In ethical theory, we can understand pluralism as the view that there is a plurality of fundamentally good things. Traditionally, ethicists have tried to analyze right and wrong action in terms of a single fundamental underlying kind of value. We can call this kind of approach ethical monism. For utilitarians that single value is happiness, for Kantian respect for persons theorists, it is the value of the person. Ethical Pluralism allows that there may be multiple kinds of fundamental and irreducible value in the world. Happiness and respect for persons might be among these, but there may be others yet. But it doesn’t take morality to be a matter of picking or choosing among basic moral values.
Let’s think a bit about how ethical pluralism differs from moral relativism. According to Moral Relativism, what makes something right relative to a group is just that it is deemed to be right by that group. Views that take morality to be matter of authority, whether of the individual, a culture or God, all suffer the same basic defect. They render right and wrong entirely arbitrary. If someone or some group gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then anything can be right or wrong. According to Cultural Moral Relativism, whatever a culture deems to be morally right is right relative to it. So, if our culture says that homophobia, sexism, and racism are fine, then they are what is right relative to our culture and that’s the end of it. If some people don’t like it, that’s just too bad. Moral Relativism denies them any objective standpoint from which to complain or any possibility of providing reasons for changing things. Complaints about the oppressiveness of the dominant group amount to nothing more than the whining of losers. The group that dominates is perfectly well within its rights to dominate on relativist thinking. This hardly sounds like a plausible account of social justice. But it is straightforwardly entailed by Moral Relativism and that’s one reason why Moral Relativism is an awful ethical theory.
This much is just a bit of review of problems for relativism and other views that make morality a matter of say so. But notice how Ethical Pluralism avoids this defect. According to Ethical Pluralism, fundamental ethical values are real. The importance of happiness comes with the existence of pleasure and pain. The value of respect for persons comes with the existence of persons. This doesn’t depend on the whim or say-so of any authority.
Suppose morality doesn’t depend on the say-so of cultures, God, or any other individual or group. On this view goodness is “out there” in the realm of things to be discovered. It needn’t be “way out there,” like goodness in some cosmic sense or goodness for the universe at large. We’re just interested in goodness for human beings and this might have lots to do with the human condition. So, let’s set aside the relativist’s claim that goodness is decided by us and ask what else goodness for humans might be. In doing so, we take goodness to be an appropriate object for inquiry, not merely a matter of custom, something somebody gets to decide, or a tool for tyranny. We have some evidence to guide us in this inquiry and it includes all of our varying perspectives on what is good (the more the better). But just as in the sciences, our evidence is fallible and needs to be tested, both against other evidence and the explanatory power of theory.
From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the Holy Grail in ethical theorizing was to find a single, rationally defensible criterion of right action. This quest was dominated by utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, and respect for persons theorists like Kant. Both theoretical approaches are value monist, that is, they take there to be just one thing that has value fundamentally. For the utilitarian it is happiness that matters and the goal is to formulate a single law of morally right action that aims at maximizing happiness. For Kant it is the good will, or the dignity of the person that matters, and the goal is to establish a single moral law that properly captures what it means to respect the value of the person.
The utilitarian might start with the idea that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount of happiness of any available action. But this clearly conflicts with respect for persons as we can see I cases like this one: Suppose Bob goes to his doctor for a check up and his doctor finds him in perfect health. The doctor also notices that Bob is a rare perfect match for several other patients of his who are in desperate need of organ transplants. It is clear to Bob’s doctor, a utilitarian, that he can dramatically increase the overall happiness in the world if he quietly kills Bob with an undetectable heart attack inducing drug and then harvest his organs to save his other patients.
There are various moves a utilitarian might make to try to address this case, but there are more subtle cases yet where Utilitarianism seems to conflict with respect for persons. So, it looks like we can’t coherently sign on to both a utilitarian and a Kantian criterion of right action as true since they will conflict in interesting ways. Utilitarian standards of right action tend to be logically incompatible with standards like Kant’s Categorical Imperative. If what we are looking for is a single criterion of right action that is based on a single kind of ultimate ethical value, it looks like we have to pick a single winner among competing monist ethical theories. But perhaps this sets the wrong kind of goal for ethical theory.
