The Nature of Political Theory

228 The Nature of Political Theory

Brian Barry states the logic of this point rather well:

Suppose...that we were to imagine the principles laid down in the Peace of Augsburg applied
not between states but within states. We would then indeed get an approximation to a policy
of promoting group diversity by state action. To the principles that ‘Where there is one ruler,
there should only be one religion’ would correspond the maxim ‘Where there is one group,
there should be only one set of beliefs and norms’. (Barry 2001: 127)

Such a logic is clearly in the end practically unsustainable.

Notes

1. As Stanley Cavell views them, conventions are ‘those forms of life which are normal to any
   group of creatures we call human, any group about which we will say, for example, they
   havea past to which they respond’, Cavell (1979: 111).


2. For more contemporary liberal pluralists, pluralism is broadly seen as a meta-ethical idea
   which suggests that there is no singular source of moral authority. Pluralism is thus often
   viewed as an objective claim about the real nature of morality and other forms of value.
   As indicated earlier though, it is a crucial aspect of pluralism, for many of its liberal
   proponents, that there are still universal values, which draw it distinct from all forms of
   relativism. The assertion of pluralism thus implies universal normative criteria for choice
   ‘among competing values’. Two important claims are therefore made here, namely, that
   pluralism ‘is not simply a matter of maximizing quantities of value, but also involves
   seeking coherence among values. Diversity thus involves a balance between “multiplicity”
   and “coherence” in the promotion of plural goods’, and second, that the ‘pluralist balance
   between multiplicity and coherence is best achieved by the liberal combination of freedom
   and order’ (see Crowder 2002: 135–6). For George Crowder, for example, choice among
   plural values is hard, in the sense that choices must be made without the direction of
   monistic rules. On the other hand, from the pluralist perspective, ‘reasons to choose’
   emerge not only from attention to the context for choice, but from attention to the formal
   components of value pluralism. In other words, pluralism presupposes universal values,
   plurality, incommensurability,andconflict, see Crowder (2002: 44ff.).


3. For Barry’s broadside on the culture-based arguments, see Barry (2001). For a culturalist
   critique of Barry see Daniel Bell (1998). Parekh, from the culturalist standpoint, describes
   Barry’s position as one which is ‘incoherent, rests on circular reasoning, and has been a
   source of much violence and moral arrogance’, see Parekh (2001: 111).


4. Many commentators, however, do distinguish between different types of neutrality: for
   example, neutrality of aim (where the state does not promote any conception of the good
   life), neutrality of procedure (where policy is decided without recourse to the superiority
   of any one conception of the good—characteristic of the work of Ackerman and Dworkin),
   neutrality of outcomes or consequences (where social and political institutions will not
   favour any one outcome over another), and finally neutrality of grounds (such that all
   persons will be treated with equal respect). This debate will be left to one side, see Bellamy
   (1992: 219ff.).


5. It is odd, in this sense, that his work should have been taken that seriously, apart from
   contingent fashions.


6. However, it is important to remind ourselves here that culture and groupsper sehave no
   substantive place in the public realm of Kukathas’s Hayekian liberalism.