Political thought michael rosen pdf free download

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If so, how does it do so? If not, how else might the piece begin? Is it stated directly? If not, should it be? Are they accurately quoted, and have any changes and omissions been indicated with brackets and ellipses? Does each part relate to the thesis? If so, are they clearly labeled with captions? If you did not create them yourself, have you cited your sources?

Where might they need more information or guidance? What does it leave readers thinking? How else might the text end? Does it announce your topic and give some sense of what you have to say? Start with global whole-text issues, and gradually move to smaller, sentence-level details. Set deadlines that will give you plenty of time to work on your revision.

Try to get some distance. If you can, step away from your writing for a while and think about something else. Does each paragraph contribute to your main point?

Does your beginning introduce your topic and provide any necessary contextual information? Does your ending provide a satisfying conclusion? Make sure that all your key ideas are fully explained. If you add evidence, make sure that it all supports your point and includes any needed documentation. You may find it helpful to outline your draft to see all the parts readily. Look closely at your title to be sure it gives a sense of what your text is about. The following guidelines can help you check the paragraphs, sentences, and words in your drafts.

Does every sentence in the paragraph relate to that point? Does each one follow smoothly from the one before it? Do you need to add transitions? How else might you begin? How else might you conclude? Sometimes these words help introduce a topic, but often they make a text vague. For example, do you need to replace verbs like be or do with more specific verbs?

Your writing will almost always be better without such predictable expressions. Proofreading This is the final stage of the writing process, the point when you check for misspelled words, mixed-up fonts, missing pages, and so on.

Use your finger or a pencil as a pointer. Ask someone else to read your text. Here are some guidelines for collaborating successfully. This is especially important when collaborating online.

Without tone of voice, facial expressions, and other body language, your words carry all the weight. Remember also that what you write may be forwarded to others. Group members may not all have access to the same equipment and software. Name files carefully. Appoint one person as timekeeper and another person as group leader; a third member should keep a record of the discussion and write a summary afterward.

Here one writer recalls when he first understood what a paragraph does. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. It offers tips and examples for composing strong paragraphs. There is, of course, nothing naturally abhorrent in the human impulse to dwell in marketplaces or the urge to buy, sell, and trade.

Rural Americans traditionally looked forward to the excitement and sensuality of market day; Native Americans traveled long distances to barter and trade at sprawling, festive encampments.

In Persian bazaars and in the ancient Greek agoras the very soul of the community was preserved and could be seen, felt, heard, and smelled as it might be nowhere else.

Often, but not always, you might start a paragraph with a topic sentence, as in this example from an essay about legalizing the sale of human kidneys. Dialysis is harsh, expensive, and, worst of all, only temporary. Acting as an artificial kidney, dialysis mechanically filters the blood of a patient. It works, but not well. With treatment sessions lasting three hours, several times a week, those dependent on dialysis are, in a sense, shackled to a machine for the rest of their lives.

Adding excessive stress to the body, dialysis causes patients to feel increasingly faint and tired, usually keeping them from work and other normal activities. See how this strategy works in another paragraph in the essay about kidneys. In a legal kidney transplant, everybody gains except the donor. The doctors and nurses are paid for the operation, the patient receives a new kidney, but the donor receives nothing. Sure, the donor will have the warm, uplifting feeling associated with helping a fellow human being, but this is not enough reward for most people to part with a piece of themselves.

In an ideal world, the average person would be altruistic enough to donate a kidney with nothing expected in return. The real world, however, is run by money. We pay men for donating sperm, and we pay women for donating ova, yet we expect others to give away an entire organ with no compensation.

If the sale of organs were allowed, people would have a greater incentive to help save the life of a stranger. I came to the United States in at age 3 with my family and immediately stopped speaking Spanish.

Whether or not you announce the main point in a topic sentence, be sure that every sentence in a paragraph relates to that point. Edit out any sentences that stray off topic, such as those crossed out below. Previous generations of immigrants were encouraged to speak only English. When someone poses a question to her in Spanish, she often has to respond in English.

In other instances, she tries to speak Spanish but falters over the past and future tenses. Situations like these embarrass Barrientos and make her feel left out of a community she wants to be part of. Native Guatemalans who are bilingual do not have such problems.

Analyzing cause and effect. The following paragraph about air turbulence identifies some of its causes. A variety of factors can cause turbulence, which is essentially a disturbance in the movement of air.

See how two social scientists use classification to explain the ways that various types of social network websites SNSs make user profiles visible. The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default, profiles on Friendster and Tribe.

