Political Theory Papers A- J

Bruce Buchan

The Australian National University

PUNISHING THE POOR:

EARLY ‘LIBERAL’ ARGUMENTS FOR PENAL AND POLICE REFORM

ABSTRACT

Alongside the emphasis on human rights, protection, and the preservation of property, liberalism has emerged as a discourse of managed public authority incorporating a measured approach to the problem of punishment. There is however, some confusion in both public and academic debate as to the nature and purpose of recent moves in some liberal-democratic nations to institute programs of mandatory sentencing or zero tolerance policing, most notably in some states in the United States and the Northern Territory in Australia. While its defenders have tended to portray liberalism, not without justification, as a doctrine of penal reform, moves toward more draconian measures of policing and punishment would appear to sit rather awkwardly alongside its reformist credentials. It will be argued here however, that through an examination of early arguments for penal reform and policing we can see mandatory sentencing as well as zero tolerance policing as consistent with the liberal tradition.

Arguments for penal reform in the work of early-modern political theorists has not always received the attention it deserves. With some notable exceptions however, where it is spoken of it tends to take the form of a celebration of the ‘humanisation’ of punishment associated with the development of liberalism. In other words, the development of liberalism is associated with the extension of more humane, carefully regulated and proportioned method of punishment, based as one writer put it, on the "liberal" recognition of "the fullest extent of liberty possible" and the necessity of "protecting the rights of the accused". Rosen is explicit in deploying this interpretation against that of Michel Foucault, whom he charges with merely arguing that early penal reformers ‘replaced’ "one system of tyranny and terror with a worse one", or one that was at least "as oppressive as the one it succeeded." Both Rosen and Carrithers reject this view by contending that liberal theories of punishment were designed primarily to deter crime by according a fair and humane proportion between punishment and offence. This interpretation of both ‘liberal’ penal reform and Focuault’s critique overlooks the fact that Foucault largely accepted the claim that early-modern penal reform did replace the terror of the gallows with more humane disciplines of ‘correction’. This paper will not be concerned with the ‘humanisation’ of penal practices per se, but with how this ‘humanisation’ came to be construed as coeval with the effort to extend and refine the reach of punishment within and without the prison walls.

As the defenders of the liberal tradition of penal reform represent it, the most important feature of these early arguments reforms was that they enshrined the central liberal concern to "devise a system of punishment which sought to protect the individual within society, prevent the criminal from committing crime, deter others" and by humane punishments "protect the liberty of the criminal." It will be argued in this paper however, that early-modern arguments for penal and police reform should be interpreted as retributive rather than corrective strategies directed against those whose ‘unruly’ and ‘undisciplined’ conduct posed the greatest threat to the security of civil society. This understanding of the rationale of penal theory (and to some extent, penal practice) was related to the emergence of new forms of government and relations of power which redefined crime, criminality and its solution. As Skinner argues, a key feature of this development, and one that Foucault tended to obscure, was the rise of state sovereignty, and especially the idea that "maintaining" the state involved dominating "the institutions of government and means of coercive control" within its jurisdiction. State sovereignty thus meant control of political and governmental institutions, but such control that aimed at creating flourishing market or commercial economies, and that these were best secured by civil societies characterised by interactions between independent, autonomous citizens. Consequently, one of the ways in which state sovereignty was manifested was an increased focus on ‘criminality’. This referred to forms of behaviour that threatened the security of citizens, the health of the economy, and the wealth of civil society; namely property crimes, vagabondage, masterlessness, begging and idleness.

It was in this light that John Locke turned his attention to the problem of begging and masterlessness throughout the country, and Henry Fielding stipulated that "the Strength and Riches of a Society consist in the Numbers of the People..." and that social well-being required, inter alia, the elimination of the burden of the poor. Fielding moreover counselled the need to focus attention on the "Customs, Manners, and Habits of the People" in order to prevent "Disorder", stimulate trade and commerce by which the poor may be disciplined to shake off "their Vassalage" and became independent citizens shunning wasteful habits such as drunkenness and gambling. Informing such views was an assumption that the role of government was to arrange social, economic and political institutions in such a way that individuals themselves could manage their own conduct without the need for direct supervision. It is this view that provides an answer to the dilemma that current moves toward seemingly more draconian penal and policing practices apparently conflict with the liberal tradition. In other words, ‘liberal’ conceptions of how the power to punish should be exercised, remain tied to an implicit distinction between those who can be relied upon to manage themselves, and those who could not.

With these words Montesquieu pointed to what he considered an incontrovertible fact, that the more despotic a state, the more its rulers undisciplined passion reigned, and thus the more severe was its style of punishment. Consequently, the more moderate the state, the more limited its powers, the more its citizens are free to arrange their own affairs, the more gentle are its mores, its manners, its laws and its punishments. In recommending moderate punishments however, Montesquieu was suggesting more effective ways of punishing. Other reformers were animated by precisely this spirit, by the attempt to devise more effective types of punishment. The Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) for instance, railed at what he called the "useless prodigality" of established punishments, which merely hardened criminals, and impeded the orderly exercise of the law. A motivation in moderating the severity of punishment was the reform or correction of the offender, which capital punishment as Pufendorf (1632-1694) noted, plainly failed to achieve "since a dead man cannot be reformed." Part of the problem with public manifestations of the power to punish was that they quite regularly did not achieve the desired result of instilling fear and awe. As many historians have observed, the ritual of public execution was a complex affair in which the forces of law, the crowd, and the offender receiving punishment each had a specific role to play. Such roles however, did not always run to script and what was intended as a solemn procession of the majesty and awesome power of the state could easily descend into farce, or even riot. Hence, the ‘severity’ of established punishments were sometimes much less terrifying than it is often assumed.

Contemporary reformers, not all of whom could be called ‘liberal’, were acutely aware of this problem. As the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615-1691) noted of placing offenders in the stocks, "their companions get about them and feast them openly… so that they are never so jovial as in the stocks and justice made an open scorn." Henry Fielding (1707-1754) turned this attitude toward the reform of the "Dress and Apparatus" of capital punishment, which he thought, could be made more solemn and dreadful if conducted ‘privately’,

William Paley’s (1743-1805) tendentious defence of the Georgian ‘Bloody Code’, which came to be called ‘Paley’s net’, was based on the idea that public capital punishment was more effective if applied to a great many crimes. Such crimes could be swept "into the net" of capital offences, but only carried out in a few exemplary cases ensuring that "few actually suffer death, whilst the dread and danger of it hang over the crimes of many." In seeking a form of punishment that was universal in reach, Paley – though himself not animated by liberal reformist sentiments - expressed one of its chief objectives.

One of the obstacles to reaching this end was the inconsistency of punishment, the frequency with which offenders escaped punishment or, like Jack Sheppard, acquired legendary and folkloric status by continually cheating the hangman and making an ass of the law. Hence arguments for penal reform addressed themselves to the "elastic measure of mercy" as well as the "differential enforcement of new and old penalties" complicated by various privileges and exemptions, such as ‘benefit of clergy’. Beccaria, for instance, argued that to be effective, the penal system must be based on the "inevitability" and "certainty" of punishment unmitigated by places of sanctuary or asylum. He opposed the death penalty because he thought its effect was "transient", whereas "imprisonment for life", in which the offender must ‘pay’ for the offence "by labours resembling those of a beast of burden", would be at least as terrifying a prospect for the potential criminal. Indeed, for punishment to be effective he concluded that it must "never be an act of violence committed by one or many against a private citizen", its severest penalties must be used sparingly, but most importantly, it must be both "proportionate to the crime, and established by law." Beccaria here expressed two of the central principles of penal reform, that it be both proportionate and consistent. In doing so, the aim was not merely to correct or reform the offender by ‘humanising’ punishment, but to eliminate the inconsistencies of punishment that militated against the inculcation of patterns of autonomous self-conduct within the citizenry itself.

This particular view is most clearly seen in the work of Montesquieu, who, as both Rosen and Carrithers argue, was at the forefront of the drive for proportionality and regularity of punishment. Montesquieu argued that excessive punishments merely hardened criminals, and were ineffective because the fear they instilled was dissipated the more the punishment was used. Punishments should be proportionate because it was "essential that the greater crime be avoided rather than the lesser one", and that potential offenders be given some incentive to choose the latter. What Montesquieu had in mind was a system of punishment based on the dictates of ‘rational’, instrumental calculation of the costs and benefits of conduct by eliminating inconsistency and ambiguity. The chief idea here was that in moderate states, individuals learn to subject themselves to the discipline of calculated self-interest. The laws themselves for example, reflected the mores of the populace and were not obeyed through fear or awe, but simply because they embodied their own interests. This was also the idea behind Beccaria’s desire for a "moderate" but "continuous punishment" dedicated to the idea that all citizens "regulate their conduct in response to the repeated action of the disadvantages they know…". Hence, a system of laws and punishments known to all, in which penalties are inexorably meted out according to the severity of the crime, was the ideal. These penalties were designed to be more effective in their application and thereby to offer would-be offenders a clear and unambiguous choice requiring rational calculation of the costs of breaking laws, for which apprehension was likely, and punishments sternly, inexorably, and universally applied.

Concerns such as these fuelled the impetus toward the refinement of the prison as the institution charged with both the reform of offenders and the standardisation of punishment. This of course was Foucault’s view, illustrated by Jeremy Bentham’s infamous Panopticon, a proposed prison designed on the basis of perpetual observation and surveillance; an institution of universal and rigorous punishment. Foucault has also been taken to task, not unreasonably, for making too much of both Bentham’s influence and the Panopticon itself, which after all was never built as Bentham planned. Such criticisms however, fail to acknowledge that Bentham’s work on prison reform and design – regardless of its actual influence – grew from a context of increasing dissatisfaction with existing forms of punishment, especially transportation, and represented "the architectural form", if not the actual blueprint for the reform movement.

III. REFORM: OF OFFENDERS AND PRISONS

As Kant so neatly described it, the purpose of transportation was to "purge our country of depraved characters, [while] at the same time affording the hope that they or their offspring will become reformed in another continent (as in New Holland)." In Britain however, even conservatives such as Paley were attacking transportation on the grounds of its ineffectiveness, because though "the convict may suffer" by it, "his sufferings are removed from the view of his countrymen: his misery is unseen" and thereby it fails to inspire fear in others. Bentham also availed himself of this argument in his review of the Hard-Labour Bill in 1778, in which he argued for a "general plan of punishment… in which solitary confinement might be combined with labour", viewing transportation as an "unexemplary" and disproportionate form of punishment. Thus, when Bentham came to compose his work on the Panopticon in the late 1780’s, it was in the context of trying to develop an alternative and more effective form of punishment.

