Perfectionism, Reasonableness, and Respect

Can Liberal Perfectionism Justify Religious Toleration? Wall on Promoting and Respecting

Philosophy & Public AffairsVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 3-45 Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM University of ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM University of ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 March 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01200.xCitations: 137 This article was first written for a conference on Isaiah Berlin at Harvard University, September 2009. I am grateful for the very helpful comments of Erin Kelly and Thomas Scanlon on that occasion. The main ideas originated in a discussion following Joseph Raz's presentation to the Law-Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago in November 2008 and published on the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. I am grateful to Raz for discussion on that occasion. For discussion of these issues over the years I am grateful to Charles Larmore, and for comments on a draft I am grateful to Daniel Brudney, Agnes Callard, Rosalind Dixon, Aziz Huq, Andrew Koppelman, Brian Leiter, Micah Lott, and Henry Richardson. Finally, I am extremely grateful to the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for their painstaking and extremely valuable comments. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume39, Issue1Winter 2011Pages 3-45 RelatedInformation

The notion of ‘liberal nationalism,' popularized by Yael Tamir, has become a mainstay of nationalism studies. Recent years have witnessed its revival alongside debates on the persistence of nationalism in contemporary politics. The Italian nationalist ideologue Giuseppe Mazzini is often cited as the leading historical exponent of this inclusive form of nationalism. Mazzini is portrayed as a liberal because of his democratic and republican stances – which is yet a depiction originating from limited engagement with his writings, the repetition of Italian national narratives steeped in anti-Austrian rhetoric, and customary conflations of democracy with political liberalism. This article reassesses Mazzini’s alleged role as a founding figure of ‘liberal nationalism.’ Through textual analysis of his Duties of Man and related works, it shows that while Mazzini’s nationalism was democratic, it was not liberal. His emphasis on collective duties and cultural homogeneity placed him at odds with political liberalism, concerned with limiting state interference in individual life, and liberal democracy. Without directly assessing the normative validity of ‘liberal nationalism,' the article challenges its purported Mazzinian genealogy by questioning the historical accuracy of grounding it in Mazzini, thereby inviting a reconsideration of the historical and conceptual foundations of the idea of ‘liberal nationalism.'

One of the key objections raised against political liberalism is the argument from asymmetry, which claims that political liberalism holds double standards between its treatment of the right and the good. According to political liberalism, the question of the good life, unlike the question of political justice, fundamentally divides even reasonable people in a liberal society, so the most sensible thing to do is for the state to refrain from making references, let alone officially endorsing, comprehensive doctrines in order to avoid implications of paternalism and even totalitarianism. However, it is also reasonable to assume that similar disagreements exist in the realm of justice. According to Joseph Chan, liberals “owe perfectionists an account as to why the state’s enforcement of controversial decisions is problematic only in the case of conceptions of the good life and not in non-good-life issues like social justice.” In other words, liberals must show that the distinction between social justice and the good life is so deep that they warrant asymmetric treatments. For instance, why is it not justified for the liberal state to endorse Aristotelian teleological ethics, whereas its endorsement of court decisions, policies on national defense, and education reforms that are no less controversial is considered legitimate? Michael Sandel argues that “political liberalism must assume not only that the exercise of human reason under conditions of freedom will produce disagreements about the good life but also that the exercise of human reason under conditions of freedom will not produce disagreements of justice.” The asymmetry objection is considered by many to be so powerful that “as long as [it] remains unanswered, the pursuit of justice opens the door to perfectionism.” As Jonathan Quong correctly points out, the asymmetry objection, instead of challenging the main assumptions from which political liberalism begins, “purports to show that political liberalism is not even internally coherent; that liberal neutrality concerning the good cannot be consistently derived from within the political liberal position.” The force of the asymmetry objection is thus twofold. First, it casts doubt on the distinction between the right and the good that lies in the heart of political liberalism. If this distinction is blurred, people who are sympathetic to perfectionism will have the ground to propose alternatives to the neutral state, albeit liberal or not. Second, the objection also turns some of the most widely used political liberal defenses against political liberalism and vindicates the reasonability of perfectionism.

In this paper I analyze the theory of legitimacy at the core of John Rawls’ political liberalism. Rawls argues that a political system is well grounded when it is stable. This notion of stability embodies both pragmatic and moral elements, each of which constitutes a key desideratum of Rawlsian liberal legitimacy. But those desiderata are in tension with each other. My main claim is that Rawls’ strategy to overcome that tension through his theory of public justification is ultimately unsuccessful, because the account of consensus it envisages is unstably placed between the extremes of moralized redundancy and pragmatic free-for-all. In other words, what counts as consensus is either regulated too tightly, or not enough.

