“….the ideal of diversity implied by the pluralist outlook cannot be captured
solely by the idea of maximizing a range of values. Once again there is a need for
choices to be made, choices that require guidance of a qualitative nature. That is
not to say that considerations of quantity are irrelevant to pluralist diversity, since
the narrowing of available values to a very small range is clearly at variance with
the pluralist outlook. Pluralist diversity implies support for at least some
generous range of goods as available goals for individuals and societies.” (142)
For all intents and purposes, this final formulation leaves the criterion of
multiplicity empty. Even granting Crowder’s qualifying point that “what exactly the
range should be is, of course, not something that can be expressed in a precise formula
applicable to all cases”, it is hard to see what evaluative work the criteria could actually
do. The “very small range” of values that would definitively violate the criteria is, in
effect, the range of one – that is, monism. For we cannot know that a range of even only
two values would be inferior in terms of promoting human flourishing to some alternative
set of more than two; the quantitative comparison will simply not tell us what we need to
know. Crowder is right in my view to introduce the qualitative criterion of coherence
into the discussion, but wrong in thinking that the quantitative criterion of multiplicity
can be sustained once this introduction is made. Value pluralism, in effect, teaches us
that the question of the good is qualitative “all the way down.”
My conclusion is that the connection between value pluralism and diversity
maintained by Crowder does not hold up. The equal value postulate cannot be used to
sustain the view that more is better when it comes to the relation between quantity of
values and human flourishing, and the coherence criteria, I have argued, serves to
undermine rather than supplement or support the view that the width of the range of
values endorsed in a society is an indicator of the degree to which that society enables
human flourishing.
19
Convention