Abstract
In his posthumously published collection of essays, In the Beginning Was the Deed, Bernard Williams identifies two ways in which moral philosophy might be thought to inform theorizing about civil life. The first, or enactment model as Williams calls it, holds that political theory, guided by moral insight, “formulates principles, concepts, ideals and values; and politics … seeks to express these in political action, through persuasion, the use of power, and so forth.”1 The second, or structural model, “lays down moral conditions of co-existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised.”2 The enactment model is on display, according to Williams, in utilitarian theory, while the structural model is illustrated by Rawls’s theory of justice.
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Notes
Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1.
Robert Nozick has expressed this point rather well: Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of the state, or do to establish such an apparatus. The moral prohibitions it is permissible to enforce are the source of whatever legitimacy the state’s fundamental coercive power has. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 6.
Cf. Kymlicka, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 4–7.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 137.
In Political Liberalism, Rawls explains his aim in Theory to be the defense of a theory of justice superior to utilitarianism. He says, “I thought this alternative conception was, of the traditional moral conceptions, the best approximation to our considered convictions of justice and constituted the most appropriate basis for the institutions of a democratic society” (Rawls, xv). He moves away from insisting that justice as fairness is a comprehensive doctrine in Political Liberalism because as but one comprehensive doctrine among many in pluralist polities, it could not guarantee the assent of those holding alternative moral (yet morally reasonable) comprehensive doctrines. Thus the case he makes for embracing his theory of justice, and hence promoting the stability of the polity, he admitted, must rest on something other than a comprehensive doctrine—that is, the case for justice as fairness must be freestanding. But the theory of justice, complete with its claims of political legitimacy, remains moral in nature; it is but one component of a comprehensive moral theory. In Justice as Fairness: A Retsatement, Rawls further explains his position by noting that justice as fairness is not a comprehensive … doctrine—one that applies to all subjects and covers all values …. Neither political philosophy nor justice as fairness is, in that way, applied moral philosophy … . It focuses on the political (in the form of the basic structure), which is but a part of the domain of the moral. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14.
See William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.
William A. Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.
Cf. William A. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 3 (1995): 516–34. Though he thinks his liberal theory offers a most capacious space for diverse social groups, he also concedes, “Liberalism is not and cannot be the universal response, equally acceptable to all, to the challenge of social diversity. It is ultimately a partisan stance.”
William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 297.
See, for example, Peter Winch, “Authority,” in Anthony Quinton, ed., Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 97–111;
Richard E. Flathman, The Practice of Political Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25–33;
Richard T. De George, The Nature and Limits of Authority (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 26–62.
Cf. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000), Ch. 1.
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© 2010 Craig L. Carr
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Carr, C.L. (2010). Politics, Morality, and Pluralism. In: Liberalism and Pluralism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106055_2
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