1
Value Conflict, Dialogical Pluralism, and the Idea of Wisdom1
Peter Jonkers (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
1. Introduction
In this paper, I want to analyze a specific kind of value conflict, which seems to preclude
consensus, and which is nevertheless characteristic of our current situation of radical
cultural diversity. This type of value conflicts is not only the subject of fierce discussions in
philosophy and political theory, but are also the gist of quite a lot of propaganda wars and,
unfortunately, even real wars. One could even say that the main issue of many ongoing
conflicts in the world is not anymore chiefly about gaining territory or economic dominance,
but about fundamental diversities in values, especially insofar as these are reflected and
concretized in cultures and civilizations. In this respect, Samuel Huntington already predicted
in 1993 that “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict
will be cultural,” leading to a “clash of civilizations”.2 What constitutes the identity of a
civilization is a common history, language, culture, tradition, and religion. These elements
result in shared ideas about the human person, the relation between the individual and the
group, between the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as
about the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality
and hierarchy.3 All these ideas, and the practices resulting from them, are concrete
manifestations of a limited number of fundamental values, some of which may be universal.
But what really defines the identity of a culture is not so much the abstract level of
fundamental values, but the way in which they are realized in specific spatio-temporal
settings, i.e. in concrete civilizations. Through education, institution, religion and ideology,
legislation, cultural practices, etc. every society aims at realizing certain fundamental values
in its daily life, and tries to solve the conflicts between some different groups of values. And
because civilizations differ greatly due to differences in history, location, language, etc.,
there is also an enormous diversity in the ways in which fundamental values are realized and
value conflicts are being solved. Without going as far as to say that these concrete
manifestations of cultural diversity will result in a clash of civilizations, it is obvious that they
are the cause of many conflicts and even wars.
In order to introduce the topic of this paper, I start, in the next section, with a concrete
example of conflicting values in the field of human rights. In particular, I will outline the
differences in values, which underlie the three groups of human rights, namely the individual
freedom rights, the basic social rights, and the cultural rights. In my view, these differences
result in, basically two different kinds of value conflicts: conflicts being fought out in a
homogeneous playing field, resulting, ideally, in consensus, and conflicts being fought out in
a heterogeneous field, which often precludes the possibility of consensus. The reason that
this second category of value conflicts is so difficult to solve is the lack of a common ground
1
Full text of a paper, presented at the international conference on ‘Value Conflict and Consensus in the
Cultural Diversity, organized by the Marxism College and Research Center for Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics of Liaoning University, on Dec. 22, 2014.
2
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations. In: Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, 1
3
Ibid., 2.
2
of, phrased positively, the importance of cultural individuality. In the third section, I will give
a short philosophical analysis of what defines value conflicts in a homogeneous and a
heterogeneous playing field, respectively, and the implications for reaching consensus. In
the final section, I try to develop a solution to the problem of value conflict in a
heterogeneous or non-consensual space by making use of the ideas of dialogical pluralism
and practical wisdom.
2. Conflicting human rights and the (im)possibility of consensus
It is not my intention to give an extensive historical account of the specific contexts, in which
the various groups of human rights came up, or to analyze how they have been
constitutionalized in various political regimes, and even less to play off one group of human
rights against the other. In this respect, I fully agree with the organizers of this conference
that it is unjust and counterproductive to participate in a discussion about value conflict
from an attitude of superiority regarding one’s own culture. In this respect, it is worthwhile
to emphasize that the most fundamental value, which is to be respected universally and
unconditionally, is the equal human dignity of all human beings. Actually, the idea of human
dignity is the ultimate foundation in order to attribute rights at all to people. But since
humans are basically cultural beings, the universal respect for human dignity also applies to
civilizations, countries, and nations, as well as to the values they try to realize, because these
values define their identity and, hence, their dignity. However, if the respect for cultural
identity applies unconditionally, it serves as a discussion stopper, putting an end to any
critical discussion about human rights; moreover, on the level of international politics, such
an argument would serve as an excuse for every country to stave off any critique of its
internal human rights policy, let alone an armed intervention by the international
community of a barbarous regime. Against this background, I want to use the example of the
fundamental tensions between the above mentioned three groups of human rights in order
to illustrate the enormous complexity, which surrounds the concept of value conflict, and
which seems to jeopardize consensus about cultural values in particular.
