ABSTRACT
Isaiah Berlinian liberalism lacks the resources to mount any decisive objection to a liberal culture being overrun by non-liberal alternatives. Mainstream rationalism exaggerates the power of reason to classify and arrange the moral universe, Berlin thinks, thereby distorts and obscures a genuine rationalism, which recognises the true limits of reason and makes room for agonising moral choices that lack rational justification. Rational indeterminacy becomes of no more than passing interest since there is no reason for it to persist if the directives of the competing values can be reasonably ranked in any situation. The force of tragic pluralism extends even within liberalism's citadel: 'It goes all the way down', as John Gray puts it, 'right down into principles of justice and rights'. Like Gray, Charles Larmor, Crowder and others, believe that it is more typical of Berlin to claim that conflicts of incommensurable values cannot be rationally resolved, in which case the Berlin-Williams piece must be regarded as anomalous.
