Class 11.1: Political Liberalism

In this unit of the course, we are turning to the study of political philosophy to find ideas about how to manage conflict. Last week we read Professor Quong’s article “Legitimate Injustice”, which is about the question of whether and if so, why, we are sometimes required to comply with incorrect decisions by groups of which we are a part - whether these are laws, or the decisions of project teams at school, or household decisions. Professor Quong argued that the ultimate explanation of why some injustice is legitimate - why we need to comply with and respect some laws even though they are unjust - has to do with the fact that none of us are perfect at figuring out what justice requires. So it’s not fair to expect each of us to take responsibility all of the time for making sure that the laws are just - that would require you to take on too much personal responsibility for whether the laws are just, and hence too much responsibility for the fact that they are unjust, if they are. The most that we can require of you is to respect a fair way of trying to decide on them.

Today’s topic is also, in a way, about the fact that none of us are perfect at figuring out what is required or even good. But here it is applied to a different question - the question of whether there are moral limits on what states can do, and if so, why. “Political Liberalism” is a name for one kind of theory about why the answer to this question is “yes”.

Liberalism

The traditional meaning of “liberalism” outside of the context of contemporary politics is that there are. Liberals say that individuals have rights against the state, and it can’t do just whatever its rulers want. Hobbes, for example, is not a liberal because he says that morality is in a way determined by the state’s power to enforce the law. So rules can do all kinds of things, according to Hobbes, so long as they do their basic job. In contrast, Hobbes’ contemporary John Locke, who also used a “state of nature” thought experiment in his arguments, does count as a liberal, because Locke argued that there are moral limits on what states can do that come from the fact that states arise from agreements between individuals to give up a limited set of their rights to the state, and therefore what states are allowed to do can’t go beyond what individuals have agreed to in this way. Locke is a predecessor of some forms of modern libertarianism.

Classical liberals say that an important part of the moral limits on what states should be allowed to do, is that they need to allow individuals to live their own lives, even if those lives involve making choices that most people disagree with. So long as those choices don’t harm others and just concern their own life, the government should stay out of their business. This idea is shared between people on the right and left of the contemporary political spectrum who disagree about whether governments social safety programs or environmental regulations interfere with or facilitate people’s ability to live their own lives without harming others.

Charles Larmore

The author of today’s reading is Charles Larmore, a political philosopher who taught at Columbia for many years and then Chicago, before finishing his career at Brown. Larmore’s work covered many topics in moral and political philosophy and in the history of philosophy but he is especially known for contributing to the topic of today’s reading.

Comprehensive Liberalism

In our reading for today, Larmore tries to contrast two different ways of justifying the liberal idea that states should not interfere with the private lives of citizens. The first, which he associates with the ideas of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, is what has become known as comprehensive liberalism. Comprehensive liberals say that the state should stay out of individuals’ business because freedom is good and it’s important for people to decide things for themselves.

Larmore’s worry about comprehensive liberalism is that it fails to solve one of the central historical problems that liberalism was supposed to solve. Historically liberalism arose in Europe as a response to conflicts that arose because different people had different visions of what kind of life it is important to live. These visions came, in the historical context, from the fallout of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. And liberalism offered the answer that the state should stay out of religion, which is a matter for individuals.

If you think that liberalism is an answer specifically to the religious wars in Europe in the centuries following the Protestant Reformation, then this will sound right. But if you think - as we might be interested in, in this class - that the problem is really more general than religion, and could arise wherever there are deep conflicts in values whether those conflicts come from religion or not, then you are likely to worry that the solution also needs to be more general than keeping the government out of religion. It should also stay out of other matters that concern public disagreement about values and what kind of life to live.

But Larmore identifies a particular kind of disagreement about values that is prevalent in modern societies. And this is between the comprehensive liberal ideas of Kant and Mill, which say that freedom and choice are very important to a good life, and what he calls “Romanticism”, according to which tradition is important. Since comprehensive liberalism is just one side of this disagreement, we can’t use comprehensive liberalism to solve it.

Political Liberalism

In contrast, Larmore suggests that there is a different way of thinking about the justification of liberal ideas - not as what we should do because it is good for people to make free choices, but what we should do in light of the fact that reasonable people disagree about which choices are the right ones for people to make. Since reasonable people disagree about this, Larmore and other political liberals suggest that the government should hesitate to take sides on things that reasonable people disagree about, especially when those concern what kind of life to live in ways that don’t harm other people. This justification of liberal ideas is called ‘political’ because it is supposed to be agreeable even to Romantics who think that tradition is important, so long as they can recognize that there is disagreement about this.

For today’s reading, just read up to page 352, through section III.