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In light of the criticisms that have been made against it, is liberalism defensible as a political philosophy?IntroductionLiberalism has faced criticism from many sources. In this essay I shall examine some of the typical criticisms with the intention of establishing if there is a common theme amongst them. I shall discuss the separation of the right from the good, and will consider Rawls' ideas of "political liberalism". I hope to show that for liberalism to be generally defensible against the typical criticism levelled against it, it needs to establish that it is based on conceptions of the right rather than the good. I also hope to show that political liberalism attempts, but fails in this task. LiberalismThere are many interpretations of "liberalism", but while the emphasis and detail may vary, they all tend to share common features. First and foremost, liberalism begins with the individual. It talks about maximising individual liberty, about autonomy and basic rights, and about an individual's conception of the good life. Broadly, it advocates the individual's right to live their life in the manner of their own choosing. Throughout history a wide variety of writers have been labelled as "liberal", some quite incongruous. Hobbes started from the liberal premise that everyone is an individual with individual desires and motives, but then concluded that because of this a near totalitarian state was required to prevent chaos. Locke's ideas on property rights still influence writers today. Mill was a notable advocate of the typically liberal ideas of freedom of speech and gender equality. Arguably the most influential writer of recent times is John Rawls who, in his book "Justice as Fairness" attempted to provide a complete and coherent account of a liberal state. In this essay I shall focus almost entirely on Rawls. The first half will focus on his justice as fairness, but will apply reasonably well to liberalism generally, while the latter half will focus more specifically on his later thoughts on political liberalism. Justice as FairnessJustice as fairness is the name Rawls gives to his political philosophy. It, like most typical liberal theories, begins with the precept that every individual is entitled to the maximum possible liberty, provided this is compatible with all other individuals being entitled to equal liberty. What distinguishes Rawls is the addition of a precept called the Difference Principle, which states that any inequalities that exist within a society must be to the benefit of the least advantaged. A distinctive feature of Rawls' theory is his method of justification - the Original Position. This is in essence a thought experiment. Suppose a large number of people had to agree upon the basic institutions for a society, but they had to do so from behind a "veil of ignorance", the purpose of which is to eliminate irrelevant and arbitrary personal considerations from the deliberation. Behind this veil, they have no knowledge of themselves as individuals. They don't know their talents, their physical attributes, their birthright, their race or gender, their moral beliefs, or their particular conceptions of the good. They do however retain basic rationality and an understanding of the so-called "primary goods" - those things that are essential to any good life and to a stable society (e.g. physical fitness, adequate financial prosperity, security). The argument is that from behind this veil they will come up with the set of institutions that Rawls advocates. It is the original position that invites the first of our criticisms. Risks, rights and virtuesAs the original position is a purely hypothetical position, and one that is extremely difficult to imagine oneself in, there is scope for dispute as to whether or not we would advocate a Rawlsian society, or indeed any kind of liberalism. Rawls seems to assume an almost Hobbesian cynicism, presuming that we are all out for our own best interests and that knowing nothing else we will assume the worst and ensure the worst is provided for. It assumes a person by default adopts a risk-adversed strategy. There are other possibilities though. We may be prepared to accept the risk of being the worst off, for the sake of the potential gain of being the better off. We could give greater consideration to society at large, arguing that inequalities should favour the majority rather than the worst off, rather in the manor of utilitarianism. We may even accept the risk of being amongst the worst off on the grounds that it is merely random chance and nobody's fault, and that it is unjust to penalise someone else because of the arbitrary fortune that befell me. Supporters of Rawls counter that because the stakes are so high, any risk is irrational, and that the primary goods include ideas of morality that would prevent such self interest. Also, as the veil of ignorance separates you from knowledge of other people, it prevents any kind of sympathetic identification that would lead to altruistic or utilitarian ideas [Freeman, 2002, sect1]. This criticism, and its counters, are difficult to assess when the thought experiment is so difficult to reliably conceive. Certainly the original position remains defensible, but scope for criticism also remains. Another possible criticism is that there is no mention in the original position of fundamental human rights. This is at the core of many of Nozick's criticisms of Rawls. One right in particular has become the focus of the conflict between Rawls and Nozick - the right of property. Nozick maintains that