Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 3-45

  Nussbaum, Martha C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 79953016418     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01200.x     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. One could reasonably think of this debate as extending to continental Europe, since Rawls's work is widely discussed throughout Europe, and since Larmore writes in French, publishes in France before publishing in other countries, and has had a major influence on the French debate.
2. Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1996.
3. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded paper ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), hereafter PL. Page references to this work will be given in parentheses inside the text. Another important contribution to the development of the idea of political liberalism is Thomas Nagel, "Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215-40, and Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Nagel's account of the relevant distinctions is different from that of Rawls, relying on a notion of two "standpoints" within the person; it therefore requires separate consideration, and, despite its interest and importance, I shall discuss it no further here.
4. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
5. Raz describes his view as perfectionist and as opposed to "anti-perfectionism": see, for example, "Autonomy, Toleration, and the Harm Principle," in Issues in Contemporary Legal Philosophy, ed. Ruth Gavison (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 313-33, at pp. 331-32, 1987.
6. Larmore, "Political Liberalism," in The Morals of Modernity, pp. 122, 132.
7. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 154-55: however, one could also argue that by emphasizing a continuity between valuable lives and liberal political institutions (a theme clearly emphasized in Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011], but already present in the earlier work), the view moves toward perfectionism.
8. Another important distinction is the distinction between perfectionism with respect to content and perfectionism with respect to grounds, or modes of justification: see the important discussion of different types of neutrality in Peter DeMarneffe, "Liberalism, Liberty, and Neutrality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 253-74. Rawls and Larmore do not invoke this distinction, which would have been helpful to their arguments. As I discuss their views below, I shall attempt to introduce it.
9. This is true to some extent even in philosophical utilitarianism: Peter Singer, for example, has never, to my knowledge, addressed the challenge that political liberalism raises for his comprehensive view. It is ubiquitously true in philosophically informed areas of welfarist economics. Thus, in the special issue of Feminist Economics devoted to the work of Amartya Sen (9, no. 2-3 [2003]), Sen is specifically asked whether he accepts the idea of political liberalism (see Nussbaum, "Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice," pp. 33-50, at pp. 49-50), but he does not address this question in his reply. (These issues of the journal have been reprinted as Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas: A Gender Perspective, ed. Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries, and Ingrid Robeyns [New York: Routledge, 2005].) Nor does the idea of political liberalism play any role in Sen's extensive treatment of Rawls in The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). Similarly, Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006) fails to ask what respect for persons requires when people have deep attachments to their ethnic or religious identities, suggesting that there is a correct, plural view of identity that politics can legitimately endorse. Influential philosophically concerned economists in law who write extensively on welfare, proposing political principles for a pluralistic society, and yet do not confront the issue of political liberalism, are Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness versus Welfare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Eric Posner, "Human Welfare, Not Human Rights," Columbia Law Review 108 (2008): 1758-1802; and Matthew D. Adler, Well-Being and Equity: A Framework for Policy Analysis, draft prior to final copy edit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Both Posner and Adler defend a plural-valued type of consequentialism for political purposes, without taking sides one way or the other on whether this political doctrine is comprehensive, or partial and political; Kaplow and Shavell are comprehensive welfarists, without confronting the challenge political liberalism raises for their view. On the policy side, where such distinctions make a real difference to people's lives, the philosophically informed and generally admirable Sen/Stiglitz/Fitoussi report on quality of life commissioned by President Sarkozy of France similarly is totally silent about the comprehensive/political distinction: see J. E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, <> (2010).?On the side of nonwelfarist political philosophy, the distinction between political and comprehensive is neglected by Anthony Appiah in The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), although it lies right at the heart of his philosophical project (to articulate a form of liberalism that is compatible with pluralism), and although he discusses Rawls in some detail: see my review-discussion in Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (2006) 301-13. It is also neglected in the excellent book Disadvantage by Jonathan Wolff and Avner De-Shalit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), where it does seem quite germane to their enterprise of establishing general welfare principles for ethnically and economically divided societies, though the authors build on philosophical work of mine on capabilities that emphasizes the distinction.
