2015 Theses Doctoral

Genuine Value Pluralism and the Foundations of Liberalism

Berger, Mark Nicholas

My dissertation articulates and defends a vision of liberal political theory grounded in genuine value pluralism. Value pluralism, I argue, is best understood as a thesis about the nature of values, not as an observation about the diversity of evaluative beliefs that individuals hold. It should be understood as the claim that values themselves are plural and not all mutually realizable in a single life. Accepting this account of value pluralism offers significant challenges to traditional liberal political theories. However, value pluralism also has wide-ranging, and often surprising, advantages in explaining key tenets of liberal political theory. My dissertation explains the significant advantages of genuine value pluralism while responding to the most pressing challenges it poses.