2.1 Conflicting human rights in a homogeneous playing field
From a historical perspective, the oldest declarations of human rights are exemplifications of
the principle of individual freedom, stressing the natural, inalienable rights of each
individual. The oldest example of such a declaration is the Magna Carta from 1215, in which
the English king guarantees certain rights and liberties to the Church of England, the nobility,
and citizens of the cities, and promises to respect the old liberties and free customs. The
‘jura et libertates’, which these treatises contained, are meant to define the relations
between the sovereign and his subjects. They express the fundamental political-ethical
principle of the regulation of power, aimed at protecting the subjects against possible
arbitrariness and injustice of the sovereign. This regulation makes up the backbone of the
so-called Habeas Corpus rights, which have a central place in the whole tradition of human
rights, expressing the crucial value of the inviolability of the person, which means that
citizens are protected against arbitrary capture and torture, and have the guarantee of a fair
jurisdiction. Originally, these rights were no human rights in the strict sense, because they
lacked the universal and unconditional character of the latter, but were rather privileges,
3
exception rights. They were attributed to certain groups or estates, who had enough power
to exact these rights from the sovereign and have them respected by him.
Moreover, all these rights and privileges were concretizations of a classical idea of the
relation between the state and its subjects, in the sense that rights are attributed to
individuals, because they are part of a community. This means that these rights are
conceptualized as exemplifications of the most fundamental value, namely the common
good or bonum commune. The principle of the common good expresses another
fundamental value, namely that the community exists naturally and necessarily, and, hence,
has priority over the individuals. The Aristotelian principle of distributive justice defines the
relation between the community and its members, which is defined as a geometric relation
(A : B = C : D) between the whole and its parts. From this perspective, the rights of
individuals are attributed to him or her as a part of the common good. However, ultimately,
not the individual citizens, but only the sovereign political authority decides about the
content and the requirements of the common good. Hence, the rights of individuals limit
and stipulate the political authority, but only insofar as the common good requires the
attribution of these rights. This implies that no individual can claim exclusive rights against
the power of the state. In sum, the two fundamental values, underlying this pre-modern idea
of human rights are the inviolability of the human person and the idea of the common good,
which subordinates the rights of the individual to those of the community.
Only since the beginning of modernity, one can speak of human rights in the full sense of the
world. They are meant to limit the power of the sovereign state as a whole over the
individuals. Moreover, these rights are no longer privileges of certain groups, but inalienable
rights of all humans without exception; they can be claimed by all citizens, simply because
they are humans. That is why these rights are inalienable and natural, which means that they
are prior to each form of government and societal order. As the second article of the
Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789, drafted in the wake of the French
Revolution, runs, it is even so that “the aim of every political association is the preservation
of the natural and inalienable rights of man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and
resistance to oppression.”4 The right to liberty and property deserve special attention,
because they have obtained a central place in the societal and political organizations of the
West: “Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others”; and
“property is a sacred and inviolable right, and no one may be deprived thereof unless a
legally established public necessity obviously requires it, and upon a condition of a just and
previous indemnity.”5 The way in which these two rights are stipulated shows that human
rights are pre-state rights, which have to be safeguarded by the societal and political
structures through the creation of a state-free zone, which is nowadays called the civil
society. In other words, the state does not have the right to interfere in the private and parts
of the public lives of its citizens. People have the freedom, among others, to uphold certain
values, to express them in public and share them with others, and to put them into practice
and pass on to their children. It goes without saying that the state may limit this freedom in
specific cases for the sake of common interest.
Hence, the fundamental values, underlying the modern, liberal declaration of human rights
are, first, the inviolability of the human person, just as in the pre-modern conception. But
4
5
Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (ed.), The Human Rights Reader. New York: Meridian, 1979, p. 118.
Ibid., p. 119f.
4
unlike the pre-modern conception of rights and freedoms, the idea of the person on which
the modern human rights rests is the free, autonomous individual, separated from other
individuals and the community. That is why these rights are typically called ‘individual
freedom rights.’ The state’s prime task is to protect the freedom of the individual, and this
explicitly includes his private property. Hence, besides the inviolability of the person, the
modern idea of human rights expresses a second fundamental value, namely that of
individualism. The societal whole and the common good no longer have priority over the
individual, as was the case in the pre-modern period, but the sovereign individual with its
natural right to free self-disposal precedes every community, and even serves as the
ultimate justification of the final goal of every polity.
