Abstract
Is neutrality on the good in some sense an ideal that a just society must embrace? A flagrantly non-neutral policy such as a state establishment of religion would surely merit condemnation. Such a policy would be non-neutral on the good, but would also run afoul of other principles of right that might have independent appeal for many of us, whatever our views on state neutrality. On the other hand, we might imagine a society in which human friendship is deteriorating according to a variety of social science measures. An alarmed government institutes laws and policies to promote friendship, consisting of a pro-friendship advertising campaign, attention to friendship in the public school curriculum, and subsidized psychotherapy and anger management classes for people who see themselves as lacking capacities for forming and sustaining friendships and are unhappy about that. Such policies would qualify as non-neutral, if the neutrality norm rules out state action that advances some controversial conception of good, and if it is controversial that friendship is good. (Maybe some theorists celebrate the hermit’s life.) Here non-neutrality does not strike me as bad policy.
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Notes
My understanding of the neutrality norm owes a lot to works by Charles Larmore and Joseph Raz. See Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); also
Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See also Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Larmore acknowledges a debt to two earlier works, Ronald Dworkin’s essay ‘Liberalism’, reprinted in his collection A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
On Lockean libertarianism, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
See also A.John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
On Objective List accounts of good, see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), appendix.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. edition 1998);
Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edition, 1996).
See also John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness, Political Not Metaphysical’ (1985);
Rawls, ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’ (1987);
Rawls, ‘The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus’ (1989) and
Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ (1997). All of these essays are reprinted in
John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
In addition to the works of Rawls cited in note 8, see Burton Dreben, ‘On Rawls and Political Liberalism’; Charles Larmore, ‘Public Reason’, both in Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Jeremy Waldron, “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,’ Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1987): 127–150.
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© 2014 Richard J. Arneson
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Arneson, R.J. (2014). Neutrality and Political Liberalism. In: Merrill, R., Weinstock, D. (eds) Political Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319203_2
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