The cardinal idea in Rawls's political liberalism is that a better conception of liberal justice is available to us once we ground principles of justice in an ‘overlapping consensus’ among the many reasonable doctrines that abound in a free society instead of any of the comprehensive liberal doctrines that liberal philosophers have traditionally championed. Rawls's contrast between the political and comprehensive liberalism is specious, though his political conception of the person and his related conception of ‘reasonable pluralism’ are shown to provide a compelling perspective on the proper scope of diversity and the conduct of political education in a liberal society.

This work seeks to trace a possible connection between the foundational principles of liberal political theory, established primarily by T. Hobbes, J. Locke, and B. Spinoza, and its developed or contemporary practices. These practices are examined in relation to fundamental concepts that were previously understood as integral to the generalized notion of the good human life, such as faith, family, love, manliness, etc., and that, as a result of its influence, underwent significant – sometimes radical – changes in the outline of the liberal logic. The piece formulates key liberal concepts like progress, consumption, and tolerance to elucidate the reasons for liberalism's success, the potential negative implications of this success, and the challenges stemming from the continued unfolding of the liberal logic for concepts like freedom of speech, meritocracy, universal peace, etc. embedded in liberal theory. The analysis, establishing a direct connection between the theoretical foundations of liberal theory and the success of its practices, highlights the impossibility of transforming the latter without reassessing the former. It posits the inadequacy of political opposition to liberalism without a preliminary theoretical resolution of the fundamental issues that liberal theory poses.

Citizens will disagree with one another on a variety of issues in a well-ordered liberal democracy. More often than not, these disagreements are motivated by citizens’ endorsement of a plurality of comprehensive doctrines that may conflict with one another. It will be recalled that the central problem for modern political theory, according to Rawls, is:Therefore, the entire project of political liberalism is motivated by the need to understand and accommodate pluralism. The kind of pluralism Rawls has in mind is reasonable in nature. Unlike pluralism as such, reasonable pluralism is the necessary outcome of human reason under burdens of judgment and enduring free institutions. From a political perspective, the kind of pluralism that is worth of being accommodated by a well-ordered liberal democracy must reflect the reasonable nature of its citizens and their comprehensive doctrines. As Chap. 3 has demonstrated, the domain of the political draws its “source materials” from the public conception of morality that provide values and commitments that are shared among reasonable citizens and justifiable without appealing to the traditionally ontological character of morality. These publicly moral values and commitments guide the transformation from pluralism as such to reasonable pluralism. For instance, comprehensive doctrines that endorse slavery and racism have no place in a well-ordered liberal democracy where citizens’ rational pursuits of self-interest subordinate to the willingness to abide by fair terms of social cooperation and recognize the burdens of judgment. But as Chap. 4 has made clear, disagreements run deep, even in the domain of the political. Although a case can be made for political liberalism’s asymmetrical treatment of the right and the good by distinguishing between foundational and justificatory disagreements, justificatory disagreements are still disagreements. In an ideal world, reasonable citizens are able to put away their differences so long as their disagreements are over how and which shared political values and commitments are prioritized, hence justificatory, rather than over how and which ethical values and commitments based on their comprehensive doctrines are to be preferred because they are true. But one might argue that the idea of reasonable pluralism is somewhat idealized. In the actual world, societies are populated by people who endorse a plurality of comprehensive doctrines, such as Roman Catholicism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, and Confucianism. As Alessandro Ferrara has pointed out, the difficulty is that some of the basic constitutional essentials—the idea of equality among all citizens, gender equality, the idea of the citizen as a self-authenticating source of valid claims, freedom of conscience, the consequent ban on apostasy, etc.—could become highly problematical at least for some of the more traditional citizens. This condition is what Ferrara calls “hyperpluralism,” which refers to “the presence on the ground of cultural differences that exceed the range of traditions Rawls sought to reconcile within Political Liberalism, and of comprehensive conceptions that are only partially reasonable, display an only partial acceptance of the burdens of judgment or make their adherents endorse only a subset of the constitutional essentials.” Is the idea of reasonable pluralism too ideal to be useful? How should political liberalism defend itself against the claim that disagreements in a non-ideal world are simply too radical to be addressed by the political liberal project? In this chapter, I will confront this third challenge against political liberalism by defending Ferrara’s recent proposal to accommodate hyperpluralism with what he calls multivariate polity by interpreting his strategy as a layered approach to broaden the scope of political liberalism and strengthen its capacity to deal with pluralism. Then, I will argue that although the idea of hyperpluralism is intended to capture the socio-political condition of mature liberal democracies, it is also applicable to the attitudes toward emerging liberal and democratic institutions in East Asia. Finally, in preparation for the next three chapters where I focus on the relationship between political Confucianism and liberal democracy in East Asia, I will briefly examine what pluralism means in an East Asian context and critically engage with two recent attempts to bridge political Confucianism with liberal democracy that fall short in taking pluralism seriously.

In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following topics: the nature of the self and its relation to autonomy, the social dimensions of autonomy and the political dynamics of respect and recognition, and the concept of autonomy underlying the principles of liberalism.

