The views of thirteenth century Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas and twentieth century economist Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business are contrasted by probing the foundations of their positions. The basis of Aquinas' normative stance in political economy is found in the metaphysical and moral realism of the classic tradition. The role Descartes and Hobbes played in overturning this philosophical starting point and ushering in an age of ideology is traced out. Friedman's commitment to Comte's vision of positivism is (...) revealed and what this entails for metaphysics, ethics, and economics is given. (shrink)

Responding to Rawls’ pleas in Political Liberalism against appeals to comprehensive doctrines, be they religious or metaphysical, I argue that such constraints are inherently illiberal—and unworkable. Rawls deems political proposals inherently coercive and judges everyone in a democracy a participant in governance—thus, in effect, complicit in state coercion. He seeks to limit the sweep of his exclusionary rule to core questions of rights. But in an individualistic and litigious society like ours it proves hard to draw a firm boundary around (...) issues that raise core (constitutional) questions. The standards Rawls proposes seem oppressive in effect, their likeliest yield, a kind of doublethink, encouraging many citizens to cloak their deepest normative concerns in neutered language. I worry about the means by which Rawls’ ‘overlapping consensus’ might be attained, and about the exclusion (as metaphysical) of policy proposals in behalf of broadly conceived human goods. I find it suppositious in Rawls to presume the innocence of seemingly secular arguments while placing in the stocks the religious appeals critical to many, along with old and new metaphysical arguments that may seek to bridge the gap between religious and secular appeals. (shrink)

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to (...) provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship. (shrink)

(1998). Consensus, neutrality and compromise. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 1, Pluralsim and Liberal Neutrality, pp. 54-78. doi: 10.1080/13698239808403248.