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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Critical Review
Frank H. Knight and Ethical Pluralism
By Richard Boyd
Abstract
For Frank Knight, the fact that we are free to engage in economic pursuits brings out what is both best and worst in human nature. The same competitive economy that liberates individuals to choose their own desired ends also provides them with socially undesirable wants and fosters habits potentially at odds with the demands of liberal democracy. Given Knight's desire both to defend human liberty and his concession that liberty is likely to be abused, his version of liberalism must of necessity be anticonsequentialist. Paradoxically, Knight's philosophical pluralism - his insistence that there are any number of incommensurable perspectives on the good or just society - underlies both his criticism of the "ethical" possibilities of the competitive order and his defense of human liberty against the dangers of social planning.