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A Perfectionist Theory of Justice : Replies to Billingham, Laborde and Quon
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Many liberal political philosophers hold that the state should not impose or even promote any particular conception of the good life or human flourishing. Instead, the state should restrict itself to maintaining a fair framework of rights and opportunities within which all citizens can pursue their own ideas about the good life. Against this backdrop, this book defends a perfectionist political philosophy. Whereas previous perfectionists have argued that the promotion of flourishing ways of life is permissible or legitimate, the author casts perfectionism as a doctrine of justice. On this view, the implementation of laws and policies designed to promote sound ideals of the good life — ideals such as moral, intellectual and artistic excellence — is not merely a legitimate complement to justice but an essential constituent of justice. Over the years, liberals have criticized perfectionism on various fronts: that it relies on value judgements that are controversial within modern pluralistic societies; that it is unduly restrictive of freedom and autonomy; that it treats citizens as if they are unable to run their own lives; that it expresses the meddlesome mentality of a village busybody; that it mistakenly assumes that there are objective truths about human flourishing; and that it risks the abuse of power by incompetent, overzealous or corrupt state officials. These ideas represent some of the deepest, most vibrant and most powerful strains in liberal thought. In defending perfectionism against these charges, the author’s arguments make a novel contribution to longstanding debates about the philosophical foundations of liberalism.
The success of political liberalism depends on there being an overlapping consensus among reasonable citizens—including religious citizens—upon principles of political morality. This paper explores the resources within one major religion—Christianity—that might lead individuals to endorse (or reject) political liberalism, and thus to join (or not join) the overlapping consensus. I show that there are several strands within Christian political ethics that are consonant with political liberalism and might form the basis for Christian citizens’ membership of the overlapping consensus. Nonetheless, tensions remain, and it is not clear that Christians could wholeheartedly endorse the political conception or give unreserved commitment to political liberal ideals.
Philosophy & Public Affairs 31.3 (2003) 246-271
The First Priority Rule (the Priority of Liberty) of John Rawls's Justice as Fairness reads: "the principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore the basic liberties can be restricted only for the sake of liberty." The basic liberties are those commonly protected by constitutional regimes, including "freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person . . . ; the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. . . ." (p. 53). The Priority of Liberty treats these liberties as paramount and prohibits their sacrifice for the sake of efficiency, utilitarian and perfectionist ideals, or even other principles within Justice as Fairness (e.g., Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle).
The Priority of Liberty has always played a central role in Rawls's political theory. Rawls himself notes that "the force of justice as fairness would appear to arise from two things: the requirement that all inequalities be justified to the least advantaged, and the priority of liberty. This pair of constraints distinguishes it from intuitionism and teleological theories" (p. 220). As we shall see, its importance in his work has if anything increased over time. Part of the reason for this greater prominence is Rawls's growing ambivalence about the other distinctive elements of his political theory, especially the lexical Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle. In the absence of the former element, the Priority of Liberty would be the only thing preventing the special conception of justice from collapsing into the general conception, where all social primary goods (and presumably the interests they support) are lumped together. Rawls is deeply opposed, however, to the notion that "all human interests are commensurable, and that between any two there always exists some rate of exchange in terms of which it is rational to balance the protection of one against the protection of the other." Anything short of lexical priority for the basic liberties would countenance such trade-offs under certain circumstances.
This central component of Justice as Fairness has been criticized in a long string of articles, including ones by Brian Barry, Kenneth Arrow, H.L.A. Hart, Russell Keat and David Miller, Henry Shue, Joseph DeMarco and Samuel Richmond, Ricardo Blaug, and Norman Daniels. All of these authors have found Rawls's defense of the Priority of Liberty wanting in certain respects, and many of them have been sharply critical of the very idea of lexical priority for the basic liberties: Brian Barry considers it "outlandishly extreme," while H.L.A. Hart deems it "dogmatic." In Section II of this paper, I will examine Rawls's three arguments for the Priority of Liberty in Theory of Justice and show that two of them do indeed fail (either in whole or in part) because of a common error: Rawls's belief that once he has shown the instrumental value of the basic liberties for some essential purpose (e.g., securing self-respect), he has automatically shown the reason for their lexical priority. I will hereafter refer to this belief—that the lexical priority of the basic liberties can be inferred from the high priority of the interests they serve—as the Inference Fallacy. Lexical priority is such a stringent condition that a special form of justification will turn out to be necessary for its defense.
As I will also show, however, Rawls's third argument for the Priority of Liberty is not vulnerable to this inference-fallacy objection. This argument, which I will call the Hierarchy Argument, suggests that the Priority of Liberty follows directly from a certain conception of free persons. Unfortunately, the argument as presented is radically incomplete, leaving many important questions unanswered. In Section III, therefore, I present a Kantian reconstruction of the Hierarchy Argument, showing that it can offer a compelling and attractive defense of the Priority of Liberty. Beginning with the Kantian conception of autonomy endorsed by Rawls (sec. 40 of Theory), this reconstruction explains our highest-order interest in rationality, justifies the lexical priority of all basic liberties, and reinterprets the threshold condition for the application of...
This is the introductory chapter to Liberalism Without Perfection (OUP). A growing number of political philosophers favour a view called liberal perfectionism. According to this view, liberal political morality is characterised by a commitment to helping individuals lead autonomous lives and making other valuable choices. In this book Jonathan Quong rejects this widely held view and offers an alternative account of liberal political morality. Quong argues that the liberal state should not be engaged in determining what constitutes a valuable or worthwhile life nor trying to make sure that individuals live up to this ideal. Instead, it should remain neutral on the issue of the good life, and restrict itself to establishing the fair terms within which individuals can pursue their own beliefs about what gives value to their lives. The book thus defends a position known as political liberalism. The first part of the book subjects the liberal perfectionist position to critical scrutiny, advancing three major objections that raise serious doubts about the liberal perfectionist position with regard to autonomy, paternalism, and political legitimacy. The latter chapters then present and defend a distinctive version of political liberalism. In particular, Quong clarifies and develops political liberalism's central thesis: that political principles, in order to be legitimate, must be publicly justifiable to reasonable people. Drawing on the work of John Rawls, Quong offers his own interpretation of this idea, and rebuts some of the main objections that have been pressed against it. In doing so, the book offers novel arguments regarding the nature of an overlapping consensus, the structure of political justification, the idea of public reason, and the status of unreasonable persons.
In this issue). Perfecting justice and legitimacy?
- P Billingham
In this issue). A perfectionist original position?
- C Laborde
A perfectionist theory of justice: Replies to Sypnowich Vallier and Wall
- C Tahzib
Whose public reason? Which reasonableness?
- C Tahzib
Stability coherence and perfection: On Collis Tahzib’s political perfectionism
- K Vallier