Talisse and Aikin (hereafter "T&A") argue for the incompatibility of pragmatism and [value-realism] pluralism. I'll argue that the 'non-realisA consider another type of pluralism with which pragmatism is compatible, namely, the 'shallow' pluralism that takes disagreement over values to have an epistemic rather than ontological explanation. (..) For James, values are produced by our practice of valuing, and this 'constructivist' assumption behind James' pluralism, contrasts sharply with both the "unabashed moral realism" of the deep pluralist and the implicit moral realism of the shallow pluralist. (..) our values purport to be "objective" (..) they are meant to be more than simply expressions of our preferences (..) Value judgments aspire to be truth-apt (..) Valuations must be brought into "wide" reflective equilibrium, and they only succeed in being true if they eventually do so. (..) Rival theories are just different ways of describing the same thing. By contrast, for the practical pluralist, an important part of the world's grain shapes itself to fit the theories, so two possibly adequate theories need not be, as it were, "practically equivalent". (..) The sort of pragmatic pluralism outlined above suggests that both sides of the deep/shallow divide are undermotivated, in that neither the purely ontological nor the purely epistemic explanation can be taken to follow from the seemingly intractable nature of disagreements about value. (..) Both the shallow pluralist (who assumes that a consensus must be, in principle, reachable, and the explanation of disagreement is just epistemic) and the deep pluralist (who assumes that both sides of the dispute represent objective values) make substantial assumptions about ethical ontology that the pragmatist does not. The disagreement may be merely epistemic, or there may be incompatible equilibria accessible, but there is no a priori reason to be assured of either. (..) Meta- ethical falliblism prevents the Jamesian pluralist from giving firm answers to questions about the sorts of facts that lie behind moral disputes. (..) The Jamesian framework highlights what is wrong with such deep pluralism and the realist framework that it presupposes. |