Abstract

Over the last ten years a distinct conception of pluralism has emerged amongst a group of thinkers including Richard Bellamy, John Gray, John Kekes and Bhikhu Parekh. For these authors, pluralism amounts to more than the claim that modern societies are marked by diversity and moral disagreement. Rather, they claim that, at the deepest level, the moral realm itself is plural and diverse. According to these pluralists, there is no master value or hierarchical ordering of values that commands the assent of all reasonable moral agents. All moral values are conditional in their applicability, and many important moral values are both incompatible and incommensurable with each other. ;Supposedly, the plural nature of morality has serious consequences for liberalism as a political philosophy. Here, liberalism is understood as a tradition of political thought exemplified by thinkers such as J. S. Mill, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. These liberals recommend the protection of individual autonomy as a general solution to the problem posed by pluralism. Under liberal institutions, individuals are encouraged to pursue their own conceptions of the good in a way that is compatible with equal concern for the similar pursuits of other individuals. The liberal state seeks to protect individual autonomy by providing basic liberties and by regulating market economies in a way that secures a fair share of economic and social goods for each person. ;Pluralists, however, hold that the liberal model is based on an unjustified faith in the primacy of values such as moral individualism, egalitarianism, and autonomy. Pluralists argue that, even within the context of the Western democracies, the conditionality, incompatibility and incommensurability of values preclude the political priority of individual autonomy espoused by liberals. In this project, I defend a modest version of autonomy liberalism along the lines of that set out by Will Kymlicka. I argue that, at least in the context of the Western democracies, the political priority of individual autonomy withstands the pluralist critique