Against this background, Marx’s famous critique of the French declaration of human rights
deserves to be mentioned, because it uncovers some problematic presuppositions of the
values that underlie them. He shows that this declaration is unable to fulfill one of the three
principles of the French Revolution, namely fraternity – besides liberty and (juridical)
equality – , although it was drafted in the wake of it. In his view, “the so-called rights of man,
the droits de l’homme […], are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e. the
rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.” 6
Herewith, he rejects the individualistic character of the values of the liberal idea of human
rights, accusing the French declaration of promoting selfishness: other humans are not
considered as my fellows, but as possible intruders of my privacy. It goes without saying that
this liberal declaration is completely at odds with the principle of fraternity. For Marx, the
fact that the liberal idea of human rights actually promotes selfishness comes to the fore
most explicitly in the rights of liberty and property: “The right of man to liberty,” being the
right to do everything that harms no one else, “is based not on the association of man with
man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of
the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.”7 What this human right means in practice
becomes manifest in the right to private property. Marx even thinks that all the articles of
the declaration of human rights serve no other goal than to sanctify private property. “The
right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to
dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of
society, the right of self-interest.”8
As a result of Marx’s critique of the liberal or, as he calls it, egoistic character of the human
rights declaration of the French revolution and, moreover, as the outcome of the struggle of
the worker’s movement for social justice during the second half of the 19 th and the first half
of the 20th century, a new group of human rights emerged, the so-called basic social rights.
Together with the individual freedom rights, these basic social rights constitute the core of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations of 1948. The latter group of
rights is not so much meant to give individuals the freedom to lead their lives as they wish,
but rather to enable them to participate and to be a full member of society; this group
comprises the right to education in a school, to paid work, to social security, to health care,
to housing, etc.
6
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 11f. (Marx, “Zur Judenfrage”, MEW I, 364).
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 12. (Marx, “Zur Judenfrage”, MEW I, 364).
8
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 12. (Marx, “Zur Judenfrage”, MEW I, 365).
7
5
As becomes apparent from Marx’s critique, the values underlying these basic social rights
are fraternity, solidarity, and, more in general, participation in society. They emphasize the
idea that humans are not only free, autonomous, individual beings, but also need to live in a
social environment that guarantees the fulfillment of their basic material and spiritual needs:
without proper schooling, the right to freedom of expression remains an empty box,
depriving someone from basic food supply and health care obviously jeopardizes his
autonomy, making someone homeless is ruinous for his self-esteem and, hence, for his
human dignity. In sum, from a socialist perspective, basic social rights are primarily meant to
ensure people’s right to participate in and contribute to shaping the total political,
economic, societal and cultural life. Just as the individual freedom rights the basic social
rights are essential exemplifications of the fundamental value of human dignity, because
they are vital for the humanization of the human being.
In the course of history, the obvious tensions between the individual freedom rights and the
basic social rights have given rise to numerous conflicts: is the right to property of the happy
few prior to the fulfillment of basic material needs of the deprived majority?; is it more
important that a highly-educated minority has the unlimited freedom to speak English or
should society protect local languages, which are predominantly spoken by people who only
have primary education?; is freedom of religion an absolute right, even if certain religions
are brainwashing their adherents? These examples illustrate more fundamental value
conflicts, most of which come down to conflicts between the value of individual freedom
and that of social and political equality. As is common knowledge, these value conflicts are
inevitable, and all societies have to deal with them, trying to solve them on the basis of their
political regime, their tradition, their economic possibilities etc.
In this context, I want to stress that these value conflicts between the individual freedom
rights and the basic social rights occur within a homogeneous playing field. In spite of their
focus on different aspects of human dignity, these two groups of rights are both universal.
Their universality concerns, first, the fact that the overall majority of the countries in the
world has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes both these
groups of human rights, and constitutionalized it, even though quite a number of them does
not always respect it. Second, there is an almost universal consensus that these two groups
of rights and their underpinning values indeed constitute the essence of what it means to be
human, in other words of the idea of human dignity. This twofold universality creates a
common ground, which makes that the inevitable value conflicts between the two groups,
and even the value conflicts within each of these groups of human rights, occur on a
homogeneous playing field. Even though people may give priority to different values, and
solve value conflicts between these two groups of human rights in quite different ways, the
idea of human dignity, which includes both groups of human rights, has become globally
recognized. Moreover, the kind of arguments they use in underpinning their choices can, in
principle, be understood by the other party. Hence, people are fighting out their value
conflicts on the basis of a shared understanding of and sensitivity to the idea of human
dignity as well as some fundamental rules and principles, and this defines the homogeneous
character of the playing field. In sum, the idea of human dignity, as well as those of
reasonableness and reciprocity, serve as a common ground or common frame of reference
for how the conflicts between individual freedom rights and basic social rights are to be
solved.
