Philosophy is intimately connected to everyday life, says Professor Patricia Marino

MA: Do you believe that pluralism is itself a value? Or is it merely a fact of life?

PM: That’s an interesting question. One kind of pluralism is value pluralism. This is the idea that we value a range of different things: we care about honesty, but also about not hurting others. We care about abstract values such as fairness, but we also care more about our friends and family than about others. We care about human rights, but we also care about bringing about good consequences.

As I explain in the book, I believe that moral disagreements often arise even among people who share values, because they interpret and prioritize among those values in different ways. For example, we might agree that honesty is important, and that fidelity is important, but disagree over when, exactly, a lie might be justified to protect others.

MA: If living in a pluralistic world implies that we need to take many different viewpoints into consideration, is moral reasoning always at risk of incoherence?

PM: At a basic level, no — absolutely not. In my consideration of moral reasoning, I focus on how someone who values various conflicting things can aim to make their moral beliefs coherent. In moral reasoning, coherence asks that we make our beliefs fit together, to universalize our judgments, and to avoid arbitrary distinctions.

It’s often thought that value pluralism is a problem for moral coherence, leading to moral dilemmas, a need for subjective judgments, and ad hoc reasoning. I disagree, though. I see moral dilemmas not as evidence of bad moral thinking, but rather as essential aspects of our moral lives. I also think that morality always rests on some subjective judgments. So I articulate a form of coherence that is compatible with conflicts and with value pluralism. My “pluralist coherence” is based on judging similarly cases that are morally similar. In this sense, plurality and conflict are no threat to coherence.

MA: Can you explain what you mean in the book by the interesting phrase “rich coherence”?

PM: Some ethical theorists believe that coherence requires unifying our values and finding a single principle to use in all cases. For example, the ethical theory of utilitarianism proposes that all actions should be judged according to whether they produce the best overall consequences. It’s like an ethical cost-benefit analysis. We see utilitarianism at work around us, when cost-benefit analysis is treated as a common-sense guide to policy. But famously, utilitarianism is incompatible with taking values like justice, fairness, and liberty as fundamental. I show that this way of interpreting coherence as unification — which I call “rich coherence” — is not only impossible to justify as correct, it also leads to bad moral reasoning. At its worst, it requires us to discard much of what we value most, for no good reason.

MA: Was it easy for philosophers in past centuries, living as they did in much more monolithic societies, to make ethical judgments in straightforward ways that cultural, religious and social diversity make difficult for philosophers today?

PM: Yes, I think so! But richly coherent theories are also surprisingly common among ethical theorists today. One of the things I found in writing this book is that there’s an interesting disconnect between ethical theory and ethics in practice. In ethical theory, it’s often thought that it’s important to have a unified view. One that, like utilitarianism, is based on a single principle, entailing a single set of right answers. In applied ethics — such as bioethics — practitioners are more likely to put forward a range of different considerations, such as benevolence, justice, and respect for autonomy, and then to acknowledge that the task of balancing these competing concerns is where the action is. From the applied point of view, this balancing requires judgment and often must proceed in an open-ended and flexible way. In the book I outline a theoretical approach that shows how these applied practitioners are absolutely right.

MA: Are most people’s beliefs, attitudes and understandings truly arrived at by the use of reason? If many of them are reached without much or any use of reason, does that explain why convictions are usually so hard to change?

PM: People are often struck by the particular bitterness and futility that seems to characterize a lot of public debate over moral issues. Some researchers — like the psychologist Jonathan Haidt — think that it’s like this because people in general are bad at moral reasoning: rather than having a thought-out position, they are basing their opinions mostly on gut reactions. But personally I’ve often noticed the opposite: how often people do come up with moral arguments, both in support of their own views and against those of others. In the abortion debate, for example, there’s no shortage of back-and-forth, and this back-and-forth frequently appeals to obviously moral matters, like the nature of personhood and the extent of autonomy rights.

I mentioned before that disagreements can happen because people interpret and prioritize values differently. In those kinds of cases, I believe it is possible for people’s different opinions to be based in different values in a basic and fundamental way.