2. What is value?
2.1. The objectivity of value
In a basic sense, ‘values’, ‘ends’ and ‘purposes’ are equivalent terms for Berlin: ‘purposes – ends, values which we strive to realise’.11 Values are for Berlin that which gives human actions meaning or a sense of purpose, as opposed to the lives and actions of plants and objects, or to the universe as a whole, which lacks, in Berlin’s view, this sense of purpose: ‘we understand what we mean by purpose or by value only when we contrast it with what does not have it, namely the world of natural objects’.12 By establishing this, Berlin settles one of the essential distinctions of his thought: between fact and value, between scientific and human knowledge, between what is human and what is not. He is adamant in denying values as observable in the same way as the physical elements of our universe are. He denies values ‘to be ingredients of the universe, to be found in it by whatever faculty it was with which investigators had classified the inventory of the world’.13 This responds to his preoccupation with the distinction between the human and the natural sciences, the same preoccupation that arose during his early years in Oxford, as described in the previous chapter. Berlin challenges strongly the belief, which in PIRA he locates as having been born in the Enlightenment, that to say that a thing is ‘good or bad, right or wrong’ is to produce ‘a descriptive statement’.14 By establishing this it is stated that albeit appropriate to call them objective,15 the objectivity of values is not similar to that of scientific data. Berlin denies that the process of producing value judgements can in any way be similar to that of providing verifiable statements that can be proven as right or wrong, like science does. However, he concedes that there is a degree of ‘truth’ within ethical statements, and that this can be verified. Nonetheless, this truth is not by any means verifiable by the same methods as in science. Thus, if value statements are not verifiable in terms of truth or falsehood,
11 Op.Cit., p 137. 12 Ibid.
13 Op.Cit., p 9. 14 Ibid.
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like in science, how can we describe values as ‘objective’ at all? The answer to this question is a complex one, and it opens up a window that unveils part of the hermeneutic composition of Berlin’s theory of value pluralism. The objectivity of value comes given, first, by the meanings we attribute to them: values are objective because they are ‘simply facts about the people who hold them’,16 and second, by their character as shared elements between all the individuals of a given society. Values act, in fact, a little bit like the ultimate presuppositions described by Collingwood:17 when critically examined, our convictions will unveil some fundamental moral commitments that we are not willing to do without, even though we cannot justify them in a logical way.18 This objectivity of value is not comparable to that of the objectivity of our experience of tangible objects, or that of logical constructs, but they are still to be conceived of as objective. Another reason why it can be assured that Berlin conceives values as objective, and in fact, as ‘equally objective’,19 is that he describes them as finite and universally shared.20 This implies that their meaning is universally understood, even if their practice is not shared: values like freedom, equality, love or honesty have universal validity, if not equal weight for all human societies and individuals. This means that the objectivity of value is achieved, a bit like the Heideggerian conception of publicness in Dasein,21 by their collective experience of them in society. When we make a choice between two moral goods ‘it is not a matter of purely
16 J. Cherniss and H. Hardy, 'Isaiah Berlin', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/berlin/), (2013), Last accessed July 2016
17 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
18 This definition of value may seem conducive to extremism – the unwillingness to discuss one’s own moral
convictions, and the will to assert it over that of others – however as it will be seen throughout the thesis, the context of pluralism generates a space of self-consciousness (akin to that delineated by Bernard Williams B. in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985)) that makes individuals aware always of the relative validity of their own values, demanding a constantly reflective and critical approach to one’s own moral convictions. This generates the space necessary for discussion and consideration of the values of others – a position that stands opposite moral extremism.
19 I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: Pimlico, 2003): 79. 20Steven Lukes provides a thorough account of this aspect of Berlin’s philosophy in his Liberals and
Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity (New York: Verso, 2003), especially in ch. 7
21 ‘Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted…’ M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978): 165.
