agent’s moral intuitions in the manner of John Rawls’ “decision procedure for ethics”(1972)
rather than a matter of unconscious mental representations which cause those intuitions.
But what if it turns out that a normal agent has such fickle moral intuitions, varying so
much from one circumstance to another, that one cannot abstract any consistent set of basic moral
principles from the sum of them? I have not ruled this out in defining pluralism. If the moral
intuitions of an agent turn out to be so motley, one can still speak of the basic principles which
cause, or which are abstractions from, the agent’s moral attitudes at a given time. This would
open the possibility that moral pluralism could be spoken of even if one were only considering
one individual: That person may have different basic moral basic principles on different
occasions, and there may be no rational way of adjudicating between these various basic
principles. One could have here an even greater extreme of moral pluralism, one in which the
individual finds him- or herself assuming incompatible basic moral principles with no objective
means of deciding between them.
Going even further, it is conceivable that a normal agent may have conflicting moral
intuitions at one time, intuitions so mutually incoherent that one cannot abstract basic principles.
Very well, one can still divide the intuitions into non-overlapping, self-consistent sets, each of
which corresponds to some coherent group of basic moral principles. In other words, we could
imagine a single individual who is “multi-moral,” whose intuitions correspond to conflicting
moral principles, who may even be obligated by conflicting principles, but who can arrive at no
means of resolution. Moral decision making under rationally irresolvable conflict turns out to be
a special case of pluralism.
Isaiah Berlin contrasted relativism and pluralism. But I find it more useful to categorize
relativism as an extreme form of pluralism, since Berlin’s conception of relativism falls within
my definition of pluralism. Berlin does not define relativism rigorously, but he does convey the