Political liberalism without scepticism

Ratio

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 320-340

  Quong, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949232232     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2007.00368.x     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
2. The idea of epistemological restraint was first introduced by Thomas Nagel, 'Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 16 (1987), pp. 215-240
3. Although I use the term in this paper, I will be examining Rawls's, not Nagel's, arguments for this principle. For an instructive defense of Nagel's position see Terry L. Price, 'Epistemological Restraint - Revisited', Journal of Political Philosophy, 8 (2000), pp. 401-407
4. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 54. There are other elements of the reasonable citizen listed by Rawls, but they are not essential for our purposes
5. See for example Brian Barry, John Rawls and the Search for Stability', Ethics, 105 (1995), pp. 901-914
6. Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 183-188
7. Graham Long, Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004), pp. 208-213
8. David McCabe, 'Knowing about the Good: A Problem with Antiperfectionism', Ethics, 110 (2000), pp. 311-338
9. Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91-94
10. or Leif Wenar, 'Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique', Ethics, 106 (1995), pp. 41-48
11. See for example McCabe or Wall
12. Barry, Long, and Wenar fall into this category
13. This paper only addresses Rawls's arguments - I do not claim it applies to other conceptions of political liberalism
14. McCabe, 'Knowing about the Good', p. 311
15. Although he does not frame his objection in terms of scepticism, Gerald F. Gaus presents a similar critique, arguing that accepting the burdens of judgement is incompatible with being an 'absolutist' about your own beliefs, something which Gaus claims (based on experimental evidence) most adult Americans are. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 134-135
16. Barry, Justice as Impartiality, pp. 168-188
17. Long, Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism, chapters 6 and 7
18. Wenar, 'Political Liberalism', p. 48
19. McCabe, 'Knowing About the Good'
20. or Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint
21. Gaus defends a similar, but more ambitious claim, namely, that we can understand belief systems which are very different than our own as rational. See Gaus, Justificatory Liberalism, chapter 3, especially pp. 42-43
22. Rawls, 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 592
23. This example is borrowed from Joseph Raz, 'Liberalism, Scepticism, and Democracy', in Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 89
24. Raz, 'Liberalism, Scepticism, and Democracy,' p. 89
25. A similar point is made by Larry Krasnoff in response to Wenar's claim Rawls's theory is problematic because a certain version of Catholicism cannot accept the burdens of judgement. See Krasnoff, 'Consensus, Stability, and Normativity in Rawls's Political Liberalism', Journal of Philosophy, 95 (1998), pp. 279-290, ft. 8
26. There is thus a dubious asymmetry in the way Barry treats reasonable disagreement about conceptions of the good and the way he treats reasonable disagreements about justice, something which several authors persuasively claim is a fatal problem with Barry's defence of liberal neutrality. See for example Simon Caney, 'Impartiality and Liberal Neutrality', in Impartiality, Neutrality and Justice: Re-reading Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality, ed. Paul Kelly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 87-107
27. or Simon Clarke, 'Contractarianism, Liberal Neutrality, and Epistemology', Political Studies, 47 (1999), pp. 634-637
28. This concern has been expressed, for example, by Joseph Raz in 'Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 19 (1990), pp. 23-24
29. See Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 59-68
30. The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 134-141
31. or 'The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism', Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999), pp. 599-625
32. Krasnoff stresses this point in his defence of Rawls. See Krasnoff, 'Consensus, Stability, and Normativity in Rawls's Political Liberalism'
33. I do discuss these issues at greater length in Liberalism Without Perfection (ms in progress)
34. See Rawls, 'The Idea of Public Revisited', p. 583
35. or Political Liberalism, pp. xlviii-xlix, 226
36. For a more complete treatment of this issue see my 'Disagreement, Asymmetry, and Liberal Legitimacy', Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, 4 (2005), pp. 301-330
37. For Rawls's description of this core concept see Rawls, 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', pp. 581-582
38. Also see Joseph Chan, 'Legitimacy, Unanimity and Perfectionism', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29 (2000), pp. 5-42
39. or Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 417.1 assess this perfectionist position in detail in 'Paternalism and Perfectionism', unpublished ms