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subjective judgement, it is dictated by the forms of life of the society to which one belongs, a society among other societies, with values held in common, whether or not they are in conflict, by the majority of mankind throughout recorded history’.22 This way, Berlin insists, the objectivity of value is not something derived from empirical observation of tangible or logical facts, as with science, but instead we attain a sense of the specific content of values ‘from the inside’, in the course of our lives and experience as human beings. Thus, once we reject ideal theories of values, ethical knowledge is devoid of stable points of reference like science, and history becomes the pool of knowledge from where the reflection on the content of values is extracted. We cannot achieve a sense of definitive truth in ethics to the extent in which we have it in biology or chemistry, but we can verify the truthfulness of our convictions by critically reflecting on their origins and their standing in the world. In this respect Berlin is very close to Bernard Williams’ rejection of philosophy as a means for achieving ethical knowledge, a similarity that will be analysed in depth in chapter five.23 The objective dimension of values is particularly relevant insofar as it allows the understanding of ‘worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own’.24 Human beings are able to understand and relate to cultures different from their own because being human means precisely having access to the universal meaning of values: ‘what men have made, other men can understand’.25 This is how communication between different cultures is possible, though an exercise of ‘sympathy and understanding’26 is necessary in order to unveil the raw values that lie beneath the complex systems they are ingrained into. This is what Berlin calls imagination and what Vico calls fantasia, the notion
22 I. Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind : An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1998b): 15.
23 B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2002).
24 I. Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1998b): 9.
25 I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: Pimlico, 2003): 60. 26 Op.Cit., p 47.
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that we can always identify in others the same values we hold ourselves by making an effort in our minds, for these values are ultimately finite and objective for all:
Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs. We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all.27
This idea may sound dangerously similar to Platonic Idealism in some aspects, but it is in reality very far from it. Values are not known as abstract, discreet, absolute values, for value pluralism does not acknowledge the existence of values in such a form. Values, as will be explained in the chapter on Berlinean ethics, are the creation of men, and do not precede them. We know them as part of our experience, that is to say, integrated in our systems of values, and we can in some way isolate them and at most exercise our imagination enough in order to understand the way in which others have considered them differently within their systems of value. This is not Platonic Idealism. If values could be contemplated in their perfect form, as Platonic Idealism affirms, the exercise of fantasia would not be necessary when engaging with others. Only Enlightened knowledge would allow understanding between individuals insofar as they were able to observe rights in their true form.28 There exists ‘a world of objective
27 I. Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1998b): 9.
28 I. Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought (London: Chatto
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values’29 which form what Berlin famously called the ‘human horizon’30 or the ‘human chore’.31 However this world is at the same time the direct product of our ethical experience and cultural and historical contexts, and it does not precede them. More importantly, far from being eternal values in the Platonic sense, the meaning and content of these objective values can be altered over time, like Collingwood’s absolute presuppositions. Not all human beings attribute the same relevance to the same set of values, but they all have a certain notion of the
meaning of all existing values. This meaning is not formed as the result of abstract philosophical analysis, but in the experience of individuals as members of societies and cultures that have shaped the meaning of such notions overtime. This is not subjectivism, relativism or nihilism, for there is a public dimension to the meaning of values, first; and second, because ethical convictions can be, to a degree, critically examined. That is exactly what Berlin does throughout his work when arguing for the need to observe value pluralism and accommodate it politically: he does not produce this argument as a truth-claim, but instead as a hermeneutic argument that reflects on the historical development of our current values and the political demands attached to them. In this regard there is an undeniable objective dimension to values insofar as they are public, or that they can be seen, indeed, as facts of human life. It could be said, too, that there is also a degree to subjectivity in their composition insofar as our knowledge of them stems out of individual experience: values cannot be held up for collective examination and evaluation like facts can. Nonetheless this apparent contradiction between the objective or subjective nature of values can be subverted whenever we think of ethical knowledge as a sui generis kind of knowledge, as expressed by Berlin, where these categories of knowledge do
29 I. Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1998b): 9.
30 Op.Cit., p 10.
31 In pp 293-297 of G. Crowder and H. Hardy, The One and the Many : Reading Isaiah Berlin (Amherst, N.Y.:
Prometheus Books, 2007)., the two authors provide an appendix titled ‘Berlin’s universal values- core or horizon?’ in which they try to throw some light over the difference of the two notions. This thesis will treat them as rough equivalents.
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not apply.32 Ethical knowledge happens hermeneutically instead, as an interpretative exercise on the shared value notions we experience within specific contexts. The objectivity of value in this case has to do with their finite and universal nature as defined by Berlin. Pluralism of value is not the result of an unlimited plurality of values that are culture-specific, but rather of the endless combinations produced with these values. That is to say, individuals observe systems of value and not isolated values. Clashes of value have to do with the different hierarchical ways in which these are ranked. The next section will explain this in more detail.