10. In order to move on to the primary issue, the critique of Berlin by Larmore and Rawls, I focus on the texts that Larmore relies on to characterize the position he criticizes. I do not purport to offer a comprehensive exegesis of Berlin's views on liberalism.
11. Here I agree with Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement," in The Morals of Modernity, especially pp. 155-63.
12. I cite the essay, referred to in this article as PI, in the version given in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1997, pp. 1-16.
13. Berlin, Crooked Timber (New York: Knopf), 1991, p. 79.
14. Thus at PI, p. 15, Berlin favors putting some views off-limits, on the grounds that they conflict with "common" values that are accepted by all the diverse forms of life that pluralism supports; those views (including Nazism and views that advocate torture for pleasure) are not to be tolerated.
15. See Raz, "Autonomy, Toleration, and the Harm Principle," p. 316, where Raz defines the type of pluralism that interests him as "the view that there are various forms and styles of life which exemplify different virtues and which are incompatible," and then observes that "[t]here is nothing to stop a person from being both an ideal teacher and an ideal family person," thus distinguishing pluralism of his sort from what I call "internal pluralism." Raz, of course, does not assert, implausibly, that there would never be difficult conflicts in the life of someone who is both a teacher and a family person; the point is that the life is one that can be lived, because the two ideals do not make demands that are in principle incompatible.
16. Nor does Larmore make this distinction, when he states, in The Morals of Modernity, that pluralism is a characteristically modern position. Internal pluralism is ubiquitous in the ancient Greek and Roman world, the Indian world, and no doubt in many other ancient cultures. The form of pluralism with which Larmore is most concerned-the idea that there are several "reasonable" comprehensive views of how to live-appears to be older in India than in the West: an edict of the emperor Ashoka (around the third and second centuries BCE) says that "the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another." But a similar idea is on the scene at least in the Roman world, and Cicero's correspondence with his Epicurean friend Atticus shows us an interesting version of it. Cicero, who certainly does not like Epicureanism, and who has a very different comprehensive doctrine, says, in a letter of 61 BCE, that he and Atticus are so close that nothing separates them "apart from our choices of an overall mode of life" (praeter voluntatem institutae vitae). He then says that his friend was led to his choice by a haud reprehendenda ratio (a hardly exceptionable course of reasoning). See Letters to Atticus, Loeb Classical Library edition by David Shackleton Bailey, vol. I. (This is my own translation: Shackleton Bailey overtranslates, I think, when he writes an "entirely justifiable way of thinking," something Cicero would never say about the Epicurean doctrine.) The larger context makes his meaning clear: in these perilous times, we can understand why an honorable man would seek retirement from public life (honestum otium), and then Cicero admits that his own choice to serve the Republic is motivated by "what one might call ambition."
17. There are limiting cases: for example, the requirements of Dionysian religion involve such a degree of tension with the standard requirements of the civic religion that it is unclear whether a coherent unitary life can be made out of the two; this case bleeds into pluralism of Berlin's type. For a revealing discussion of different types of conflict, see Henry S. Richardson, Practical Reasoning about Final Ends (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1994, pp. 144-51.
18. Or, really, many wholes, since Hinduism contains large regional differences: see Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York and London: Penguin), 2009.
19. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), hereafter MF; "Autonomy, Toleration" (see note 5). The two contemporaneous texts treat the same set of problems from slightly different perspectives, and I shall treat the two texts as of equal authority.
20. Raz, "Autonomy," p. 173; see also p. 168: government is not required to create repugnant or evil options so that people may freely avoid them.
21. MF, pp. 373-76.
22. MF, pp. 380-81.
23. A key element of such a politics will, he argues, be endorsement of Mill's "harm principle"; here he and the political liberal can agree. But Raz's reasons for endorsing the harm principle will be different from those that Rawls would favor: for Raz, the truth of plural valuable options; for Rawls (who, however, does not discuss this example), the idea that respect for persons requires government not to take a stand on the truth of people's comprehensive doctrines one way or the other.
24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), book 4, chap. 8, p. 226.
25. See PI, pp. 12-14: monism is "dangerous," because it teaches that there is an "ultimate solution to the problems of society" (the comparison to Hitler is explicit in the text), and "the millions slaughtered in wars or revolutions-gas chambers, gulag, genocide, all the monstrosities for which our century will be remembered-are the price men must pay for the felicity of future generations."
