ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” is clearly set within a Cold War context. However, its framework of ideas is also applicable to a range of twenty-first century social and political issues. First, Berlin’s “inversion thesis” concerning liberty captures a salient pattern of thought in radical Islamism. Second, his understanding of the power of belonging and recognition bears significantly on the rise of authoritarian nationalism and populism. Third, his value pluralism implies a critique of global neoliberalism and support for (...) egalitarian liberalism or social democracy. Thus, Berlin’s framework provides us with a set of useful tools for understanding and responding to some of the most urgent political problems that trouble us now. But this framework has limitations and needs to be supplemented by thinking that goes beyond Berlin. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because of the irresolvable disagreement between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the U.S. Constitution both embodies value pluralism and has encouraged it ever since its adoption. Rather than ignoring the nation-centered, dynamic ideas of the Federalists or the state-centered, static ideas of the Anti-Federalists, the Constitution incorporated both views, giving rise to plentiful opportunities for interpretive disagreements that have not, however, stood in the way of the interpreters’ shared commitment to the document itself. In this respect, the Constitution and constitutional (...) law model the politics of pluralism. (shrink)

What does it mean to be irresponsible in developing or using a technology? There are two fundamentally different answers to this question and they each generate research strands that differ in scope, style and applicability. To capture this difference, I make use of two mythical creatures of Jewish origin that have been employed in the past to represent relationships between man and man-made entities: the Golem (Collins and Pinch, 2002, 2005 ) and the Leviathan (Hobbes, 1994 ). The Golem is (...) the traditional image of technology as a creature that can be helpful but needs to be controlled. Irresponsibility in this perspective is the failure to exercise control. The Leviathan is the image of technology as a difficult compromise between fundamental values. Irresponsibility is in this perspective is allowing some values to systematically dominate others. Having worked out the basics of these images, I show that each comes with its specific methodological challenges: where the Golem gives rise to the Collingridge Dilemma of control, the Leviathan gives rise to Münchhausen’s trilemma of justification. Since the Golem image is predominant in scholarship on irresponsibility, I conclude with an appeal for a more equal distribution of efforts in conceptualizing technologies as Golems and as Leviathans. (shrink)

The inclusion of stakeholders in science is one of the core ideas in the field of responsible innovation. Conspiracists, however, are not your garden-variety stakeholders. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the conflict between conspiracists and science is deep and intractable. In this paper, we ask how the game of responsible innovation can be played with those who believe that the game is rigged. Understanding the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation is necessary in order to understand the unvisited corners (...) of the science-society interface in the post-pandemic future. We claim that pluralism, already part of the philosophical background that spurred responsible innovation, can offer insights into how conspiracism can be approached. As a case in point, we develop these insights starting from the policy on conspiracism developed in 2021 by the European Commission. We show that the ideal of inclusion can only be extended to conspiracists by accepting a pluralist framework, and we explain this pluralist response. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism remains attractive because of its compelling account of tragic loss. The expectation and recognition of tragic loss can alert us to, and help guard us against, the fanaticism, the distortion of values, and the self-deception that may result from even the most well-meaning and good-faith pursuit of political ideals.

ABSTRACT Returning to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” offers a defense of liberal democracy that can help us come to terms with its limits, as well as the implicit tradeoffs that are an inescapable feature of politics in a liberal democracy. While critics of Berlin are right to note his neglect of Enlightenment constitutionalism, his skeptical liberalism is illuminated by comparative constitutional law, where we see how different constitutional regimes balance different values—such as democracy, liberty, and equality—in different ways (...) that are attuned to the particulars of place and history that both Berlin and critics of liberalism insist are so important. (shrink)

Overview of the main issues about value pluralism.

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin makes two brief references to John Milton in the essay he strategically titled “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life.” The references establish a contrast between Milton and Mill by associating Milton with moral monism and Mill with its opposite, value pluralism. Yet a careful reading of Milton’s Areopagitica, cited dismissively in the essay, reveals the inadequacy of Berlin’s intellectual-historical account of the two concepts, which he presents as fully distinct and diametrically opposed. Although still heuristically (...) valuable, Berlin’s account warrants historiographic revision and refinement, as his treatments of both Milton and Mill make apparent. (shrink)