This book offers a critical survey of the origins of liberalism. It challenges the widely-held belief among philosophers that liberalism developed in opposition to religion. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation, it illustrates how Christian thinkers reinterpreted Christianity and used a set of biblical presuppositions from their reinterpretations to develop the first liberal ideas, starting a process that culminates in the birth of the first systematic liberal political philosophy in the writings of a Christian philosopher, John Locke. -/- Foreworded (...) by Michael A. Gillespie, the author of The Theological Origins of Modernity, this book explains how the Protestant Reformation, covenant theology, anti-trinitarianism, and medieval Christian natural law theories formed the foundations of liberalism. Thus, the main argument of this book is that liberalism is better understood as a socio-political project of theistic rationalism, a radical reinterpretation of Christianity that emerged in the post-Reformation and early modern period. (shrink)

After so much scholarship has been devoted to the dispute between the defenders and critics of liberalism, it is reasonable to ask whether the topic has been exhausted or, at the very least, if the rival and incommensurable options have been so thoroughly defined that one simply has to pick a side. John Christman's new book, The Politics of Persons, demonstrates that this intuition is flawed. The central concern of this compelling work is to outline an alternative conception of (...) autonomy that incorporates a wide range of insights provided by the critics of liberalism. What emerges is not only a plausible philosophical compromise but also a politically relevant model for understanding how the policies and .. (shrink)

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of (...) political coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

The contemporary epoch has confronted our country with the problem of choosing its path of development and at the same time has placed the problem of liberalism at the center of political discussions. But at first glance there would not seem to be a problem here: since liberal principles played a decisive role in the genesis of Western society and form the basis of the modern world order, it would seem that we should accept these principles, which have passed (...) the fundamental test of history, without any reflection. However, such a straightforward answer leaves out of account two essential factors. The first of these is the specific nature of the Russian "mentality," the Russian public mind or, put more broadly, the specific nature of the whole of Russian social life. The fact that the idea of a "special way" for Russia is being actively exploited by various political movements with an overtly expressed nationalist shading should not blind us to the need for a profound and sober interpretation of what this idea really means. It is no accident that the assertion that Russia's historical development has a special character has been a commonplace in all currents of Russian social life. Even the ideologues of an extremely "Westernizing" bent accompanied their acceptance of the necessity of Russia's adopting a system of values traditional for Europe with a sharp criticism of Western European civilization itself . It turned out that, after adopting these values, Russia was to demonstrate to the West itself the true path of development, the true purport of the latter's intellectual achievements, which had been discredited by the realities of Western civilization. The difference between the "Westernizers" and the Slavophiles in this regard lay merely in their disparate understanding of the essence of Russia's "uniqueness" and in the disparate criteria they had chosen for assessing it; but neither current called into question this "uniqueness" itself. (shrink)

Liberal political philosophers have underestimated the philosophical relevance of historical injustice. For some groups, injustices from the past—particularly surrounding race, ethnicity, or religion—are a source of entrenched social inequality decades or even hundreds of years later. Rawls does not advocate the importance of redressing historical injustice, yet political liberalism needs a principle of historical redress. Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity, which is designed to prevent the leveraging of class privilege, could be paired with a supporting principle of (...) historical redress that would contend with partiality and bias in open access to positions. (shrink)

In The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara seeks a philosophical breakthrough from what looks like it could be a pending dead-end for democracy. The best hope, Ferrara superbly maintains, lies through an extension or updating – a “renewal,” as he calls it – of lines of thought bequeathed to us, by John Rawls and others, under the name of political liberalism. Somewhere near the crux of Ferrara’s reflection stands a class of institutional (...) fixtures whose name is missing from his title. I mean the class “constitution.” I use that word to name a country’s scriptural basic law, its publicly cognizable corpus of canonically worded sentences ordaining the country’s basic institutional framework. My suggestion will be that it is no less tellingly a “constitutional” than a “democratic” horizon that Ferrara’s work, in conjunction with Rawls’s, shows us to be facing. (shrink)

