The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This article challenges this view by showing how neorepublicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neorepublicanism into the liberal framework, the article shows that neutrality (...) is what neorepublicans must jettison to offer a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neorepublicans ensure greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection. (shrink)

While it is uncontroversial to point to the liberal roots of feminism, a major issue in English-language feminist political thought over the last few decades has been whether feminism's association with liberalism should be relegated to the past. Can liberalism continue to serve feminist purposes? This book examines the positions of three contemporary feminists - Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin and Jean Hampton - who, notwithstanding decades of feminist critique, are unwilling to give up on liberalism. This (...) book examines why, and in what ways, each of these theorists believes that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women's situations. It also brings out and tries to explain and evaluate the differences among them, notwithstanding their shared allegiance to liberalism. In so doing, the books goes to the heart of recent debates in feminist and political theory. (shrink)

Several philosophers of education argue that schooling should facilitate students’ development of autonomy. Such arguments fall into two main categories: Student-centered arguments support autonomy education to help enable students to lead good lives; Public-goods-centered arguments support autonomy education to develop students into good citizens. Critics challenge the legitimacy of autonomy education—of the state imposing a schooling curriculum aimed at making children autonomous. In this paper, I offer a unified solution to the challenges of legitimacy that both arguments for autonomy education (...) face. I first defend a particular construal of liberal legitimacy, and then consider each legitimacy challenge in light of that construal. I argue that the legitimacy challenges confronting both types of argument can be overcome. Further, I explain why we should pursue both arguments, rather than resting the entire case for autonomy education on one or the other. I conclude that each argument—if it can justify autonomy education at all—can justify autonomy education consistent with the requirements of liberal democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

The victims of severe injustice are allowed to employ disruption and violence to seek political change. This article argues for this conclusion from within Rawlsian political liberalism, which, however, has been criticised for allegedly imposing public reason’s suffocating norms of civility on the oppressed. It develops a novel view of the applicability of public reason in non-ideal circumstances – the “no self-sacrifice view” – that focuses on the excessive costs of following public reason when suffering from severe injustice. On (...) this view, those treated in what Rawls describes as less than a reasonably just way are relieved of the duty of public reason and therefore entitled to employ disruption and violence. In contrast, their privileged fellow citizens must still obey public reason’s civility unless they have been authorised by the oppressed to join their fight. This article also starts exploring from within political liberalism the normative principles governing disruptive and violent protest. (shrink)

This dissertation extends John Rawls’s mature theory of justice out to address the environmental challenges that citizens of liberal democracies now face. Specifically, using Rawls’s framework of political liberalism, I piece together a theory of procedural justice to be applied to a constitutional democracy. I show how citizens of pluralistic democracies should apply this theory to environmental matters in a four stage contracting procedure. I argue that, if implemented, this extension to Rawls’s theory would secure background environmental justice. I (...) explain why the theory can be viewed as a partially specified political conception of environmental pragmatism, and how it relates to public environmental policy and discourse. While the framework is anthropocentric, it is one that reasonable non-anthropocentrists can endorse. Using this theory, I argue that liberal democracies must take measures to secure basic environmental rights for all presently existing and future citizens. Measures must also be in place to secure a minimum of social goods (including environmental goods) that guarantees that all citizens (present and future) can exercise their basic rights and liberties. Moreover, disparities in environmental goods should only be tolerated if they arise in accord with Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. I discuss carbon taxes, as well as carbon allocation trading schemes. I also argue that free democracies should employ precautionary reasoning when attempting to meet the demands of background environmental justice. (shrink)

