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Week of 12 November 1999 Vol. III, No. 14 Feature Article Templeton Lecture Galston to address moral pluralism, political singularity By Eric McHenry William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton, remembers lively White House discussions of pesticide regulation. Every participant's number one concern, he says, was growth. The trouble was, the term meant something different to every participant. Representatives of agribusiness were worried about the growth of crops. Environmentalists were concerned with the growth of other flora and fauna potentially affected by pesticides. Economic advisors cared about economic growth. Foreign policy advisors were focused on the growing trade deficit. As deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, Galston was in charge of interagency groups that worked to hammer out coherent positions on issues like pesticide control. In such settings, with so many valid and competing interests at the same table, he couldn't help but begin thinking deeply about moral pluralism. He'll flesh out his recent thoughts on the subject November 16, when he delivers the year's first Templeton Lecture on Freedom, Markets, and Economic Justice. Administered by BU's Institute on Race and Social Division (IRSD), the lecture series brings four prominent social critics to the University each year. As its rubric suggests, the program, like the Templeton seminar it supplements, was created to examine the relationship between freedom, in political and economic terms, and progress toward a more just society. "I'm more of a moral pluralist now than I was before I spent two and a half years in government," says Galston, whose lecture is entitled Negative Liberty, Moral Pluralism, and the Case for Liberal Democracy. "I had the experience over and over again of sitting at a table and having people from different agencies, departments, interest groups, what have you, advancing arguments that could not be easily dismissed, but that represented what seemed to me to be legitimate moral points of view. "It struck me that all of their arguments were important, up to a point," he says. "And the question was, what was that point? How can you bring it all together, recognizing the heterogeneity of the arguments? You can't organize it around a common unit of measure -- dollars, utility, anything of that sort. The coordination has to be qualitative, rather than quantitative. It was these experiences that helped confirm me in my view that this could be a fruitful way of looking at politics generally." Galston, currently director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland, says he will gesture in his speech to the work of Isaiah Berlin, the late British political philosopher. Berlin wrote seminally on the subjects of negative liberty -- the freedom, in a civil society, to be left alone -- and moral pluralism. William Galston "Now pluralism is not the same thing as relativism," Galston says. "Berlin believed, of course, that there is a significant distinction between good and evil. But once one has made that distinction, there are plural goods in the moral universe. And they're qualitatively different. They can't be reduced to one another. So there are lots of different ways of configuring lives that are rationally and morally defensible." What political systems and institutions, then, can best preserve freedom while accommodating moral pluralism? Contemporary thought, Galston says, is divided on the question. Some students of Berlin hold that moral pluralism lends itself to a sort of political pluralism, a "pluralism of legitimate regimes." Other thinkers, Galston included, argue that it leads to "a singular political outcome" -- thus, the "Case for Liberal Democracy" in his lecture. According to Glenn Loury, UNI professor, CAS professor of economics, and director of IRSD, Galston is an ideal Templeton lecturer because of his parallel accomplishments in theoretical and practical spheres. "He combines a rigorous and sophisticated philosophical mind with experience in practical politics and public policy formulation," Loury says. "Also, he's been thinking a good deal about the question of values -- for example with respect to family issues: the stability of the American family, the changes in family life over time, rising out-of-wedlock birth, rising divorce, and so forth. He's thinking about how such questions can be effectively discussed in a pluralistic democracy, where not everybody is on the same page of the hymnal." Political philosopher and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, social and political scholar Charles Tilly, and 1998 Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen will round out the 1999-2000 lecture series, which is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Private support for IRSD nearly quadrupled in the 1998-99 academic year, its second year of existence, with grants totaling $1,174,500. These included a commitment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of over half a million dollars, which will underwrite research on diversity and opportunity in higher education. Such investments of confidence, Loury says, are tremendously satisfying. "I think that we are being recognized as a high-quality operation," he says, "with a vision that is pertinent to contemporary concerns in both the domestic and international arenas." William Galston will give his Templeton Lecture at 6 p.m. Tuesday, November 16, in CAS 211. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about the Institute on Race and Social Division, visit www.bu.edu/irsd.