Abstract
Liberal neutrality requires that, given the diversity of conceptions of the good life held by people, the state should be in some sense neutral between these conceptions. Just what that sense is has been a matter of debate but it seems generally accepted that neutrality is a property of the justifications for government action and not of the consequences of such action. In other words, the state must be neutral by avoiding invoking any conception of the good in its justification for laws and policies and by avoiding having any laws and policies that can be justified only by reference to some conception of the good. It need not, so it seems generally accepted, ensure that the consequences of its laws and policies do not favor some conceptions of the good over others. Against this commonly held view, in this chapter I argue that justificatory neutrality is inadequate as a full picture of what liberal neutrality means and that some conception of consequential neutrality is more plausible.
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Notes
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 108.
Will Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality’, Ethics, 99(4) (1989): 883–4.
See Richard Arneson ‘Neutrality and Utility’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(2) (1990): 217–9;
Gerald Gaus, ‘The Moral Foundations of Liberal Neutrality’ in Thomas Christiano and John Christman (eds) Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing, 2009), p. 81.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 175.
Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 44.
Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 160.
Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 159.
Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 32. Wall writes here about ideas that are controversial or publicly inaccessible rather than conceptions of the good. Whilst this makes an important difference for the arguments he considers, he seems to believe that most conceptions of the good fall into this category. What is significant here is that the notion he has in mind is one that places a restriction on the range of justifications available in political morality.
Ronald Dworkin, ‘Foundations of Liberal Equality’, in Grethe B. Peterson (ed.) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, IX (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), p. 21.
Dworkin is more commonly understood as a defender of liberal neutrality rather than a critic. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in his A Matter of Principle, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985) where he defends the idea that ‘political decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life’ (p. 191). His view is too complex to summarize here.
For these kinds of arguments, see A Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality’, p. 884; George Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 3–4; Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 193; Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, pp. 43–4. There are, however, some exceptions to the general rejection of consequential neutrality. Wall argues lor it over justificatory neutrality, although his argument is different from the one I give. The conception of consequential neutrality that I outline is similar to one that he defends.
I have in mind here the theories set out in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971);
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000).
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© 2014 Simon Clarke
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Clarke, S. (2014). Consequential Neutrality Revivified. In: Merrill, R., Weinstock, D. (eds) Political Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319203_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319203_7
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