Alternatively, LinkedIn controls what a viewer might see based on whether she or he has a paid account. Structural variations around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other. See how the following paragraph divides the concept of pressure into four kinds. I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and selfinduced pressure.

But there are no villains; only victims. One is to shift back and forth between each item point by point, as in this paragraph contrasting the attention given to a football team and to academic teams. The football players enjoyed the attentions of an enthralled school, complete with banners, assemblies, and even video announcements in their honor, a virtual barrage of praise and downright deification.

As for the three champion academic teams, they received a combined total of around ten minutes of recognition, tacked onto the beginning of a sports assembly. After all, why should they? See how this approach works in the following example, which contrasts photographs of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton on the opening day of the baseball season. The next day photos of the Clintons in action appeared in newspapers around the country.

The one of Bill Clinton showed him wearing an Indians cap and warm-up jacket. The President, throwing lefty, had turned his shoulders sideways to the plate in preparation for delivery. He was bringing the ball forward from behind his head in a clean-looking throwing action as the photo was snapped. In preparation for her throw she was standing directly facing the plate.

A right-hander, she had the elbow of her throwing arm pointed out in front of her. Her forearm was tilted back, toward her shoulder. The ball rested on her upturned palm. As the picture was taken, she was in the middle of an action that can only be described as throwing like a girl.

See how one writer uses analogy to explain the way DNA encodes genetic information. Although the complexity of cells, tissues, and whole organisms is breathtaking, the way in which the basic DNA instructions are written is astonishingly simple. Like more familiar instruction systems such as language, numbers, or computer binary code, what matters is not so much the symbols themselves but the order in which they appear.

In exactly the same way the order of the four chemical symbols in DNA embodies the message. The following paragraph provides brief definitions of three tropical fruits. I walked onto a patio speckled with dark stains, as if the heavens had been spitting down on it.

I looked up; there were the two trees responsible. One was a lollipop mango tree. The other was a nispero tree. Beyond the patio, I saw a mammee tree, which bears large, football-shaped fruit.

Here a paragraph weaves together details of background, appearance, and speech to create a vivid impression of Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. His father was a gas driller drilling for natural gas in the coalfields , his older brother was a gas driller, and he would have been a gas driller had he not enlisted in the Army Air Force in at the age of eighteen. In , at twenty, he became a flight officer, i. Even in the tumult of the war Yeager was somewhat puzzling to a lot of other pilots.

What was puzzling was the way Yeager talked. He seemed to talk with some older forms of English elocution, syntax, and conjugation that had been preserved uphollow in the Appalachians. Cookbooks explain many processes step-by-step, as in this explanation of how to pit a mango.

The simplest method for pitting a mango is to hold it horizontally, then cut it in two lengthwise, slightly off-center, so the knife just misses the pit. Repeat the cut on the other side so a thin layer of flesh remains around the flat pit.

Holding a half, flesh-side up, in the palm of your hand, slash the flesh into a lattice, cutting down to, but not through, the peel. Carefully push the center of the peel upward with your thumbs to turn it inside out, opening the cuts of the flesh. Then cut the mango cubes from the peel. One such incident that has stayed with me, though I recognize it as a minor offense, happened on the day of my first public poetry reading.

It took place in Miami in a boat-restaurant where we were having lunch before the event. I was nervous and excited as I walked in with my notebook in my hand. An older woman motioned me to her table. Thinking foolish me that she wanted me to autograph a copy of my brand-new slender volume of verse, I went over. She ordered a cup of coffee from me, assuming that I was the waitress. Easy enough to mistake my poems for menus, I suppose. We shook hands at the end of the reading, and I never saw her again.

She has probably forgotten the whole thing but maybe not. Illustrating a point with one or more examples is a common way to develop a paragraph, like the following one, which uses lyrics as examples to make a point about the similarities between two types of music.

On a happier note, both rap and [country-and-western] feature strong female voices as well. Repetition, parallelism, and transitions are three strategies for making paragraphs flow. One way to help readers follow your train of thought is to repeat key words and phrases, as well as pronouns referring to those key words.

Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring.

Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs. Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. And wonderful films are still being made. The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection.

The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. Yolanda, the third of the four girls, became a schoolteacher but not on purpose. For years after graduate school, she wrote down poet under profession in questionnaires and income tax forms, and later amended it to writer-slash-teacher.

