Americans aren’t used to having to defend democracy. It’s just been a given for so long. After all, it’s the country’s 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that US democracy may break down in the next three years, many people feel worried about it — and passionate about protecting it.
But how do you defend something when you don’t quite remember the justifications for it?
Many intellectuals on both the left and right have spent the past decade attacking America’s liberal democracy — a political system that holds meaningfully free, fair, multiparty elections, and gives citizens plenty of civil liberties and equality before the law.
On the left, thinkers have criticized liberalism’s economic vision for its emphasis on individual freedom, which they argued feeds exploitation and inequality. On the right, thinkers have taken issue with liberalism’s focus on secularism and individual rights, which they said wrecks traditional values and social cohesion. The common thread is the belief that liberalism’s core premise — the government’s main job is to defend the freedom of the individual to choose their path in life — is wrong.
These arguments gained mainstream success for a time, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has documented. That’s in part because, well, liberalism does have its problems. At a time of rising inequality and rampant social disconnection, it shouldn’t be surprising when some people complain that liberalism is so busy protecting the freedom of the individual that it neglects to tackle collective problems.
But awareness of these problems shouldn’t mean that we give up on liberal democracy. In fact, there are very compelling reasons to want to uphold this political system. Because Americans have gotten used to taking it for granted, many have forgotten how to make the intellectual case for it.
Liberal democracy does have a good defense. It’s called value pluralism.
When you think of liberalism, you might think of philosophers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or John Rawls. But, believe it or not, some people not named John also had very important ideas.
Prime examples include the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar, who are strangely underappreciated given their contributions to liberal thought in the Cold War period. Associated thinkers like Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor are also worth noting.
Let’s focus on Berlin, though, since he was one of the clearest and greatest defenders of liberal democracy. Born to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, he experienced the political extremes of the 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the rise of Soviet communism, the Holocaust — and came away with a horror for totalitarian thinking. In all these cases, he argued, the underlying culprit was “monism”: the idea that we can arrive at the true answers to humanity’s central problems and harmoniously combine them into one utopian, perfect society.
For example, in Stalin’s communism, monism took the form of believing that the key is to establish a classless society — even if millions of people had to be killed to achieve that vision.
If it were possible to have a perfect society, any method of bringing it about would seem justified. Berlin writes:
For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever — what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken — that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao.
But this utopian idea is a dangerous illusion. The problem with it, Berlin argued, is that human beings have lots of different values, and they’re not all compatible with each other. In fact, they’re inherently diverse and often in tension with each other.
Take, for example, justice and mercy. Both of these are equally legitimate values. But rigorous justice won’t always be compatible with mercy; the former would push a court to throw the book at someone for breaking a law, even if no one was harmed and it was a first offense, while the latter would urge for a more forgiving approach.
Or take liberty and equality. Both beautiful values — “but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs,” Berlin writes, “total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.” The state has to curtail the liberty of those who want to dominate if it cares about making room for equality or social welfare, for feeding the hungry and providing houses for the unhoused.
Some ethical theories, like utilitarianism, try to dissolve these sorts of conflicts by suggesting that all the different values can be ranked on a single scale; in any given situation, one will produce more units of happiness or pleasure than the other. But Berlin argues that the values are actually incommensurable: attending a Buddhist meditation retreat and eating a slice of chocolate cake might both give you some sort of happiness, but you can’t rank them on a single scale. They are extremely different types of happiness. What’s more, some values can actually make us less happy — think of courage, say, and intellectual honesty or truth-seeking — but are valuable nonetheless. You can’t boil all values down to one “supervalue” and measure everything in terms of it.
If human values are incommensurable and sometimes flat-out incompatible, that means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. To put it more simply: We can’t have everything. We’ll always face trade-offs between different goods, and because we’re forced to choose between them, there will always be some loss of value — some good thing left unchosen.
Berlin says it’s precisely because this is the human condition that we rightly place such a high premium on freedom. If no one can justifiably tell us that their way is the one right way to live — because, according to Berlin’s value pluralism, there can be more than one right answer — then no government can claim to have uncontestable knowledge about the good and foist its vision on us. We should all have a share in making those decisions on the collective level — as we do in a liberal democracy. And on the individual level, we should each have the freedom to choose how we balance between values, how we live our own lives. When others come up with different answers, we should respect their competing perspectives.
Value pluralism is not relativism
“I do not say, ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps,’” Berlin memorably writes. Although he argues that there’s a plurality of values, that doesn’t mean any and every possible value is a legitimate human value. Legitimate values are things that humans have genuine reason to care about as ends in themselves, and that others can see the point in, even if they put less weight on a given value or dispute how it’s being enacted in the world.
Security, for example, is something we all have reason to care about, even though we differ on the lengths the government should go to in order to ensure security. By contrast, if someone said that cruelty is a core value, they’d be laughed out of the room. We can imagine a person valuing cruelty in specific contexts as a means to a greater end, but no human being (except maybe a sociopath) would argue that they value it as an end in itself. As Berlin writes:
The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.
Contemporary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have made a similar case. His research suggests that different people prioritize different moral values. Liberals are those who are especially attuned to the values of care and fairness. Conservatives are those who are also sensitive to the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. It’s not like some of these values are “bad” and some are “good.” They’re just different. And even a liberal who strongly disagrees with how a conservative is applying the value of sanctity (for example, as a way to argue that a fetus represents a life and that life is sacred, so abortion should be banned) can appreciate that sanctity is, itself, a fine value.
Berlin anticipated this line of thinking. Although he acknowledges that some disagreements are so severe that people will feel compelled to go to war — he would go to war against Nazi Germany, for example — by and large, “respect between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible,” he writes.
Liberalism can’t just be about warding off totalitarianism. Is there more to it?
Berlin’s analysis offers a highly effective vaccine against totalitarian thinking. That’s a huge point in its favor — and defenders of liberal democracy would do well to resurface it.
But there’s more to a good society than just warding off totalitarianism — than, to put it in Berlin’s own terms, guaranteeing “negative freedoms” (freedom from things like oppression). We also care about “positive freedoms” (freedom to enjoy all the good things in life). In recent years, critics have alleged that Berlin and other Cold War liberals neglected that part of the equation.
It’s fair to point out that American liberalism has done a poor job of ensuring things like equality and social connection. But Berlin’s account of value pluralism never pretended to be laying out a timeless prescription for how to balance between different priorities. Just the opposite. He specified that priorities are never absolute. We exist on a seesaw, and as our society’s concrete circumstances change — say, as capitalism goes into hyperdrive and billionaires amass more and more power — we’ll need to repeatedly adjust our stance so we can maintain a decent balance between all the elements of a good life.
And on the global scale, Berlin fully expects that different cultures will keep disagreeing with each other about how much weight to put on the different legitimate human values. He urges us to view each culture as infinitely precious in its uniqueness, and to see that there may be “as many types of perfection as there are types of culture.” He offers us a positive vision that’s about respecting, and maybe even delighting in, difference.
Nowadays, a new generation of philosophers, including American thinkers influenced by Berlin like Ruth Chang and Elizabeth Anderson, is busy trying to work out the particulars of how to do that in modern society, tackling issues from ongoing racial segregation to rapid technological change.
But this can’t just be the work of philosophers. If America is going to remain a liberal democracy, everyday Americans need to remember the value of value pluralism.
