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People and groups are different. It’s not just that I like vanilla ice cream and you like chocolate; we also have different conceptions of value and different ideas about the good life.
As philosopher John Rawls wrote in Political Liberalism,
The fact of reasonable pluralism is not an unfortunate condition of human life, as we might say of pluralism as such, allowing for doctrines that are not only irrational but mad and aggressive. In framing a political conception of justice so it can gain an overlapping consensus, we are not bending it to existing unreason, but to the fact of reasonable pluralism, itself the outcome of the free exercise of free human reason under conditions of liberty.
Whatever you think about Rawls’s work, it’s hard to disagree with the fact of pluralism and reasonable pluralism. In other words, a) we’re all different, and b) we can hold different comprehensive doctrines—and these can compete. Rawl’s mistake was to offer a universal theory of justice when what we need is a thousand experiments.
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