Why pragmatists cannot be pluralists

It must have resources to deal with them; it must have something to say about why such responses are mistaken.

This is to say that they justify liberal institutions with reference to liberal principles that they simply assume individuals hold. As such, these justifications would have given Schmitt no reason to favour tolerant liberal institutions over intolerant authoritarian ones. The structure of her argument is quite simple: The aim of moral and political inquiry is acquiring true beliefs.

The best way to acquire true beliefs is to expose your beliefs to the arguments, reasons and experiences of everyone. This commits us to such liberal values as autonomy, equal moral worth, respect for persons, free speech and toleration. So the justification for liberal institutions is an epistemic one derived from the best methodology for acquiring true beliefs.

That the aim of moral and political inquiry is true belief will be denied by non-cognitivists or at least insofar as it does aim at truth we will be bitterly disappointed for moral and political propositions are not truth-apt.

Against the non-cognitivist Misak says we need to take seriously the phenomenological role that truth plays in moral and political inquiry. So that we ensure that our theory of moral and political inquiry is a theory of moral and political inquiry, and not something else, we need to make sure that our theory preserves the important features of that inquiry, and this requires us, Misak thinks, to take seriously the thought that our moral and political inquiries aim at delivering us true beliefs.

Our beliefs change, or should change, insofar as they either fit with or do not fit with reasons and experience. And insofar as we encounter new, better or more decisive reasons and experiences that tell against believing p we must no longer believe p but must believe whatever it is that best fits with these new reasons and experiences.

In the moral and political realm, this requires that everyone be given the chance to contribute to debate. It requires democracy in practice. They can be criticised as failing to aim at truth properly. The pragmatist argues that if we are to take seriously the experience of all, we must let ways of life flourish so that they can be articulated and we must let people articulate them for themselves… It is hard to see how anything but a principle of tolerance could be the upshot of the methodological principle to take the views of others seriously.

There are, according to Misak, two constitutive norms of belief. One is that beliefs aim at the truth. When I believe p , I commit myself to saying what could speak for or against p and to giving up p in the face of sustained evidence and argument against it.

A belief, in order to be a belief , is such that it is responsive to or answerable to reasons and evidence. That is a very part of what it is to have a belief — it is a constitutive norm of belief. As Misak writes:. Broadly speaking we could say that there are three different forms of justification. The first relies upon actual acceptance of X whereby X is justified only if individuals accept that it is justified.

Insofar as rational individuals do not accept a subjective justification it will either be because it appeals to beliefs that they do not hold or because they are making some mistake about the consequences of their own beliefs.

In this sense they are objective reasons and this form of justification could be called objective justification. Thus she clearly understands Rawls to be offering a subjective justification. If such objective reasons can be found for supporting liberal institutions then we would have justified them to all individuals regardless of their conception of the good or of whether they actually accept them or not. Once anti-liberals such as Schmitt accept that they are truth-seekers and belief-holders, Misak believes that we can then show them why they have good reasons to support liberal institutions.

As Misak writes,. Once that acknowledgement is made as it is made by the flat-earther, the Nazi, etc. The way is paved for the justification of the democratic principles of inquiry. Once it is acknowledged that we have beliefs, then we can say qua believers , we must abide by certain principles.

Her Peircian epistemic justification is superior, she believes, insofar as it is a justification that appeals to beliefs that we can assume all individuals will hold, regardless of their conception of the good. A question that needs to be addressed is whether this universalistic aspiration to provide justifications for liberal institutions to all individuals, including ardent anti-liberals such as Schmitt, is an appropriate aim for justifications in modern liberal societies characterised by a plurality of different and conflicting conceptions of the good?

In order to establish this we need to examine the character of pluralism itself, specifically how different accounts of the sources of pluralism affect the possibility that all individuals, regardless of their conceptions of the good, will hold those same beliefs and from this what the appropriate aims for justifying liberal institutions should be.

While Misak locates her disagreement with Rawls at the level of which beliefs we should appeal to when justifying liberal institutions, there are good reasons to think that this difference is only the symptom of a much deeper disagreement regarding the sources of pluralism and that this difference actually precludes Rawls from pursuing the sort of universalistic justification that Misak chastises him for failing to provide. Here would be an instance in which different accounts of the sources of pluralism result in different accounts of the appropriate aims of justification of liberal institutions.

