A Third Face for Liberalism?

Daniel Nellor

Abstract: In Two Faces of Liberalism John Gray argues for value pluralism – the thesis that the human good is fundamentally plural – and claims that liberalism should abandon the hope of achieving rational consensus about the good society, and instead focus on arranging a workable modus vivendi among incommensurable ways of life.  I endorse Gray’s claim that rational consensus is unachievable, but resist his calls for a modus vivendi.  I claim that what our ethical experience reveals is not an irreconcilable plurality of goods, but rather our own limitations before an idea of the good without which we cannot function as moral actors.  Further, a political modus vivendi of the kind Gray advocates must inevitably shut down dialogue; and finally, there may be a third way of conceiving liberalism, which seeks neither rational consensus nor modus vivendi, but rather sees humans as engaged in a shared, ongoing search for the good.