Sharing a Conception of Justice, Sharing a Conception of the Good

In this chapter, I explore the distinction between pluralism as a peculiarly liberal concept and pluralism among cultural and linguistic communities, analyzing the potential conflict between justice and cultures. As two opposing views, liberalism and cultural pluralism disagree about the source and the nature of our obligations. For liberals, obligations are on the one hand required for the sake of collective interest, but on the other hand, as we might be tempted to not live up to them when they run against our private interests or good, obligations can be seen as burdens: Their distribution is important to us. Since contemporary societies are characterized by the fact that people do not share all of their interests and have different conceptions of the good and different values, grounding obligations on a shared conception of the good is unrealistic and might be obtained only by way of oppression. According to cultural pluralists, however, different societies may have different ways to ground obligations and different justified obligations. I argue that distinguishing our judgments about how individuals act under institutions we don’t belong to from judgments about the institutions themselves, we can grasp the appealing insight of cultural pluralism, by reaching a more convincing view of liberalism.