Bentham saw the plan as a multipurpose establishment, not just a prison but a "new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind" equally applicable to factories, hospitals, schools, and mad-houses. The central principle that made the plan so versatile was that it offered a form of control and power over both inmates and warders, a form of control that was all seeing but unseen, based on surveillance and solitary confinement. Although widely practiced in British houses of correction, the twin principles of reform by solitude and surveillance were not systematically applied. Bentham’s plans however, developed them to new heights,

Histories of the prison in Britain illustrate the role they were designed to play in providing discipline and industry to inmates. In earlier models, discipline was linked to gradations of corporal punishments as in John Locke’s proposal to revive the system of poor houses in conjunction with measures such as compulsory impressment into the navy, transportation, and flogging to ensure "idle vagabonds" were "inured to work" and made "sober and industrious all their lives after". By the 1750’s, attention had shifted to the design of institutions of regimented industry in which the routine of activity replaced the need for corporal penalties. Thus Henry Fielding’s proposal of a system of county-houses where the poor and vagrants may be lodged, forced to work, and prevented from wandering, was premised on "correction" which he described as an "Endeavour to persuade the Offender that he is corrected only for his own Good." Interestingly, Fielding thought this best accomplished by solitary incarceration,

By the 1780’s, William Paley could write of solitary incarceration that it offered the best chance of ‘reform’, but that the duration of confinement was to be measured by the "quantity of work" accomplished by the offender which would, he thought, "excite industry, and… render it more voluntary."

As enthusiasts such as Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820) observed, Bentham’s Panopticon would employ surveillance and solitude to make inmates industrious and profitable. Importantly however, the whole institution was designed to do away with the need for corporal punishments, irons and shackles. The whole building was designed to facilitate the "apparent omnipresence of the inspector" who oversees both inmates and warders "without being seen" and thus encourages the strict self-management of conduct because each person in the institution feels as though they are under surveillance. Alone in their cells, with no way of seeing or communicating with others, the inmates would have nothing else to do but to labour and thereby earn some little wage to improve their conditions. While his model was never actually built, Bentham’s work is illustrative of the ongoing effort to refine punishment, to make it more effective, and this meant not simply targeting the offender, but using the prison as a presence to guide the conduct of those on the outside. In his letter of 1802 entitled Panopticon Versus New South Wales, Bentham once again applied himself to the task of recommending the advantages of his institution over transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales, Australia. One of the chief advantages he identified was that incarceration in the Panopticon sited "in the vicinity of the metropolis" was more exemplary than transportation affording all citizens a clear view of the penalty for crime.

Thus the Panopticon was designed not just as an institution for reforming the offender; it manifested a form of political power exerted without recourse to violence or savagery. The governmental power represented by and embodied in this ideal penitentiary was designed to appear less brutal, but was made thereby a more constant and unrelenting power inducing all to conduct themselves in such a way as to avoid its penalties. The foundation of such arguments was that punishments must be such that they offered a clear, consistent and unambiguous penalty so that all citizens may be induced to engage in autonomous calculations of the costs of running foul of the law. Early arguments for penal reform were thus directed to the augmentation of the capacity for autonomous action of those who committed no crime, but who were continually and more effectively reminded of the consequences of breaking the law due, in part, to a more vigorous system of policing.

The art of government in early-modern Europe became increasingly concerned with the management of populations by developing more precise knowledge of its dynamics. One version of this new art of government, stronger in Continental Europe but not unknown in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, centred on the activities of ‘police’ in regulating areas of social and economic life representing a "great effort of formation of the social body". The rationale of this art of government was that the pursuit of the health, wealth and well-being of society required the efficient regulation of areas of social life by an exhaustive policy of investigation, supervision and control. In this conception of government, police authorities were invested with the power to carry out such functions in order to "produce a well ordered civic or territorial community." For Kant, police were to regulate public "security, convenience and also propriety" making it "much easier for the government to perform its business of governing the people", by suppressing "begging, uproar in the streets, offensive smells and public prostitution". The police moreover, should be charged with the "right of inspection" into any and every "association which could influence the public welfare".

Contrasting with this view of police as a strategy of government, in Anglo-Scottish thought the health, wealth and well-being of society could best be achieved by ensuring that individuals themselves, rather than police could regulate their own conduct. It was in this sense that William Blackstone could refer to "public police and oeconomy" by which he meant the "due regulation" of society "whereby the individuals of the state… are bound to conform their general behaviour to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners… to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations." Instead of seeing police as a strategy of government, it became a subsidiary arm of government concerned with the task of monitoring the boundaries between self-regulated and non-self-regulated conduct. In seeing police as a strategy of government or an activity of integration and command, extensive areas of society were identified as requiring regulation. As Beccaria put it "the sciences, education, good order, security and public tranquillity, objects all comprehended under the name of police". Within early liberal thought by contrast, the chief task of government was to produce a society in which significant areas of self-regulation were achieved through a variety of disciplinary structures. Some of these structures (such as the army) operated under more direct government control, while others (such as churches, schools, and work places) were relatively autonomous. The organisation and regulation of the police was thus an important part of this activity of government, but the attempt to define police powers was also an attempt to confine them. The ‘liberal’ strategy of government through self-conduct thus entailed a form of policing premised on significant areas of self-regulation.

It was with the prospect of a government by police in mind that William Paley defended the frequent use of capital punishment in Britain. Because "the liberties of a free people" and the "jealousy" with which they are defended "permit not those precautions and restraints, that inspection, scrutiny, and control" in "arbitrary governments", a government by "police with… discretionary powers" would not be tolerated. As Paley saw it then, the problem for a government based on the liberty of citizens was that crime was more difficult to prevent, because the activities of police would have to be curtailed. For early liberals then, it was vital to establish that self-regulation and self-government could be relied upon to maintain public tranquillity. The primacy of this concern can be identified for instance, in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he aimed to demonstrate how to "restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections" and to regulate their effects by appealing to self-interest in the maintenance of society. In giving form to this prescription, Smith implicitly adopted a conception of the self, the essential elements of which were the "reason" and "self-command" of the provident and industrious man of business, one who practiced "frugality, industry, and application" in the "acquisition of fortune", pursued "remote advantage" by giving up "all present pleasures", and enduring "the greatest labour both of mind and body" to win a general "approbation". Such was the conduct of one who could be relied upon to behave appropriately, in effect to police themselves; the function of the institutions of police therefore was to regulate the conduct of those who could not police themselves.

In his Lectures on Jurisprudence of 1763, Smith developed a conception of police appropriate to British society, noting that the term ‘police’ had originally referred to "the regulation of government in general" but should now be "confind" [sic] to the "inferior parts of it." In his discussion of the duties of police Smith maintained that its chief duty was to promote the "opulence of the state" through regulating "trade, commerce, agriculture, manufactures" and ensuring regular supply and cheapness of goods. He contrasted this view to the more extensive reach of police in France arguing that this did not produce greater security, but showed merely that the French needed stricter regulation because the number of disorders there was greater owing to the greater number of "retainers and dependents". Smith’s view was that disorders were occasioned by the practice of keeping a large retinue of servants which rendered them entirely dependent and "altogether depraved both in mind and body", unable to earn a living when cast out other than by "crimes and vices." The transition to a commercial economy provided the means by which such individuals could be subjected to the new mastery of a firm and unforgiving yet also voluntary discipline of labour. Above all else this new discipline afforded to former retainers an independence which was the most effective form of protection from crime and vagabondage,

Consequently, the police were to provide "security" and "safety" of possession, "maintain the rich in possession of their wealth against the violence and rapacity of the poor", and thereby "preserve" the inequalities that resulted from "the various degrees of capacity, industry, and diligence". According to this conception, police existed to patrol the regulations under which commerce was conducted and to protect those who profited most by it. As Colquhoun conceived it in his A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, the chief function of the police was to protect commerce and private wealth by targeting the dealers and receivers of stolen goods thereby removing the incentive to engage in crime.

Colquhoun’s and Smith’s conceptions of police was thus concerned with the inculcation of patterns of self-discipline and self-policing, but the shift that occurred in the nineteenth-century was one of tactics for accomplishing that end. While eighteenth-century policing can be broadly described as a process of shaping conduct by regulating commerce, early nineteenth-century policing, particularly after the introduction of Peel’s constabulary, was concerned above all with protection from the organised masses. Here the danger to be circumvented was that posed by the indiscipline of ‘the mob’, the elimination of riot, and the other public disturbances caused by that "dangerous class… of criminals, paupers and persons whose conduct is obnoxious to the interests of society… [as well as] that proximate body of people who are within reach of its contagion, and continually swell its number." The activities of this police were therefore centred not simply on the protection of property, but on shaping society through the elimination and prevention of crime, thereby protecting a sphere within which commerce could regulate itself, and mould the conduct of those engaged in it. In fulfilling this function the police were (and still are) charged with the task of monitoring the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable conduct or, as the first Metropolitan Police handbook put it, of "watching the conduct of loose and disorderly persons". It was within the realm protected by this vigilance to which the ‘liberal’ idea of a society constituted by autonomous individuals whose conduct was underwritten by disciplines of ‘self-policing’ applied. This was the accomplishment of a form of government in which policing was involved with securing the social space in which these ‘co-operative’ ventures could flourish. As such policing and punishment was conceived as a retributive strategy for dealing with those sections of society who showed that they would not conduct themselves autonomously. It was their improvidence, ill-discipline, ‘violence and rapacity’ that harboured the greatest threats to commerce and its benefits.

In this paper, it has been argued that a liberal approach to the problem of punishment and police is one distinguished by its emphasis on the self-regulation of conduct. Such conduct was to be carefully disciplined, but the most effective methods for doing so were those which made the discipline seem ‘voluntary’, rather than coercive. Hence the liberal appeal to commerce was an appeal to just such a method of ‘voluntary’ discipline. Liberals also realised however, that some form of coercive discipline was required because not all people were capable of self-regulation. The purpose of policing was to identify those who were incapable of autonomy, who resorted to ‘crime’ and thus deserved punishment. It was in this sense that those without property were identified as the greatest danger to the security of those with property. Poverty was thus associated with crime and a punitive attitude was founded on the view that the poor were to blame for their condition due to their undisciplined behaviour, lack of thrift, vagrancy, idleness, lewdness, or drunkenness.

As Salter has observed, Smith adopted this punitive approach to the poor because he believed that the "universal opulence" of commercial economies meant that poverty should be an easy condition to avoid so long as one made the effort to develop the habits of industry, frugality and prudence. The assumption here is that because the poor are improvident, they require strict regulation and instruction; if such regulation is not applied, crime will be the result. This punitive approach to poverty has a long ancestry, and I do not claim that it belongs to liberalism alone, merely that it is fully consistent with the liberal tradition of thought. In arguing so, it is possible to appreciate the continuity between the liberal tradition of penal and police reform and current trends toward mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance policing.

The central idea behind zero tolerance policing for example, is that police target offences that mark out and define the boundaries of legitimate conduct, to enforce standards of self-discipline in the interests of personal security and public tranquillity. In the United States zero-tolerance policing has been used to target specific groups, most notably activists and protesters, as well as those who live on the streets, but particularly racial minorities such as the Hispanic, African and Haitian communities. Together these communities constitute the least favoured socio-economic sectors in American society, those in which rates of poverty are greatest, and those from which the greatest number of victims of zero-tolerance can be found. In Australia’s Northern Territory, mandatory sentencing has had a similar effect on the indigenous Aboriginal community, members of which are more likely to be targeted by the police and to end up in prison. In proposing a form of sentencing that is clear and consistent however, mandatory sentencing is consistent with the liberal tradition of penal strategy. Consider for example the main arguments employed in its defence,

Such arguments for mandatory sentencing thus encompass the appeal to the instrumental rationality of the offender, with the inexorability and immediacy of punishment so cherished by earlier penal reformers. In targeting those whose position in civil society is marginal, zero tolerance policing and mandatory sentencing target those most likely to re-offend. This results in a retributive attitude to punishment, a view that persistent re-offenders deserve strict punishment because they have failed to discipline themselves.