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The homogeneity of this playing field makes it possible that these value conflicts, ideally,
result in a ‘reasonable overlapping consensus’. According to Rawls, this means that all
people who are defending diverging values on the basis of different comprehensive
doctrines, e.g. a liberal and a socialist one, “support a political conception of justice
underwriting a constitutional democratic society whose principles, ideals, and standards
satisfy the criterion of reciprocity.”9 This consensus is more than a pragmatic modus vivendi,
since “first, the object of consensus, the political concept of justice, is itself a moral
conception. And second, it is affirmed on moral grounds, that is, it includes conceptions of
society and of citizens as persons, as well as principles of justice, and an account of the
political virtues through which those principles are embodied in human character and
expressed in public life.”10 In sum, this kind of value conflicts appears in a homogeneous
playing field, in which there is a global recognition of the fundamental principle of human
dignity, as well as of the rules of constitutional democracy and reciprocity are shared by all,
and in which reason is accepted by all parties involved as a neutral judge.
2.2 Conflicting human rights in a heterogeneous playing field
However, with the rise of a third group of human rights, the so-called cultural rights, since
the sixties of the previous century, a new and different kind of value conflicts has emerged,
which jeopardizes the very idea of consensus and of global justice. In the wake of the painful
decolonization process many countries that had only recently become independent, wanted
to get rid of the culture of their former colonizers, and started to affirm their own, specific
cultural identity. In a vehement reaction against the former colonizer’s culture, they rather
emphasized and sometimes even exaggerated the differences between the ‘externally
imposed’ and the ‘native’ culture than looking for the values they had in common with other
cultures. Meanwhile, this stress on cultural individuality and, hence, on diversity has also
permeated in most Western civilizations, depriving traditional reference points for social
cohesion of their plausibility. Several factors have contributed to this change in the public
consciousness: a) the modern (virtual) media have confronted Western civilizations with a
wide variety of cultures and their underpinning values; b) migration streams of people
looking for better life conditions have resulted in a growing impact of cultural diversity upon
Western societies; c) the rise of expressive individualism in many Western countries has
contributed to promoting an ideal of personal and cultural authenticity.11 Consequently, the
conviction that not only countries and nations, but also individual regions have a specific
cultural identity and uphold specific values, diverging from all the other ones, has gained a
lot of popularity. At the same time, all of them want this identity to be recognized and
respected on equal terms with mainstream cultures and their values.12 In sum, the global
recognition of the value of human dignity as fundamental, as analyzed in the previous
9
John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. In: Idem, Political Liberalism. Expanded Edition. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 482f.
10
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 147.
11
Cfr. a.o. Jürgen Habermas, Die Revitalisierung der Weltreligionen – Herausforderung für ein säkulares
Selbstverständnis der Moderne. In: Idem, Philosophische Texte. Band 5: Kritik der Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2009, pp. 392-394.
12
Odo Marquard also points to the intriguing combination of social harmonization and universalization versus
pluralization. However, I do not agree with his thesis that these two trends compensate each other. Cfr. Odo
Marquard, Einheit und Vielheit. In: Idem, Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Philosophische Essays. Stuttgart: Reclam,
2003, 210f.
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section, paradoxically goes hand in hand with the growing awareness of the local nature of
cultures and their values.
Obviously, the current situation of cultural diversity has led to new value conflicts between
cultures and subcultures. Examples of them abound, some of them quite innocent, other
ones far more problematic. It is essential for the identity of a culture that its members can
express themselves in their mother tongue, not only in private, but also in public (e.g. in
school, in the media, in court, etc.). Because speaking one’s mother tongue is a fundamental
value, cultures claim the right to speak it, if need be against the linguistic majority. In many
Western countries with an extensive legislation on animal rights, the Muslim minority claims
the right to slaughter sheep according to the rite of the Islam, that is without anaesthesia.
Some Arab countries consider it to run counter to cultural, that is Islamic, identity if women
drive a car, and in a few of them, their cultural identity forbids girls to receive school
education. Some African cultures claim the right to female circumcision, arguing that it is an
inherent part of their cultural identity. Obviously, especially the last examples of cultural
identity run completely counter to what is considered by most Western countries to belong
to the essence of human dignity, namely the universal equality between men and women,
the universal right to education, and the inviolability of the human body.
