The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

by Alison Gopnik

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued for “value pluralism,” contra both Mill and Kant. We have a multiplicity of diverse ethical values and those values are often simply incompatible. There is no way to measure or weigh them against one another, no single value that trumps the others. Justice or mercy, altruism or autonomy, what Yeats called “perfection of the life or of the work”—these values can’t simply be weighed in some single objective scale. They can’t be measured against each other in a way that reveals the single best thing to do. And yet often, in real life, we have to choose between them. Berlin thought this made human life inescapably tragic, and he was right. But it is also what makes it rich and deep. Caring for children fits Berlin’s picture better than Mill’s or Kant’s.