ABSTRACT
The relations of value-pluralism with liberal political morality exemplify starkly the apologetic character of recent political philosophy. In the Rawlsian school it has been taken for granted that value-pluralism and liberal ethics go together. Strong value-pluralism makes three related claims. The first is what might be called anti-reductionism about values. Second is called as non-harmony among values. Third is called as value-incommensurability. In Rawls, as in Nozick and Dworkin, liberal principles are meant to be sheltered from the kinds of conflict that can arise between ways of life partly constituted by incommensurable goods. Herbert Hart showed that Rawls's requirement that each person have the maximum liberty consistent with every other person having the same liberty was disabled by indeterminacy. Aristotle and J. S. Mill are in the central tradition of western ethical theory. They do not doubt that where good lives cannot be combined they can be ranked for the species and for its individual members in hierarchy of value.