The perspectives of the dominant Western ethical theories, have dominated the concepts of autonomy and informed consent for many years. Recently this dominant understanding has been challenged by ethics of care which, although, also emanates from the West presents a more nuanced concept: relational autonomy, which is more faithful to our human experience. By paying particular attention to relational autonomy, particularity and Process approach to ethical deliberations in ethics of care, this paper seeks to construct a concept of informed consent (...) from the perspective of ethics of care which is here called relational autonomy-in-informed consent. Thus, providing a broader theoretical basis for informed consent beyond the usual theoretical perspectives that are particularly Western. Care ethics provides such a broader basis because it appeals to a global perspective that encompasses lessons from other cultures, and this will help to enrich the current ideas of bioethics principles of autonomy and informed consent. This objective will be achieved by exploring the ethics of care emphasis on relationships based on a universal experience of caring; and by contrasting its concept of autonomy as relational with the understanding of autonomy in the approaches of the dominant moral theories that reflect rational, individualistic, and rights-oriented autonomy of the American liberalism. (shrink)

This book argues that justice often governs apologies. Drawing on examples from literature, politics, and current events, Cohen presents a theory of apology as corrective offers. Many leading accounts of apology say much about what apologies do and why they are important. They stop short of exploring whether and how justice governs apologies. Cohen argues that corrective justice may require apologies as offers of reparation. Individuals, corporations, and states may then have rights or duties regarding apology. Exercising rights to apology (...) or fulfilling duties to provide them are ways of holding one another mutually accountable. By casting rights and duties of apology as justifiable to free and equal persons, the book advances conversations about how liberalism may respond to historic injustice. Apologies and Moral Repair will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in ethics, political philosophy, and social philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines the criticisms that Chicherin directed at the classical Western liberalism that emerged from the works of John Locke, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach, and Jean-Jacque...

Introduction to the symposium on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Rawls's Political Liberalism, including overviews of the contributions to the special issue.

The article analyzes the ideological support of the life cycle of the industrial education system. The dynamics of such a system in time is estimated, as well as the influence of ideology on the formation of the information education system at the beginning of the XXI century. The life cycle of education is considered as a multi-stage process, which is characterized by both unpredictable changes in its properties and the presence of predictable parameters. The development of the education system is (...) mediated by the division of social labor and is limited in time and space by the properties of the “social organism” of a particular civilization. The life cycle of the industrial education system consists of four stages: origin ; growth ; maturity ; decline. At the stage of origin, dominated predominantly the religious-state form of ideology, which was spontaneous in origin, did not have a formalized ideologeme and was initiated from religious consciousness, as well as theological philosophy, cultivated a matrix of religious values. At this stage the state, although it participated in the management of human behavior, was in secondary roles and performed the corresponding functions with the help of violence. At the stage of growth, ideology received a theoretical basis, corresponding social movements also appeared, the most powerful of which were liberalism and Marxism, formed two ideologically opposite social systems: capitalist and socialist. At the stage of maturity, ideology brought social systems to the plane of technocratism, which happened as a result of maximizing the role of science and rationality. Because of this, other ways of producing socially significant ideas were blocked, that is, their sources such as art, theater, cinema, religion, etc. At the stage of decline, the ideology of radical rationalism found itself in the horizon of the ideas of multiculturalism. Since powerful migratory movements of the population arose on the territory of the African, European and American continents, these processes naturally raised the question of new cross-cultural social structures, as well as the modernization of systems of modern general and vocational education. (shrink)

This book posits that a sustainable future is possible without abandoning Capitalism. In its present form as Consumer Capitalism, the organization of the global economy is clearly unsustainable. But Capitalism is a malleable concept that has assumed a variety of forms since the 17th Century, and it can be altered as needed. In Part I of this book, Wayne Henry sets out an economic model for a sustainable form of Capitalism, referred to in the literature as Natural Capitalism. In Part (...) II, he abandons exposition in favour of rigorous philosophical analysis and critiques the older but still dominant narrative that underlies Classical Liberalism. The narrative will be reconstructed with great care and analyzed to understand why it has been so powerful and enduring, and, of course, why it is no longer appropriate for our present circumstances. In Part III, he investigates Classical Liberalism and globalized capitalism, the economic system it licenses, from a normative perspective. Finally, in the conclusion, Henry draws the threads of the discussion together in a way that emphasizes the differences between the two narratives, Classical Liberalism on the one hand, and the contemporary version of Progressive Liberalism that nurtures and supports Natural Capitalism on the other. This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars and curious laypersons interested in a clear and interdisciplinary presentation of the issues arising out of climate change, including corporate governance, social and environmental policy, declining social capital and the capacity of democratic institutions to deal effectively with sustainability. It will be particularly relevant for students and instructors of philosophy, history, economics, political science, social policy and environmental sociology. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Rawls's signature is the thought experiment he introduced to sort out the requirements of justice. Rawls argues that “justice as fairness” will be a form of political liberalism. Rawls claims that under free institutions we should expect “profound and irreconcilable differences” in people's religious and philosophical worldviews, and in people's basic notions of what makes life worth living. In his vision of democracy, the solidarity required to support common political values and egalitarian norms of distributive justice must be built (...) through productive and fair social cooperation. Social solidarity is needed to support democratic equality, and this solidarity must be built through the mutual production and reciprocal sharing of the fruits of social cooperation. Constraining socioeconomic inequality is an essential aspect of a just scheme of social cooperation and a necessary basis for securing a mutual commitment to the rights, liberties, and opportunities that give democracy its substance and meaning. (shrink)

