Pluralism

Pluralism and Context

Discourse on pluralism often falls under contextual couplets such as cultural pluralism, democratic pluralism, religious pluralism, moral pluralism, and other social, political, or feminist frameworks. Issues within these frameworks have sometimes been considered through binary opposites that identify the tensions inherent in living among and with other human beings. These oppositions include diversity and homogeneity, disunity and unity, and difference and similitude. Pluralism emphasizes the hallmarks of a postmodern structure that includes diversity, multiplicity, and difference.

Cultural pluralism emerged from different and opposing perspectives that privileged dominance, exploitation, and hegemony. Cultural pluralists embrace and respect differencethey do not intend acculturation or assimilation; rather, their aim is for pragmatic and moral engagement between groups of difference to be able to continue and coexist with respect and harmony.

Democratic pluralism, or pluralistic democracy, is a form in which there are descriptive and prescriptive models of pluralism; laissez-faire pluralism is a self-correcting system that provides for competing political agents and bargaining among various interest groups; corporate pluralism describes a system in which monopoly cannot emerge, but there is still a controlling power that is outside of any self-correcting system; and public pluralism is a prescriptive model of pluralism because it is reform oriented and invites and regulates interplay of competing interests in society. Religious or theological pluralism has been interpreted as polytheism, and moral pluralism refers to a plurality of ethical systems that engage interpretive interplay of right and wrong. A broader [Page 583]and cosmological way to think about pluralism includes the idea that it recognizes there is more than one principle at play in the universe.

Beyond the contextual aspects of pluralism, philosophers distinguish between substantival pluralism and attributive pluralism. Substantival pluralists offers a perspective that suggests the world contains numerous things that are incapable of being reduced or transformed into other conditions or to other things. Conversely, the multiplicity in attributive pluralism does not reside in the thing or substance as in the case of substantival pluralism but instead refers to the diversity of attributes and characteristic features that make up the things to be distinct and separate from another. In other words, attributive pluralists find the nature of the pluralism in its properties, but substantival pluralists find the nature of pluralism in the-thing-itself and not dependent upon the properties of the thing.

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