Pluralism?

[nimble]

I'm not sure if this is covered elsewhere in this forum, I haven't been on here lately. Anyway, I was curious what the Objectivist stance on moral pluralism (NOT relativism) is.

My thoughts were that rationality is fundamental in Objectivist ethics, and that rational action is action with concern to a goal. Whatever said goal may be, once it is established to be moral, if there are multiple courses of action to get to said goal, then you'd have rational means to a moral end. Because there are two or more rational means to said moral end, is it not that both actions are good, and if so, isn't that pluralism rather than absolutism?

Thanks

Chris

[DavidOdden]

Is moral pluralism the position that there can be two justificationally-equivalent claimants to the moral choices in some circumstance? If so, I don't see how it could be denied. It may well be that there is never more than one "actually better" choice, but reason is based on the known, i.e. you cannot integrate things that you don't know and cannot hierarchically rank two principle whose relative importance you have not previously considered. Of course you can always insist that a person find out those facts and discover that detail of his value hierarchy, but sometime you have to act rather than wait for a miracle.

Is moral pluralism the position that there can be two justificationally-equivalent claimants to the moral choices in some circumstance? If so, I don't see how it could be denied. It may well be that there is never more than one "actually better" choice, but reason is based on the known, i.e. you cannot integrate things that you don't know and cannot hierarchically rank two principle whose relative importance you have not previously considered. Of course you can always insist that a person find out those facts and discover that detail of his value hierarchy, but sometime you have to act rather than wait for a miracle.

[nimble]

Moral pluralism only states that there are multiple ways to be moral in some circumstances. It differs from relativism in that it says that there ARE moral actions that are objectively good and bad.

So you think that it might be fair to say Objectivism is morally pluralistic. I suppose I didn't have to really post this question, because now that I think about it, Objectivism definitely isn't absolutist, because it states that context matters. And it obviously isn't relativistic, and pluralism is all that is left as far as I know.

Thank you