One of the central debates amongst U. S. constitutional theorists for more than a generation has been between (conservative) ‘originalists’ arguing that, in interpreting and applying the Constitution, judges are duty bound to adhere to the original understandings at the time of the Constitution’s adoption and (liberal/progressive) ‘living constitutionalists’ arguing rather that, when appropriate, judges should read the Constitution in light of contemporary needs and moral aspirations. While acknowledging the significance and legitimacy of the originalist call for fidelity to history (...) and newly incorporating elements of their arguments into his theory, Fleming, in Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution, re-affirms moral aspirationalism as the ultimate foundation of the interpretive project. I argue here, as against Fleming, that the opposition that he (and other American constitutional theorists) have drawn between originalism’s historicism and living constitutionalism’s moral aspirationalism is a false binary – the contingent product of a developmental succession of political battles between American conservatives and progressive/liberals over the course of the twentieth century. I argue here, contra Fleming, that in both theory and practice, in the U. S. at least, history and moral aspiration are and have always been inextricably intertwined —inseparable— and that, going forward, U. S. constitutional historians and theorists would do better by forthrightly acknowledging and accounting for this fact, and dynamic. (shrink)

In his dissection of the 1998 tobacco settlements, W. Kip Viscusi provides a window on how the ostensibly liberal public philosophy behind the modern American regulatory state betrays its foundational commitments. Animated by a moralizing concern with preventing harm to self, and a leftist antagonism towards corporate capitalism, “progressive liberalism” at first foundered in its war against the tobacco industry in the face of traditional liberal counterarguments about individual autonomy, knowledge of risk, and choice. Only when progressive liberals translated (...) their paternalist impulses into science‐centered arguments about ignorance and addiction, which involve barriers to autonomous choice and harm to others, did they succeed in turning the legal and regulatory tide against smoking. This dynamic raises questions about the future of individual autonomy in a science‐centered, progressive‐liberal modern polity. (shrink)

André Comte-Sponville is a French philosopher-essayist, pondering the problems of morality and life wisdom. He develops the conception of ego-philosophy that is the theory based on the analysis of the subjective existential human experience. As an initial evidence of consciousness and a point of support for philosophical reasoning, he cites feelings of anxiety, despair and suffering. Ego possesses being, it is a subjective reality that is revealed to a man as a result of free and creative perception of the world. (...) This knowledge is always unique, situational, not amenable to formalization and unification, because it is a result of a personal relation of man to the absolute. Ego-philosophy is not a traditional scientific discipline, summarizing specific facts and formulating theories. Ego-philosophy expresses itself in a generally accessible language and appeals to all mankind. This is an art of life wisdom, indicating to the individual a path to true ideals, allowing one to gain dignity and happiness, to free oneself from temptations and passions. Comte-Sponville substantiates the ethical theory that, under the conditions of the crisis of traditional ideas about moral norms, a person must strive to fill the emptiness of the world with his own creative energy, give meaning to life, affirm positive values. The philosopher creates a theory of virtues in which he takes the leading role in sublime love (agape) as the apotheosis of generosity and mercy. In the area of politics, Comte-Sponville adheres to the position of socio-liberalism. Recognizing the economic efficiency of market relations and the principle of freedom action, the philosopher believes that the logic of economic activity does not coincide with socially important tasks and ethical values. In order for society to develop harmoniously, it is necessary to create a welfare state and reliable political institutions that ensure the observance of the principles of humanism, high culture and justice. (shrink)

The recently manifested public interest in the ideas of liberalism is quite understandable: the liberal model of the country's development is totally in consonance with the situation our society is currently experiencing. The experience of social change accumulated over the past few years confirms the permanent value of many of the principles of liberalism for overcoming the profound crisis being experienced by Russia.

