—67.

10 For anyone who believes we possess an immortal soul, our rational practical aspirations are limited by our materiality only while we are embodied. That is still a considerable constraint, however. II Even for suicide some minimal material means will normally be required.

12 That is why the freedom of choice of an occupation is not a universal requirement of a rational agent. But we should not too readily identify being a beneficiary of others' productive efforts with being an exploiter or a parasite. There are difficult issues here about who exactly is productive as well as about entitlements. See Graham, 1989 and Van Parijs, 1995, ch. 5.

13 For some reasons why those theories are implausible, see Graham, 1994.

14 I am indebted to Chris Bertram, Adam Morton and the participants in the Royal Institute of Philosophy conference on Pluralism and Philosophy, 1995, for helpful comments. I am also grateful to the University of Bristol Arts Faculty Research Fund for financial assistance.