This chapter synthesizes the unifying theme across the different domains by mapping each conflict onto the egalitarian–libertarian debate: does autonomous constituent self-rule demand ensuring that all constituents enjoy a baseline substantive opportunity to contribute to public governance, or require noninterference with the application of private power and constituent preferences (including by powerful or privileged constituents who will enjoy disproportionate practical influence over politics)? The Conclusion also describes the two related trends in current Supreme Court lawmaking that threaten contestation over freedom. There is the threat – most clearly expressed in Bush v. Gore – that purely tribal partisanship will overdetermine election law outcomes and displace rather than frame the debate over freedom. Second, the parallel rise of the use of summary modes of disposition further erodes the opportunities for philosophical engagement by the bench.

Meaning of life and technology are not normally theorized together. But once we realize that all human activity is always technologically mediated, we see that any acts in pursuit of personal significance, too, are so mediated. However, this point then opens the possibility that technology enters the quest for meaning the wrong way. This chapter explores what that possibility means and how to respond to it. I use as my starting point Nozick’s proposal for how to think about the meaning of life. Nozick’s account makes central the idea of “limited transcendence,” essentially folding the kind of transcendence normally involved in interaction with divinity into a finite life. Nozick’s high-altitude view does not make sufficiently clear how technology enters. But once we bring in additional ideas from Ihde and Arendt, we can see clearly how it does. Next, we turn to Wiener’s classic God & Golem. Wiener is concerned with “gadget worshippers,” people who surrender control over their lives to machines in ways that are not appropriate to what these machines can do. Working with this notion, we can throw light on how technology can enter into the quest for meaning the wrong way and offer advice for how to counterbalance this challenge.

This chapter argues that we can consider policing either a primary good, subject to the requirements of distributive justice, or a feature of the democracy necessary for creating and distributing primary goods secure from threats of populism, majoritarianism, and crime. It uses historical examples of failed states and states in transition to observe that a reduction in government to policing actions and the emergence of a dominant protective association demarcate transitions between states, and become the overriding priority in cases where states falter or fail, highlighting policing as a necessary, core feature of the conception of the state itself, regardless of how minimal that state may be (or how extensive it may become). The chapter closes by considering the potential for a Rawlsian difference principle to guide the distribution of police resources to benefit the least well off, and the utilization of public health metrics and outcomes to ensure policing delivers practical justice by seeking equitable population-level reductions in morbidity and mortality, and increases in health and resilience, rather than relying on crime rates or police productivity as surrogate indications that policing has positively impacted communities and their most vulnerable members.