26. He describes his own route to the realization of this "truth" in PI, pp. 6-10.
27. In October 1995, Pope John Paul II endorsed a limited form of pluralism, granting that there were plural routes to salvation. Particularly striking was his inclusion of polytheistic Hinduism among those routes.
28. Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement," p. 167.
29. Here I am invoking DeMarneffe's distinction (see note 8) to flesh out what Larmore's discussion clearly suggests.
30. This is how doctrines would ultimately need to be defended. Rawls's later discussions of civility add the "proviso" that one may, without violating the ethical duty of civility, invoke one's comprehensive doctrine to defend political principles, "provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support" (PL, pp. li-lii; and see the similar statement in "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," hereafter IPRR, in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], pp. 573-615, at pp. 591-4).
31. Once again, however, it has determinate ethical content and is justified by determinate ethical notions, so it is not fully neutral in either of DeMarneffe's two senses.
32. For the idea of citizens as free and equal persons, and the related idea of reciprocity, see PL, pp. 18-19 and passim; the idea that citizens' freedom and equality requires fair treatment of their varied comprehensive doctrines is fundamental to both PL and A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), for example, in its reasoning about the priority of religious liberty. It is given a particularly extensive treatment in "Fairness to Goodness," in Collected Papers, pp. 267-85. At TJ, p. 586, Rawls says that ideas of equal human dignity and respect are given a definite content by the principles of justice: to respect persons is to recognize an "inviolability founded on justice" that is expressed in the two principles. As Larmore observes, the idea of respect for persons, though nowhere subjected to extensive analysis on its own, "shape[s][his] thought at the deepest level": see Charles Larmore, "Public Reason," in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 368-93, at p. 391.
33. See my discussion of Roger Williams's view and its relationship to Rawls's in Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), chap. 2. Rawls does not discuss the "compelling state interest" requirement apropos of the Religion clauses of the First Amendment, but he does discuss it with reference to the Speech clause, arguing that only a danger of the utter collapse of the constitutional system can justify limiting political speech.
34. Larmore, "Public Reason," and "Respect for Persons," The Hedgehog Review 7 (2005): 66-76.
35. See Larmore, "Respect for Persons": respect is incompatible with conduct that treats "persons merely as means, as objects of coercion, and not also as ends, engaging directly their distinctive capacity as persons."
36. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 586, on dignity: he argues, convincingly, that it has little determinate content which needs to be defined in connection with a group of other ideas and principles. See my discussion in "Human Dignity and Political Entitlements," in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington, D.C.), 2008, pp. 351-80.
37. See Maritain, note 39. Rawls, too, insists on the distinction between an appropriation of Kantian ethical notions for political purposes and the use of a controversial comprehensive Kantian doctrine, and he insisted on the importance of not using or even suggesting that one was using a comprehensive Kantian doctrine. Thus, in a 1998 letter about planned revisions to PL on file with the author and with Columbia University Press, he announced his intention to change the terms "practical reason" and "principles of practical reason," because they suggest a Kantian doctrine of reason, which he calls "a serious mistake."
38. See discussion below in note 61 and text at that point.
39. Jacques Maritain, "Truth and Human Fellowship," in On the Use of Philosophy: Three Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). Maritain's own views anticipate Rawls's in many respects. Describing the practical political agreement that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the drafting of which Maritain worked on with thinkers from Egypt, China, and so on, he makes it evident that he thinks the agreement prescinds from sectarian metaphysical commitments precisely in order to arrive at a mutually respectful agreement among people who differ in their comprehensive doctrines. See Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chaps. 4 and 5, especially 4.1, entitled "Men Mutually Opposed in Their Theoretical Conceptions Can Come to a Merely Practical Agreement Regarding a List of Human Rights," p. 76. For a fine account of the work that led to the framing of the Universal Declaration, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2002).
40. In Women and Human Development, Frontiers of Justice, and Creating Capabilities (see note 4); see also Liberty of Conscience.