The above examples show that cultural value conflicts, generated by claims to cultural rights
differ qualitatively from the traditional ones: whereas the individual freedom rights and the
basic social rights are universal, the cultural rights lack this universality, because they are
inherent to a specific culture. First, although there is an almost universal consensus that
cultural identity is a basic value, the specific, individual cultural values and the rights
resulting from them have to be negotiated one by one and are certainly not universally
recognized by an international body, such as the United Nations. Second, people who are
not a member of this or that specific culture can hardly understand why some cultural values
matter so much, and sometimes are even fiercely opposed to their recognition in their own
culture; on the contrary, they consider some of them as outright violations of the universal
of value of human dignity. The fact that the specific cultural values obviously lack
universality implies that the playing field, on which cultural conflicts are being fought out, is
not homogeneous, but fundamentally heterogeneous: there is no common ground, because
cultural values are by definition culture specific, and, even more importantly, because the
individuality of every culture even extends – to a certain extent – to the kind of rationality
that is supposed to substantiate these values. There is a gap separating the predominantly
procedural rationality of modern societies, which is focused on developing just procedures
to reach consensus in case of a value conflict, from the more substantial rationality of more
traditional cultures, which focuses on the content of these values.
The above examples have made clear that, when it comes to the substantial rationality of
individual cultures, outsiders often do not share the presuppositions of the people who
defend cultural values. Hence, in a cultural value conflict people often don’t understand
each other’s arguments, let alone sensitivities. Nevertheless, it would be a sign of disrespect
to accuse ‘the others’ of simply being irrational. Hence, when cultural value conflicts are at
stake, the procedural kind of rationality, which underlies most contemporary political
philosophies, is no longer accepted as a universal, neutral judge. This explains why it has
become so difficult or even impossible to reach reasonable consensus when conflicting
cultural values are at stake. In sum, the rise of a kind of radical cultural diversity since the
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sixties of the previous century confronts us with a heterogeneous playing field, which seems
to preclude consensus.13
3. A philosophical analysis of value conflicts
The work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, two of the most prominent contemporary
Western political philosophers, is focused on the value conflicts in a homogeneous field.
Standing in the tradition of modernity, they recognize that reasonable pluralism is the
normal result of a democratic culture of free institutions.14 This means that, in their eyes,
cultural diversity is a fundamental reality of all modern, democratic societies. But at the
same time they are convinced that the value conflicts, which result from this diversity, are
fought out in a homogeneous playing field, which makes that these conflicts can, in
principle, be settled through a reasonable, overlapping consensus.15 Moreover, they
consider human rights as a homogeneous point of reference, which orientates the solution
of all value conflicts.16 Hence, in their theory of political liberalism, they do not take into
account adequately the fact that, as a consequence of the emergence of a radical cultural
diversity, the homogeneous playing field of modernity, in which procedural rationality is the
final judge, is gradually and partly being replaced by the heterogeneous field of postmodernity.
Richard Rorty, by contrast, offers a philosophical analysis of value conflicts in a
heterogeneous field, which enables him to understand and appreciate the reality of a radical
cultural diversity, which is part and parcel of Western societies, these days. He interprets all
grand cultural narratives, such as the great ideals of the French revolution, liberalism,
Marxism, Christianity, and even reason as a universal common ground, as contingent ‘final
vocabularies’, whose truth can only be demonstrated by means of circular arguments. This
means that notions like consensus and truth only function within, but not outside a given
vocabulary, so that they cannot serve as a common ground between various vocabularies.
This does not mean that Rorty opts for a kind of relativism, according to which every belief
would be as good as any other or that ‘true’ would be an equivocal term. But it does imply
“the ethnocentric view that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart
from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society – ours –
uses on one or another area of inquiry.”17 Hence, one can only reach consensus between the
persons or local communities, who use the same final vocabulary. Because all vocabularies
13
Wolfgang Welsch makes a similar distinction between a horizontal and a vertical dimension of the plurality of
the cultural world. Cfr. Wolfgang Welsch, “Weisheit in einer Welt der Pluralität,” W. Oelmüller (Hrsg.),
Philosophie und Weisheit. Paderborn, München, Wien, Zürich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989, p. 236.
14
Rawls defines reasonable pluralism as “the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive
doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions,” See John
Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 441.
15
Jürgen Habermas, The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. In: Idem, Postmetaphysical Thinking:
Philosophical Essays. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 139-146.
16
Jürgen Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State. In: Jürgen Habermas and Joseph
Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006, p. 33; Rawls,
Political Liberalism, 411.
17
Richard Rorty, Science as Solidarity. In: John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, Donald N. McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric
of the Human Sciences: Language and Arguments in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987, p. 42.
