Those conditions include, but are not limited to, civility, equality, freedom, a healthy environment, justice, order, peace, prosperity, rights, security, toleration, and welfare. Conservatives, unlike liberals or socialists, are sensitive to the fragility of political arrangements conducive to good lives, and look to history for lessons on how to nourish and protect them. Each component is an Aristotelian mean between two rejected alternatives. Take skepticism first. In a century torn by rationalist and irrationalist political experiments that exacted an incalculable toll in human suffering, a skeptical attitude toward political arrangements, anyway is surely a reasonable one if we care at all about human well being.
Pluralism is the second component of conservative political morality.
Kekes is indebted to Isaiah Berlin, the political philosopher who returned repeatedly to the problem posed by the incommensurability of human goods. Kekes agrees, and sees pluralism as a via media between absolutism and relativism. Pluralists, Kekes suggests, are more sensibly awake to the variety of political arrangements, conditions, traditions, and conceptions of the good life that human nature legitimately allows. But they are aware, too, that that variety isn t infinite, and that a society that abets prostitution or venality isn t a decent one. Conservatives are traditionalists, Kekes avers.