While citizens of developed countries enjoy lives of unmatched affluence, over a billion people struggle to subsist on incomes of less than $1/day. Can't we conclude that their poverty constitutes a glaring injustice? The answer almost certainly is yes—but not because some countries are rich, nor because of inadequate levels of redistribution. Liberal political theory traditionally maintains that persons are rights-holders, and the primary duty owed them is noninterference. Corrupt and tyrannical governments flagrantly violate the liberty rights of their captive (...) populations. External governments conspicuously fail to respect noninterference, however, when they erect barriers to trade between foreign nationals and their own citizens, subsidize domestic industries, prevent innocent movement across borders by would-be workers, and when they tender assistance to abusive states (such as foreign aid that lines the pockets of kleptocrats and enhances their power). The theory advanced here is similar to that of Rawls in rejecting an international difference principle, but unlike Rawls it advances an account of international justice as continuous with domestic principles of justice. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism demands that political decisions be publicly justified to the citizens who are subjected to them. Much recent literature emphasises the differences between the two main interpretations of this requirement, justificatory and political liberalism. In this paper, I show that both views share structural democratic deficits. They fail to guarantee political autonomy, the expressive quality of law, and the justification to citizens, because they allow collective decisions made by incompletely theorised agreements. I argue that the result (...) can only be avoided by changing public reason’s role in collective decision-making. Instead of incompletely theorised agreements, we should demand agreement both on the public reasons themselves and on the other premises that justify political decisions. In this way, it is always possible to point to a procedure-independent reason that justifies democratic decisions, and the reasoning of the state is public and contestable. Finally, I explain how this, in turn, implies that only political liberalism can be rescued—by accepting what I will call strong political liberalism. Modifying justificatory liberalism in the necessary way will inevitably open the door to an objectionable form of perfectionism. (shrink)

This paper presents a more holistic variety of liberalism than the Rawlsian kind, which involves judging that various things are not properly liberal, things which the Rawlsian would seek to avoid conflict with, e.g. “This is not liberal poetry,” “This is not liberal computer programming.” Such judgments seem to be based on an emotional, or aesthetic, sense of coherence.

David McClean’s book Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism is an excellent contribution to Rorty scholarship and pragmatism in general. The book begins with a masterful reconstruction of the tradition of American philosophy from Emerson and Thoreau to Peirce and James and Dewey, culminating in Rorty. This beginning, from the Preface entitled “Rorty’s ‘Violence of Direction’” to Chapter 1 entitled “From Pragmatism to Rortyism” occupies almost the first third, and seems to establish a three-part structure, of the book. The second (...) part of the book, also very well done, critically engages Rorty’s pragmatist cosmopolitanism, finding the outlines... (shrink)

Answering the question of whether and how liberalism could acknowledge dependency and foster just care arrangements—with a sensitivity to issues of race, class.

Maudemarie Clark is a leading interpreter of Nietzsche’s theory of truth, and as such we are fortunate to have her papers on his ethics, politics and metaphysics collected in one volume. Opening her section on politics – the subject of this review – with a critique of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, she condemns Bloom’s Straussian demand that philosophers lie about the fact that no truth exists to protect their way of life as a recurrence of the nihilist (...) ascetic ideal Nietzsche rejected at the end of the Genealogy. In doing so, she definitively frees Nietzsche from Strauss’ grip, and opens up the possibility of questioning anew Nietzsche’s relationship to feminism, queer theory, democracy and community. Her most striking claim is that Nietzsche’s aristocratic ethics can be reconciled with modern democratic politics. Whether that is the case or not is up for debate, but what clearly isn’t, as this collection reminds us, is that we cannot do our thinking about politics without him. (shrink)

Automobility, or the myriad institutions that foster car culture, has rarely if ever been put under the lens of liberal political theory, even though driving is one of the most common and widely accepted features of daily life in modern societies. When its implied promise of guaranteeing both freedom and equality is examined more closely, however, it appears that the ethical implications of driving may be darker than initially supposed. Automobility may indeed be in violation of both the Kantian categorical (...) imperative and Gewirth’s principle of generic consistency, even though there has thus far been remarkably little ethical analysis to reveal these possibilities. It is conceivable that liberal political theory has turned a blind eye to automobility precisely because the latter has naturalized us into accepting what Roberto Unger has called a routine of “false necessity,” so that driving is now virtually imperceptible as a social fact worthy of critical analysis. (shrink)

