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Freedom, fairness, and sufficiency in Tahzib’s perfectionist theory of justice

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Book
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.
Chapter
It is a central tenet of much contemporary liberal theory that the state should remain as far as possible neutral between rival conceptions of the good life. By contrast, perfectionists hold that one function of the state is to encourage citizens to lead good or flourishing ways of life. But perfectionists have not generally been clear about whether they take perfectionist interventions to be permissible or mandatory. This chapter argues in favour of the stronger duty-based version of perfectionism. After introducing the distinction between duty-based and non-duty-based forms of perfectionism (Section 1), it makes a case for duty-based perfectionism by defending the idea of a right to the fair conditions of a flourishing life (Section 2). It then shows how the invocation of perfectionist duties can help perfectionists to rebut a number of powerful objections that have recently been levelled against their view (3). Finally, it defends duty-based perfectionism against the charge that it violates the public justification principle (Section 4).
Chapter
This article describes the influence of under-acknowledged assumptions about property rights, akin to those more frequently associated with John Rawls' foremost libertarian critic, Robert Nozick, on the debate concerning liberty and equality. It shows that Nozick's challenge to egalitarians has played an important role in Ronald Dworkin's alternative statement of liberal egalitarianism and indirectly influenced later non-Rawlsian egalitarianisms. The article also discusses Rawls's initial formulation of the so-called luck-sharing project.