Today the used-book market is exceedingly well organized and efficient. Campus bookstores buy back not only the books that will be used at their university the next semester but also those that will not. Those that are no longer on their lists of required books they resell to national wholesalers, which in turn sell them to college bookstores on campuses where they will be required.

This means that even if a text is being adopted for the first time at a particular college, there is almost certain to be an ample supply of used copies. But while a brief, one- or two-sentence paragraph can be used to set off an idea you want to emphasize, too many short paragraphs can make your writing choppy. Opening paragraphs. In the following opening paragraph, the writer begins with a generalization about academic architecture, then ends with a specific thesis stating what the rest of the essay will argue.

Academic architecture invariably projects an identity about campus and community to building users and to the world beyond. Yet in other cases, the architectural language established in surrounding precedents may be more appropriate, even for high-tech facilities. The bottom line is that drastically reducing both crime rates and the number of people behind bars is technically feasible. Whether it is politically and organizationally feasible to achieve this remains an open question.

Sometimes you can rely on established design conventions: in academic writing, there are specific guidelines for headings, margins, and line spacing. No matter what your text includes, its design will influence how your audience responds to it and therefore how well it achieves your purpose.

To keep readers oriented as they browse multipage documents or websites, use design elements consistently. In a print academic essay, choose a single font for your main text and use boldface or italics for headings.

In writing for the web, place navigation buttons and other major elements in the same place on every page. Keep it simple. Resist the temptation to fill pages with unnecessary graphics or animations. Aim for balance. Create balance through the use of margins, images, headings, and spacing. Use color and contrast carefully. Academic readers usually expect black text on a white background, with perhaps one other color for headings.

Make sure your audience will be able to distinguish any color variations in your text well enough to grasp your meaning.

Use available templates. To save time and simplify design decisions, take advantage of templates. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can customize font, spacing, indents, and other features that will automatically be applied to your document. Websites that host personal webpages and presentation software also offer templates that you can use or modify. The following guidelines will help you make those decisions. The fonts you choose will affect how well readers can read your text.

Decorative fonts such as should be used sparingly. If you use more than one font, use each one consistently: one for headings, one for captions, one for the main body of your text. Every common font has regular, bold, and italic forms. Layout is the way text is arranged on a page. An academic essay, for example, will usually have a title centered at the top and one-inch margins all around. Items such as lists, tables, headings, and images should be arranged consistently.

Line spacing. In general, indent paragraphs five spaces when your text is double-spaced; either indent or skip a line between paragraphs that are single-spaced. When preparing a text intended for online use, single-space your document, skip a line between paragraphs, and begin each paragraph flush left no indent. Use a list format for information that you want to set off and make easily accessible. Number the items when the sequence matters in instructions, for example ; use bullets when the order is not important.

Set off lists with an extra line of space above and below, and add extra space between the items on a list if necessary for legibility. White space and margins. To make your text attractive and readable, use white space to separate its various parts.

In general, use one-inch margins for the text of an essay or report. Headings make the structure of a text easier to follow and help readers find specific information. Whenever you include headings, you need to decide how to phrase them, what fonts to use, and where to position them. Phrase headings consistently. Make your headings succinct and parallel in structure.

Whatever form you decide on, use it consistently. Make headings visible. Position headings appropriately. If you are not following a prescribed format, you get to decide where to position the headings: centered, flush with the left margin, or even alongside the text, in a wide lefthand margin.

Position each level of head consistently. In print documents, you can often use photos, charts, graphs, and diagrams.

Online or in spoken presentations, your options expand to include video and printed handouts. A discussion of Google Glass might be clearer when accompanied by this photo. Tables are useful for displaying numerical information concisely, especially when several items are being compared. Presenting information in columns and rows permits readers to find data and identify relationships among the items. Pie charts can be used to show how a whole is divided into parts or how parts of a whole relate to one another.

Percentages in a pie chart should always add up to Plotting the lines together enables readers to compare the data at different points in time. Be sure to label the x and y axes and limit the number of lines to four at the most. Some software offers 3-D and other special effects, but simple graphs are often easier to read. Diagrams and flowcharts are ways of showing relationships and processes. This diagram shows how carbon moves between the Earth and its atmosphere. Flowcharts can be made by using widely available templates; diagrams, on the other hand, can range from simple drawings to works of art.

Avoid clip art. Position images as close as possible to the relevant discussion. Italian Economic Growth Rate, — If you use data to create a graph or chart, include source information directly below. Large files may be hard to upload without altering quality and can clog email inboxes. Linking also allows readers to see the original context. To include your own video, upload it to YouTube; choose the Private setting to limit access. Be sure to represent the original content accurately, and provide relevant information about the source.

