ABSTRACT
The thought of Isaiah Berlin raises ‘the problem of value pluralism’: if, as Berlin supposes, fundamental values are incommensurable and there is no general rule for ranking them, then how do we choose between them when they conflict? Berlin advances various answers to this question but only briefly and unsystematically. The task of following through on these suggestions has been taken up by other writers, and it is the work of these ‘successors’ of Berlin that will be my central concern. I shall be especially interested in three broad approaches to the problem. These focus respectively on ‘the great goods’, or universal values; contextualism, in several different dimensions; and conceptualism, in which guidance is obtained by reflection on the concept of pluralism itself. I argue that conceptualism is the most fruitful of these responses, although it must be qualified by historical context in particular.