one has the right to retain property that has been justly earned. Rawls by contrast focusses on the plight of the unfortunate, arguing that an inequality between wealthy and poor is unjust and must be rectified. This seems quite a stark opposition of views. On one side, I have the right to my property. On the other, those with less property than me have a right to equality. Alasdair MacIntyre recasts this dilemma in terms of virtue ethics, and in doing so simultaneously solves it and rejects it. He observes that the horns of the dilemma are different aspects of desert. I have a right to my property because I deserve it. I have a right to equality because I do not deserve poverty. The advantage of the virtue ethics approach is that situations can be taken on a case by case basis, considerations weighed and practical wisdom (phronesis as virtues ethicists say) applied. I may deserve my property, but do I deserve it more or less than you deserve equality? The disadvantage of virtue ethics is that it rarely provides universal answers. [MacIntyre, ch17, pp244-255] Neither Nozick nor Rawls can readily accommodate ideas of desert however. Rawls explicitly rejects it, claiming "such a position would not be chosen in the original position". The thinking is that ideas of desert have no place within a conception of justice. The concept of the veil of ignorance is in large part intended to make us blind to questions of what is or isn't deserved [Rawls, 1999, ch48, pp273-277]. Nozick's ideas of entitlement are based entirely on legitimacy. If the correct chain of legitimate transactions can be traced between your ownership of an item and a point of free availability of said item, then your ownership is legitimate [Nozick, pp150-153]. Legitimacy does not equal deserved though. An inheritance is normally legitimate, but beneficiaries rarely do anything to make themselves worthy of it, so it is rarely deserved. This rejection of desert is by no means a fatal flaw, but does reflect a general theme in the criticisms of liberalism , and one that I shall return to. In its focus on rights and individuals, liberalism omits values that should not be omitted. Personhood Our next argument is more metaphysical in nature, and asks what the veil of ignorance implies about the nature of a person. The veil of ignorance strips a person of their identity. All their past, their values, their upbringing is removed, leaving only pure rationality and a knowledge of the primary goods. This suggests, so the argument goes, a model of a person that is no more than a disembodied rationality. While liberalism is by no means a metaphysical thesis, if it can be shown that this conception of a person is incoherent, it could represent a significant flaw in Rawls' justification. There is a line of thought known as the embeddedness thesis that claims that a person's identity is essentially derived from the community in which they are raised. A person simply cannot be a person without an environment, and thus the veil of ignorance is fatally flawed. The embeddedness thesis is far from uncontroversial though. How much a person's values and conception of the good is determined by their environment is hotly debated, not only in philosophy but in fields such as sociology and psychology. It seems implausible to maintain that a person's nature is wholly determined by their environment. After all, if everything you believe to be true is determined by your community, then it would be impossible to ever critically asses your community's values, and yet people do this all the time. Thus, if their identity is at least partially independent of their environment, then it is coherent for it to remain when the person is placed behind the veil of ignorance. Community and nationalityCommunitarianism and nationalism share some common features, so I shall consider them together. Communities and nations are both collections of individuals sharing some common feature or features. Both consider that the collective has both instrumental value - for example in providing a sense of belonging, unity, a support to its members - and value in itself. The difference is primarily one of size. A nation is - or has the capacity to be - a sovereign state, while a community is normally part of a sovereign state. However, as far as their criticisms of liberalism go,there is more similarity than difference. Let's first consider a communitarian argument. It is easy to imagine scenarios where the desires of the individual come in conflict with the needs/desires of the community at large. This is particularly likely in cases where the community has quite deeply held standards/beliefs and an individual is exposed to alien beliefs that he finds more appealing. It is a scenario typified by Amish communities in the USA for example, but is increasingly faced by small isolated rural communities in the UK. Consider an island community, out in the Hebrides perhaps. It is a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone else. There is no real crime, and no real poverty as everyone helps out anyone in need. There is, as they say, a strong sense of community. Then one individual decides the island life is not for him and that, rather than take over the family farm, he'd much prefer to seek his fortune on the mainland. If he is an only child, and the family farm is an important one for the community, then the community will be significantly adversely affected by his departure, perhaps ultimately leading to its dissolution and demise. And yet, if he has hated farming all his life, and can think of no fate worse than a life of toiling