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A view with some considerable influence in current moral and political philosophy holds that there is a plurality of values, all of them fundamental and authoritative and yet, in some genuinely disconcerting way, in conflict. I shall call it ‘value-pluralism’.
1 Mill (1969, p. 206): ‘the intuitive school’; Moore (1903, p. x): ‘the common doctrine, which has generally been called by that name’; Rawls (1972, p. 34). The term ‘intuitionism’ is often used to refer not just to the thesis that fundamental ethical principles are irreducibly plural, but to that conjoined with the further view that these plural principles are known by rational or a priori ‘intuition’. In section III I refer to this conjoint view as ‘rational intuitionism’.
2 One or both of them can be found in some measure in the writings, for example, of Isaiah Berlin, Alasdair Maclntyre, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor. John Gray has recently emphasised this side of Isaiah Berlin's thought (Gray, 1993, 1995). Unfortunately space precludes discussion of these writers, or of Gray's account of the relations between value-pluralism and the politics of liberalism (an interesting issue in its own right). 101
3 I discuss a definition of agent-relativity in Skorupski, 1995. Patientrelativity can be defined along parallel lines.
4 In the paragraphs which follow I draw on a view of morality, practical reason and blame outlined in Skorupski, 1993.
5 A normative proposition deduced from decidable normative premises together with some undecidable factual proposition would of course also be undecidable. By ‘fundamental norm’ I mean ‘normative proposition knowable independently of deduction from any factual proposition’.
6 Thus the thesis that judgement incurs the convergence commitment differs from a view recently argued by Wright (1992, 1996). He holds that a concept of truth as representation or ‘fit’ carries with it the convergence commitment: to judge true in that sense is to incur the commitment. But he holds that the concept of truth applicable to ethical judgements does not involve the notion of representation. The concept of truth which is applicable there, he suggests, allows that a person may, without irrationality, judge that an ethical proposition p is true while also judging that convergence of fault-free thinkers (thinkers who suffer from no ‘cognitive shortcoming’) cannot be expected to occur on that judgement. I agree that ethical truth involves no notion of ‘fit’ to a domain of reality. But if what has been said here is right that is irrelevant. No notion of truth allows a person to judge a proposition true without incurring the convergence commitment, because the convergence commitment arises quite generally from the rationality of judgement rather than any particular notion of truth.
