Abstract

Fishkin claims that the three liberals principles concerning assignment of social positions constitute a “trilemma”: the realization of any two of these principles precludes the realization of the third. In this paper, I try to prove that this is the case, only if these principles are interpreted in an extreme way. Liberalism, however, has strong reasons to reject such interpretation of each of these principles. Moreover, these reasons are independent from the question of whether their conjunction may be conflictive or not. If we assume moderate versions of the principles , the trilemma disappears or, at least, becomes much weaker