in the fields, it would seem deeply immoral to condemn him to a life of misery. This is the central conflict between liberalism and communitarianism. However, for this conflict to become a criticism for liberalism it must first be shown that a community has value at least equal to that of a person's liberty. If there is value in communities, then people will naturally form them, as indeed they do. Liberalism does not discourage this. Quite the opposite - it falls comfortably within the idea of pursuing one's conception of the good. What liberalism does discourage is forcing people to remain in a community once their conception of the good is no longer compatible. If a person chooses to leave a community, it is because it has lost the value it once had for them, or because they have found something of greater value to them elsewhere. The fact that people do leave their community demonstrates that whatever value a community has, it is not unsurpassable. Rather, for a given person the value of a given community can change over time. A person's liberty by contrast is of fundamental value. Whatever else changes, one's liberty is a basic necessity for living one's life. In the case of a nation, the intrinsic value is easier to see. A sovereign state requires a degree of unity to provide it with coherence, without which it would disintegrate into chaos. While the dissolution of a community may be sad, the dissolution of a state can be catastrophic. A shared national identity can provide this sense of unity. Liberalism, so the nationalists maintain, cannot. Governments and bureaucratic institutions do not tend to inspire loyalty. This is particularly true in a democracy, where the ruling government may not be what you voted for. Instead, one's loyalty tends to be to something higher that the government - something the government serves. Normally this is the nation itself, or sometimes a figurehead that represents the nation (e.g. the Queen). Thus governments can come and go, political parties can jostle for power, while the loyalties of the citizens remain constant. It is perhaps conceivable that liberalism itself could inspire this loyalty. Certainly people can hold principles very highly, and even fight wars for them. However, liberalism exists in many countries, so couldn't inspire a loyalty to ones own country specifically, which is what we require in order to maintain coherence and stability. Nationality also provides an answer to a question that liberalism fails to address: what brings a state together before the state exists? Many, although not all, versions of liberalism rely on the idea of a social contract. This is a - invariably hypothetical - contract between individuals that determines the nature of a new state. Rawls' original position can be interpreted as a social contract mechanism. What liberalism fails to address though is the question of what brings the potential citizens together in the first place to forge this contract? A shared national identity would serve this purpose. It is quite coherent for a nation to exist without a state. Consider the Kurds for example. Thus it is quite coherent to imagine all the Kurdish nationals coming together and agreeing upon a social contract for a new Kurdish state. Liberalism cannot provide this initial unification. It is the result of, not the cause of a social contract. MulticulturalismA central premise of liberalism is that all individuals are equal. However, while we may all be equal, we are certainly not all the same. In this modern world, multiculturalism is a fact of life. Within a society there will be many subgroups and subcultures, each with their different values, priorities and needs. Liberalism allows for different values and priorities, but says less about differing needs. Liberalism's insistence on applying laws equally across all subcultures may, paradoxically, result in inequalities. Differences in values and customs may make a law inconsequential for some and debilitating for others. Sikhs, for example, are required to wear turbans as part of their religion, which results in them being disproportionately affected by a law requiring motorcyclists to wear crash helmets. However, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the law is unjust, or that liberalism is wrong. The law may simply be poorly drafted. If our example had been phrased differently, so that instead of requiring a crash helmet specifically, it required motorcyclists to adequately protect their heads, then it would have a far more equal impact. Also, almost any law will impact different people to different degrees, and it may have nothing to do with multiculturalism. Laws on speed limits only affect drivers who, for whatever reason, wish to drive over the speed limit. A law that prevents one person from endangering another is neither unjust nor illiberal, and this remains true even if the law affects one group disproportionately more than another. Another argument that is sometimes heard is that liberalism - in its insistence on equality - suppresses diversity. Now, certainly a suppression of diversity is a restriction of choice, and thus is a restriction on freedom of choice. So, if liberalism suppressed diversity, one could rightly claim this was a bad thing - and indeed contrary to the ideals of liberalism. However, liberalism insists on equal opportunities, and equal rights and things of that nature. This is somewhat different from insisting on equality in the sense of conformity. It could be argued that liberalism suppresses diversity inasmuch as it suppresses illiberalism. However, it would be hard