9
are local and incommensurable, there is no neutral meta-vocabulary, which could serve as a
common ground for all final vocabularies. Unlike modernity, which lived on the belief that all
specific final vocabularies were to justify themselves before the tribunal of reason, which
served as a kind of impartial judge, people living in the postmodern condition have lost this
conviction. Nowadays, the dominant idea is that all value systems are nothing but
contingent social constructions, available only on the local market. This explains why, in this
fundamentally heterogeneous field, there is no common ground on the basis of which a
consensus between different value systems could be found. It is therefore no surprise that,
many post-modern individuals so often don’t feel at home in any vocabulary, and run the
risk of completely losing their identity: they are constantly in doubt as to whether they
haven’t been raised in the ‘wrong’ vocabulary, and inclined to give it up in favour of another,
because they utterly lack the possibility to discuss and compare these vocabularies on
reasonable grounds.18 In reaction to the rise of this unreflective pluralism and the doubts it
generates, some people feel the need to affirm their individual and collective cultural
identities as (exclusive) singularities. This shows that, paradoxically, for postmodern people,
the threatening feeling of losing their identity amidst a plurality of alternatives, which all
seem equally attractive, but also equally contingent, and the longing to unreflectively affirm
the identity with which they feel most familiar, often in an exclusivist way, are not opposite
attitudes, but just two sides of the same coin.
4. Dialogical pluralism as an alternative for consensus in value conflicts
In the previous sections it has become clear that, against the background of today’s radical
cultural diversity, philosophical reason has been forced to give up its claim to neutrality, and,
consequently, to a homogeneous, neutral public square, in which value conflicts could be
discussed. This has undermined political liberalism’s most fundamental condition for
reaching reasonable consensus in case of conflicting values. Hence, it is necessary to develop
an alternative way of dealing with value conflicts, which takes into account the reality of
radical cultural diversity and, consequently, of a heterogeneous playing field. I propose to
call this alternative approach ‘dialogical pluralism’ and try to give an outline of it. Dialogical
pluralism can be defined as a conscious, well-organized critical dialogue between people
who are living conflicting values in a heterogeneous field.19 The pluralist character of this
dialogue implies the recognition that values are mostly part of specific cultures or traditions,
which stand more or less on their own, and, hence, cannot be translated into the language
of neutral reason. This means that the differences between values can be compared with
each other, but not fully comprehended by outsiders. As a Westerner, I have a first person’s
experience of my own, Western culture and its values, but only a third person’s knowledge
of non-Western cultures and their values. Through (cultural) empathy, I can perhaps even
sympathize with the values of others, but, as a Westerner, I can never experience fully what
it would mean to live by non-Western values.20 This is all the more so, when it comes to
specific, cultural values, generating specific practices and insights, because these cannot be
18
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 203.
Henk Vroom, Walking in a Widening World. Understanding Religious Diversity. Amsterdam: VU University
Press, 2013, pp. 265f.
20
Thomas Nagel makes a similar point in the case of the subjective character of experience. Cfr. Thomas Nagel,
What is it Like to Be a Bat? In: Idem, Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
19
10
integrated in a higher, universal value system. Dialogical pluralism does not require that one
has to downplay or translate one’s own specific, cultural values for the sake of finding some
common ground. By dropping this requirement, it wants to do justice to the reality of a
heterogeneous playing field in the case of conflicting cultural values.
But although we don’t have a first person’s experience of radically different cultural values,
we can learn from the values of others, mostly by contrasting them with ours. In other
words, traditions, of which cultural values are part, are not closed wholes, which cannot be
understood by others, but rather configurations of insights, stories, rituals and organizations,
which develop and change continuously in interaction with their broader cultural milieu.21
Especially in our times of cultural globalization, this interaction is becoming ever more
important, and we can see the effects of this development in the ways in which most
traditions have, indeed, become players in a global field. Although this field is still
heterogeneous, the fact that there is interaction makes that cultural traditions have to
become more self-reflective about their own identity and their correspondence and
differences with other traditions. This self-reflexivity creates room for mutual understanding
between different cultural values, even though the fact that this self-reflexivity is bound to a
specific cultural perspective precludes that these value traditions would be prepared to
enter a neutral or homogeneous playing field. In sum, in the case of conflicting cultural
values, dialogical pluralism aims at avoiding a complete deadlock, which would be the
inevitable consequence of holding on to the idea of a complete incommensurability between
heterogeneous values, by requiring the participants in this dialogue to be open minded to
the values of others while at the same time remaining attached to their own values.