Are you familiar with Michael Sandel’s work?Yes I am. In the nineties I read several books on communitarianism, including Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.What do you think of communitarianism?I discussed communitarianism in my books Five Essays from 1999 and, especially, Historical Ontology more than ten years ago. My thoughts have not changed since then. Simply put, I think communitarianism is the product of developed countries with long traditions of liberalism. It has referential value, (...) but if directly or indiscriminately adopted in other societies it can be quite dangerous.In recent years Sandel has become very... (shrink)

Li Zehou is perhaps best known among Western audiences for his work on aesthetics. This is mainly due to the fact that translations of his writings available in English are mostly limited to his aesthetics.1 The content of A Response to Michael Sandel and Other Matters differs greatly from these previous translations. Published in Chinese in 2014, it is one of Li’s most recent books, and in it he discusses several main points of the systematic philosophical outlook he has developed (...) over recent decades, and places them in relation to Western liberalism. A Response thus aims far beyond responding to Michael Sandel’s views on justice and morality as presented in the... (shrink)

[Samuel Scheffler] Some egalitarian liberals have proposed a division of moral labour between social institutions and individual agents, but the division-of-labour metaphor has been understood in different ways. This paper aims to disentangle some of these different understandings, with an eye to clarifying the appeal of the egalitarian-liberal project and the challenges that it faces. The idea of a division of moral labour is best understood as the expression of a strategy for accommodating diverse values. It is not an apology (...) for economic self-interest or a device for justifying personal acquisitiveness. /// [Véronique Munoz-Dardé] Are there distinctively political values? Certain egalitarians seem to think that equality is one such value. Scheffler's contribution to the symposium seeks to articulate a division of moral labour between norms of personal morality and the principles of justice that regulate social institutions, and using this suggests that the egalitarian critique of Rawls can be deflected. In this paper, instead, I question the status of equality as an intrinsic value. I argue that an egalitarianism which focuses on the status of equality as valuable in itself embraces a theory of value with the worst elements of utilitarianism while leaving behind any of the intuitive appeal that utilitarianism has. In its place I press that we need a political conception of egalitarianism which stresses the role we engage beyond those found in the norms of personal morality. (shrink)

Praca zawiera pogłębioną analizę dwóch ważnych, powiązanych ze sobą doktryn – utylitaryzmu i liberalizmu. Ich powstanie i rozwój zbiega się z historią uprzemysłowionego świata Zachodu. XIX wiek to bez wątpienia okres pełnego rozkwitu liberalizmu w jego klasycznej postaci. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) jest kluczową postacią w historii obydwu doktryn. Jego dialog z utylitaryzmem ma w tle współczesne dylematy i takież interpretacje.

Książka ta jest poświęcona analizie filozofii politycznej Johna Deweya osadzonej w kontekście kryzysu liberalizmu po pierwszej wojnie światowej. Jedną z dróg wyjścia z impasu, w jakim znalazła się myśl liberalna, był radykalny liberalizm reprezentowany przez takich intelektualistów, jak John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Karl Polanyi i Karl Mannheim. Wymienieni myśliciele upatrywali szans na odrodzenie liberalizmu w odrzuceniu koncepcji wolnorynkowych i dialogu z myślą socjalistyczną. W pracy przedstawiono zręby ideologii radykalnego liberalizmu oraz stosunek lewicowych liberałów do innych ideologii, w szczególności zaś do (...) liberalizmu ekonomicznego i rewolucyjnego marksizmu. Osobny rozdział pracy poświęcony jest refleksji Johna Deweya na temat demokracji, która należy do najoryginalniejszych osiągnięć amerykańskiego filozofa. Przedstawiona interpretacja uwypukla związki myśli Johna Deweya z radykalizmem Nowej Lewicy oraz twórczością takich teoretyków, jak C. W. Mills Axell Honneth czy James Bohman. Drugim ważnym obszarem podejmowanych w pracy rozważań jest rekonstrukcja Deweyowskiej koncepcji myślenia jako rozwiązywania problemów. Pragmatyzm utrzymuje, że możliwe jest znalezienie mniej lub bardziej obiektywnych odpowiedzi na pytanie, co należy robić w danej problematycznej sytuacji. „Pragmatyczne oświecenie”, by posłużyć się terminem Hilarego Putnama, wyrzeka się oświeceniowego uniwersalizmu, ale nie rezygnuje całkowicie z roszczeń do obiektywności w dziedzinie rozstrzygnięć moralnych i politycznych. (shrink)