Liberal approaches to punishment should be seen as a retributive strategy for delineating the boundaries of acceptable and appropriate conduct from unacceptable and inappropriate conduct. Many of the early arguments for reform were designed to separate those whose actions and whose very presence within civil society threatened the security and property of those who so prudently and providently governed themselves. The institutions of punishment and policing thus acted as institutional bulwarks to the boundaries separating realms in which citizens could be relied upon to govern themselves, from those in which they could not. In this way, the development of modern punishment and policing can be located within the context of state-formation, as strategies of power employed by states in the process of forming productive civil societies. One of the objectives of this ‘governmental’ state power was to shape the ‘sensibilities and mentalities’ of the (prison and non-prison) population in such a way that savagery and overt violence were no longer the primary mechanisms of its authority. The purpose of punishment then, was not simply reform or correction of the offender, nor the management of delinquency (though each have played their part), but the delivery of deserved punishment on those whose indiscipline and improvidence threatened the peace and productivity of civil society, those who were deemed incapable of autonomous action. In this light, zero tolerance policing and mandatory sentencing, both of which are applied most severely to those sectors of the community that have always been identified in liberal thought as harbouring the greatest threat to the security and productivity of civil society – the poor, the itinerant, the dispossessed, the undisciplined and uncivilised - can be seen as entirely consistent with the liberal tradition.

Paul Corcoran

Associate Professor of Politics

University of Adelaide

'Isn't It Embarrassing?' The Affective Basis of Australian Political Language & Identity

Shame is the emotional cognate of a threatened or damaged bond, just as threatened bonds are the source of shame. Normal shame is an essential building block of relationships and of community.

Introduction

'Isn't it embarrassing?' Politically aware Australians will be familiar with this commonplace rhetorical question. Although the emphatic interrogatory can easily be understood as a remonstration that invites detachment from an object of odium, I want to explore quite a different implication. My aim is to show how the invocation of the negative emotions of shame and embarrassment is a mode of strong national identification.

In a world of increasingly unstable identities, the recognition of nationality, along with a host of other cultural markers (race, religion, ethnicity, gender), becomes at once a more risky and more important concern. Recognition in the sense in which I use it here is not simply a theoretical or legal concept, but is rather a perceptual, moral and aesthetic task - very difficult to achieve - with which we all struggle every day. This paper endeavours to uncover such efforts precisely where Australian identity appears on the surface to be undermined by powerful emotional factors which discourage or deny recognition.

Approaches

My approach to these issues acknowledges, but purposely leaves to one side, the questions of 'nation' and nationalism that have been accorded salience among political theorists in recent years. This is a debate that has fruitfully begun to re-examine Herder and Renan, and now plays an important part in scholarly conversations about liberalism, communitarianism, theories of justice, multi-culturalism, post-colonial theory and communication theory (Eisenberg, 2001). The reader will have to decide whether I have erred by omitting a review of this growing body of literature and deciding not to use its vocabularies or engage with its theoretical lineaments.
Conventional approaches to the study of national identity focus on positive evidence as reflected in literature, works of art, political discourse, social patterns of affiliation and, in the past several decades, attitudinal surveys. Such efforts look for symbolic and literary representations of patriotism, institutional memberships, chauvinism, xenophobic movements and deeply embedded ethno-cultural solidarity. By contrast, this paper approaches the question of national identity by negative or 'contrastive' affective phenomena. The focus will be on rhetorical expressions of embarrassment, shame, humiliation and, by implication, a discourse ranging in tone and content from the insecure to the acrimonious and condemnatory.

The study of 'affects' relies upon rather technical concepts and methods of analysis which evolved several decades ago in experimental, clinical and applied psychology (Tomkins, 1963; Edelman, 1987). The present analysis has also been influenced by a highly diverse range of literature. These include the concepts and interpretative applications stemming from the appropriation of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in cultural analysis; historical studies, both empirical and theoretical, of the evolution 'civilities and courtesies' in social manners (Norbert Elias, 1978); the psychology of emotions (Harré & Parrot, 1996); applied psychological research in criminology and mediation (Braithwaite, 1989; Scheff & Ratzinger, 1997); the sociology of emotions (Barbalet, 1998; Scheff, 1994, 1997); and philosophical reflection (Griffiths, 1997; Elster, 1999; Wollheim, 1999). Many of these studies are candid in stating that the human emotions are (like the influences I have named) 'heterogeneous,' in so far as emotions defy classification according to any comprehensive system of behavioural, psychological or physiological coordinates, though many attempts have been made (Elster, 1999, 141-45; 239-44).

Negative Emotional Discourse

Australian public discourse is vehement, contentious and polarised. Most, if not all, 'divisive' issues (as they are commonly described) are spoken about and represented in the media as calling into question the legitimacy of political institutions, the nation itself, and the meaning of Australia's historical experience. Party political rhetoric, with some degree of paradox, is vehemently criticised and condemned for being abusive and condemnatory.

This rhetoric, to a striking degree, is what a psychologist of emotions would call 'inwardly directed.' Several standard explanations, not at issue here, have been advanced as to why this should be so: the 'convict past,' vestiges of British colonialism and class division, demographic contrasts between rural and urban populations, or the supposed psychic pressures attendant upon economic globalisation. This paper is primarily concerned with the effects rather than the cause of the heat. I merely note in passing - although the observation is crucial to my central argument - that these ideological schisms in Australian society do not demarcate degrees or strengths, much less the presence or absence, of patriotic national identification.

Embarrassment and shame are commonplace declarations by politicians, professional commentators and 'ordinary' people in letters to the editor and talk-back media. These expressions, presumably to reveal feelings in the most public way, routinely take the form of a 'confession' of dastardly misdeeds by a person or group, normally the prime minister or the government of the day, but also sporting celebrities, sports announcers inter alia. The typical occasion of this self-acknowledged shame is that either a horrible truth or a horrible falsehood has been revealed to 'the world' (ABC, 1999; Brunton, 1999; Kelly, 2001; Murray, 2001; Price, 2001.)

The assumptions of such revelations are quite extraordinary. A declaration of shame effects a kind of sanctification which morally elevates the speaker above the misdeed. The public confession of shame is a rite of sacrifice which purifies, propitiates and seemingly both exonerates and capacitates the speaker to judge and sentence the malefactors. By this confessional act, the emotional distress of the malefaction is transmuted from the speaker to 'Australia.' The personal shame elides into an exposure of the nation's integrity and honour to general embarrassment, with the wound to one's own deepest feelings registered as a betrayal of the nation. Thus the rhetorical expression of a personally disorienting shame enables a recovery in the enactment of emotional identity with the nation.

There is something of the 'family feeling' in this. The intimacy and complicity of membership affords a position from which to castigate something of one's own. A common metaphor in such rhetoric is the shame of having one's own dirty linen 'exposed' to the wider community of nations. Thus one acknowledges and 'owns' this disgrace, even though it is opposed and hated. Vehement opposition is at the same time an expression of identification. One cannot be shamed and outraged, one cannot feel disgust, embarrassment or moral revulsion, unless one has a very strong sense of identity that threatens to be threatened, sullied, destroyed.

I want to notice two large paradoxes about acrimonious public discourse, and look more closely at only one. The one I analyse at some length is the surprising paradox that Australia's discourse of mutual recrimination is a contest between rivals for recognition as the truest, best, most loyal citizens: most in love with their country, most loyal to its heritage, most prescient of its future and best guardians of its destiny. For example, Australia's progressive, leftward-leaning political party - the party most 'uncomfortable' with the nation's historic failures and injustices - nevertheless passionately boasts of its elder tradition, identifies itself with the nation's political and social history and takes pride in its 'true believers.'

A paradox I note in passing is how, in the face of this strange and fractious consensus, the mass media interpret contemporary Australian reality in a rhetoric of war, division, fragmentation, criminal violence, hatred, racism and irreconcilable difference. The national newspaper, The Australian, presents itself as the clarion of republicanism and champion of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Yet in the saturation coverage of the Australian Reconciliation Convention in 1997 and subsequent feature coverage of Reconciliation Commission celebrations and events, the newspaper marshalled its artists, cartoonists and page-editors to depict the public events with graphic metaphors of war, racial hatred, axe-blades dripping blood and a continent riven by tectonic schisms. There was a total absence of any recognition of this presentation as paradoxical, tragic or ironic. The Australian's imagery of racial strife is not atypical of other spheres of public discourse and its representation in the popular media (ABC, 1999; Kelly, 1999; Steketee, 1999).

The intentional and unintentional instances of the paradox to which I am drawing attention - an emotional display of contempt and hatred between rivals to represent 'Australia' - is characteristic of a desperate, perhaps dysfunctional, love of country. Nowhere is this more explicit than in Ausflag's perennial scorn for the nation's primary emblem, the national flag. Ausflag's advocacy revolves around the proposition that the nation's flag is an embarrassment and its retention is a symbol of humiliation (Kelly & Scruby, 2001). Contempt and scorn are meted out to those opposing its views. No less than in dysfunctional families, where powerful emotions threaten havoc and breakdown, Australian political and patriotic discourse exhibits a similar range of negative emotions.

The Emotional Terrain of Identity

The embarrassment, humiliation and shame expressed in Australian political rhetoric and media commentary are manifestations of what psychologists of emotion have long called the 'looking glass self.' Technically speaking they are expressions and displays of the self-regarding, negative, social emotions arising from inwardly experienced mental and physiological responses to stress, anxiety, exposure and perceived defect or failure. These markers of emotion are employed to indicate and give voice to 'moods,' the motions, in other words, of our inner feelings. Not thoughts, but feelings. Not facts or probabilities, but the inward feeling, the emotional sense of ourselves and of our presentation to others. (Elster, 1999, 244-50; Goffmann, 1956, 1959; Harré & Parrott, 1996, 39-56).

The ritualistic use of embarrassment, humiliation and shame in Australian public discourse draws attention not only to their apparent use as performatives of moral condemnation, but as rhetorical strategies to enable the speaker to declare his or her own guilt. It is degradation by association with the act or person being condemned. This psychologically charged use of the terms I designate as dissociative or contrastive identity.

The terms not only describe and express feelings as experienced, but also have the clear rhetorical purpose of engendering similar feelings in others. Listeners or readers are not simply informed of the speaker's feelings vicariously. Rather, they are enjoined to share empathetically, and thus experience, a shared actual shame and embarrassment. Thus one does not just oppose a particular politician or a piece of legislation. We do not merely dislike the person or the proposed policy. Rather, we proclaim ourselves to be embarrassed or shamed by that person or that policy. We are humiliated, suffering a loss of esteem and competence in our own eyes. We confess to a sense of guilt in the eyes of some larger world.

These strong emotions may be expressed outwardly to a presumed world audience (for example in the case of the treatment of refugees and immigrants); inwardly (in the case of 'shameful' events, policies and leaders); or generally (in relation to indigenous issues and racial reconciliation). Whether the issue is grave (in the case of refugees or indigenous issues) or utterly trivial (the selling and delivery of tickets to the Olympics), Australians are likely to react with extraordinary reports of severe embarrassment and shame.

A relatively minor but familiar example will illustrate the play of self-regarding emotions in political discourse.

