Patrick Neal

Liberalism and the Communitarian Critique: A Guide for the Perplexed

During the last decade a good deal of discussion of the “communitarian critique” of liberalism has occurred. The debate is perplexing for a number of reasons. The competing positions are often difficult to characterize (or, sometimes, even to distinguish) and it is often unclear what would be the theoretical or practical significance of affirming one position over the other. In this “guide for the perplexed” the authors discuss two ambiguities and two problems which they believe are central to the debate. Examining these problems and ambiguities suggests some distinctions and confusions, strengths and weaknesses, characteristic of both communitarian and liberal arguments.

Justice as Fairness: Political or Metaphysical?

In the two decades after the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls reframed certain aspects of his understanding of the nature of that theory, and also devoted greater attention to the question of the role of political philosophy itself in a democratic society. He now argued that his theory of justice could best be understood as a view that was “political, not metaphysical,” and that once this difference was understood, many criticisms of the theory would be shown to be misguided. In this chapter I argue that Rawls’ theory is not “political” in the senses he claims it to be, and indeed that it cannot be. Rawls’ idea of a “political” conception of justice which is neatly situated between and above the twin pitfalls of “metaphysical” and “modus vivendi” conceptions of justice is in some ways similar to the idea of neutrality about the good. Each notion functions to create the sense that liberalism stands as an ordering principle detached from and superior to the conflicting moral ideas at the heart of alternative political moralities. The temptation to think this way about the views they affirm is one that I counsel liberals to resist. That counsel, of course, is unsolicited.

Liberalism and Neutrality

One of the most attractive recent defenses of liberal politics is based upon the idea of the state acting as a neutral authority to fairly order the terms of interaction between the competing interests, both moral and material, of the various groups and individuals in society. This chapter aims to reveal the inadequacies of this idea through a critical analysis of Ronald Dworkin’s articulation of it.

Is public reason innocuous

Rawls’s controversial idea of public reason is often criticized for being exclusionary and unfair. Yet it is possible to read the idea of public reason as being largely innocuous, especially if one attends to all the qualifications and specifications of the idea that Rawls articulated. This essay pursues such a reading, by systematically considering each element of qualification that Rawls built into the idea of public reason. Considered together and in terms of their cumulative effect, they make the innocuous reading possible. My aim is not, however, to try to defend Rawls’s idea of public reason by claiming that it is innocuous, but to help clarify the ambiguous nature of the idea through this reading.

Does He Mean What He Says? (Mis)Understanding Rawls’ Practical Turn

Many political theorists interpret John Rawlss current work on the practical tasks of political philosophy as yielding a less ambitious theory than advanced in A Theory of Justice. This article contends that such criticisms rest on conflating his use of justice as fairness as the logical foundation for an argument with a claim that justice as fairness expresses substantive truth. The author argues that Rawls makes no such foundational claim, and that his current political philosophy is more ambitious because it requires citizens to actively develop and maintain consensus on justice as fairness as their first political organizing principle.

A Liberal Theory of the Good

Assuming that the argument of the previous chapter is correct, a puzzle arises. If it is indeed a relatively straightforward path of argument that leads to the conclusion that liberalism is not neutral with regard to the question of the good life, then why do so many liberals remain convinced that it is?1 Why, when liberals and their critics debate the issue of neutrality, do they so often seem to talk beyond one another? It seems to me that instances of these debates ought to come off better than they do, and in this essay I attempt to describe how they might. Leaving aside the consequences of state action and inaction in relation to the ideal of neutrality, I focus instead upon the two-tiered structure of liberal thinking about the idea of the good and the ideal of neutrality. My claim is that this structure inclines liberals to subtly but powerfully distort the nature of non-liberal ideals through the way in which the notion of “conceptions of the good” is itself conceptualized.

Perfectionism With a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and Raz’s Political Theory

The views of Rawls and the defenders of the idea of neutrality about the good constitute the mainstream of contemporary American liberal thought. But this procedural-deontological voice is not the only voice in the liberal chorus, even if it is the leading one. This chapter critically analyzes what I take to be an important expression of the minority voice of perfectionist liberalism, the political theory advanced by Joseph Raz in The Morality of Freedom and other works. In my view, while perfectionist liberalism is correct to abandon the notions of neutrality and deontology as the essence of the liberal project, it nevertheless fails to express the spirit of that project in its most compelling form. This chapter seeks to explain and support these judgments, and along the way to bring to light the sources of appeal of a more modest, pragmatic expression of the liberal spirit which might stand as an alternative to both neutralist and perfectionist expressions.

Dworkin on the Foundations of Liberal Equality

Earlier, in Chapter 2, we had occasion to examine in detail the arguments in support of the idea of neutrality about the good advanced by Ronald Dworkin in “Liberalism”. In his Tanner Lectures published in 1990, Dworkin offered an account and defense of liberalism significantly different from and more ambitious than that earlier view. In these lectures, Dworkin, like Raz, rejected the idea of a merely political liberalism advanced by Rawls, and set out instead to show that the principles of liberal political order were founded upon a distinctive ethical view (the “challenge model”) which spoke directly to the question of the good. This suggests a form of perfectionist liberalism. However, this chapter tries to show that a lingering neutralism undermines Dworkin’s attempt to articulate a comprehensive perfectionist liberalism, and that this neutralism also leads Dworkin to treat those who think otherwise than he does in an illiberal, or at least ungenerous, fashion.

C. B. Macpherson and Liberal-Democratic Theory

Copyright

Liberals and theocrats: on Lucas Swaine’s The Liberal Conscience

Lucas Swaine’s respectful manner of engaging with theocrats is at odds with the more heavy-handed arguments he gives to those who would reject his position. Furthermore, it is not clear that Swaine’s case can reach theocrats whose self-conceptions do not fit within the liberal idiom.