THE LESSON OF THE LAST CHAPTER has been that if there is moral pluralism in our world, it is there because the concepts with which different groups make moral judgments are different from one another - perhaps radically so, perhaps in more mundane ways.
This is not to say that our languages determine what we think; rather, it is our practices and the commitments they entail that shape our languages. As our commitments change, so too can the meanings of our words, or even the words we use themselves.
One of the goals of this chapter is to think about the ways in which these changes can occur as we interact with one another.Chapter 2 was motivated in large part by Liu Huaqiu’s claim that the Chinese concept of rights differed from corresponding Western concepts. In order to know what to make of this claim, we needed to understand better what it means for concepts to differ from one another. We came to see concepts as emerging from relatively stable agreements in a community’s norms, rather than as single, unchanging things that people had to share for communication to succeed. Concepts are more messy and complicated than Liu’s formulation envisioned.
This chapter is motivated by the second of Liu’s claims - that since the Chinese have a concept of rights different from those of their persistent critics, they should not be held accountable to these concepts different from their own. We can generalize his idea: There is a plurality of sets of moral concepts, and one is bound only by those sets that are like one’s own. This second claim takes pluralism for granted, and derives from it an important practical conclusion. For the purposes of this chapter, I will grant the claim’s premise and consider whether Liu’s conclusion follows. We will see that just as in the previous chapter, things are more messy and complicated - and more interesting - than Liu imagines.
To say this is not yet to say that moral pluralism currently exists in our world, and in particular I have not yet argued that the moralities of China and the United States are actually plural. If what I have said above is correct, the actual existence of moral pluralism is not something that can be established through a priori argument.
It must be argued case by case based on concrete situations. We also need to recognize that the existence of pluralism in a particular case is itself a normative question: Groups A and B may disagree on whether they should be understood as part of a single community subject to a single set of norms, or as two separate communities each with its own morality. I will argue in subsequent chapters that at various stages in their development, there have existed significant conceptual distances between Chinese and Western moralities, and this despite the degrees to which adherents of the different moralities come to engage with one another. In my concluding chapters I will suggest that some important differences remain, though diversity and contestation internal to both Chinese and Western communities make sweeping conclusions problematic. A central goal of the present chapter is to show in an abstract way how substantial, constructive engagement is possible even if differences between moralities persist; in the book’s last two chapters, I will look at concrete ways in which such engagement can be undertaken.What, then, are the consequences of pluralism? The short answer is, It depends. It depends on the structure and content of our values, and on theirs; on what costs we pay for interfering with them, and for not interfering; and on the relations of power between us and them, among many other things. It also depends on what we take the implications of pluralism to be for our commitment to our own values. Does moral pluralism mean that our own morality loses its grip on us? I will argue that it should not, though reflecting on pluralism may cause that grip to relax ever so slightly. After this, I will turn to the various strategies that we can adopt toward others with different moralities, which range from static attitudes like ignoring, repressing, or accommodating, to various kinds of more dynamic engagement. In fact, we can often do more than one of these things simultaneously. In the chapter’s final section, I will look at the possibilities for, and implications of, divided communities (both ours and theirs) and multiple strategies.