Australian politicians are continually criticised for behaving in parliament like school yard bullies. They give every appearance of being spoiled, wilful, abusive, profane and undisciplined boys throwing calculated tantrums and generally behaving badly. The typical critique of parliamentary invective - the tone, attitude and moral concepts employed - is reminiscent of the nanny in the nursery or the stern schoolmarm attempting to bring the naughty boys back into line. Of course we now have naughty girls too. With Pauline Hanson, Bronwyn Bishop and Cheryl Kernot in mind, there is shame enough to mete out with a degree of equity.

These unhappy metaphors for the place and persons intended to represent the nation - occasionally someone will observe that, uncannily, perhaps they do - leads to a paradoxical conflation of what is naughty and nice. On the one hand, parliamentary bad behaviour is a linguistic archaism, reflecting a nostalgia harkening to old traditions of formal speech and highly stylised public oratory. For these mainly older, desk bound, committee-plagued men with large egos, parliamentary shouting matches enable them to glory in the ancient citizen-soldier's example of heroism and the feudal knight's courtly metaphors of military combat (now only partly transmuted into the cognates of sport). Is it entirely bad of them to enact, however artificial and unconvincing the performance, a ceremonial tribute to truth-telling, honour and dignity?

On the other hand, the criticism of parliamentary behaviour is an instance of the shaming devices at work. The schoolmarm and nanny subdue their charges not with the rod, and certainly not with sweet reason, knowing too well how powerless that is in the case. Rather they wield more profound weapons, whose inflicted bruises are psychological: shame and self-disgust meted out to the perpetrator. The opportunity for ridicule, self-righteousness and a familiarity with shame is also generously extended to all the other children. The vituperative rhetoric - 'Shame on you!' - apportions scorn to the bullies, but also assigns a general shame for the unruliness of the whole playground. The idea of using shame to ameliorate the moral level of a nation's public life is neither very happy nor convincing. It seems no more likely to work than the schoolmarm's scolding will create a classroom full of happy, well-adjusted, diligent pupils.

Nevertheless, the schoolmarm's righteous indignation resounds in the daily emotional pulse of Australian public discourse. An 'outrage' will dominate the media leads for a period of time, then subside in the wake of an apparently inexhaustible fund of new outrages. Generally it is a politician's cupidity, but it might be someone or something else that seems, on the basis of daily news reports, to have the national in a paroxysm of moral indignation. Interest or action on any other front is treated as gross negligence of the need for rectification of the current crisis, compounding the shame of it all.

Something like this moral indignation animated the reaction to John Howard's first, fateful reference in 1996 to his hoping to govern in a way that would make Australians feel 'relaxed and comfortable.' What smugness and temerity! What oafish complacency! What callous and philistine indifference! How dare he say such a thing?

It seems, upon reflection, that anyone feeling, thinking and speaking with such vehemence has to be profoundly secure - a devout patriot with a moral sense that is deeply identified with the welfare of the nation. Whereas by contrast, John Howard's platitude was experienced as disgusting: a betrayal of the needs, aspirations and desire for an arduous justice which can only be won by vigilance, ceaseless striving and sacrifice.

My point here is not about policy or electoral majorities. I simply draw attention to a process of strong national identity at work, confidently expressed. Yet it is highly unlikely that those who experienced such feelings, as well as those who were or wanted to be relaxed and comfortable, could define in words a generally agreed 'national identity' or agree on a symbolic means of representing it. Both silence and antagonism have an eloquence of intention that may be missed or mistaken unless one listens with special care.

So complex a phenomenon as national identity, therefore, may be expressed as much by conflictual, dissociative and contrastive emotional outbursts as by positive emotional and attitudinal consensus. Strong negative feelings about persons or things, indeed even strong negative ('abreactive') feelings about 'Australia,' may well demonstrate, a forteriori, the robust expression of identification.

The Formation of Identity

Many commentators have emphasised the difficulty of defining or identifying a 'true' Australian national identity (Crough & Wheelright, 1982; Hudson & Carter, 1993; Melleuish, 1998; Spillman, 1997; Whitlock & Carter, 1992; White, 1981; Willis, 1993.) Recent evidence of this identity crisis is superabundant: the 1999 referendum (proposing a preamble to the constitution and a republican 'head of state'), the perennial campaign to design and adopt a new national flag, and the fraught policy of 'reconciling' indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, European and non-European 'communities.' It has been often suggested that Australians are simply confronted with an intractable dilemma in this regard. This has led some to conclude that there is no such thing as an Australian identity, thus the task is pointless and doomed to failure (McQueen, 1998).

The virtual consensus of academic and journalistic despair (or postmodern ironic celebration) with regard to this conclusion invites a counter-proposition. 'Australia' is, despite the absence of a sharply defined national identity, an object of interest, feeling, passion and value. This proposition, certainly in the public domain of rhetorical evidence, is at least sufficiently intuitive to warrant the following hypothesis: If interests, passions and values associated with 'Australia' are contentious and inflammatory, the apparent contradiction of a missing identity implies not the absence but rather the presence of a powerful process of identification. Something so emotionally encompassing, historically bound and personally resonant as a national identity surely cannot be merely 'documented' by an explicit, singular, positive definition. Even less should it be expected to be easily and happily reduced to a static (much less statutory) form of words or a cleverly inventive logo. It is fatuous to imagine that an Australian identity does not exist because, even with the aid of Les Murray and several poll-conscious assistants, John Howard's literary powers proved unequal to the task of expressing it in a neat paragraph. The proposed preamble text was a 'statement of definition' of Australia sold as a 'best on offer' poll-driven product which conceived the nation as a collection of niche-market consumers. The failed referendum was not evidence of a weak or non-existent national identity but a rejection of the craven reduction of emotional recognisance to a mosaic of platitudes and brittle stereotypes.
Nevertheless, a 'reductive' expression of national identity is undoubtedly appealing for media-savvy governments. An 'official definition' and recognisable visual symbols are crucially important for purposes of accessible identification, even when this serves the paltry convenience of 'branding.' (One thinks of the 'mascot' symbols, slogans and colours of football clubs.) But there is a great difference between a lack of consensus about a reductive definition of national identity, which is only a form of words, and a psychologically complex powerfully felt, dynamically experienced 'identification.' Of course it is possible to be strongly attached to a form of words if those words identify and resonate directly with stronger, more deeply engaging 'forms' which animate, personify and bind the emotions.
The 'trouble' is that Australia is far from having a reductive, simply defined or positive identity. The nation's several meanings and rival symbols, its common and disparate identities, are hotly contentious. If this is a problem - and there is no reason to deny that in various ways it is - it would seem that the only reasonable path would be to reduce the heat, but certainly not try to put out the fire.
Emotional Control & National Self-Identity
A relatively recent but significant body of literature in the humanities and social sciences has given serious reconsideration to the emotions as important social phenomena. Edelman (1987, ix), for example, states that
the very experience of embarrassment can have a very dramatic effect on our day-to-day lives. It is systematically built into our social system, controlling and occasionally inhibiting our everyday behavious and in particular our social behaviour.

Spread across several traditional disciplines - mainly psychology, sociology, history and philosophy - this scholarship has in common a focus upon the emotions in relation to social structure and function, and as mechanisms of differentiation and control. Even scientific treatises on the neurophysiology and chemistry of emotions, taking their cue from Charles Darwin's foundational study of 1872, reflect an appreciation of the evolutionary, social and relational context and adaptive functions of emotional behaviour (Panksepp, 1998).

Typically cited in the recent literature are the landmark studies of the historical evolution of the 'affectivity of human behaviour' by Norbert Elias (1939/1978) and the socio-psychological studies of Erving Goffman (1956, 1959) which delineate the importance of embarrassment and shame in shaping and constraining the 'presentation of the self.' What is significant for present purposes is that the 'negative emotions' of embarrassment, shame, guilt and anger are specified as 'social emotions.' These emotions have functional and adaptive effects in prescribing and regulating behavioural norms and preserving cultural values supportive of honour, esteem, status and moral appraisal (Gross & Stone, 1964).

What is especially powerful about the negative emotions is their dual capacity of self-enforcement and social enforcement. We experience embarrassment for a real or imagined faux pas when our blunder is seen by an observer, whereas we may feel shame quite privately as we acknowledge our guilt and the consequence of lowered self-esteem.

In an area of inquiry that even specialists routinely describe as murky because of its mental and subjectively experienced nature, it is not surprising to find a number of controversies and divergent classifications and interpretations. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see scholars moving beyond obligatory 'critiques of rationalism' and 'Cartesian mind/body fallacies' to examine bodily self-awareness and self-control, intimate as well as public presentation, social norms and constraints, and the integration of emotional dispositions in relation to public markers of status, effectiveness and esteem.

This is not to say that perennial philosophical and theoretical issues have been solved or dismissed. Students of human emotion grapple with the question of what is universal and what is socially constructed in the range of emotional phenomena, what is epistemologically coherent or empirically verifiable when classifying or comparing emotional experiences, or measuring their intensity within or between individuals. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the emotions constitute an important phenomenological range of personal, relational and social experience.

It is perhaps not too bold a premise - a premise, indeed, that one may evaluate intuitively at a personal level - to say that the emotional self is the personal self. It is possible to imagine a creature entirely lacking, or incapable of, emotions. But that being would not be a person in the sense of possessing a 'self' - that is, having an identity communicable or reciprocal to other selves. It is interesting that psychologists link the inability to be emotionally self-aware - to 'have feelings' and to show emotion - directly to the inability to disclose ourselves to others. A therapist (Swiller, 1988) quoted such a patient: 'I don't naturally express my feelings. I don't know what to talk about; I have no strong feelings, either positive or negative.' This patient's 'emotional flatness' was diagnosed as alexithyma, a Greek term meaning 'lack of words for emotion,' a condition given its first description in 1972 (Sifneos, 1991).

It will be readily granted that participants in Australian public discourse who declare their embarrassment, shame and humiliation do not suffer from alexithyma. My present point, of course, is that their emotional identity is sound. The complementarity is that their social identification is strong and, in an important sense, secure. Even though the negative emotions signify a response to challenges to one's sense of security, worth or esteem, 'shame signals' are properly understood as reinforcing rather than subversive of the 'social bond.' That is to say, the emotional response is a 'reply' - a parry to the thrust made against one's personal safety and well-being. Hence, for example, the blush of embarrassment is an appeal, an act of obeisance, regret, apology and contrition. Thus it is a means of recovery in the wake of a faux pas. A manifest display of shame and guilt is a moral penance, and may be a public token of punishment, atonement and supplication for restoration and reintegration. This is why shame has been described (Scheff, 1994, 53) as the 'master emotion.'

Shame seems to arise from our need to feel the right degree of connectedness with others. Shame is the emotion that occurs when we feel too close or too far from others. When too close, we feel exposed or violated; when too far, we feel invisible or rejected …. [T]he basic shame contexts - transgressing morally, making a mistake in public, being ridiculed or rejected - all involve the potential for exclusion or incorporation or the anticipation of exclusion or incorporation. The basic pride contexts - achievement or success, admiration or love - all involve notice or acceptance.

All societies train their members to balance closeness and distance, the interests of self and others….

Just as [the emotion of] fear automatically signals a that to the safety of our physical self (our bodies), so shame automatically signals a threat to our social self, the person that we think we are and expect others to think that we are. We need to feel connected because the self is a social product, just as the body is a biological one. (Scheff, 1994, 40-41, 51; italics in original).

