The name is absent

idea well enough: “’I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no
more to be said.’ That is relativism.” Berlin claims that this view stands in contrast to pluralism,
“the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,
fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each
other, as we derive it from reading Plato or the novels of medieval Japan - worlds, outlooks, very
different from our own” (1990: 11).

If I like coffee and hate the taste of champagne while you are the reverse, I should not
find your taste reasonable or unreasonable. Your taste would neither make sense nor fail to make
sense to me. I could only note that our tastes differ and perhaps seek some causal explanation or
perhaps even insult you, but without saying why your taste is wrong. But the moral values of a
radically different society, provided that it is a human society, will make some sense to me and
somehow seem compelling even if only partially, even if the degree to which they seem
compelling and make sense is not strong enough to make me feel that I should adopt them. My
sympathy could be mixed with repulsion, and yet the sympathy and understanding remain. Were
relativism true, there could be no discussion between cultures over their value differences except
to note them, perhaps also to find some scientific hypothesis or creation myth to explain them,
and perhaps even to call names. But there could be no discussion across cultures as to how the
values on both sides of the divide make sense, where “making sense” can be understood either
rationally or emotionally. But this shows relativism to be a form of pluralism as I have defined
the latter. It is an extreme form of pluralism, precluding meaningful communication about the
justification of the respective values. Berlin’s conception of pluralism can be called “mere
pluralism” in contrast to relativist pluralism.

To clarify these concepts, it may be useful to distinguish two different sorts of diversity:
disagreement and multiplicity. In the case of disagreement, one has some rational or emotional

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