Liberalism Beyond Justice

John Tomasi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His work has appeared in many leading journals, including Political Theory, Ethics, and The Journal of Philosophy.

Liberal regimes shape the ethical outlooks of their citizens, relentlessly influencing their most personal commitments over time. On such issues as abortion, homosexuality, and women's rights, many religious Americans feel pulled between their personal beliefs and their need, as good citizens, to support individual rights. These circumstances, argues John Tomasi, raise new and pressing questions: Is liberalism as successful as it hopes in avoiding the imposition of a single ethical doctrine on all of society? If liberals cannot prevent the spillover of public values into nonpublic domains, how accommodating of diversity can a liberal regime actually be? To what degree can a liberal society be a home even to the people whose viewpoints it was formally designed to include?To meet these questions, Tomasi argues, the boundaries of political liberal theorizing must be redrawn. Political liberalism involves more than an account of justified state coercion and the norms of democratic deliberation. Political liberalism also implies a distinctive account of nonpublic social life, one in which successful human lives must be built across the interface of personal and public values. Tomasi proposes a theory of liberal nonpublic life. To live up to their own deepest commitments to toleration and mutual respect, liberals, he insists, must now rethink their conceptions of social justice, civic education, and citizenship itself. The result is a fresh look at liberal theory and what it means for a liberal society to function well.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xiii CHAPTER ONE Political Liberalism 3 Motivational Foundations 3 Neutrality of Effect 10 The Ethical Culture of Political Liberalism 12 CHAPTER TWO The Boundaries of Political Theory 17 Alphabet People 17 Two Kinds of Cultural Defeaters 20 Free Erosion 26 Liberal Theory and the Doctrine of Double Effect 33 CHAPTER THREE Liberal Nonpublic Reason 40 The Limits of Justice 40 The Personal Uses of Public Reason 42 The Machinery of Nonpublic Virtue 45 Answering the Uneasy Citizens 55 CHAPTER FOUR Citizenship: Justice or Well-Being? 57 The Derivative Ideal 57 From Civic Humanism to Political Liberalism 61 A Different Approach 67 CHAPTER FIVE The Formative Project 73 The Substantive Ideal 73 Moral Development and Liberal Individuation 79 Rethinking Civic Education 85 Back to Tennessee 91 The Tax-Flattening Principle 100 Mind the Gap 105 CHAPTER SIX High Liberalism 108 The Intuitive Argument 108 Feudalism or Medievalism? 110 The Idea of Society 114 The Original Position and Cost-Free Guarantees 116 Liberalism beyond Justice 124 CONCLUSION 126 Notes 129 Bibliography 151 Index 161