How to Respond to Conficts Over Value Pluralism? Peter Jonkers Tilburg University Abstract Tis paper starts with arguing that the main reason why value pluralism has become confictual is that it challenges people’s socio-cultural identity. Te next section gives a summary of recent sociological research on socio-cultural tensions and conficts in the Netherlands and Europe. Tey are closely linked to “globalization issues,” such as cosmopolitism, immigration, and cultural integration. Tis shows that the prediction of the modernization theory, according to which substantial socio-cultural values would be replaced by a universalist, procedural ethics, has not come true. Te third section discusses the philosophical reasons of the potentially confictual character of today’s value pluralism: the fragility of socio-cultural identity, the spread of the culture of expressive individualism and the ethics of authenticity, and the infuence of the (politics of) recognition of socio-cultural diferences. Te fourth section discusses two philosophical responses to the confictual character of value pluralism. First, there is Taylor’s plea for a broadening of our socio-cultural horizon and a transformation of our common standards of (value-)judgments, based on his idea of a fusion of cultural horizons. In spite of its obvious merits, Taylor underestimates the degree of cultural distance that characterizes many instances of value pluralism. Second, there is an idea of cultural hospitality, which is an application of Ricoeur’s idea of linguistic hospitality to the cultural sphere. It is more modest than Taylor’s proposal, since it recognizes the unbridgeable gap that separates diferent cultures and their values. Another even more modest suggestion to diminish the confictual character of value pluralism is the virtue of tolerance, which combines the idea that I have good reasons for my value attachments with the recognition that my values are not the completion of the ideal of human existence. Keywords Charles Taylor; cultural hospitality; European value study; fusion of cultural horizons; Paul Ricoeur; socio-cultural identity; tolerance; value-pluralism © 2019 Peter Jonkers, published by Sciendo. Tis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics Volume 13 Issue 2  DOI 10.2478/jnmlp-2019-0013 * Peter Jonkers, Tilburg University, School of Catholic Teology, Nieuwegracht 61, 3512 LG Utrecht, the Netherlands; p.h.a.i.jonkers@tilburguniversity.edu. Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 17.10.19 17:40 UTC