October 2007

I’ve been working on Berlin-style value pluralism lately. I’m particularly concerned with the attempt (made by Galston and Crowder, among others) to derive liberal political commitments from value pluralism. My sense is that value pluralism has no entailments regarding politics. But that’s a topic for another day. I’m writing here to try to get some help on the meaning of a comment by Bernard Williams frequently cited approvingly in the value pluralist literature.

In his introduction to Berlin’s *Concepts and Categories*, Williams claims that “if there are many and competing values, then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be single-valued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better.”

Maybe I’m just being thick-headed about this, but I don’t see how “more must mean better,” unless some common measure among values is presupposed; but value pluralists must deny that this kind of common measure exists (the lack of common measure in part explains the incommensurability among values and the unavailability of rational rank-orderings among them). So it seems to me that Williams’ “better” must not mean *morally* better. But if that’s the case, then I don’t see how Williams’ point is of much use to the value pluralist.

Am I missing a natural reading of Williams’ comment that’s both consistent with value pluralism and of use for making the case that value pluralism entails liberalism?

The US House Foreign Affairs Committee has just approved House Resolution 106 which acknowledges the Armenian Genocide of 1915.¹ President Bush, like President Clinton before him, is opposed to the resolution, given the expected Turkish reaction and the strategic links between the US and Turkey. It’s unclear to me what the short or long-term consequences of an official US acknowledgment of the genocide may be, but I find myself firmly behind the resolution, so much so that my intuitive sense is that opposition to it is just a disgrace, something beyond the pale of reasonable, principled politics. I admit, this is not something I feel like being open-minded about in the slightest.

But I don’t really know how I can defend that intuition philosophically, and I’m not sure if there has been much good philosophical literature on why genocide denial is a moral problem or on whether genocide acknowledgment is some sort of moral imperative. Generally, it’s been historians who have written about genocide denial and their moral conclusions have not been terribly nuanced. Denying the travesty is murdering the victims once again, it is sometimes claimed, and there endeth the metaphor.

So my question is two-fold: what exactly makes genocide denial morally problematic, if it is (and is there any good philosophical literature on this?); and what exactly makes genocide acknowledgment morally important, if it is (and is there any good philosophical literature on this?).

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1. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Harper Perennial, 2003; Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, Harper Perennial, 2004; Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Holt Paperbacks, 2007 [↩]

First, I want to thank Simon for starting this blog. I think its a great idea and suspect it will flourish.

Now, my first post:

I’ve long considered writing a paper about Waste and now have an extrinsically important reason to do so.

People have thought that Locke’s (first) proviso–the requirement that there must be “enough, and as good, left in common for others”–can’t be satisfied in the modern world. People seem to think Locke’s second (waste or spoilage) proviso–the requirement that we must “make use of” that which we want to claim as property “before it spoils”–is settled by the existence of a means of exchange (money) as it allows us to store value so that nothing need spoil.

I think this is backward. I think David Schmidtz has shown that the first proviso is easily settled (and far from limiting property, sometimes requires that we take property). I think the second proviso is too often ignored. Nozick only calls it a “further condition.” It seems to me that “waste” must be understood normatively. I’m not inclined to spend much time doing textual exegesis to determine what Locke meant by the term “spoilage” though that might be part of the project. More interesting to me is determining the best way to understand the term and, with that in place, the best way to understand the proviso. The next question would be: should we take the waste proviso as providing an inherent limit to property? I’m inclined to think we should (and to think there is a moral duty not to waste).

OK. There’s the project. Now the question: any suggestions for reading? I believe Jeremy Waldron was working on something like this at one point but I don’t recall anything in print. Any ideas? There is a recent piece in Locke Studies by Helga Varden¹ and a 1993 piece by Bernard Baumrin in the J of Social Philosophy,² but I haven’t found much else.

Comments and suggestions very much welcome!

1. Helga Varden, “Locke’s Waste Restriction and his Strong Voluntarism,” Locke Studies, vol. 6, 2006: 127-42 [↩]
2. Bernard Baumrin, “Waste,” Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 24, #3, Winter 1993: 5-18 [↩]