David Enoch on Certainty and Compromise

That point is that uh I draw a rather sharp distinction between the underlying values and principles. As I said, we're committed to those and don't lose our confidence just because some people are racists or made chauvinists or whatever, right? We don't we don't go for a kind of relativism where no, no, we know what we stand for. On the other hand, there's the stage of doing politics. And I'm fully a pragmatist at that stage.

So I think at that stage what you should do is you should be practically and politically wise and you should get the best liberal deal, as it were, that is available in the circumstances. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. What is the best way for philosophical liberals to stand up for their values in complicated political circumstances? Are there real moral truths?

Or do those who have a more morally relativistic position, those who say, for example, that it would be wrong for us to complain about the treatment of women by the Taliban, since that's a different culture we should respect, right or wrong. In what way should we think about pragmatic considerations when standing up for values, of whose truths, of whose importance, we are convinced, in actual political battle? Those are the questions that one of the most distinguished moral philosophers of our age has been asking himself for the last years. His name is David Enoch.

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