5. Practical wisdom
Against this background, I want to examine whether the idea of practical wisdom could be
helpful to develop the idea of dialogical pluralism further. In particular, the question is
whether this kind of wisdom presents a possible way to deal with value conflicts in a context
of radical cultural diversity. The reasons for drawing such a parallel with dialogical pluralism
are, first, that the idea of wisdom does not uphold either the idea of a neutral public space,
but tries to establish a shared space. Moreover, in both cases this shared space rests less on
a procedural than on a substantial kind of rationality. Finally, just as dialogical pluralism,
practical wisdom has a close relation to cultural values, including the implicit, fragmented,
and local ones.
To my mind, the idea of wisdom may be making a comeback, after it has been associated for
a long time with old people, tradition and conservative caution in a culture of youth,
modernisation, innovation and risky exploration. The revival of wisdom is especially evident
in areas where knowledge and (technical) know-how come up against questions of ethics
and, above all, values.22 Any wisdom needs to take seriously the desire for some sense of
overall meaning and connectedness, and also for guidance in discernment in specific
21
Vroom, Walking in a Widening World, 260f.
David Ford, Christian Wisdom. Desiring God and Learning in Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007, p. 1.
22
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situations.23 This means that wisdom requires an objective as well as a subjective integration
or connectedness, and, hence, has an aspect of theoretical learning as well as of practical
virtue: someone who has a vast knowledge about values, but who lives foolishly himself,
would not be termed wise.24 Since striving for wisdom is an inherent element in all religious
and secular value systems, wisdom can be qualified as having a trans-cultural, universally
human character,25 which is founded on the fact that all humans have to deal with value
issues.
A concrete example of how the idea of practical wisdom offers a concretization of dialogical
pluralism is cultural value reasoning. This approach stems from the tradition of interreligious
dialogue, which, under the name of ‘scriptural reasoning’, is aimed at solving conflicts
between religions in a peaceful way.26 Because of the major similarities between religious
conflicts and cultural value conflicts, what I will do in this section is to examine whether this
approach can be rephrased in such a way that it can be applied to cultural value conflicts as
well. It has to be noted that ‘value reasoning’ refrains from a theorizing about values, but
concentrates on how people with diverging values can dialogue with each other about
concrete, practical value issues.27 First of all, all participants engaged in cultural value
reasoning have to acknowledge the fundamental character of the others’ values to them
(without having to acknowledge their authority for oneself), as well as to recognize that they
do not exclusively ‘own’ the values of their cultural tradition, which means that they are not
the only experts on its final meaning.28 By taking this approach, cultural value reasoning aims
at stimulating a self-reflective attitude among the people who participate in such a dialogue,
without requiring them to give up the fundamental character of their values to them.
Cultural value reasoning starts with recognizing that cultural values are at the heart of the
identity of a culture, as has been pointed out in the introduction of this paper. However,
cultural values are not just abstract principles or strange practices, but result from long
chains of reasoning about the good life, thus constituting the essence of a cultural identity.
So, cultural value reasoning prevents these values from being reduced to contingent social
constructions. In order to show how these values can orientate the lives of people today
they have to be made public. Value reasoning fulfils this task by bringing together the views
of the good life, their interpretation by philosophical reasoning, and ‘public issue’ questions.
As is common knowledge, each of these value systems can also be used to frame the identity
of a culture in a problematic way, e.g., by opposing it to other identities, legitimatizing
violence, claiming superiority, pronouncing blanket condemnations, etc.29 This refers to the
pitfall of exclusivism, i.e. the tendency that one value system strives for exclusive
recognition. In order to avoid this and other pitfalls, cultural value reasoning stimulates that
23
John Kekes, Wisdom. In: American Philosophical Quarterly, 1983, 277-286.
Robert Nozick, What is Wisdom and Why do Philosophers Love it so? In: Idem, The examined Life.
Philosophical Meditations. New York: Touchstone Press, 1989, p. 273.
25
Andreas Speer, Weisheit. In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel (eds.), Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004, p. 371.
26
For an analysis of scriptural reasoning and references to other literature about this issue see: Peter Jonkers,
From Rational Doctrine to Christian Wisdom. In: Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers (eds.), A Catholic Minority
Church in a World of Seekers. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015.
27
For a description of the practice of scriptural reasoning see: Ford, Christian Wisdom, pp. 275-278, and Nicolas
Adams, Habermas and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 239-243.
