John Kekes argues that the present moral and political uncertainties are due to a deep change in our society from a dogmatic to a pluralistic view of values.
Dogmatism is committed to there being only one justifiable system of values.
Pluralism recognizes many such systems, and yet it avoids a chaotic relativism according to which all values are in the end arbitrary. Maintaining that good lives must be reasonable, but denying that they must conform to one true pattern, Kekes develops and justifies a pluralistic account of good lives and values, and works out its political, moral, and personal implications. He painstakingly analyzes the radicality of moral conflict, which cannot be masked by resort to facile monisms. Further, he carefully sketches a reasonable approach to the practical resolution of value conflicts in the individual and the political orders. . . .