Whatever the occasion, you need to make your points clear and memorable. This chapter offers guidelines to help you prepare and deliver effective presentations. Spoken texts need a clear organization so that your audience can follow you. The beginning needs to engage their interest, make clear what you will talk about, and perhaps forecast the central points of your talk. The ending should leave your audience something to remember, think about, or do. In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln follows a chronological structure.

A tone to suit the occasion. In a presentation to a panel of professors, you probably would want to avoid too much slang and speak in complete sentences. Slides and other media. Organize and draft your presentation. If in drafting you find you have too many points for the time available, leave out the less important ones. Thank your listeners, and offer to take questions and comments if the format allows. Consider whether to use visuals. Remember, though, that visuals should be a means of conveying information, not mere decoration.

You then offer only a brief introduction and answer questions. What visual tools if any you decide to use is partly determined by how your presentation will be delivered: face to face? You may also have to move furniture or the screen to make sure everyone can see your visuals. Finally, have a backup plan. Computers fail; the internet may not work. Have an alternative in case of problems. Presentation software. Here are some tips for writing and designing slides. Use slides to emphasize your main points, not to reproduce your talk.

A list of brief points, presented one by one, reinforces your words; charts and images can provide additional information that the audience can take in quickly. On slides, sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are easier to read than serif fonts like Times New Roman. Your text and illustrations need to contrast with the background. Dark content on a light background is easier to see and read than the reverse. Decorative backgrounds, letters that fade in and out or dance across the screen, and sound effects can be more distracting than helpful; use them only if they help to make your point.

Indicate in your notes each place where you need to advance to the next slide. Label handouts with your name and the date and title of the presentation. Furthermore, given the place of moral evaluation in ordinary human thought and speech, an account couched in morally neutral terms will fail accurately to reflect the experience or self-perception of the historical actors in question.

He therefore insisted that the historian must attend to the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical events. Finally, his concern with the conflicts of his own day led him to concentrate mainly on modern intellectual history, and to trace the emergence of certain ideas that he regarded as particularly important, for good or ill, in the contemporary world.

This created a tension within Enlightenment thought between the view that nature dictates human ends, and the view that nature provides more or less neutral material, to be moulded rationally and benevolently ultimately the same thing by conscious human interventions — education, legislation, rewards and punishment, the whole apparatus of society.

Berlin saw the school or schools of thought that began to emerge shortly before the French Revolution, and became ascendant during and after it, as profoundly antagonistic towards the Enlightenment.

Berlin has been viewed both as an adherent of the Enlightenment who showed a fascination, whether eccentric or admirable, with its critics; and as a critic and even opponent of the Enlightenment, who frankly admired its enemies.

But he also believed that they were wrong, and sometimes dangerously so, about some of the most important questions of society, morality and politics. He regarded their psychological and historical vision as shallow, excessively uniform, and naive; and he traced to the Enlightenment a technocratic, managerial view of human beings and political problems to which he was profoundly opposed, and which, in the late s and early s, he regarded as one of the gravest dangers facing the world.

He attacked or dismissed their metaphysical beliefs, particularly the philosophies of history of Hegel and his successors. He was also wary of the aesthetic approach to politics that many Romantics had practised and fostered. Romanticism rebelled in particular against the constricting order imposed by reason, and championed the human will.

Berlin was sympathetic to this stance, but also believed that the Romantics had gone too far both in their protests and in their celebrations.

Berlin did not set out a systematic theory about the nature of values, and so his view must be gleaned from his writings on the history of ideas. His remarks on the status and origins of values are ambiguous, though not necessarily irreconcilable with one another. Rather, they are human creations, and derive their authority from this fact.

From this followed a theory of ethics according to which individual human beings are the most morally valuable things, so that the worth of ideals and actions should be judged in relation to the meanings and impact they have for and on such individuals. At other times Berlin seems to advance what amounts almost to a theory of natural law, albeit in minimalist, empirical dress.

In such cases he suggests that there are certain unvarying features of human beings, as they have been constituted throughout recorded history, that make certain values important, or even necessary, to them. Values, then, would be beliefs about what it is good to be and do — about what sort of life, what sort of character, what sort of actions, what state of being it is desirable, given human nature, for us to aspire to.

In an attempt to reconcile these two strands, one might say that, for Berlin, the values that humans create are rooted in the nature of the beings who pursue them. But this is simply to move the question back a step, for the question then immediately arises: Is this human nature natural and fixed, or created and altered over time through conscious or unconscious human action?