These 'affective' responses or 'abreactions' typically reflect an intensity of emotion expressive of having been soiled or damaged by something monstrous, repugnant, repulsive, disgusting. It takes us to the emotional terrain bordering deeply embedded cultural and psychological taboos. Rhetorical expressions of shame, humiliation and disgust have the effect of analogising how one is soiled by the 'dirt' of politics with the psychological imagery and repressive forces associated with a person's 'abject' or debilitating response in the presence of horror: of forbidden, repellent and degrading things at the borders of birth, sexual acts, other 'lower' bodily functions, and death (Kristeva, 1982). To acknowledge, much less to be identified with, the figure of taboo is to invite horror and disgust. To be identified with the taboo is to become it.
These extreme affective expressions are associated with other experiences and expressed by wider emotional responses such as 'pathos' - the negative, extreme, passionate emotions we have on occasions of anger, grief, sorrow or revulsion. But these are not 'pathological' human responses. Emotional experiences and expressions have highly beneficial and adaptive effects in domestic and social life. This seems to be true for our own species as well as others (Moussaieff & McCarthy, 1996).
There is a long tradition of philosophical 'opposition' to the power of emotions. Since Aristotle they have not been treated as an intellectual 'faculty,' and therefore the emotions have been regarded as subordinate and essentially antithetical to reason. Indeed this is one of the 'prejudices' that Aristotle holds against rhetoric, since the rhetor must necessarily 'lower' himself to persuasion by acting upon the audience's emotions. Powerful emotion, especially love, has been treated with disdain by political thinkers, who tend to ignore it, propose careful legal and social constraints upon its expression, or (with many poets) dismiss it as a debilitating 'sickness,' a particularly intractable, if common, form of insanity (Duggin, forthcoming).

Triumphant Opposition

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, words have an uncanny way of meaning exactly the opposite of what we mean to say. As noted above, Australians are commonly described as having a laid-back indifference to politics and a larrikin irreverence for politicians and other persons of rank. We are said to be casually vulgar of speech, ironic in the face of sentiment and cynical toward established conventions. Yet these stereotypical characteristics nevertheless exist side by side with passionate patriotism, prideful aspirations and a jealous regard for Australia's rightful place in the overall scheme of things. Godzone, not to put too fine a point on it.

The myth of politically apathetic Australians has been eroded for a quarter of a century by another myth, or at least a political talisman. Those who solemnly vowed to 'maintain the rage' appear to have done so with little sense of the ironic. This historic sound-byte from November 1975 has evolved into something like an article of faith - a staunch 'manly virtue' in the classical sense to 'stand up' in a heroic display of emotive outrage. To argue that something is wrong, illegal or unconventional is insufficient condemnation. Rather, emotional satisfaction is attainable only by a proclamation of 'outrage.' It would be a mistake to dismiss this cliché as merely the hyperbole of people overused to having an ABC microphone shoved in their faces. It is, I suggest, manifest evidence of passionate, confident, vigorous national identification. There is something in it of Shakespeare's account of the downfall of Julius Caesar, and the need for all parties, especially the dying Caesar, to recognise that there is a higher loyalty, consecrated by travesty, broken trust and the stain of blood publicly spilled that is of far greater worth than mere craven ambition or a lack of friends in the Senate.
Is there in all of this something noble about Gough Whitlam's refusal of exile from Canberra, and his life-long commemoration of November 25th? Who would deny that his 'rage' exceeds in purity and strength that of all others - the true aristocrat of outrage? It might be said that his is some ultimate form of patriotism even in this quarter-century and more of opposition, repudiation and probably - at some sublime level to which mere mortals may not be admitted - profound and consuming shame. Yet he has now survived, in the midst of friend and foe, as the great living spolia opima - to see his conqueror stand beside him as a companion at arms in the service of a new republic.

Paul Corcoran

George Crowder

School of Political and International Studies

Flinders University

VALUE PLURALISM AND THE VIRTUES OF LIBERALISM

Abstract

Does Berlinian value pluralism assist or impede the justification of liberalism? In contrast with recent commentators such as John Gray, I argue that a reasoned case for liberal universalism is not only compatible with value pluralism but can be derived from it. Pluralism implies that there are many different legitimate conceptions of the good, and it might seem that the liberal good is only one such among others. But pluralism also implies that reasoned choices among conflicting plural and incommensurable values in particular cases require a particularist form of practical reasoning which is supported by certain pluralist ‘virtues.’ These, in turn, overlap or are reinforced by the civic virtues distinctive of liberal forms of politics. The value-pluralist outlook thus endorses liberalism (the liberal virtues) as an ethical framework for the best lives under pluralism, hence it endorses a perfectionist liberal state in which such lives are actively promoted.

VALUE PLURALISM AND THE VIRTUES OF LIBERALISM

What is the relation between liberalism and value pluralism? This question is attracting a rapidly growing literature.¹ Its starting point is the political philosophy of the late Isaiah Berlin, who was both a pluralist and a liberal.² Berlin’s pluralism consists in the view that fundamental human values are irreducibly plural, potentially conflicting, and incommensurable. His liberalism is signalled by a defence of human rights and personal liberty as fundamental to any decent or humane form of politics. Berlin evidently thinks that value pluralism and liberalism are compatible. Moreover, in some places he seems to go further, arguing that pluralism justifies liberalism. In the seminal ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ he argues that if values are plural and incommensurable, then when such values come into conflict we cannot escape making radically hard, perhaps tragic, choices among them; in which case we must value the freedom to make such choices, a freedom best promoted by liberal political institutions (Berlin 1969, 168).

The claim that value pluralism and liberalism are compatible, even mutually supportive, has been increasingly challenged in recent years, most prominently by John Gray.³ For Gray, the political implications of Berlin’s pluralism are much more radical and much less sympathetic to liberalism than Berlin himself realised. If values really are plural and incommensurable, then none is inherently superior or inferior to any other, each makes its own distinctive claim. Rankings of such values in particular cases must then be the result not of universal reason but merely of subjective preferences or at best of local cultural inheritance. It seems to follow that liberalism itself represents no more than one such subjective or local ranking of values among others. The universal priority accorded by Berlin and other liberals to goods such as human rights and personal liberty cannot be defended in the rational and universal terms characteristic of the liberal tradition. At best, the truth of value pluralism is compatible with what Gray calls an ‘agonistic’ liberalism, clear-sighted in its modest claim to being only one solution among others to the problem of conflicting incommensurables, with no pretensions to universal superiority (Gray 1995b, Ch. 6).

In this paper I shall respond to Gray’s argument not by tackling it head-on, but by the more oblique strategy of setting up an alternative view of the political implications of value pluralism, showing how pluralism itself can generate a distinctive and powerful case for liberalism. How is this possible? It is hard to deny the weakness of many attempts to argue from pluralism to liberalism, Berlin’s included. From the fact of value plurality and incommensurability it does follow that people must make hard choices when plural and incommensurable values conflict, but it does not follow that we must value such choices or (therefore) the freedom with which to make them (Crowder 1994, 298). Pluralism does not imply a case for liberal freedom of choice in the direct way that Berlin seems to suppose.

However, even if the pluralist-liberal arguments offered by Berlin and others are unsuccessful as they stand, that does not show that there could be no successful argument of the kind.⁴ While such a case may be supported by several lines of argument, here I shall focus on one in particular. Pluralism implies that there are many different legitimate conceptions of the good, and it might seem that the liberal good is only one such among others. But pluralism also implies that reasoned choices among conflicting plural and incommensurable values in concrete cases require a particularist form of practical reasoning which is supported by certain pluralist ‘virtues.’ These, in turn, overlap or are reinforced by the civic virtues distinctive of liberal forms of politics. The value-pluralist outlook thus endorses liberalism (the liberal virtues) as an ethical framework for the best lives under pluralism, hence it endorses a perfectionist liberal state in which such lives are actively promoted. Moreover, this argument is universal in scope, since it rests on a view of moral experience that applies universally. Far from yielding the modestly agonistic liberalism favoured by Gray, there is good reason to believe that value pluralism implies a case for liberalism in a robustly universalist and perfectionist form.

1. Value pluralism and practical reasoning

I begin by sketching the main conceptual elements of value pluralism before drawing out its implications for moral and political thinking. ‘Value pluralism’ is a highly contentious idea, and I have space here to do no more than offer my own working interpretation.⁵ Nor shall I attempt to pursue in detail the difficult question of why, if at all, we should believe value pluralism to be true.⁶ My overall question will be, supposing pluralism to be true, what are its implications for liberalism? In this section I set out the idea of value pluralism in a degree of detail sufficient for my purposes.

I take the idea of value pluralism to consist of four main elements: universality, plurality, conflict, and incommensurability. First, pluralists claim that there are certain fundamental values that are universal in the sense that they contribute to the flourishing of any human life (Berlin 1992, 79-80; Kekes, 1993, 17-19, 38-44; Nussbaum 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 2000). These values range from the satisfaction of survival needs, such as the need for food and shelter, to benefits required for any human life to count as a good life, such as friendship and intimacy, to the social and political values that frame the potentialities and limits of individual lives, including values such as justice, liberty and equality. Such values may be understood or instantiated in different ways in different cultural or material circumstances. They are also objective in the sense that these things make any human life go better than it would otherwise, even if particular individuals or societies do not recognize this.

Secondly, the things that are valuable for human beings - including both universal and local values - are plural or several. They cannot be reduced to a single good or narrow range of goods, unless this is a trivial or empty category such as ‘happiness’ understood as meaning no more than ‘what is good for human beings.’ Furthermore, values are themselves internally complex, containing distinct components (also subject to material and cultural variation in particular instantiations) that add further to moral diversity.

Thirdly, these plural values may in particular cases come into conflict with one another. That is, they may be incompatible or mutually exclusive, such that one may be realizable only at the cost of sacrificing or curtailing another - as for example if ‘liberty’ may be increased only by sacrificing some degree of ‘equality’.

The fourth component of pluralism is the most distinctive. This is that values are not only potentially incompatible, they may also be incommensurable with one another. An ethical monist could allow that there are many different values and that these may clash, but add that such conflicts can be resolved by reference to a universal ranking procedure. Such a procedure would set up either a super-value to which all other goods are subordinate, or a common denominator in terms of which all goods could be quantified. Classical Benthamite utilitarians, for example, hold that all values are quantifiable, and therefore rankable in particular cases, in terms of their capacity to produce ‘pleasure.’ For the value pluralist, however, no basic value is inherently superior to any other, and none embraces or summarizes all other values. Rather, there are many different values, all bearing their own unique character and force, and none is always subordinate or reducible to any other. In contrast with classical utilitarians, for example, value pluralists will regard pleasure as merely one value among others, a value grounding claims of its own which are no more fundamental or authoritative than claims based on, say, liberty or justice. (More accurately, on the value-pluralist view there will be no single good of ‘pleasure’, but many different pleasures, each with its own character and ethical force.)

It follows from the notion of incommensurability in particular that value pluralism is opposed to value monism, the view that a single super-value or narrow range of such values overrides or serves as a common denominator for all others. Berlin observes that monism has been the dominant view of the nature of value, in one version or another, throughout the history of Western thought (Berlin 1992, 4-7). In one version the monist structure of morality is thought to be contained in the will of God or the fabric of the universe, yielding a natural law that human beings could discover by the use of their reason. Alternatively a monist system might be implied by the nature of human wants or preferences, as in the case of utilitarianism. What is common to all monist views is the idea that in some sense human morality forms a unified or harmonious whole. Its practical implication is that all moral conflicts can be solved, at least in principle, by reference to a single ranking of values, or method of commensurating them, that applies in all cases.

