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How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Brian Barry
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Extract

Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1990 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 ‘What I have suggested to be the case by and large about our own culture [is] that in moral argument the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.’ (MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 18.)Google Scholar

2 See Freeden, Michael, The New Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).Google Scholar

3 See King, Preston, Toleration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), esp. p. 101Google Scholar. The most familiar version of this argument among Anglophones is Locke, John's Letter Concerning TolerationGoogle Scholar (in Gough, J. W., ed., The Second Treatise of Civil Government (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), pp. 123–65)Google Scholar, but what should be emphasized, and is made clear by King, is how widespread within Europe arguments of this kind were.

4 Ackerman, Bruce A., Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Dworkin, Ronald, ‘Liberalism’, in Hampshire, Stuart, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 113–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Dworkin, Ronald, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 181–204Google Scholar; and Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

5 Dworkin, Ronald, ‘Reverse Discrimination’, in Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 223–9, quotation from p. 236.Google Scholar

6 ‘Briefly, the idea is that in a constitutional democracy public conceptions of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines.’ (Rawls, John, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 223–51, quotation from p. 223.)Google Scholar

7 Since, ex hypothesi, these would be ‘victimless crimes’ their enforcement would be a greater threat to liberty than other forms of law enforcement, since it would require collecting information about consensual transactions. Corruption of the police and opportunities for organized crime tend to arise from the prohibition of harmless acts. And, to the extent that members of the society do not see anything wrong in harmless acts, the law is liable to fall into disrepute. Another point often made is that the pursuit of victimless crimes diverts police effort from more important crimes. But this in effect presupposes that preventing harm is what matters, so it is essentially a variant on the view considered in the text.

8 Ackerman, , Social Justice, p. 11 (italics in original).Google Scholar