Douglas J. Den Uyl

In Search of Universal Political Principles: Avoiding Some of Modernity's Pitfalls and Discovering the Importance of Liberal Political Order

In our recent work, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics , 1 we discovered, while arguing for the moral necessity of a political/legal order whose fundamental structural principles are individual negative rights, that there is much confusion about the role of universality in ethics and political philosophy. Moreover, we discovered that the role of universality varied greatly depending, not only on how one conceived the nature of what is good and obligatory, but also on how one conceived deeper issues in philosophy. We were thus drawn to questions about the nature of ethics, and the difference between practical and epistemic universals. As a result, when asked to consider what might be the basis for universal ethical and political principles, we find ourselves asking, first, what it is that makes universality so important, and what its proper place is in ethical and political philosophy. It is our contention that the search for universal political principles needs to be put in its proper context if there is to be any chance of finding such principles, and this requires first rediscovering some of the insights inspired by the Aristotelian tradition regarding knowledge in general and ethical knowledge in particular. We need to free ourselves from the following four interrelated epistemological and meta-ethical constraints of Modernity: (1) that, in order for ethical claims to qualify as knowledge, they must have the same form as those of theoretical science; (2) that universality is necessary for objectivity; (3) that universality is a substitute for objectivity; and (4) that the ethical is essentially legislative. This essay builds on the defense of a classical liberal political order we set forth in Norms of Liberty , focusing here on the groundwork that we consider critical to the advancement of universal claims in politics and ethics.