For pluralists like Berlin, value monism is false because moral conflict goes deeper than this. ‘The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others’ (Berlin 1969, 168). Monism need not deny moral conflict altogether. But according to value pluralists, monism (like relativism) underestimates the depth of moral conflict, regarding it as a superficial or temporary phenomenon, or as at least in principle surmountable by a clearer conception of the essential unity of moral values and principles. Value pluralism, on the other hand, takes actual ethical conflicts as an accurate sign that the moral fissures we regularly experience run all the way down.

Many people will find the pluralist picture of the nature of values persuasive and even attractive. It fits with salient aspects of modern moral experience: our sense of the multiplicity of values, and of the distinctness of those values which shows up, in particular, in those cases where we have to choose among them. Value pluralism seems to explain why we sometimes find that even a decision that is the best possible in the circumstances still leaves us with a sense of uncompensated loss or regret. As Bernard Williams puts it, ‘that there is nothing that one decently, honourably, adequately, can do in a certain situation seems a kind of truth as firmly independent of the will or inclination as any truth of morality seems’ (Williams 1979, 225). The idea of value pluralism, of goods as not merely plural and conflicting but incommensurable, answers to this experience.

But here we come to the central problem: if goods are plural and incommensurable, then how can we decide what to do in cases where they conflict? Some philosophers believe that if values are incommensurable then we can choose among them only in some non-rational way: by ‘plumping’ arbitrarily for one or another, by relying on preference or desire or intuition, or by employing some random decision-procedure like tossing a coin.⁷ The better view is that value pluralism need not exclude reasoned value judgement. True, there may be cases where conflict between plural values yields no resolution that is decisively more rational than the alternatives. The truth of value pluralism certainly does not exclude the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas; on the contrary it helps to explain how such dilemmas can occur. But to allow that there may be no uniquely right answer in some situations is not to deny the possibility of such an answer in others. The claim that pluralism excludes reasoned value judgement altogether depends on a false assumption, namely that rational choice requires commensurability (Richardson 1997, 89). Pluralists can account for the possibility of rational choice despite the incommensurability of values.

What account of practical reasoning can pluralists give that does not depend on commensurability of values? I believe they can give two such accounts. Both of these, moreover, generate arguments for broadly liberal forms of politics (pace Gray). The first is a universalist account, according to which certain ethical or normative principles are implicit in the notion of value pluralism itself. If we reflect on the four elements of pluralism, we find that they suggest a set of normative criteria applicable to judging moral and political arrangements. First, the claim that there are at least some universal goods implies that these ought to be respected universally: an embryonic account of human rights (Riley 2000). Secondly, to emphasize the plurality of legitimate human goods is to commend the pursuit of a diversity of goods and ways of life, the accommodation of which is a natural goal of liberalism. Thirdly (a point stressed by Berlin), the notions of plurality, conflict and incommensurability, taken together, suggest the unavoidability of significant value conflict in human affairs, and consequently of reasonable disagreement about how one should live. They point, that is, to a form of politics which accepts such conflict as permanent and tries to manage rather than transcend it. Again this reinforces a liberal politics of accommodation rather than, on the one hand, a conservative or strongly communitarian politics of cultural orthodoxy or, on the other hand, a radical politics of transformation and perfectibility (classical Marxism or anarchism, for example). The value-pluralist case intersects at this point with neutrality-based arguments for liberalism familiar from Rawls (1971, 1993), Dworkin (1977, 1985) and others.

I want, though, to focus here on a different route from pluralism to liberalism, one resting on a second account of practical reasoning under pluralism. This is a particularist account, according to which reasons to choose among plural values are generated by attention to the context of the choice. It takes as its starting point the observation that although value pluralism appears to make more abstract or general rankings of values problematic, there seems to be less difficulty in choosing rationally among plural values in particular cases or contexts. How does attention to context enable rational choice among plural values? The short answer is that specification of context reveals the values that are most important to us, hence the values that guide choice. Conversely, to get clearer about the values guiding my choice in a particular case involves my specifying the choice situation or context.

This picture of ethical judgement may be at odds with commensurating accounts like those of the utilitarians, but it is supported by a powerful and subtle tradition of moral philosophy, namely that of Aristotle. Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1992b, 1993, 1995) provides an especially useful interpretation of Aristotle for my purposes because she emphasizes the extent to which his account of practical reasoning is conditioned by an implicit notion of value pluralism.⁸ According to Nussbaum, Aristotle’s starting point is his rejection of the ‘scientific’ conception of moral knowledge found in Plato. For Plato, the Good is like any other object of knowledge in that it can be understood from a detached, ‘god’s-eye’ standpoint as a single entity with an essence, the implications of which can be formulated as law-like rules of universal application. Aristotle, by contrast, sees ethical thinking as phronesis, or ‘practical wisdom’, the making of ‘concrete situational judgments of a more informal and intuitive kind’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 66). Moreover, Aristotle sees the good not as a seamless unity but as irreducibly plural. Its component parts each raise distinct considerations among which there is no common denominator - goods are plural and incommensurable. Choices among such goods must therefore be qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘choice among alternatives will involve weighing these distinct natures as distinct items, and choosing the one that gets chosen for the sake of what it itself is’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 59).

Such choices will be strongly particularist, primarily informed by the demands of a situation rather than being merely one application of a general rule. For Aristotle, practical wisdom is concerned with ‘ultimate particulars’, concrete situations that cannot be subsumed within universal principles ‘but must be grasped with insight through experience’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 68). This point is connected with incommensurability, since attention to the particularity of goods leads to attention to the particularity of cases. Rules may still play an important role, but only as rules of thumb or convenient summaries of experience, useful for those who lack experience themselves or for situations where there is insufficient time for proper reflection. Rules should not be normative for experience. It follows that the question of how one should choose among conflicting plural values cannot be given a wholly general or rule-based answer. The nearest approach to a general rule on this account is: ‘choose as the person of practical wisdom would choose.’

Nussbaum denies, however, that Aristotle’s particularist ethic is empty. The Aristotelian agent cannot rely wholly on antecedently formulated rules, but that does not mean that anything goes. Nussbaum draws an analogy between Aristotelian practical judgement and improvisation in the theatre or in music. The improvisor does not merely follow a prepared script or score, but neither is her performance random or arbitrary: she must attend and respond to the evolving situation and to other performers (Nussbaum 1992b, 94). Attention and responsiveness to the concrete context might thus be advanced as a general guideline, even a rule, on the Aristotelian view. Furthermore, attention to context will include attention to the agent’s own background values and concerns. ‘The perceiver brings to the new situation a history of general conceptions and commitments, and a host of past obligations and affiliations (some general, some particular), all of which contribute to and help to constitute her evolving conception of good living’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 94). It is not that the Aristotelian account leaves us without guidance in choosing among plural values. Rather, that guidance is supplied not by abstract rules alone, but by a combination of rules, attention to context, and (as part of context) reflection on one’s background values and concerns, in particular one’s conception of the good life.⁹

2. Pluralist virtues

Particularist ethical reasoning requires, as Aristotelians are well aware, certain skills or excellences or ‘virtues’. Taking Nussbaum’s version of Aristotle as my model, I list four of these as follows: generosity, realism, attentiveness, and flexibility.

In order to reason successfully under value pluralism we must first have an appreciation of something of the great range of values that are part of human experience, and so potentially available to be pursued. This appreciation may be termed (following Walzer 1995) generosity. A person who can conceive of no more than a narrow range of values, or who has only a vague notion of all but a few limited ends, cannot cope well with the demands of rational choice under value pluralism. Such a person would be unaware of, or would ignore, genuinely valuable options (Macedo 1990, 219).

The person of practical wisdom under pluralism consequently needs to have an awareness of the diversity and incommensurability of universal values, and of the forms taken by those values in different ways of life. This awareness includes, first, a basic notion of the generic human goods, that is, of those goods that contribute to any form of human flourishing. Secondly, the pluralist chooser must also appreciate that the values from which one must choose are not only multiple but radically distinct from one another - that is, incommensurable. Pluralist choosers must therefore have a capacity to appreciate each value in its own right and for its own sake. Thirdly, some understanding would be needed of the multiplicity not only of human goods but also of legitimate ways of life in which those goods are instantiated. Value pluralism does not imply a duty to endorse existing ways of life to the same extent as it implies respect for generic human values. The general principles which I mentioned earlier as derivable from value pluralism itself (universality, incommensurability, and diversity) all place limits on what can count as a legitimate form of life from a pluralist point of view. But within those limits an appreciation of the range of legitimate forms taken by human life must be part of the pluralist outlook, if only as a consequence of the necessary grasp of the plurality of goods.

It follows that the pluralist person of practical wisdom will need those qualities or dispositions of mind that enable him or her to achieve the necessary appreciation of the diversity of values and ways of life. These qualities will include knowledge, experience, and what may be called ‘moral imagination’, or the ability to conceive of goods or forms of life as valuable even when one does not pursue them oneself. Pluralist persons of practical wisdom must therefore be generous in the sense that they are capable of envisaging a range of values and ways of life as genuinely good, and as comprising a number of irreducibly distinct goods, even though these are not their own values or ways of life.

A second set of virtuous dispositions necessary for good choice under pluralism can be labelled the virtues of realism. When incommensurable values come into conflict, one of the senses in which choices among them are ‘hard’ is that there can be no complete compensation for whatever value or combination of values is chosen against. Where such values are very important, pluralist choices can be genuinely tragic; even in less momentous cases inescapable choices among competing plural values can be cause for regret despite one’s best efforts. The clear-headed pluralist is thus, as Nussbaum observes, faced with the experience of ‘vulnerability to loss’: in having to choose among important plural values, we cannot escape forgoing some genuine good. ‘Aristotelianism fosters attention to the ways in which the world can impede our efforts to act well; it indicates that caring about many things will open us to the risk of these terrible situations’ (1992b, 67, 64).

The quality of mind required for this aspect of the pluralist outlook is honesty or even courage. Those who genuinely adopt a pluralist point of view cannot fool themselves that conflicts of this kind can be resolved without ultimate, perhaps tragic, cost. Rather, they must face the depth and permanence (as well as the pervasiveness) of value conflict and the absolute nature of the losses that result from it. They are ‘realists’, in contrast with ‘utopians’ who deal in final solutions and complete compensations.

Thirdly, rational choice under value pluralism requires attentiveness. We have seen that particular decisions in cases of conflict among incommensurables must be determined by a particularist approach, one in which close attention is paid to the particulars of the concrete situation. It is only by specifying the precise facts and values that constitute the context for choice that the pluralist chooser can specify what is most important to him or her in the situation. Only then can the chooser arrive at reasons to subject the contending considerations to some kind of ranking.

The idea of particularist attentiveness can be seen to have different aspects or levels, three of which can be distinguished as follows. First, attention must be paid to the distinctive character of the different goods involved in a choice situation. ‘The Aristotelian agent scrutinizes each valuable alternative, seeking out its distinct nature’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 63). Secondly, the agent must attend to the distinctive particularity of the situation, which is constituted partly by the values at stake but also by the relevant facts. For the pluralist or Aristotelian chooser, ‘the subtleties of a complex ethical situation must be seized in a confrontation with the situation itself’ (Nussbaum 1992b, 69). Thirdly, again closely connected with the first two aspects, we must attend to the individual persons involved in the situation, to their claims and needs. As Nussbaum reminds us, we should beware of losing sight of the human reality behind conflicts of values, and of allowing ‘numbers and dots’ to take the place of real men and women (1992b, 101).

