Sideways at the Entrance of the Cave
Alessandro Ferrara
Abstract
The idea of a “true” account of pluralism is ultimately contradictory. Liberal political philosophers often fell prey to a special version of this fallacy by presupposing that there might be only one correct argument for justifying the acceptance of pluralism as the core of a liberal-democratic polity. Avoiding this trap, Rawls’s “political liberalism” has offered a more sophisticated view of reasonable pluralism as linked with the “burdens of judgment”. His philosophical agenda, however, left some questions underexplored: What is the relation of pluralism to relativism? How can a conception of pluralism (epistemic, moral and political) avoid being either one view among others with no special claim to truth or a foundationalist claim? If pluralism is a fact, in what sense can it bind us? These questions – crucial for grasping the distinctiveness of “political” liberalism – are addressed by revisiting Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to make it accommodate the groundbreaking Rawlsian notion of the “reasonable”.