He rejects the idea of a fixed, fully specified human nature, regarding natural essences with suspicion. Yet he does believe however under-theorised, unsystematic and undogmatic this belief may be in boundaries to, and requirements made by, human nature as we know it.

This common human nature may not be fully specifiable in terms of a list of unvarying characteristics; but, while many characteristics may vary from individual to individual or culture to culture, there is a limit on the variation — just as the human face may vary greatly from person to person in many of its properties, while remaining recognisably human, but at the same time it is possible to distinguish between a human and a non-human face, even if the difference between them cannot be reduced to a formula.

There is a related ambiguity about whether values are objective or subjective. Yet it is unclear what exactly he meant by this, or how this belief relates to his view of values as human creations. There are at least two accounts of the objectivity of values that can be plausibly attributed to Berlin. These views are not incompatible with one another, but they are distinct; and the latter provides a firmer basis for the minimal moral universalism that Berlin espoused.

Finally, Berlin insisted that each value is binding on human beings by virtue of its own claims, in its own terms, and not in terms of some other value or goal, let alone the same value in all cases. His definition of monism may be summarised as follows:. We have seen that Berlin denied that the first two of these assumptions are true.

In his ethical pluralism he pushed these denials further, and added a forceful denial of the third assumption. They may — and often do — come into conflict with one another. When two or more values clash, it is not because one or another has been misunderstood; nor can it be said, a priori, that any one value is always more important than another.

Liberty can conflict with equality or with public order; mercy with justice; love with impartiality and fairness; social and moral commitment with the disinterested pursuit of truth or beauty the latter two values, contra Keats, may themselves be incompatible ; knowledge with happiness; spontaneity and free-spiritedness with dependability and responsibility.

Berlin further asserted that values may be not only incompatible, but incommensurable. There has been considerable controversy over what he meant by this, and whether his understanding of incommensurability was either correct or coherent.

Thus one basic implication of pluralism for ethics is the view that a quantitative approach to ethical questions such as that envisaged by Utilitarianism is impossible. In addition to denying the existence of a common currency for comparison, or a governing principle such as the utility principle , value incommensurability holds that there is no general procedure for resolving value conflicts — there is not, for example, a lexical priority rule that is, no value always has priority over another.

Yet he also held that the doctrine of pluralism reflected logically necessary rather than contingent truths about the nature of human moral life and the values that are its ingredients. The idea of a perfect whole or ultimate solution is not only unattainable in practice, but also conceptually incoherent.

To avert or overcome conflicts between values once and for all would require the transformation, which amounted to the abandonment, of those values themselves. It is not clear that this logical point adds anything significant to the empirical point about human ends recorded in the last quotation, but we do not pursue this doubt here.

One of these, discussed below, was liberalism. Another was humanism — the view that human beings are of primary importance, and that avoiding harm to human beings is the first moral priority Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet ; Cherniss and Hardy Philosophy itself cannot tell us how to do this, though it can help by bringing to light the problem of moral conflict and all of its implications, and by weeding out false solutions.

Pluralism holds that, in many cases, there is no single right answer. Berlin also made a larger argument about making choices. Pluralism involves conflicts, and thus choices, not only between particular values in individual cases, but between ways of life. While Berlin seems to suggest that individuals have certain inherent traits — an individual nature, or character, which cannot be wholly altered or obscured — he also insisted that they make decisions about who they will be and what they will do.

Choice is thus both an expression of an individual personality, and part of what makes that personality; it is essential to the human self. Berlin provided his own inconsistent and somewhat peculiar genealogies of pluralism. He found the first rebellion against monism either in Machiavelli , 7—9 or in Vico and Herder a, 8—11 , who were also decisive figures in the first account.

Other scholars have credited other figures in the history of philosophy, such as Aristotle, with pluralism Nussbaum , Evans In Germany, Dilthey came close to pluralism, and Max Weber presented a dramatic, forceful picture of the tragic conflict between incommensurable values, belief systems and ways of life Weber , esp.

Weber , esp. Brogan This essay, drawing on Aristotle, and focusing on literary and cultural criticism rather than philosophy proper, made the case for epistemological and methodological, rather than ethical, pluralism.

