Abstract

This study begins with a mystery: the support of physician-assisted suicide by egalitarian liberals, in direct opposition to many groups of the disadvantaged that liberals otherwise support. I argue that this extraordinary outcome points to deeper problems with the realization of liberalism's more egalitarian impulses. Unraveling this mystery requires attention to the larger issues of the role of religion in American public life, the problem of growing inequality in American society, and the inadequacy of liberalism, the dominant American political framework, in accounting for both. Using physician-assisted suicide as an exemplary case, I argue that political liberalism in America, both philosophical and cultural, has emphasized liberty at the expense of equality; that the loss of equality as both a goal and a social reality makes the legalization of PAS unjust; and that liberalism, to be consistent with its heritage and to be genuinely just, must recover a commitment to egalitarianism. The latter will be achieved only if liberalism incorporates a "theory of culture" as part of correcting its own claim to be "ethically" neutral, a correction that in turn opens an egalitarian liberalism to a more adequate view of religious and other thick moral languages as resources supporting its egalitarian commitments. I conclude by arguing that a modified form of Ronald Dworkin's "equality of resources" has the potential to lay the groundwork for a "liberal civic republicanism," which would combine the best features of an egalitarian liberalism with a strong social vision that understands thick conceptions of the good not as problems but as indispensable resources for bringing about a more just social order.