This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
A close cousin of the nihilist position – worth articulating in a footnote, if not in the main text – is that of the “skeptic”. In contrast to the nihilist, the skeptic allows that there may actually be some “fact of the matter” with regard to the Good Life, but that human beings are unable to know it. (Or at least, have thus far failed to successfully identify the true account of human flourishing).
William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3.
George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 22.
John Milton, Areopagitica, in Gordon Campbell (ed.), John Milton: The Complete English Poems (London: David Campbell Publishers), 573–618, p. 613.
John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 29–30.
Galston, op. cit., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 20.
For an instructive survey of much of this literature, see William Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chp. 2.
Galston (2002), pp. 40ff. Galston (2005) appeals to a similar distinction, when he writes on p. 194 of there being “no guarantee that what is philosophically defensible will coincide with what is publicly and politically desirable.”
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 13.
Ibid., p. 12.
Mark Henrie, “Understanding Traditionalist Conservativism,” in Peter Berkowitz (ed.), Varieties of Conservativism in American (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2004), 3–30, p. 15.
Galston (2002), p. 6.
Readers who find themselves simply unable to entertain the notion that proponents of including ID in public school curricula are reasonable (I presume I will have some such readers) should focus their attention instead on the aspect of this conflict that pits the values of parental choice and public regulation with regard to the final determination of public school curricula.
Henrie, op. cit., p. 23.
Extremely minarchist versions of classical liberalism, often going under the name of “Night Watchman” conceptions of the state – of the style associated with Robert Nozick, e.g. – provide an exception.
Readers who accepted my counsel in footnote 14, and who focused on the privileging public regulation vs. privileging parental choice dimension of this example, will now have to focus on the manner in which the voucher system sketched here effects a better accommodation of these conflicting values, than does the current approach to settling such disputes – wherein school boards face no option but to privilege one of these values to the exclusion of the other.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Baltzly, V.B. 2014 Rockefeller Prize Winner: Four Strikes for Pluralist Liberalism (And Two Cheers for Classical Liberalism). J Value Inquiry 48, 315–333 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9437-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9437-x