ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 investigates conceptual connections between value pluralism and two further ideas, namely democracy and compromise. The starting point is a link between pluralism and democracy that associates multiple voices with multiple values. The addition of liberal rights prevents minority voices from being ignored or suppressed. But might there be a pluralist case for insisting that democracy be not merely liberal but ‘deliberative’? I argue that the best pluralist view sees deliberation as supplementing rather than replacing the more orthodox liberal model. A second theme of the chapter is compromise. I consider the nature of compromise in general from a pluralist perspective before going on to discuss the typology of compromise presented by Bellamy and the modus vivendi theory of John Gray. These approaches raise the question of limits. On this point, Gray appeals to the idea of a universal minimum morality, but this takes us back to the great goods and their limitations, discussed in Chapter 2. Margalit asserts that there is a class of ‘rotten compromises’ that should never be entered into, but again it remains unclear how these should be defined. Compromise, in short, needs the framework provided by the conceptual norms identified earlier.