28
Ford, Christian Wisdom, pp. 279f. See also Adams, Habermas and Theology, p. 243.
29
Ford, Christian Wisdom, p. 274.
24
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cultural traditions become self-reflective: in particular, its members have to acknowledge
the fundamental character of the others’ values to them, but without having to acknowledge
their authority for oneself. When people enter the hermeneutical circle of the public debate
and, by doing so, become self-reflective, they learn to accept the idea that the values of
others express a kind wisdom that can be interpreted philosophically, and, hence, offers
food for thought to all participants in the public debate, even though they may not share or
even reject these values. Hence, this philosophical interpretation of the wisdom that is
embedded in value traditions creates a shared field for people from different cultures. But,
given the heterogeneous character of this field, value reasoning is polyphonic, which implies
that it is not aimed at reaching consensus. It even less can be reduced to an authoritarian
monologue of one value system, distorting all the other ones.
The above shows that value reasoning can mediate between divergent cultural values in a
heterogeneous playing field. It realizes this aim by making deep value reasonings public so
that others may learn to understand them and discover why particular trains of reasoning
are reasonings, and not just particular assumptions, contingent social constructions, and
why they are attractive or problematic.30 In other words, value reasoning stimulates value
traditions to become self-reflective, so that they can situate themselves against a broader
cultural background, and can be recognized by people who do not belong to this specific
tradition, but without requiring them to accept any claim for exclusive recognition. Value
reasoning is able to fulfill this task because it is a manifestation of practical wisdom, which is
the fruit of a much broader kind of rationality than the rather procedural kind of rationality,
which dominates the thinking of many prominent modern political philosophers.
Hence, value reasoning is able to understand the values that are foundational for a culture in
their own right. It is aimed at establishing a self-reflective, hermeneutical field that is shared
by various value traditions. This shared field is the result of the common need for existential
orientation, to which all value traditions are trying to respond. In this context, it is also
important to note that the shared field, at which value reasoning aims by making the
reasonings of different value systems public, is not identical with striving after consensus. As
we have discussed in the previous section, consensus is only possible in a homogeneous
playing field, whereas the kind of value conflicts that I am discussing in this paper take place
in a heterogeneous field. Rather, the best result that can be reached is friendship, that is, the
recognition of the sacred nature of each other’s values and a shared desire to study them.
How, then, can value reasoning realize the recognition of the sacred character of
fundamental values, while avoiding that this recognition becomes exclusive? The answer is
that it only coordinates discussions between members of different value traditions without
requiring a commitment to a specific culture and a specific interpretation of human rights,
which often turns out to be a Western, individualist one. Participants engage in value
reasoning only as members of a particular value tradition. But by doing so, they also
recognize that their specific value system does not completely exhaust the very idea of
human dignity, which underlies each value system. Because this recognition counts for all
specific value systems, none of them can claim to have a monopoly on it. Moreover, value
reasoning prepares a shared playing field, which means that the members of value traditions
accept the claim that the other belongs there too, without stating further conditions as to
the nature of their reasonings. This explains why value reasoning is aimed at friendship,
30
Adams, Habermas and Theology, p. 242; see also Ford, Christian Wisdom, p. 281.
13
resulting from respectfully studying religious traditions, rather than at consensus on specific
issues. A final reason why value reasoning may offer a solution to the problem of value
conflicts in a context of radical cultural diversity is that it does not make a strong contrast
between argumentation and narrative. Because value reasoning brings together the
interpretation of values, the practices of philosophical and theological reasoning, and ‘public
issue’ questions, there is argumentation at every stage of it. This is so because, again, value
reasoning is an expression of practical wisdom, and is practiced in a shared, not in a neutral,
space. In other words, through its origin in wisdom, value reasoning manifests a broader
kind of reasonableness than modern, procedural reason, and is therefore able to include
argumentation and narration.
6. Conclusion
Accepting dialogical pluralism and cultural value reasoning, being instances of practical
wisdom, as possibly fruitful approaches to deal with conflicting cultural values in a
heterogeneous field inevitably means having to accept a far greater variety as regards the
substance of these values. Hence, no specific cultural value tradition, including the Western
one, can legitimately claim to have the prerogative to impose its own values on other
cultures or even to require that the latter have to translate their values into the procedural,
secular rationality, which predominates the current public debate on these issues. The only
fundamental requirement that has to be fulfilled is that all value traditions are prepared to
make their values public by showing that they result from reasoning, thus stimulating a
process of self-reflexivity.