Paper's abstract

Daniel Weinstock, Wrong track: Does the Way Toward Political Plu-ralism Go Through Axiological Pluralism?
Some pluralist political philosophers assume that an acceptance of the thesis of value pluralism entails a rejection of autonomy-liberalism in favor of a form of liberalism based on the ideal of toleration. This assumption is mis-taken. First, value-pluralism shares with relativism the difficulty inherent in any attempt at deriving a normative conclusion from a descriptive thesis. An attempt at filling in the argument with missing bridging premises shows that value pluralism is more naturally connected with autonomy-liberalism than it is with a toleration-based liberalism. This is because individuals must pos-sess a capacity for autonomous choice in order for pluralism to have any rele-vance for them.

Key Words : autonomy, liberalism, toleration, relativism
t. 49 : 2005, p. 185-197