Abstract

Liberalism is premised upon moral egalitarianism, so that no arbitrary fact about persons can serve to justify a difference in the administration of justice. Yet liberalism also traditionally applies its egalitarianism only within the borders of the territorial state, so that arbitrary facts of citizenship serve to place a limit upon the range of such egalitarian principles. I argue that the current ways of solving this dilemma are inadequate; both the partialist and the Rawlsian cosmopolitan approaches to the issue ignore the moral importance of shared political institutions, and thus fail to establish liberalism's coherence. I defend a reworking of liberalism based upon the value of autonomy as the basic justificatory value in political morality. Such a liberalism, I argue, will have different implications in different contexts; a globally impartial liberalism based upon this principle will entail distinct duties between fellow citizens, so that liberalism may legitimately limit some of its distributive guarantees to the context of shared liability to a coercive legal system. This conception is also able to articulate and defend a substantive conception of international human rights, thereby unifying our concern for such rights with our concern for domestic political justice. I close by articulating some directions for future research, including the issues of immigration, secession, and humanitarian intervention