Abstract
Liberals stand for coercion. This is often under-emphasized, sometimes to the point of being inconspicuous. But the bite of liberalism is clear enough, as when Brian Barry says: “I do not intend to deny, of course, that people who hold the idea of reasonableness in contempt have to be taken seriously. But the only response worth making is to try to defeat them politically and, if necessary, seek to repress them by force.”1 There is a taste of paradox in this passage. Is Barry’s comment an instance of what liberal tolerance amounts to or what liberal neutrality and impartiality are about? We are left wondering how liberalism is possible. How can liberals maintain a coherent and defensible thesis about political legitimacy? They cannot do so, if they ground liberalism in skepticism about conceptions of the good.
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Notes
Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 ), p. 169.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 214–215; and Political Liberalism ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 ), pp. 150–154.
Gerald Dworkin, “Non-neutral Principles,” Journal of Philosophy 71:3, 1974.
Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16:2, 1987; Charles Larmore, “Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement,” Social Philosophy and Policy 11:1, 1994.
Lesley Tritschler, “U.S. Marshals Sent to Guard Eight U.S. Abortion Clinics,” Gannett News Service, 1 August, 1994.
See Peter De Marneffe, “Liberalism, Liberty, and Neutrality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19: 3, 1990.
Nagel, op. cit.
Barry, op. cit., p. 169.
Ibid., pp. 169 172.
Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 20–21.
Barry, op. cit., p. 180.
Ibid., p. 181.
Ibid.
John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New York University Law Review 64: 2, 1989, p. 253.
Barry, op. cit., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 115.
Nagel, op. cit., p. 229; see also Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 ), p. 229.
See Jean Hampton, “The Moral Commitments of Liberalism,” in David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy ( Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ).
Larmore, op. cit., p. 62.
Barry, op. cit., p. 168.
Nagel, Equality and Partiality,p. 158.
I wish especially to thank Chris Griffin, Mark Lebar, Jan Narveson, Paula Rodgers, Kenneth G. Scalet and David Schmidtz for many helpful comments in the construction of this essay. I also gratefully acknowledge the Earhart Foundation’s support in the form of a fellowship that funded the larger project of which this is a part.
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Scalet, S. (2000). Liberalism, Skepticism, and Neutrality: Making Do Without Doubt. In: Narveson, J., Dimock, S. (eds) Liberalism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9440-0_4
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