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Rights, neutrality, and the oppressive power of the state

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References

  1. Benjamin Constant,Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Governments, inBenjamin Constant: Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 176.

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  2. Judith Shklar,Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 237.

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  3. Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in hisA Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 127.

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  4. Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 195.

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  5. This argument appears in chapter two of a manuscript still in progress entitledBeyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics.

  6. Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,”Ethics 99 (1989): 884.

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  7. Bruce Ackerman,Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 369.

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  8. Ibid., p. 363.

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  9. Thus, Jeremy Waldron quotes T. S. Eliot as opposing “the ideal of a neutral society” in a book that Eliot published just before the Second World War; but Waldron adds that “I have managed to find no evidence that any liberal view that Eliot was opposing was ever actually formulated in these terms” (Jeremy Waldron, “Legislation and Moral Neutrality,” in Robert E. Goodin and Andrew Reeve, eds.,Liberal Neutrality (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 62.

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  10. Shklar,Ordinary Vices, pp. 237–38.

  11. In “Liberalism,” cited above.

  12. Ibid., p. 197.

  13. Ibid., p. 198.

  14. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” p. 183; see also Will Kymlicka,Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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  15. These phrases from the mission statement of the N.E.A. are from a passage cited by David Schwartz in “Can Intrinsic Value Theorists Justify Subsidies for Contemporary Art?”Public Affairs Quarterly, forthcoming.

  16. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” p. 197.

  17. For arguments to this effect, see Stephen Macedo,Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 5.

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  18. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” p. 197.

  19. That this is Dworkin's motivation emerges clearly in “Liberalism,” p. 197.

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  1. Dept. of Philosophy, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

    George Sher

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  1. George Sher
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Sher, G. Rights, neutrality, and the oppressive power of the state. Law Philos 14, 185–201 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01001043

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