to garner support for the view that diversity should be promoted above all else if it meant allowing all manner of depraved subcultures emerging and flourishing [Barry]. The liberal paradoxThe preceding arguments have all targeted liberalism from various alternative viewpoints, but there are similarities between them. They all argue that liberalism ignores desirable values while advocating undesirable values. This from a thesis in which impartiality between values is supposedly central. This is the paradox of liberalism. The liberal ideal is a society where every individual can pursue their particular conception of the good without interference from the state, or from other individuals. All conceptions of the good are equal. However, liberalism is itself a conception of the good. Thus there arises the possibility of a conflict between a community imposing illiberal values upon its members, and the state wishing to allow those members full liberal opportunity. This is most likely to be the case with religious communities, that will have internal rules on blasphemy running counter to liberal freedom of speech, or will assign life roles based on gender. If the state intervenes and prevents the imposition of the community's illiberal values, it is itself guilty of illiberalism. A route out of this paradox is to draw a distinction between the good and the right. The good - in this context - is subjective. Every individual can, theoretically, have a unique and distinct conception of the good based on their own particular moralities, values and desires. The right, by contrast, is objective and universal. In the event of a conflict, the right - being (in theory) universally acceptable - takes precedence. So the task of liberalism is to show that it is built, not on an arbitrary conception of the good, but on a universally agreed conception of the right. Rawls attempts such a task in his later work on political liberalism. Political liberalismIn his later writings, Rawls draws attention to the distinction between a political conception of justice and a general or comprehensive conception. A political conception restricts its applicability only to the political domain - that of the functions, offices and institutions of the state. i.e. how the state works. It may have moral aspects to it, and it may at times overlap with moral doctrines, but fundamentally it is to do with political questions. In particular it is not a political application of some larger doctrine. A general doctrine is one with a scope that extends beyond the political, and a comprehensive doctrine is one that addresses questions of value and ideals. Religious doctrines will often claim to encompass all aspects of human life, and can thus be described as fully general and comprehensive [Rawls, 1989, p165]. Rawls maintains that a conception of justice that is to be practically implementable and stable in the long term without requiring coercive force is one that meets with the approval of the majority - ideally the entirety - of the population. However, in this modern world multi-culturalism is a fact, and it is not unreasonable to assume it is inevitable. So, the conception of justice must be one that a diverse range of people, with diverse - often conflicting - ideals and values, can all agree is reasonable. For this to be at all plausible, the political conception needs to restrict itself to as minimal a set of considerations as possible. The more it strays from the domain of the political, the more danger there is that it will directly contradict the values and ideals of one or more subcultures [Rawls, 1987, sect1, pp3-6]. Rawls advances the idea of an overlapping consensus. The idea is that even wildly differing comprehensive doctrines will be able to agree on certain core principles, upon which a political conception can be justified. Once the overlapping consensus is established, the various subcultures acknowledge that debate over issues within the political domain can only be conducted by reference to the consensus, not with reference to their own doctrine [Rawls, 1987, p15]. The political domain has been elevated from "good" to "right". However, for a political conception to be more than merely a diplomatic concession between disputing parties, it needs to carry some moral weight. It needs to be right, rather than merely conceded. This is where cracks start to show in Rawls' thinking. Criticisms of Rawls' political liberalismRawls openly accepts that his ideas are intended for modern liberal democracies, referring often to "the basic intuitive ideas found in the public culture of a constitutional democracy" [Rawls 1985, p25]. The primary goods that are known from behind the veil of ignorance are very western liberal in nature, particularly the inclusion of "income and wealth" [Rawls, 1988, p8]. It suggests the primary goods are considered primary precisely because they support justice as fairness, and the original position becomes - as Daniel Dennett might say - an intuition pump. Rawls also concedes that, in practice, the possibility of establishing an overlapping consensus depends on the specifics of the comprehensive doctrine you are dealing with. It is quite conceivable that even amongst wholly reasonable people a consensus will be impossible to reach. Thus he provides criteria for an acceptable comprehensive doctrine, stating that they must share a value of the primary goods [Rawls, 1988, p8]. Again we are lead to suspect that an overlapping consensus is only possible within a pre-existing liberal democracy, in which liberal values are shared by the majority. All this opens