Whether Misak is right to criticise Rawls for failing to offer a universalistic justification or not, and indeed whether we should aspire to offer such a justification or not, is going to depend on which account of the sources of pluralism we find the most compelling. Instead, they are in part the work of free practical reason within the framework of free institutions.

For example, to think that pluralism is something that we should aim to overcome would require us to take a similar view with regard to liberal institutions themselves, given the central causal role that those institutions play in the creation of pluralism.

As such, pluralism acts as an unavoidable internal constraint on what liberal political philosophy should realistically aspire to achieve. This is particularly evident and relevant when it comes to the issue of justifying liberal institutions in at least two ways: First of all, it is no longer a realistic aspiration to try and provide a universalistic justification for liberal institutions that appeals to beliefs which all individuals hold, regardless of their conception of the good.

Given the plurality of different and conflicting conceptions of the good, it is not realistic to expect that there will be a belief or set of beliefs which could be used to justify liberal institutions which all individuals hold.

Thus we must accept that it is highly unlikely that we will be able justify liberal institutions to all individuals regardless of their conceptions of the good. As such, the sort of justification that we should seek are those which avoid appealing to controversial moral, religious or philosophical premises over which we can reasonably expect individuals to disagree. Because liberal institutions play a central causal role in creating pluralism, we should expect that pluralism to take a largely liberal shape.

In which case it is more than likely that individuals will share certain beliefs, common liberal moral or political ones, which could be used to fairly easily provide good reasons for supporting liberal institutions.

These societies offer the conditions for the creation and flourishing of anti-liberal as well as liberal conceptions of the good.

The reality of life in modern liberal societies is that pluralism is far from wholly liberal in nature.

Our initial premise P1 is that liberal institutions play a central causal role in the creation and sustenance of the plurality of different and conflicting conceptions of the good which characterises modern liberal societies.

From this premise, and according to this line of argument, we might draw the conclusion C1 that all conceptions of the good which exist within societies regulated by liberal institutions will be of a largely liberal nature and that, consequently, all individuals within those societies could be offered good reasons for endorsing liberalism with reference to liberal beliefs and values that they all share i.

This is, however, too strong a conclusion to draw from our initial premise for while it might be intuitive to think that pluralism will be of a largely liberal nature if liberal institutions play a central causal role in its creation, there is no a priori reason to think that this will be true for all conceptions of the good. Rather, P1 gives us good reason to think C2 liberal institutions create societies in which it is highly unlikely which is to say, the probability is close to though not 0 that all citizens are going to hold beliefs which will lead them to support liberalism or enable us to provide a subjective justification why they ought to.

This conclusion C2 accepts that the source of pluralism does have a very important role in determining the nature of the plurality of conceptions of the good, though does not go as far as to say that it plays a totally determining factor such that pluralism must be liberal because its source is, to a large degree, liberal institutions themselves.

This is that we should expect conceptions of the good in liberal societies to be broadly liberal in nature because shared liberal institutions exert strong pressure on those individuals who live in the societies that they regulate.

The ideas and principles that those institutions express i. There does not seem to be any reason to think that this attachment to liberal ideas and principles is something that every individual in liberal societies will develop and indeed it is merely an assumption to think that all individuals regardless of their conception of the good will be sensitive to this institutional pressure to an appropriate degree.

Many conceptions, such as religious fundamentalist ones for example, look totally impervious to such pressure. At any one time there are likely to be many different conceptions of the good at different stages of this modification, where previously anti-liberal conceptions have become liberalised, others have become moderated and others — probably newer conceptions of the good or conceptions that have yet to be adequately exposed to liberal institutions — are still fervently impervious to any justification for them.

Thus it would seem unrealistic to think that liberal institutions could be justified to all individuals regardless of their conception of the good at any one time. Given these points, it would be more sensible to draw the weaker conclusion C2 that it is unrealistic to expect that we will be able to offer good reasons for supporting liberal institutions according to the subjective model of justification to all individuals regardless of their conception of the good from premises P1 and P2.

Talisse and R. Talisse , R. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy Contemporary pragmatists often maintain that their doctrine is intrinsically allied with pluralism. We contend that pragmatism and pluralism are in fact not compatible, that pragmatists cannot be pluraliste.

Our demonstration of this thesis will proceed in an ordinary way: We shall first identify three distinct types of pluralism. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Results Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters.

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