The final virtue required for pluralist practical reasoning is flexibility. Having attended to the particulars of the concrete situation in which she finds herself, the pluralist chooser must be able to respond flexibly. That is, she must not insist on trying to resolve the situation by rigid application of a general rule, but rather be prepared to reach a balance between general rule and particular judgement tailored to the circumstances. Illustrating the idea of ethical flexibility, Nussbaum recounts Aristotle’s metaphor of the ‘Lesbian Rule.’ The person who persists in choosing according to a rigidly predetermined standard is like an architect who tries to apply a straight ruler to a fluted column. The architect who knows his business will use the Lesbian Rule, a flexible ruler that ‘bends to the shape of the stone and is not fixed.’ Nussbaum concludes that ‘good deliberation’, like the Lesbian Rule, accommodates itself to to the shape that it finds, responsively and with respect for complexity’ (1992b, 70).

Again, this does not mean that rules are irrelevant and that pluralist choices must be arbitrary or ad hoc. Even in the strongly particularist account of practical reasoning presented by Nussbaum, general rules have an important role to play as useful summaries of decision-making experience. But rules will not by themselves determine particular decisions. Rather, such decisions will require a process of ‘interplay’ or ‘conversation’ between general rules and concrete particulars in which each may be modified by the other (Nussbaum 1992b, 94-95). Especially important here is the ‘evolving picture of the good or complete human life’ that the agent brings to the situation. ‘She views the good particular judgement as a further articulation of this evolving conception of the human good - or as a revision of it, if it should seem defective. Nothing is unrevisable’ (1992b, 95).

The habit or cast of mind necessary for thinking and choosing in this way is that of flexibility. The pluralist chooser must be prepared to balance background commitments, including those summarized in the form of general principles or a conception of the good life, against considerations brought forward by attention to the concrete situation. Achieving such a balance means being open to reconsidering and revising either principles or particular judgments. The pluralist chooser must be flexible enough to consider changes in either direction.

Having shown how pluralist practical reasoning requires certain virtues, I shall now argue that those virtues flourish best under a broadly liberal form of politics. Liberalism promotes values and attitudes, indeed virtues, that in various ways complement or support the pluralist virtues identified in the previous section. I shall proceed by reviewing each of the pluralist virtues and articulating its connections with attitudes distinctively promoted by liberalism.

First, the generosity required by the pluralist outlook is virtually identical with the kind of broad-mindedness encouraged by liberalism at its best. We have seen that to be genuinely conscious of the plurality of values is to acknowledge as legitimate and valuable something of the range of distinct (incommensurable) goods and ways of life pursued not only by oneself but also by others. The same sort of generosity is a virtue of liberalism. It is true, as Galston points out, that liberals can sometimes be ‘decidedly ungenerous when faced with traditional ways of life they regard as stultifying and benighted’ (1999, 777). But at its best liberalism is guided in part by its foundational commitment to the peaceful accommodation of multiple forms of life. The attitude encouraged by this commitment is one ‘receptive to a wide although not unlimited range of value-based claims. It will be generous to ways of life that reflect unusual but not indefensible choices among, or orderings of, basic values’ (1999, 777). A similar point is made by Macedo: ‘the character that flourishes in a liberal, pluralistic social milieu, will have broad sympathies’ (1990, 267). This is because a liberal politics is one which balances the acceptance of disagreement with the acknowledgement of human commonalities. Liberals will acknowledge that although others may pursue different substantial goods and ways of life from their own, those others are still, like themselves, moral agents worthy of respect and therefore that their choices are also worthy of respect, at least prima facie. ‘As we come to realize that those who engage in lives different from our own are nevertheless like us in important ways, we may come to sympathize not only with these persons but also with their projects and commitments’ (Macedo 1990, 267). Liberal respect for persons leads at least to toleration of other cultures, and perhaps to a more positive celebration of cultural diversity.

Liberal broad-mindedness will not be unlimited, since it cannot embrace those choices and ways of life that are themselves hostile to toleration and respect for persons. But on the score of broadness of mind the liberal outlook is likely to be superior to the viable alternatives. This connects with the general pluralist principle of diversity. From the point of view of pluralist diversity, liberalism is superior to those conservative or strongly communitarian approaches that sanction the political enforcement of a single local tradition. The politics of postmodernism or ‘difference’ may be in a sense even more broad-minded than liberalism, but that is only because it lacks the limits that would make it coherent.¹⁰

The second virtue required for pluralist reasoning, realism, overlaps and is supported by the liberal virtue of moderation. Pluralists accept that incommensurable values will sometimes come into conflict and that such conflict will result in uncompensated, perhaps tragic, losses. Consequently, pluralists are realists in the sense that they accept that the harmonious realization of all genuine values is not to be achieved in human life, either the life of an individual person or a society. Liberals, similarly, accept the inevitability of conflict, loss, and personal and social imperfection – the theme emphasized by Berlin. The good political system, for liberals, is one that accommodates and manages conflict rather than trying to transcend it. It follows that the liberal outlook is moderate in two senses. First, liberalism is not excessively demanding or ambitious; it does not expect moral or social perfection. Secondly, those principles to which liberals are committed are themselves held and pursued subject to revision rather than with single-minded fanaticism.

In these senses moderation is a virtue for both citizens and leaders in a liberal society, and for both citizens and leaders moderation is underscored by pluralist realism. In his virtues-based defence of liberalism, Galston lists several ‘virtues of citizenship’, among which is the requirement that liberal citizens ‘be moderate in their demands and self-disciplined enough to accept painful measures when they are necessary’ (1991, 224-5). According to Galston, this virtue is especially important in counteracting a besetting vice of popular governments, namely their ‘propensity to gratify short-term desires at the expense of long-term interests and the inability to act on unpleasant truths about what must be done’ (1991, 224). The insistence that ‘unpleasant tuths’ about the costs of our decisions be faced honestly is precisely the message of pluralist realism. Moderation in the demands of liberal citizens must be complemented by moderation in the conduct of their leaders: the citizenry must not ask for too much, but the leadership must not promise too much. In addition, Galston argues that liberal leaders must exhibit virtues of patience in accepting the limitations of a diverse society, and integrity in resisting the temptation to curry favour ‘by pandering to immoderate public demands. Against desire liberal leaders must counterpoise restraints; against the fantasy of the free lunch they must insist on the reality of the hard choice...’ (1991, 226). Here again, in the emphasis on ‘the reality of the hard choice’, liberal moderation and pluralist realism overlap.

Another dimension of overlap between pluralist realism and liberal moderation is the provisional nature of liberal commitment. The experience of value conflict and loss that results from value pluralism may be ‘internalized’ (to borrow a term from Macedo 1990, 238) at either of two levels. First, it may be internalized by a society as a whole, with the effect already discussed, namely moderation in the sense of realistic social and political expectations. Secondly, value conflict and loss may be internalized by individual persons. The effect of this is also to encourage moderation, this time in the sense of moderating or qualifying the nature of one’s commitments. If pluralism means that the particular way a person ranks goods is only one legitimate way among others, then to appreciate that is to see that one’s preferred ranking might have been otherwise, and may yet be open to revision. To see this is to be discouraged from regarding one’s commitments as incontestable absolutes, and so to make it less likely that those commitments will be held fanatically, to the detriment of every other concern and to the concerns of others. Pluralist realism will thus lead again to liberal moderation. Conversely, living in a liberal society characterized by diversity and toleration encourages the thought that such features are justified by an underlying value pluralism: liberal moderation in this sense reinforces pluralist realism.

We come now to the third of the central virtues implied by pluralist practical reasoning, namely attentiveness. Due regard to value pluralism means that reasoned choices among conflicting plural values cannot be wholly determined by general rules, since these imply abstract rankings of values that pluralism renders questionable. Pluralist practical reasoning must be particularist, or attentive to the particularity of the case in hand. I distinguished three aspects of this attentiveness, namely attention to the particularity of values, of situations, and of persons.

Is pluralist attentiveness promoted by liberalism? At first sight it may seem that attention to particularity is not one of liberalism’s strong points. Liberal thought places a strong emphasis on the acceptance of general rules, derived by abstraction from particular cases and uniformly applicable across a range of such cases. One thinks immediately of principles such as the rule of law and universal rights. But while liberal commitments to rules and to generality cannot be denied, that does not mean that liberalism neglects the virtue of attentiveness altogether. In fact liberalism promotes attentiveness in all three of the respects listed earlier.

First, attention to the range and distinctiveness of values is already implied by the ‘generosity’ or broad-mindedness common to both pluralism and liberalism. Secondly, attention to the particularity of concrete situations is present in the liberal outlook in two ways. To begin with, general rules, whether liberal or non-liberal, are usually themselves the product of reflection on concrete situations. As Nussbaum points out, Aristotelian particularism can accept a universal rule as authoritative ‘insofar as it is a summary of wise decisions’ (1992b, 69). Many liberal principles are defensible in just this way. For example, the notion of human rights can be defended as encapsulating many particular judgments made in the past to the effect that in concrete situations more good comes of allowing people certain claims and liberties than of witholding these (Lukes 1993). This aspect of rules is not, of course, peculiar to liberal rules. More distinctive of liberalism is the way rules are applied in particular situations – the second sense in which the liberal outlook implies attention to concrete situations - but this involves the notion of personal autonomy, which I shall come to in a moment.

The third aspect of pluralist attentiveness was attention to the individual persons affected by a decision. In this respect liberal attentiveness is perhaps at its strongest, since the idea that individual persons matter, and matter equally, is the most fundamental of all liberal commitments. Among pluralist liberals, the ideal of respect for persons is seen, for example, in Berlin’s attack on those versions of positive liberty that make it possible for leaders ‘to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their "real" selves’ (1969, 133). Nussbaum’s warning against treating individual human beings as if they were ‘numbers and dots’ is another powerful expression of an attitude that is both pluralist and liberal (1992b, 101). Note also the link between liberal attention to persons and pluralist realism. What motivates attention of this kind is the ‘vulnerability to loss’ that pluralism implies, in this case the sense that each human being is something both valuable and irreplaceable.

It might be objected that what is being respected here is not so much the particularity of the persons concerned as the universal attributes of which persons are merely bearers. But this objection has more force against some versions of liberalism rather than others. The Kantian notion of respect for persons, it is true, takes as the focus of respect the capacity for moral autonomy that is possessed by all normal mature adult human beings equally. For Mill, on the other hand, liberty is to be defended in part as instrumental for ‘individuality’, the sense that as well as possessing a common humanity each individual human being is unique (1974, Ch. 3). In this notion of the human person as valuable in a way that is irreplaceable because incommensurable with the value of any other human being, the liberal view once more coincides with the pluralist.

So far I have argued that the pluralist virtues of generosity, realism and attentiveness are promoted by liberalism through the corresponding liberal virtues or attributes of broadmindedness, moderation and respect for persons. The question arises whether forms of politics other than liberalism may have the same effect. I believe that the points already made are sufficient to show that the claims of liberalism in this regard are superior to those of any rivals. This is true, for example, of a comparison between liberalism and conservatism (Kekes 1993, 1997, 1998). Conservatism may run liberalism close on the score of realism and moderation, but on the remaining criteria liberalism clearly has the stronger claim. The conservative stress on local tradition makes it less generous or broad-minded towards different goods and ways of life, and perhaps less attentive to the particularities of different situations.