This is the editors' preface to a special issue of Philosophia on 'Religion and Limits of Liberalism'. It begins by noting the challenges which the 'return' of religions to liberal democracies poses to the liberal commitment to respect citizens’ freedom and equality. Then, with particular reference to Rawls' theory of liberal politics, it situates the papers in relation to three different senses of liberal ‘respect’ that are challenged by contemporary religions – one understood in terms of the justification of (...) political power, another as tolerance of diversity, and the third in terms of freedom from interference. (shrink)

This article, forthcoming in the international legal philosophy journal Ratio Juris, responds to an article by Francis J. Beckwith arguing that the consistent application of liberal principles requires that same-sex marriage not be recognised in civil law. This response demonstrates that Beckwith’s article contains a series of interpretative and substantive flaws that render his argument unsuccessful. These relate to a misinterpretation of core liberal principles and a sidestepping of the matter of undue bias against same-sex partners. In correcting these flaws (...) I tentatively propose a ‘Voltarian argument’ in favour of same-sex civil marriage for those citizens with moral qualms about same-sex relationships derived from their reasonable comprehensive doctrine. (shrink)

Democracy After Liberalism (Routledge, 2005) argues for a non-liberal interpretation of democratic politics. The argument of the book moves in two stages. First, a case is made against liberalism, the dominant interpretation of democratic politics. I argue that liberalism suffers an internal tension between its conception of legitimacy and its neutralist stance towards the good; this internal tension manifests in palpable external social ills that liberalism cannot sufficiently remedy. Second, an alternative, “post liberal” view is developed (...) according to which democracy combines a civic republican conception of freedom with a deliberativist view of democratic practice. Democratic deliberation is in turn understood on a pragmatic-epistemic model. According to this view, democratic deliberation is aimed at truth and requires a virtue-theoretic account of deliberative processes. As a civic republican view, liberal neutrality is rejected and a version of perfectionism is endorsed; however, the homogenizing tendencies of communitarian proposals are avoided insofar as the formative role of the state is taken to be epistemic and not moral. (shrink)

If the U.S. Constitution is a liberal Constitution, liberal governments can have a constitutional obligation to secure positive benefits or welfare rights. The original constitutional text describes a government instrumental to the Preamble's abstract ends or goods. Constitutional rights can be reconciled to the text's instrumentalist logic by viewing them as functional to better conceptions of abstract ends among actors who would compensate for their fallibility. The Federalist confirms the instrumentalism of the constitutional text. Conservative writers who treat negative liberties (...) as constitutional ends err in several ways. They assume rational actors would establish a government for the sake of limiting it, and they ignore the positive nature of goods (life, liberty, property) that are the objects of negative liberties. They also fail to see that tax-supported protections for all positive goods, including the objects of negative liberties, must be justified by public purposes. (shrink)

The target article argued that there is currently no reliable evidence of theory of mind in nonhuman primates and proposed research methods for future use in this field. Some commentators judged the research proposals to be too chauvinist (in danger of falsely denying that primates attribute mental states), but a majority judged them to be too liberal (in danger of falsely affirming theory of mind in primates). The most valuable comments from both camps exemplified “experimental thought,” the obverse of “thought (...) experiments,” and recommended specific alterations and alternatives to the studies I proposed. This Response evaluates these recommendations and presents a revised version of the proposals that appear in the target article. Other valuable commentary cast doubt on the assumption that people have a theory of mind, aired the possibility that language may be a prerequisite for either possession or detection of a theory of mind, questioned the notion of critical experiments, and emphasized the distinction between attribution of sight and belief. In addition to commenting on these issues, I respond to objections to my interpretation of existing research on self-recognition, imitation, and deception. (shrink)

