Abstract
Value pluralists see themselves as philosophical grown-ups. They profess to face reality as it is and accept resultant pessimism, while criticising their monist rivals for holding on to the naïve idea that the right, the good and the beautiful are ultimately harmonisable with each other. The aim of this essay is to challenge this self-image of value pluralists. Notwithstanding its usefulness as a means of subverting monist dominance, I argue that the self-image has the downside of obscuring various theoretical positions that do not fall into either the pluralist or monist camp. Yet such positions do exist, as shown by my discussion of Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Near contemporaries of the pioneering value pluralist Isaiah Berlin, the pair, just like him, sought to be realistic about the lived experiences of political disasters and moral disorientation in the twentieth century. Moreover, they shared with Berlin a keen interest in real-world moral dilemmas, which seemed to them (as well as to Berlin) to have made traditional morality obsolete. But the three thinkers’ perspectives on ‘reality’ hardly converged, and neither Camus nor Arendt became a value pluralist as a result of their reflections on moral dilemmas. This, however, by no means indicates the pair’s immaturity. Rather, it shows that there is more than one way of observing fidelity to our actual experience and that value pluralists’ commitment to realism and resultant pessimism is not as uniquely mature as they would have us believe.
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Notes
In this essay I use the term ‘pluralism’ to mean value pluralism. Although Arendt may be called ‘pluralist’ in some other senses (see Flathman 2005), she certainly did not endorse value pluralism (or monism, for that matter). She never took sides in the pluralism/monism debate partly because she died in 1975, a few years before this debate emerged as an important issue in Anglophone philosophy. It is interesting to speculate on what she might have said had she lived two more decades and familiarised herself with the value pluralism/monism debate. As a matter of fact, however, this debate was unknown to her and the pluralism/monism rivalry remained alien to her thought.
Needless to say, this does not necessarily mean that Arendt was more realistic than Berlin and Camus. Who among the three was most pessimistic is one question; whose stance on pessimism was most realistic is another. This essay is concerned with the first question. (Parenthetically, the second question cannot be answered on a general level because different contexts demand different levels of pessimism.)
I use the term ‘existentialism’ in a broad sense to include Camus without minimising his disagreement with other existentialist figures such as Sartre.
Arendt also discusses moral dilemmas in Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1965), which has attracted intense debate. A full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this essay, although I shall mention it briefly later.
I follow the important distinction, introduced by Trunk (1996, pp. 570–575), between semi-voluntary ‘collaboration’ and thoroughly coercive ‘cooperation’. Berlin’s discussion here strictly concerns cooperation.
This, according to Caute (2013, p. 270), was ‘one of Berlin’s favourite topics for light-hearted debate’.
Berlin subscribes to this moralistic reading of Arendt, as evidenced by Berlin and Lukes (1998, pp. 107–108). Whether this reading is correct has been a central issue in the so-called ‘Eichmann controversy’. For further discussion see my forthcoming book provisionally entitled ‘Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin’.
The mother’s consequentialist reasoning is also omitted in another telling of the story in The Rebel (Camus 2000, p. 134).
This, needless to say, is the title of the French translation of Arendt’s The Human Condition.
Isaiah Berlin to Miriam Gross, 26 November 1993. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Berlin 239, fols. 195–196; cited here with the permission of the trustees of Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust.
I mean the final two chapters of the third edition of Origins, that is, ‘Totalitarianism in Power’ and ‘Ideology and Terror’, the latter originally published as Arendt (1953).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Allyn Fives and other participants in the ‘Political Obligation and Moral Conflict’ panel at the 2018 MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory, where I presented an earlier version of this essay. Thanks are also due to Shin Osawa for his feedback; and to Raffaele Rodogno and other members of the Research Unit for Ethics, Legal, and Political Philosophy at Aarhus University for their comments on the penultimate version.
Funding
This article has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 754513 and the Aarhus University Research Foundation. It has also benefitted from a EURIAS fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), co-funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for research, and from a funding from the French State programme ‘Investissements d’avenir’, managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+).
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Hiruta, K. Value Pluralism, Realism and Pessimism. Res Publica 26, 523–540 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09463-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09463-3