If any doubt remains, however, liberalism decisively shows its advantages over its rivals in relation to the fourth of the pluralist virtues, namely flexibility. If pluralism requires that we attend to the particularities of concrete situations rather than insisting always on the application of general rules, whether universal or local, then we need to be able to respond flexibly to those situations. Corresponding to pluralist flexibility is the liberal celebration of personal autonomy. Since autonomy is the most distinctive of liberal virtues, a link between autonomy and flexibility will be the strongest of links between pluralism and liberalism.

The idea of personal autonomy is that of making one’s own life, judging and acting for reasons that one has not merely received uncritically from others, but rather endorsed through a process of critical reflection (Mill 1974, Raz 1986, Benn 1988). For liberals, autonomy is a virtue, perhaps the paramount virtue, the principal distinguishing mark of a developed personality. As Mill puts it, ‘it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way’ (Mill 1974, 122). To be autonomous contrasts with being coerced or manipulated. It also contrasts with the uncoerced and unmanipulated acceptance of what Mill calls ‘the despotism of custom’, the unquestioning reception of prescriptive tradition as one’s ethical standard (1974, 136). To be autonomous is to act on standards that are ‘one’s own’ in a strong sense. It is to deny that value conflicts can be resolved simply by the mechanical application of traditional or other rules. Thus far autonomy, in its opposition to unquestioning adherence to custom, is immediately on the side of flexibility against rigidity in ethics.¹¹

The link between the liberal idea of personal autonomy and the pluralist requirement of flexibility in practical reasoning turns on the demanding nature of rational choice under pluralism. To adopt the pluralist outlook is to recognize that in a particular situation one may have to choose among several incommensurable goods. Such choices are hard, in part because they cannot be determined by the universal application of simple rules such as those proposed by utilitarians and other monists. Pluralist choosers must therefore be flexible in their practical reasoning, attending and responding to the particulars of the situation. Rules may be useful as rough summaries of wise decision making in past experience, but they cannot be regarded as decisive. Still less can pluralists allow their unexamined desires to decide value conflicts for them, since that would amount to treating the satisfaction of de facto preferences as commensurating all other values - another essentially monistic approach. Rather, pluralist choosers are obliged to adopt a critically reflective attitude towards both their own desires and those rules and traditions that come to them from their social milieu. They are obliged, that is, to be autonomous.

4. Pluralist liberalism

To summarize, I have so far argued the following. Practical reasoning under value pluralism involves the exercise of certain ‘pluralist virtues’, namely generosity, realism, attentiveness, and flexibility. These pluralist virtues are promoted by liberalism through the cognate or overlapping liberal virtues of broad-mindedness, moderation, respect for persons, and personal autonomy. Liberalism is superior to rival forms of politics in its support for the pluralist virtues, especially through the link between pluralist flexibility and the key liberal commitment to autonomy. There is an especially strong link of mutual support between pluralism and liberal autonomy because of the distinctively demanding nature of pluralist choice.

What kind of liberalism does this argument commend? To focus on two major fault-lines in contemporary liberal thought, will it be neutrality-based or perfectionist, and will it be universalist or particularist? First, pluralist liberalism will, I believe, be ‘perfectionist’ (following Rawls’s definition: 1971, 25, 325-332) rather than neutralist. That is, the pluralist liberal state may legitimately promote liberal values as part of the best life for all of its citizens, rather than attempting to remain neutral on questions of the good. It is true that the universalist arguments I outlined briefly – those based on the elements of value pluralism itself – are broadly accommodationist in character, advocating liberalism as a framework for managing diversity and conflict among rival goods and ways of life. But the particularist argument that has been my main concern goes beyond this by deepening the sense in which, on the pluralist view, liberalism should enter into people’s lives. The effect of the virtues argument is that liberalism is presented as not merely a container for rival conceptions of the good, but in addition as involving values which ought to be part of those conceptions of the good. To live well under pluralism requires choosing well (i.e. for good reason) when plural values conflict, which in turn requires the practice of liberal virtues, including personal autonomy. In short, the best lives under pluralism are liberal lives. This is not to say that under pluralism there is only one way to live. Rather, there are many different legitimate conceptions of the good on the pluralist view, but the best of these have liberal components, namely the virtues required for pluralist choice. In other words, liberalism provides not only a political framework for a pluralist society, but also an ethical framework for the best ways of life under pluralism. The best lives under pluralism are liberal lives, but these come in many varieties.

Given that, on this argument, liberalism is justified not merely as a neutral framework for containing rival conceptions of the good, but as itself part of the best form of life under pluralism, the role of the state should reflect this. A liberal state, on this view, has a right, even a duty, to promote a certain (liberal) range of conceptions of the good: it will be a ‘perfectionist’ state in Rawls’s terminology. However, it does not follow that the best way of fulfilling that right or duty will be heavy-handed enforcement. That the massive use of force can be both a cruel and unproductive way of advancing a vision of the good is itself an insight of pluralism: as Berlin insisted, the doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’ fits more comfortably with the monist view that certain ends can override all others absolutely. Pluralist liberal perfectionism, in other words, need not be identified with coercion and imperialism, indeed it ought not to be so. More consistently with the principles of liberalism, the liberal good is better pursued through argument, education and lived examples of actual liberal lives. Pluralist liberalism, then, although tending towards the more militant end of the liberal spectrum, should not be thought of as ruthless and aggressive. It will nevertheless be staunch in defence of liberal values in contrast with the claims of anti-liberal or non-liberal ways of life. This will be a form of liberalism that dares speak its name.

Secondly, value pluralism will be universalist rather than particularist. This may seem surprising given my emphasis on particularist practical reasoning under pluralism, but the point is that this kind of reasoning, together with its concomitant virtues, is required universally because it answers to a universal feature of ethical experience. Value pluralism is an account of the objective nature of values and the relations among them: its central thesis is that some human values are plural and incommensurable independently of the contingent beliefs of particular individuals and groups. If that is true, it follows that conflicts among such values are themselves objective phenomena – as observed by Bernard Williams, quoted earlier (1979, 225). People may be faced with pluralist choices whether or not they recognize them as such. The concept of value pluralism may be modern, but the experience it describes is as old as ethical experience: the Greeks’ awareness of dramatic tragedy is strong evidence of this (Nussbaum 1992b; cp. Larmore 1996). If so, then the virtues necessary to make such choices well also apply regardless of whether those concerned are clear-headed pluralists. Pluralist choices may arise under any way of life, and so the qualities of mind requisite to coping well with those choices will always be desirable, even if not recognized as desirable, and even if not always realizable in practice. So far as the pluralist virtues overlap liberal virtues, the latter must, on the pluralist view, be part of the best life for any human being. I do not wish to say that a life that lacks the pluralist or liberal virtues, or that does not acknowledge the plurality and incommensurability of values, cannot be a good life in some, perhaps many, respects. There are good lives other than liberal and self-consciously pluralist lives, and good lives lived in ignorance of significant truths. If value pluralism is true, however, such lives will not be among the best possible.

Further questions remain, of course, about the kind of liberalism that fits best with the value-pluralist outlook. For example, will pluralist liberalism take a classical or egalitarian form, and will it be monocultural or multicultural? Briefly, I believe that pluralist liberalism will be broadly ‘egalitarian’ or redistributive rather than ‘classical’ or laissez-faire in form, since the pluralist ideals of value diversity and personal autonomy, in particular, are better served by redistribution than by a regime in which the goods of the market dominate all others (Walzer, 1983, Ch. 4; Bellamy 2000, 190-191). It also seems to me that a pluralist polity will be moderately multicultural, that is, that it will offer official recognition and special rights to certain disadvantaged minority cultures, subject to the protection of civil liberties for all citizens. This is in line with the demands both of pluralist diversity (of ways of life as well as goods) and of the pluralist-liberal virtues. Personal autonomy, in particular, requires an adequate cultural basis (Kymlicka, 1989, 1995; Raz, 1986, 1995). But full discussion of these issues must wait for another time.

Notes

1. Recent publications include: Bellamy, 1999, 2000; Crowder, 1998, 1999, forthcoming; Galston, 1999a, 1999b; Gray, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Dzur, 1998; Kenny, 2000; Newey, 1998, Riley 2000.

2. See in particular Berlin 1969, 1980, 1981, 1992, 1996, 1997, 2000. For a comprehensive and continually updated bibliography of writing by and about Berlin, see The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, a website maintained by Berlin’s editor, Henry Hardy: <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/.>

3. See Gray, 1989, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 2000a, 2000b.

4. I depart here from my own earlier (1994) view that (1) past attempts to argue from value pluralism to liberalism have been unsuccessful, and (2) no such attempt is likely to succeed. I still maintain that (1) is true, but now believe that (2) was too precipitant.

5. My understanding of value pluralism is influenced by the following sources in particular: Berlin, as above, note 2; Chang, 1997; Galston, 1999a, 1999b, Gray, as above, note 3; Kekes, 1993, 1997, 1998; Lukes 1991; Nagel 1991; Nussbaum, 1986, 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 2000; Raz, 1986, 1995; Richardson, 1997; Stocker, 1990; Williams, 1980.

6. For recent discussions of this question, see MacKenzie, 1999; Newey, 1998.

7. Berlin, for example, sometimes seems to believe this, as when he refers to our being ‘faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute’, and to our ‘irrational and disordered lives’ (Berlin 1969, 168-169). Elsewhere, however, he repudiates that view, insisting that we do in fact make rational choices among plural values all the time, at any rate in particular cases (Berlin and Williams 1994). Gray’s position on this issue is similarly ambiguous: compare 1995b, 70 with 1995a, 154.

8. This value-pluralist reading of Aristotle is contested by Larmore 1996, Ch. 7. But even if Nussbaum’s reading is rejected as an accurate interpretation of Aristotle, it may still stand as a persuasive account of practical reasoning under pluralism.

9. For similarly particularist accounts of rational choice under pluralism, see Chang 1997; Kekes 1993, Ch. 5; Richardson 1997.

10. See Crowder forthcoming, where I argue that the kind of moral diversity that is desirable from a value-pluralist point of view involves coherence as well as sheer multiplicity, since multiple goods and ways of life may otherwise conflict.

11. This is not to say that custom or culture has no role to play in the autonomous life, merely that that role must be subject to critical assessment by the autonomous person: Caney 1992; Kymlicka 1989, 1995; Raz 1986, 1995.

References

Bellamy, R. 1999. Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a politics of compromise. London and New York: Routledge.

Bellamy, R. 2000. ‘Liberalism and the Challenge of Pluralism’, in Rethinking Liberalism. London and New York: Pinter.

Benn, S. I. 1988. A Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berlin, I. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, I. 1980. Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. H. Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, I. 1981. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. H. Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, I. 1992. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. H. Hardy. New York: Vintage.

Berlin, I. 1996. The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. H. Hardy. London: Chatto & Windus.

Berlin, I. 1997. The Proper Study of Mankind: an Anthology of Essays, ed. H. Hardy and R. Hausheer. London: Chatto & Windus.

Berlin, I. 2000. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. H. Hardy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University P