ISAIAH BERLIN BY JOHN GRAY

I've posted about Isaiah Berlin several times (see some quotes here) but I've never gotten around to placing in relation to other liberal or Enlightenment thinkers. John Gray has done it for me (page 8):

The species of liberalism which Berlin's work embodies is a deeply distinctive and decidedly original one that is at odds both with the schools of liberal thought recently dominant in the Anglo-American world and with the older traditions of liberalism from which these newer developments spring. As it is-expressed in the work of Rawls and Dworkin, Hayek, Nozick, and Gauthier, all of recent liberalism turns on a conception of rational choice, whether Kantian or Million, Lockean or Hobbesian in content, from which liberal principles are supposedly derived. If, in J. S. Mill, liberal principles are adopted as rational strategies for the maximal promotion of general well-being — as devices for the maximization of utility — then in John Rawls, late as much as early, they are adopted as rational terms of cooperation among persons having no comprehensive conception of the good in common. In Berlin's agonistic liberalism, by contrast, the value of freedom derives from the limits of rational choice. Berlin's agonistic liberalism — his liberalism of conflict among inherently rivalrous goods — grounds itself on the radical choices we must make among incommensurables, not upon rational choice.

Gray later gives a great description of Berlin's ideas of values plurality, uncombinability and incommensurability (pages 43-44):

First, Berlin affirms that, within any morality or code of conduct such as ours, there will arise conflicts among the ultimate values of that morality, which neither theoretical nor practical reasoning about them can resolve. Within our own liberal morality, for example, liberty and equality, fairness and welfare are recognized as intrinsic goods. Berlin maintains that these goods often collide in practice, that they are inherently rivalrous by nature, and that their conflicts cannot be arbitrated by any overarching standard.

Secondly, each of these goods or values is internally complex and inherently pluralistic, containing conflicting elements, some of which are constitutive incommensurables. We have seen already how on Berlin's view liberty, even negative liberty, contains rivalrous and incommensurable liberties: examples may be The liberties of information and of privacy, which are often competitive and which may embody incommensurable values. The same is true of equality, which breaks down on analysis into rival equalities, such as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Such goods are not harmonious wholes but themselves arenas of conflict and incommensurability.

Thirdly, different cultural forms will generate different moralities and values, containing many overlapping features, no doubt, but also specifying different, and incommensurable, excellences, virtues and conceptions of the good. Or, to state this third aspect or implication of value-pluralism in another way: There are goods that have as their matrices social structures that are uncombinable; these goods, when they are incommensurables, are also constitutively uncombinable. This is the sort of incommensurability that applies to goods that are constitutive ingredients in whole ways or styles of life. This is the form of incomparability among values, cultural pluralism, that is most easily confused with moral relativism — the view that human values are always internal to particular cultural traditions and cannot be the objects of any sort of rational assessment or criticism. Berlin's value-pluralism embraces all three forms or levels of conflict in ethics in that he affirms that incommensurability breaks out in each of them.