For liberal contractarians, moral and political principles are justified if agreeable to persons as free and equals. But for critics of liberal contractarianism, this justification applies only to those capable of agreement. Understanding why contractarianism suffers from the problem of exclusion helps up understand the distinctive character of contractarianism and the importance of agreement in particular. I suggest contractarianism need not be objectionably exclusive. I first consider why agreement is important in contractarianism, and then introduce the main versions of contemporary (...) contractarianism and their different understandings of agreement. I discuss how agreement results in exclusion in each, and distinguish two kinds of response to the problem of exclusion: differential inclusion and permissive inclusion. Differential inclusion is unsuccessful because it offers those not fully capable of agreement unequal status. Permissive inclusion may either make the circumstances of agreement more open, or characterize the capacities required for inclusion more permissively. I advocate the latter as the most promising response to the problem of exclusion. I outline a more inclusive contractualism based on the capacity to share goals. (shrink)

Can a liberal state exclude illiberal immigrants in order to preserve its liberal status? Hrishikesh Joshi has argued that liberalism cannot require a commitment to open borders because this would entail that liberalism is committed to its own demise in circumstances in which many illiberal immigrants aim to immigrate into a liberal society. I argue that liberalism is committed to its own demise in certain circumstances, but that this is not as bad as it may appear. (...) class='Hi'>Liberalism’s commitment to its own demise is merely a reflection of the fact that it must take into account the rights of outsiders, not just the rights of existing citizens, and of the fact that circumstances of injustice can sometimes leave liberal societies with no correct choice. (shrink)

Current understanding of Mill as a founding father of liberalism is a Cold War creation. Discarding this conception opens the way to a general reassessment of his thought: who was the historical Mill? He did not define himself as liberal and there is no simple template. Most obviously he is a pluralist, defined by a plural heritage received through his father. This framework permitted great creativity in political and social theory, but it was diffuse. The one clear unifying theme (...) is a unique conception of a hierarchy of intellect founded on the inexorable accumulation of positive knowledge. The one important exception to this is political economy. What stands out overall is his individuality, where Mill embodies his own ideal. So apart from political economy, where he could be identified in more conventional terms, his nineteenth-century legacy was personal and incalculably diffusive rather than doctrinaire. This left it ripe for twentieth-century re-invention. (shrink)

This is a book about the harms of oppression, and about addressing these harms using the resources of liberalism and Kantianism. Its central thesis is that people who are oppressed are bound by the duty of self-respect to resist their own oppression. In it, I defend certain core ideals of the liberal tradition—specifically, the fundamental importance of autonomy and rationality, the intrinsic and inalienable dignity of the individual, and the duty of self-respect—making the case that these ideals are pivotal (...) in both understanding and counteracting oppression. I argue that if we take these ideals seriously then it follows that people who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression. (shrink)

Introduction [Nancy L. Rosenblum] I. Varieties of Liberalism Today 1. The Liberalism of Fear [Judith N. Shklar] 2. Humanist Liberalism [Susan Moller Okin] 3. Liberal Democracy and the Costs of Consent [Benjamin R. Barber] II. Education and the Moral Life 4. Undemocratic Education [Amy Gutmann] 5. Civic Education in the Liberal State [William Galston] III. Moral Conflict 6. Class Conflict and Constitutionalism in J. S. Mill’s Thought [Richard Ashcraft] 7. Making Sense of Moral Conflict [Steven Lukes] 8. (...) Liberal Dialogue Versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation [Seyla Benhabib] IV. Repairing Individualist and Communitarian Failings 9. Cross-Purposes: The Liberal--Communitarian Debate [Charles Taylor] 10. Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights [George Kateb] 11. Pluralism and Self-Defense [Nancy L. Rosenblum] 12. The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought [Stephen Holmes]. (shrink)

Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals’ commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can accommodate (...) two feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties. (shrink)

One of political liberalism’s central commitments is to a principle of public reason. Political liberals frequently justify this principle by appeal to considerations of respect. In this article, I argue that political liberalism cannot be grounded in a moral principle of respect for persons. Instead, I argue that a particular interpretation of the principle of public reason can be justified as a key component of a political conception of mutual civic respect.