To moral pluralist thinks there are multiple kind of fundamental moral value. We can competing monist theories like utilitarianism and respect-for-persons to be literally true (since they are logically inconsistent). But there is nothing logically incoherent about taking happiness and respect for persons to both be good in fundamental ways. And there may be other plausible candidates for fundamental goodness. Happiness and respect were just the ones that got most of the attention in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, feminist philosophers have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in caring relationships. Environmental ethicists have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in the natural world. Hindus and Buddhists have long suggested that there is a kind of fundamental value in consciousness.
Perhaps this short list is long enough. Or perhaps it is already too long. A moral value is only fundamental if it can’t be explained and supported in terms of some other fundamental value. So, if caring relationships matter just because they bring happiness to human lives, then we already have this kind of value covered when we recognize happiness as a kind of fundamental value. But it is not at all clear that happiness fully explains the value of caring relationships. There are issues to explore here. In any case, kinds of fundamental value might be rare, but still plural.
So, what should ethical theory say about cultures that differ in the fundamental values that shape their customs and codes? Monist approaches to ethical theory would insist that we pick winners in this kind of situation. But should we? Certainly, in some cases we should. The fundamental values of Nazi culture were racist through and through. Good ethical theory should not be accommodating this kind of cultural diversity at all. Recall that our most compelling argument against Moral Relativism was that it is committed to accepting that racism is right relative to racist societies and our condemnation of racism has no more moral force than their endorsement of it.
But what about cases like Confucian cultures that give kinship relationships a higher priority than respect for persons? The more individualistic cultures of the West would favor respect for persons. Must we pick a winner here? Monist ethical theories would insist. But pluralism about ethical value offers us a few other options. The ethical pluralist can say that both cultures are structured around worthy fundamental values and neither unjustly favors one kind of fundamental value at the expense of another. Or a pluralist might allow that some ways of prioritizing worthy fundamental ethical values really are better than others, but hold that there is no strict rational formula for working out which is best. Because we have a plurality of worthy fundamental ethical values and these are not reducible to each other or anything more basic, rational methods of inquiry might not be up to settling the matter and the best we can hope for is good judgment. But however we settle these issues, pluralism about fundamental ethical value opens some new avenues for explaining a broader range of cultural diversity without legitimizing the sorts of obvious injustice moral relativism would condone.
So why is oneness so special? Why would philosophers like Kant and Mill think it so important to have just one kind of fundamental ethical value? One powerful appeal of oneness is that is allows for a high degree of precision and rigor. Bentham even hoped that we would one day have a calculus of utility that would allow us to rigorously prove which actions will maximize utility and therefore be right. The powerful appeal of oneness here is that it allows us to completely replace human judgment with rational calculation. We have yet to outgrow this intellectual lust for reduction. Many of us still want to see the sciences as in some way reducible to just one, physics. But philosophers of science have been raising a steady stream of questions about our reductionistic inclinations over the past few decades. And even physics itself appears to be stuck with a kind of force pluralism. The fundamental forces, according to our best theory, include nuclear, gravitational, and electrical forces. We have specific theories that explain the behavior of things if we abstract away from other forces and focus only on gravity. And we have specific theories that explain the electrical behavior of things, but only when we ignore other forces that might be at play. Similarly, some version of Utilitarianism might give us the ethical truth about the value of happiness at least when no other important ethical values are relevant. And some interpretation of Kant might give us ethical principles that get at the truth so long as we abstract away from ethical values other than the moral dignity of persons. Plurality in both ethics and physics denies us the satisfaction of a single specific formula that accounts for absolutely everything. But that shouldn’t bother us too much. I rather doubt that this kind of intellectual satisfaction is really worthy of human beings.