Jamesian Pluralism and Moral Conflict

Henry Jackman Jamesian Pluralism and Moral Conflict While most pragmatists view themselves as pluralists of one sort or another, Talisse and Aikin (hereafter "T&A") argue that the two views are, in fact, "not compatible" (T&A, p. 2). However, while their charge may be true of the types of pluralism that they consider, these pluralisms all presuppose a type of realism about value that the pragmatic pluralist need not accept. In what follows, I'll argue that the 'non-realist' account of value that one finds in James underwrites a type of pluralism that is both substantial and compatible with pragmatism. When T&A argue for the incompatibility of pragmatism and pluralism, they have in mind mainly what they call "deep pluralism" which offers "an ontological account of the persistence of moral dispute" (p. 102), and as they put it: According to the ontological account, the moral facts are themselves in conflict; consequendy there is a number of true moral propositions that nonetheless do not form a consistent set. Hence even a cognitively perfect being ... must confront moral conflict. Given this, to expect moral consensus among mere humans is unreasonable. (P- 102) Deep pluralism ... is generally the prescriptive outcome of a strong ontological account of value conflict. Given that conflict is interminable and built into the very fabric of moral reality, one must adopt a kind of agonistic attitude toward all values, where there could be no moral reason to adopt any view over another. That is, the deep pluralist lives in a world where conflicts among goods are arational and consequendy often violent, and the only prescription could be to secure or protect one's own values, (p. 103) T&A argue that pragmatists can't be deep pluralists of this sort because such deep pluralism treats each conflicting viewpoint as "static and perfect" and thus not subject to criticism or correction (T&A, p. 109). Deep pluralism is thus in conflict with pragmatist commitments to falibilism and the importance of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1 124 Henry Jackman inquiry. T&A consider another type of pluralism with which pragmatism is compatible, namely, the 'shallow' pluralism that takes disagreement over values to have an epistemic rather than ontological explanation. There may be facts of the matter relating to moral disagreements, but neither party in moral dispute might be subject to criticism because the questions are so complex that human beings might not ever be capable of settling them. T&A, however, consider such a view to be "pluralism in name only", since the kind of pluralism it endorses (which includes a monism about the moral facts) could be accepted by writers such as Plato and Descartes, neither of whom should count as pluralists (p. 111). Consequently, if shallow pluralism is the only kind of pluralism that the pragmatist can endorse, then pragmatists are not 'really' pluralists at all. However the dilemma offered between deep and shallow pluralism1 is one that the pragmatist need not accept. Indeed, given pragmatism's tendency to tie together epistemic and ontological questions, it should not be surprising that a pragmatist might seek a way of understanding the persistence of moral disagreement that is neither purely epistemic nor purely ontological. Indeed, James's pluralism is not only compatible with his pragmatism, but also instructively different from the varieties of pluralism that T&A consider. In what follows, I'll outline what I take to be some of the main features of a Jamesian story about value,2 and while I won't defend the view in any detail, I hope to show how a Jamesian approach to moral disagreement is different from the more traditional epistemic or ontological explanation mentioned above. First of all, for James, values are produced by our practice of valuing, and this 'constructivist' assumption behind James' pluralism, contrasts sharply with both the "unabashed moral realism" of the deep pluralist (p. 107) and the implicit moral realism of the shallow pluralist. In spite of this comparative lack of realism about value, James still insists that our values purport to be "objective". While values are constructed out of our valuations, they are meant to be more than simply expressions of our preferences. Value judgments aspire to be truth-apt, and because of...