Liberal Democracy and the Challenge of Ethical Diversity

Human Affairs 18 (1):10-22 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

What do we talk about when we talk about ethical diversity as a challenge to the normative justifiability of liberal democracy? Many theorists claim that liberal democracy ought to be reformed or rejected for not being sufficiently ‘inclusive’ towards diversity; others argue that, on the contrary, liberalism is desirable because it accommodates (some level of) diversity. Moreover, it has been argued that concern for diversity should lead us to favour (say) neutralistic over perfectionist, universalistic over particularistic, participative over representative versions of liberal democracy. This paper provides a conceptual framework to situate those debates, and argues that there are two fundamental ways in which diversity constitutes a challenge to the justificatory status of liberal democracy: consistency (whereby diversity causes clashes between the prescriptions generated by normative political theories), and adequacy (whereby diversity generates a rift between our experience of what is considered valuable and what the theory treats as such).

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-09-24

Downloads
764 (#18,584)

6 months
66 (#58,552)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Enzo Rossi
University of Amsterdam

Citations of this work

Can Modus Vivendi Save Liberalism from Moralism? A Critical Assessment of John Gray’s Political Realism.Rossi Enzo - 2018 - In John Horton, Manon Westphal & Ulrich Willems (eds.), The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 95-109.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Political Liberalism.John Rawls - 1993 - Columbia University Press.
The Morality of Freedom.Joseph Raz - 1986 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Rethinking Multiculturalism.Bhikhu C. Parekh - 2000 - Harvard University Press.
Liberalism and value pluralism.George Crowder - 2002 - New York: Continuum.

View all 11 references / Add more references