Berlin criticised the belief in, and search for, a single method or theory, which could serve as a master key for understanding all experience. He insisted that, on the contrary, different standards, values and methods of enquiry are appropriate for different activities, disciplines and facets of life. In this can be seen the seeds of his later work on the differences between the sciences and the humanities, of his attacks on systematic explanatory schemes, and of his value pluralism; but all these ideas had yet to be developed or applied.

Berlin was further nudged towards pluralism by discovering what he saw as a suggestion by Nicolas Malebranche that simplicity and goodness are incompatible , e. Berlin referred to pluralism and monism as basic, conflicting attitudes to life in Berlin et al. But his use of the term and his explication of the concept did not fully come together, it appears, until Two Concepts of Liberty ; even then, his articulation of pluralism is incomplete in the first draft of the essay.

Late in his life, taking stock of his career, and trying to communicate what he felt to be his most important philosophical insights, Berlin increasingly devoted himself to the explicit articulation and refinement of pluralism as an ethical theory.

One problem that has bedevilled the debate is a persistent failure to define the terms at issue with adequate clarity and precision. Pluralism, of course, has been the subject of repeated definition by Berlin and others the repetition not always serving a clarifying purpose. Whether pluralism can be distinguished from relativism depends largely on how relativism is defined, as well as on how certain obscure or controversial components of pluralism are treated.

It should also be noted that the question of whether values are plural is logically distinct from the question of whether they are objective, despite the frequent elision of the two topics in the literature on this subject.

One way of defining relativism is as a form of subjectivism or moral irrationalism. This is how Berlin defined it in his attempts to refute the charge of relativism brought against his pluralism. This view rests on a belief in a basic, minimum, universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief have taken across time and place. Berlin seems to have believed in such a faculty, and linked it to empathy, but did not develop this view in his writings.

Yet another way of defining relativism is to view it as holding that things have value only relative to particular situations or outlooks; nothing is intrinsically good — that is, valuable in and for itself. A slightly different way of putting this would be to maintain that there are no such things as values that are always valid; values are valid to different degrees in different circumstances, but not others.

For instance, liberty may be a leading value in one place at one time, but has a much lower status as a value at another. Berlin admitted that liberty, for instance, had historically been upheld as a pre-eminent ideal only by a minority of human beings; yet he still held it to be a genuine value for all human beings, everywhere, because of the way that human beings are constituted, and, so far as we know, will continue to be constituted. Hollis , 36 , and by denying that the competing values may be, and often are, binding on all people.

This is not a position that Berlin explicitly advances; but his later writings suggest a sympathy for it. But Berlin did hold that, as an empirical matter, most individuals do make decisions about how to balance, reconcile, or choose between competing values in light of their existing general commitments and visions of life, which are shaped though not completely determined by cultural tradition and context.

Liberty may be a genuine, and important, good for human beings in general; but how human beings decide to promote or actualise liberty in relation to a whole web of other values will differ between different societies. The claim that values are objective in being founded on or expressions of and limited by certain realities of human nature would seem to provide a defence against relativism, in holding that there is an underlying, shared human nature which makes at least some values non-relative.

The argument that values are objective simply because they are pursued by human beings may seem to allow for relativism, if it makes the validity of values dependent on nothing but human preferences, and allows any values actually pursued by human beings and, therefore, any practices adopted in pursuing those values to claim validity.

One can make a three-way distinction, between weak incommensurability, moderate incommensurability and radical incommensurability. Weak incommensurability is the view that values cannot be ranked quantitatively, but can be arranged in a qualitative hierarchy that applies consistently in all cases. Berlin goes further than this, but it is not clear whether he presents a moderate or a radical version of incommensurability. This view is certainly consistent with all that Berlin wrote from the s onwards.

Berlin does sometimes offer more starkly dramatic accounts of incommensurability, which make it hard to rule out the more radical interpretation of the concept, according to which incommensurability is more or less synonymous with incomparability. But plumping need not be a disembodied, inexplicable act: it can draw, albeit subconsciously, on a hinterland of moral understanding rooted in the moral experience of the plumper and in his cultural tradition. A related question concerns the role of reason in moral deliberation.

If values are incommensurable, must all choices between conflicting values be ultimately subjective or irrational? If so, how does pluralism differ from radical relativism and subjectivism? However, the personal blogs are limited to viewers with MSU accounts. Google Sites has a well-developed set of tools, and its ease of use make it a great option for hosting.

Paid Options:. Migration is essentially a copy-paste function, and LAMP Stack works with genuine domain names such as mysite. This option is not recommended for websites that cannot experience downtime, as the LAMP stack may experience occasional outages. Student Computer Requirement.