Today, liberals face a predicament: how to defend liberal principles, when adherence to them seems to constitute a fatal disadvantage against unprincipled opponents. The challenge is not new. In the early years of the twentieth century, liberalism was attacked, by critics on both the right and, especially, the left for being hypocritical, naïve, irresponsible, and impotent. It couldn't, for example (anti-liberalists thought), address the acute inequality of imperial rule, racial segregation, and socio-economic poverty. These issues of social justice it (...) was claimed by critics required a politics marked by an uncompromising commitment to ultimate ends, and an unrelenting use of power. Faced with such sentiments and the practical successes of anti-liberal ideologies (i.e. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) liberals felt pressure to silence their scruples and doubts, and embrace the confidence, ruthlessness, and intransigence exhibited by their opponents. But doing so seemed tantamount to abandoning liberal hopes for, and commitments to, human freedom and all they valued in the first place. In Liberalism for Dark Times, Cherniss tells the story of the liberal response to this challenge in the twentieth century. Through a close study of five leading intellectuals engaged in these debates-Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin-Cherniss reconstructs a distinctive, neglected strand of liberal thought. This strand defines and defends liberalism as a political ethos: a complex of dispositions, temperament, and sensibility and style-which include skepticism; openness to experience; and careful, discriminating judgment-that shape how individuals make choices, meet challenges, understand and pursue possibilities, and conduct themselves toward others in the course of political struggle. In reconstructing the history of, what he calls, a tempered liberalism, and formulating it as a distinctive political perspective, Cherniss offers an alternative to the prevalent ways of thinking about both, liberalism's history and the intellectual resources available to it today. (shrink)

How sexuality should be regulated in a liberal political community is an important, controversial theoretical and empirical question—as shown by the recent criminalization of possession of some adult pornography in the United Kingdom. Supporters of criminalization argue that Mill, often considered a staunch opponent of censorship, would support prohibition due to his feminist commitments. I argue that this account underestimates the strengths of the Millian account of private conduct and free expression, and the consistency of Millian anticensorship with feminist values. (...) A Millian contextual defense of liberty, however, suggests several other policy approaches to addressing the harms of pornography. (shrink)

Some claim that liberalism’s neutrality toward the Good encourages anomie, thereby disallowing social confirmation of beliefs, leaving the individual with an uncertainty about judgments that is opposed to confidence and self-respect. This is the “anomie challenge.” I begin by discussing toleration and neutrality and motivating the problem. I then look at responses to the challenge by liberal pluralists and liberalism’s critics. After dismissing both, I argue that the right to choose is the good to be advocated and that (...) it allows for supportive, but voluntary, social structures. I conclude that liberalism better supports self-respect than the alternatives. (shrink)

I argue that a gendered division of labor is often the result of choices by women that count as fully voluntary because they are an expression of preferences and commitments that reflect women's understanding of their own good. Since liberalism has a commitment to respecting fully voluntary choices, it has a commitment to respecting these gendered choices. I suggest that justified political action may require that we fail to respect some people's considered choices.

Rawlsian political liberalism famously requires a prohibition on truth. This has led to the charge that liberalism embraces non-cognitivism, according to which political claims have the moral status of emotions or expressions of preference. This result would render liberalism a non-starter for liberatory politics, a conclusion that political liberals themselves disavow. This conflict between what liberalism claims and what liberalism does has led critics to charge that the theory is disingenuous and functions as political ideology. (...) In this paper, I explore one way that this charge unfolds: critics charge that liberalism utilizes an individualistic and identity-insensitive social ontology, which in turn yields epistemic deficiencies that render it incapable of detecting oppression. The theory’s claim to freestandingness then shields it from necessary critique. I argue that this objection relies on constructing a conflict between liberalism’s professed non-cognitivism and its actual cognitivist commitments. By demonstrating that Rawlsian political liberalism explicitly endorses substantive moral truths, and that the method of avoidance applies only to public justification for coercive state action, I show that the theory is openly and foundationally cognitivist, and thus that the charge of disingenuousness does not stick. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

A liberalism which scorns all individualism is fundamentally misguided. This is the chief thesis of this paper. To argue for it, I look closely at some key concepts. The concepts of morislity and individualism are crucial. I emphasize Dewey on the "individuality of the mind" and a Deweyan discussion of language, communication, and community. The thesis links individualism and liberalism, and since appeals to liberalism have broader appeal in the present context of discussions, I start with consideration (...) of liberalism. The aim is to dispute overly restrictive conceptions and explore a broader perspective. To bring the argument to a close, attention turns first to Dewey on value inquiry, to Dewey's "democratic individualism" (cf. Dewey 1939, 179), and to the concept of moral community. Disputing the acquisitiveness of utilitarian influences in classical liberalism, a Deweyan argument from the nature of moral community supports re-emphasis on individualism in contemporary liberal thought. (shrink)

The ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the ‘conjunctive approach’ to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the ‘non-conjunctive’ approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do (...) not consider enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism. (shrink)

I argue that contemporary liberal theory cannot give a general justification for the institution or practice of punishment, i.e., a justification that would hold across a broad range of reasonably realistic conditions. I examine the general justifications offered by three prominent contemporary liberal theorists and show how their justifications fail in light of the possibility of an alternative to punishment. I argue that, because of their common commitments regarding the nature of justification, these theorists have decisive reasons to reject punishment (...) in favor of a non-punitive alternative. I demonstrate the possibility of this alternative by means of a careful examination of the nature of punishment, isolating one essential characteristic—the aim to impose suffering—and showing how this characteristic need not guide enforcement. There is logical space for a forceful and coercive, yet non-punitive method of enforcement. This fact poses difficulties for many classical and contemporary justifications of punishment, but it poses particularly crippling problems for general liberal justifications. (shrink)

Are immigration restrictions compatible with liberalism? Recently, Freiman and Hidalgo have argued that immigration restrictions conflict with the core commitments of liberalism. A society with immigration restrictions in place may well be optimal in some desired respects, but it is not liberal, they argue. So if you care about liberalism more deeply than you care about immigration restrictions, you should give up on restrictionism. You can’t hold on to both. I argue here that many restrictions on contractual, (...) economic, and associational liberties seem to be justified by considerations other than liberty – thus the task for Freiman and Hidalgo is to tell us why such restrictions are justified but immigration restrictions are not. Moreover, even if this worry can be addressed, I argue, liberalism is not committed to its own demise in scenarios where there exist large enough numbers of would-be immigrants who accept and endorse illiberal norms in a way that is sufficiently resistant to change. Such a commitment requires thinking of border coercion as violating an absolute deontological constraint. This, I contend, is implausible. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that liberalism and religious belief conflict. Liberalism, its proponents and critics maintain, requires the privatization of religious belief, since liberals often argue that citizens of faith must repress their fundamental commitments when participating in public life. Critics of liberalism complain that privatization is objectionable because it requires citizens of faith to violate their integrity. The liberal political tradition has always sought to carve out social space for individuals to live by their own lights. (...) If liberalism requires citizens to violate their integrity, liberals have cause for concern. I seek to rebut this integrity objection to liberalism. I focus on the dominant form of philosophical liberalism: public reason liberalism. I argue that the integrity objection undermines the mainstream conception of public reason liberalism, but not public reason liberalism itself. The paper opens by outlining the structure of public reason liberalism and the integrity objection (§§2 and 3). It then analyses two versions of the objection and argues that the second version is successful against the mainstream conception of public reason (§4). I argue in response that public reason liberalism need not endorse principles of restraint—the civic restrictions on religious expression typically associated with it. I then sketch a conception of public reason liberalism that eschews principles of restraint (§5). This alternative promises to reconcile public reason liberals and their faith-friendly critics by putting the integrity objection to rest. (shrink)

(Please note: the main ideas of this paper are restated in revised/developed form in: "On actualist and fundamental public justification in political liberalism" and "Patterns of justification: on political liberalism and the primacy of public justification". Both papers are available from philpapers.) The paper suggests the deep view of Rawls-type public justification as promising, non-ideal theory variant of an internal conception of political liberalism. To this end, I demonstrate how the deep view integrates a range of ideas, (...) views and commitments at the core of political liberalism’s justification structure, including pro tanto justification, full justification, political values and their priority, justificatory neutrality, the role of reasonable comprehensive views, the nature public reasons, the wide view of public political culture, the role of overlapping consensus and political legitimacy, and not least, the status of reflective equilibrium and the Original Position. I then contrast the deep view with Quong’s ideal theory variant if the internal conception, and argue that we should prefer the deep view. Thus, the prospects of political liberalism depend not so much on whether we find ways to make ideal theory relevant for non-ideal purposes. Rather, it depends on whether political liberalism can devise a credible response to the problem of public dogma. (shrink)