In this paper I argue that Rawlsians have largely misunderstood the idea of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, thereby failing to delineate in an appropriate way the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. My argument rests on two core claims. The first claim is that (i) political liberalism is committed to three theses about the overlapping consensus. The first thesis concerns the subject of the overlapping consensus; the second thesis concerns the function of the overlapping consensus; the third thesis explains how the overlapping consensus can serve its function in accordance with political liberalism’s commitment to epistemic neutrality. The second claim on which my argument relies is empirical: (ii) Rawlsians typically deny at least one of the three theses to which political liberalism is committed. Based on (i) and (ii), I conclude that Rawlsians have hitherto provided unconvincing accounts of the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism.

Some religiously devout individuals believe divine command can override an obligation to obey the law where the two are in conflict. At the extreme, some individuals believe that acts of violence that seek to change or punish a political community, or to prevent others from violating what they take to be God’s law, are morally justified. In the face of this apparent clash between religious and political commitments it might seem that modern versions of political morality—such as John Rawls’s political liberalism—that refuse to take a stance on controversial religious matters, or eschew appeal to perfectionist doctrines, are beset by a particularly acute version of this problem of religious disobedience. Whilst political liberalism follows this path so as to generate wide and stable support, it raises the question of how political liberals should respond to religiously motivated non-compliance with the norms of that liberal conception of justice. This article evaluates what resources are available to political liberalism to respond to this challenge. It examines whether anti-perfectionism can be sustained in the face of those whose religious beliefs are in conflict with the law. We argue that, under certain circumstances, political liberalism requires direct engagement with the religious views of the unreasonable, including offering religious arguments to show that their particular interpretation of their faith is mistaken. This view takes political liberalism away from its usual ambitions, but it is a position that is both anticipated by Rawls and consistent with his view. It does, however, require that political liberals give up the claim that the view is a wholly non-sectarian, purely political view, and accept that, under certain circumstances it is a partially comprehensive version of liberal theory.

No one who has read either Rawls's Political Liberalism or my An Essay on Rights can fail to profit from the penetrating analysis to which Peter Jones has subjected them.Disposed to agree with most of what he says about the former, I am also inclined – but as yet unable – to disagree with much of what he says about the latter. However, alongside his many acute criticisms on which I'll need to reflect further, Jones's report of two key moves in my argument requires some revision and may, therefore, warrant this brief early response.

Theories of the state: A. Vincent, vii + 248 pp., Basil Blackwell, Oxford, no price given

This study examines ways in which political ideology influences discourses of race and social class in the formal curriculum and teacher attitudes in social studies education. More specifically, the study determined how elements of conservative, liberal, and radical ideologies affect discourses around race, social class, democracy and citizenship. The study drew on two data sources: all seven versions of the formal social studies curriculum used in British Columbia's high schools from 1941 to the present; and transcripts from interviews with current social studies department heads in ten high schools in Vancouver, British Columbia. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyze both data sources. The interview transcripts were also analyzed using an interpretation of meaning approach. The study demonstrates that the British Columbia curriculum evolved from a conservative document to one influenced by liberalism. The early curriculum guides were essentially conservative. The 1956,1968, and 1980 versions indicated oscillation between these two ideologies. The 1988 and 1997 versions were completely dominated by liberalism. Over this time period, conservative depictions of non-white peoples that were overtly racist transformed to liberal representations in a pluralist multicultural framework. Social class issues were always presented from the standpoint of capital in the conservative versions of the curriculum, while subsequent liberal versions almost completely ignored social class representation. The treatment of democracy and citizenship evolved from conservative to liberal conceptions. Radical elements were almost completely absent from any curricular documents. The study revealed that ideology influences teacher attitudes toward issues of race, class, democracy and citizenship. In general, liberalism was the most dominant ideology. Conservative discourses, however, appeared more than in the formal curriculum. Teachers invoked radical discourses only rarely. The liberal cultural deficit discourse was used by the majority to explain differences in academic proficiency along axes of race and class. Conservative genetic-deficit discourses appeared about as frequently as radical discourses that focused on unfair structural problems. The teachers were evenly divided in their use of conservative and liberal discourses about democracy and citizenship. Recommendations were made to alter social studies curriculum and teacher education programs to reflect social justice aims from a radical perspective.

This article explores the historical and philosophical backgrounds that inform the appropriation of the term “public reason” in liberal theory. Particularly, it studies the differing nuances attached to public reason by Kant and Rawls. The article suggests that, while Kant viewed the public use of reason as a conditio sine qua non for Enlightenment to take place within the Prussian society, Rawls’s notion of public reason in Political Liberalism serves a different purpose in our contemporary world. Rawls sees public reason as a tool, which would enable citizens of the pluralistic liberal state to unearth tolerable bases for coexistence, despite their trenchant and often conflicting ideological, cultural and religious differences. Moreover, Rawls’s notion of public reason aims at liberal legitimacy: the normative and political justification of the legal power of the state in liberal democracy.