41. Mill repeatedly expresses enthusiasm for Auguste Comte's idea that an atheistic doctrine of extensive sympathy (given extensive state sponsorship, although not coercively enforced) would come to replace existing religions: see in particular Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: Kegan Paul, 1891; reprinted from original of 1861); "The Utility of Religion," in Mill, Three Essays on Religion (Amherst, N.Y.: Promethus Books, 1998); Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 3, in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (New York and London: Penguin, 1987). Mill criticizes many specifics of the Comtean program, but he considers Positivism (whose central tenet is that humanity has reached a postreligious age) a philosophical achievement on a par with the work of Descartes and Leibniz (see Auguste Comte, p. 200). One might argue that in other writings Mill expresses ideas that are more compatible with political liberalism; that exegetical issue will not occupy me here. Both Rawls and Larmore treat Kant as the holder of a comprehensive perfectionist doctrine, but, once again, that is a controversial exegetical claim that is irrelevant to the argument of this article.
42. On the importance of the notion of "fair terms of cooperation" for Rawls, see Larmore, "Public Reason," p. 391.
43. Samuel Freeman, Rawls (New York: Routledge), 2007, p. 346.
44. Freeman does not, however, discuss the difficulties to which this shift gives rise.
45. Paradiso, canto 23; compare Purgatorio canto 31, lines 13-21, where Dante compares himself to a bow drawn too tight and therefore broken, using Aristotle's metaphor for intellectual aspiration to show that this aspiration to understanding must be humbled before Christian love.
46. See Peter Brown's interpretation of the Ad Simplicianum de Diversis Quaetionibus in Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), pp. 155ff, 1967.
47. For discussion of some key historical texts, see Martha Nussbaum, "Judaism and the Love of Reason," in Philosophy, Feminism, Faith, ed. Marya Bower and Ruth Groenhout (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2003, pp. 9-39.
48. Burton Dreben, "On Rawls and Political Liberalism," The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2003, p. 326.
49. Similarly, the idea that it is very difficult to arrive at the correct view in such matters, even using one's reason in the best possible way, is fundamental to at least one strand in Locke's defense of toleration.
50. And so it is also not clear whether the account of "reasonable" persons would need to be correspondingly revised: it might be that only the condition having to do with fair terms of cooperation would survive, and that having to do with the burdens of judgment would drop out. For illuminating discussion on this point, I am grateful to Erin Kelly.
51. Rawls appears to take this line in IPRR, his latest statement on this question: see pp. 573-74; a plurality of conflicting doctrines is "the normal result" of a culture of free institutions, and "[c]itizens realize that they cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines."
52. For Larmore, this is the pivotal distinction; unlike Rawls, he does not focus theoretical attention on the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines, although he would very likely consider this a closely related distinction.
53. Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement," p. 171. In his 2005 article "Respect for Persons" (cited in note 34), Larmore explicitly states that for him "reasonable," as applied to comprehensive doctrines, is not a notion that flows directly from the notion of equal respect; he casts aspersions on that sort of view, saying, "naturally little is accomplished by definitional maneuvers." His own definition of "reasonable" there is "rather abstract," involving "exercising the basic capacities of reason and conversing with others in good faith." An earlier account is "thinking and conversing in good faith and applying, as best we can, the general capacities of reason that pertain to every domain of inquiry." Thus he would seem to favor a definition that is at least partly theoretical, and only minimally ethical.
54. Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement," p. 173.
55. Is Marxism a reasonable comprehensive doctrine in Rawls's sense? Not if it requires endorsing the legitimate use of violence and the suspension of political liberties; but there are versions of Marxism, both in philosophy (G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster) and in politics (the Marxist parties of India and some parts of Europe) that do seem to qualify as reasonable.
56. Law-Philosophy Workshop, The University of Chicago, 2008. Even though Raz does not state this in MF, it seems to be a natural consequence of the theoretical importance he gives to the broad acceptance of these views.
57. Of course, on the view I hold, individual citizens and groups of citizens in the "background culture" will be free to try to convert others to their view: the phobia about conversion that has led some Indian states to restrict proselytizing has no place in political liberalism. The point is rather that government cannot be the agent of this process without establishing a hierarchy.
58. Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," 1785, in Religion and the Constitution, 2nd ed., ed. Michael McConnell, John H. Garvey, and Thomas C. Berg, (New York: Aspen), 2006, p. 50.
59. PL, pp. xliv-xlv.
60. No state really says this, because every state needs military defense, and presumably Raz would not deny this. His state, then, would have to say, "It is fine to subordinate your autonomy to the service of your country, but not to religious authority," a statement even more problematic than a blanket condemnation of all nonautonomous lives.
61. See PL, p. 199: "Political liberalism is unjustly biased against certain comprehensive conceptions only if, say, individualistic ones alone can endure in a liberal society, or they so predominate that associations affirming values of religion or community cannot flourish, and moreover the conditions leading to this outcome are themselves unjust, in view of present and foreseeable circumstances."
62. PL, pp. 340-56. In such a case, the person would be unreasonable in the ethical sense, as would her doctrine; but the state will take no action, provided that she is not violating the rights of others or causing a threat of upheaval.
63. Although, once again, exegetical controversies about the interpretation of Kant and Mill are irrelevant to my argument here.
64. On the delicate question of how the political conception will advance a norm of objectivity without becoming a comprehensive doctrine, see Nussbaum, "Political Objectivity, New Literary History 32 (2001): 883-906, interpreting and defending Rawls's view.
65. It is not clear whether Rawlsian duties of civility apply to such people: one could argue that they do; given the pervasive influence of public education on all of one's life as a citizen, schools are part of the basic structure. But even if one should resist this idea, and thus hold that it is morally permissible for teachers to make statements defending comprehensive rationalism, one should certainly insist that the teacher point out that the nation in which pupils and teacher live is not built upon the truth of comprehensive rationalism, so that teacher is simply arguing from her own comprehensive doctrine, not from public values.
66. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Susan Moller Okin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett), 1988, p. 4.
67. Mill certainly wants both culture and law to change; how far he believes it right for government to promulgate a comprehensive doctrine of women's equality-by contrast with specific political reforms that he evidently favors-remains unclear, and therefore I do not address it further here.
68. Susan Moller Okin, "Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,"Ethics 105 (1994): 23-43; Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 9-24, and the longer version, "Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions,"Ethics 108 (1998): 661-84. Okin's central discussion concerns the "founding myths" of ancient Greco-Roman religion, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but her theoretical claim is much more sweeping: "much of most cultures is about controlling women and maintaining gender roles" ("Feminism," p. 667). A similar statement appears in the shorter version: "most cultures have as one of their principal aims the control of women by men" (Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, p. 13). As the Ethics paper unfolds and she engages with theorists who discuss examples from other religions (e.g., Kymlicka's discussions of the religious practices of indigenous minorities and Kukathas's general reference to "immigrant cultures"), she similarly broadens the scope of her critique. (The book version, similarly, discusses native practices in Peru and in traditional African religion.) In "Feminism," note 17, she explicitly endorses a claim by two feminist scholars that "[t]raditions have always been a double-edged sword for women. Subordinate economic and social status, and restrictions on women's activity and mobility are embedded in most traditional cultures." While Okin usually does not distinguish between religion and culture, her lengthy discussions of the four religious "founding myths" place an emphasis on religion as a medium of control.
69. Nussbaum, "Rawls and Feminism," Cambridge Companion to Rawls, pp. 488-520.
70. Even in those cases where a religious hierarchy still espouses overtly sexist doctrines-as, for example, with the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church to ordain women-the laity and large parts of the clergy, in the United States at any rate, favor change, so it should not even be said that the Roman Catholic religion is per se opposed to sex equality. Clearly, however, the centralized and international character of the Roman Catholic Church poses special difficulties for change, since the public cultures of the nations from which many of its members are drawn do not fully support the equality of women.
71. See MF, pp. 401-2.
72. See PL, pp. 158-63, for the idea of a "constitutional consensus."
73. I have treated this example extensively in Liberty of Conscience.
74. By "sends the message," O'Connor presumably means that the policy in question, by communicating government's approval of a particular comprehensive doctrine selected among others, is reasonably understood to make a statement that this doctrine is preferred by government, and that its adherents, therefore, by living the life that government prefers, are a privileged in-group of citizens.
75. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, chap. 6.