abstract One way in which we may be tempted to understand the distinction we make in practice between liberals and fundamentalists is via the issue of truth. Liberals are generally more sceptical about truth while fundamentalists tend to be more objectivist, believing not only that objective truth exists but also that they know it. I call this interpretation the ‘truth interpretation’. In this paper I attempt to undermine the ‘truth interpretation’ by showing that it does not map on adequately to (...) the sorts of distinctions that we actually make in practice. We will see that thinking that the distinction between liberals and fundamentalists revolves around the philosophical issue of truth, such that the ‘good guys’ are sceptics and the ‘bad guys’ objectivists, fails to connect with our practical distinctions. The second half of the paper then addresses the question of what role, if any, truth does play in distinguishing between liberals and fundamentalists, arguing that if truth does play a role we should see it as a very narrow and political, rather, than philosophical one. (shrink)

The interview focuses on Kymlicka's major area of research, i.e., the issue of minority rights. Kymlicka explains why the rights of national minorities have been traditionally neglected in the Western political tradition. He argues that these rights promote individual freedom, and so should be seen as promoting liberal democratic principles. The interview covers many issues including the relationship between ethno‐cultural groups and other forms of “identity politics”; how to individuate cultural groups with legitimate claims to minority rights; whether something like (...) a “cosmopolitan view” can seriously challenge the need for minority rights; what are the dangers of building transnational political institutions such as the EU for democratic citizenship; what are the bases of social unity in multination states and what are the limits of toleration of illiberal minorities. (shrink)

The separation of church and state in the USA and the critical role of disestablishment in the political doctrines of that country is no indication of a secular polity. In fact, the separation of church and state as developed in 18th century American political thought was itself a religious doctrine and rested on the unique religious beliefs of certain Protestant Churches there. One consequence of this particular mode of accommodating religion has meant that the challenge of pluralism and difference in (...) the United States of America is met, most often, by liberal indifference. Differences are trivialized, aethetisized and, more critically, privatized. They are shielded from public scrutiny and conceptualized as irrelevant to public concern. This is an increasingly inadequate response to the challenge of difference and the plurality of the human experience. Challenges to contemporary modes of accommodating religious and ethnic pluralism are necessitating the formulation of new sets of answers which are not based on such Protestant or post-Protestant assumptions. (shrink)

Liberalism and Distributive Justice discusses liberalism, capitalism, distributive justice, and John Rawls's difference principle. Chapters are organized in a narrative arc: from liberalism as the dominant political and economic system, to the laws governing interpersonal transactions in liberal society, to basic economic and political institutions that determine distributive justice.

This paper provides a brief overview of the relationship between libertarian political theory and the Universal Basic Income (UBI). It distinguishes between different forms of libertarianism and argues that a one form, classical liberalism, is compatible with and provides some grounds of support for UBI. A classical liberal UBI, however, is likely to be much smaller than the sort of UBI defended by those on the political left. And there are both contingent empirical reasons and principled moral reasons for (...) doubting that the classical liberal case for UBI will be ultimately successful at all. (shrink)

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677)--often recognized as the first modern Jewish thinker--was also a founder of modern liberal political philosophy. This book is the first to connect systematically these two aspects of Spinoza's legacy. Steven B. Smith shows that Spinoza was a politically engaged theorist who both advocated and embodied a new conception of the emancipated individual, a thinker who decisively influenced such diverse movements as the Enlightenment, liberalism, and political Zionism. Focusing on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Smith argues that Spinoza (...) was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism (what later became known as the Jewish Question) an essential ingredient of modern political thought. Before Marx or Freud, Smith notes, Spinoza recast Judaism to include the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition. Smith examines the circumstances of Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his skeptical assault on the authority of Scripture, his transformation of Mosaic prophecy into a progressive philosophy of history, his use of the language of natural right and the social contract to defend democratic political institutions, and his comprehensive comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth and the modern commercial republic. According to Smith, Spinoza's Treatise represents a classic defense of religious toleration and intellectual freedom, showing them to be necessary foundations for political stability and liberal regimes. In this study Smith examines Spinoza's solution to the Jewish Question and asks whether a Judaism, so conceived, can long survive. (shrink)