Cowen views pluralism as “a core moral intuition”.
When assessing value Cowen considers the following frameworks:
- Time (present value vs. future)
- Aggregation (conflicting individual needs)
- Rules (structure and order to operate by)
- Radical Uncertainty (how can we know what is good or valuable with so much uncertainty about long run consequences)
- Rights (human)
- Common Sense morality
He rests on two “philosophical moves”:
- Economic production is good.
- Future humans should be more important to us than they are typically treated when assessing value
Pluralism
Pluralism is the belief that there is not one consistent means, in fact there are many, of approaching truths about the world. Life has many complicated values and no single one trumps the other(Cowen 2018).