Rawls up to charges of question-begging, as he is justifying liberalism with reference to liberal intuitions and presupposed shared liberal values. Another significant question that arises is whether questions of values and morals can be removed from the political conception to quite the degree Rawls maintains. He accepts that a political conception is not wholly morally neutral, but is vague as to how to draw the line between morality that does and does not have a place within a political conception. Take his example of education. A state that demanded children be educated in a certain comprehensive doctrine is illiberal, even if liberalism is the comprehensive doctrine being taught. Rawls argues that political liberalism does not advocate such an education, but merely requires that a child be made aware of such things as their constitutional and civic rights, and that a world exists outside of any religion they may have been brought up within [Rawls, 1988, pp18-19]. However, while this may not be the teaching of overt liberal values such as individualism and personal autonomy, it is liberalism nonetheless. It is teaching that one's conception of the good is subjective, and may change. It is teaching that one's religion is merely one amongst many comprehensive doctrines, and of no greater or lesser worth than any of them. This contradicts the fundamental precept of most religions; i.e. that their way is the only (or at least the best) way. Rawls' thinking is that conceptions of the good may be permitted within the political domain provided they are strictly political in nature. So, in the above example, the child is taught only enough liberalism to enable them to participate in political life. However, what separates the political from the moral can be hard to pin down. If we return, for example, to the discussion of redistributive justice. Rawls obviously wants welfare for the least advantaged to be part of the political consensus, yet this doesn't obviously have anything to do with the essential institutions and functions of the state. Once it has been established that welfare should be provided, it becomes a political question as to how, but the initial question is surely a moral one? Also, the central premise as to why the political conception could be agreed upon by the various comprehensive doctrine was precisely because it avoided questions of the good, but Rawls then goes on to say that concepts of the good can be allowed in to the political conception provided they are political in nature. Once again there is a suggestion of circularity in his arguments. So, it appears that the idea of an overlapping consensus fails to provide liberalism with a robust defence against its critics. I shall now consider whether there is an alternative method of defence. Thoughts on an alternative directionLiberalism is intended to be impartial with regards to moral values and conceptions of the good, favouring no comprehensive doctrine over any other. However, liberalism is itself a comprehensive doctrine, and so must be ultimately justifiable from fundamental objective principles. The ideal is to have a system that favours no comprehensive doctrine, but this may prove to be impossible. Thus, a comprehensive doctrine must be chosen, and shown be be superior to the alternatives. An anarchist utopia has no rules. Anything less than that must, by definition, have some laws. These laws must be based upon values (at the very least, a valuing of an ordered society) and thus these laws can always be (at least in theory) disputed unless they can be shown to be universal. If there are such things as universal laws, then it is the task of the philosopher to discover them. While I make no claims to have established any such universal laws, I shall attempt an outline of the form such a proof might take. First, we would need to establish the basic principle of liberalism: that an individual is entitled to total liberty up to the point where they begin to limit someone else's liberty. The first step might be to show, through a series of thought experiments, that an individual in isolation from any other person is subject to no restraints on their liberty. If their actions in no way affect another person, then hypothetical moral constraints on their actions are incoherent. The next step would be to establish equality as the default state between two or more given individuals. Again, through a series of thought experiments one could perhaps show that if two previously isolated individuals are introduced into the same (otherwise isolated) environment, there is no way of prioritising one individual over another without presupposing some additional criterion. Thus, by default any two individuals are equal, and therefore have equal right to their liberty. Therefore no one person has a right to deprive another's liberty in order to advance their own. Other basic rights could be derived with reference to a person's liberty, the deprivation of which could be regarded as a violation of their rights. In effect, there is precisely one fundamental right - the right to liberty. Once the foundation is established, further corollaries could be derived from it, building up layer by layer until it resembles a philosophical theory. Of course, this is a very brief sketch of a possible line of argument, and as such leaves many questions unanswered, but my intention here is merely to outline the beginnings of a way in which liberalism might be proven from first principles. ConclusionLiberalism will always be accused of advancing certain values while ignoring others. While each argument can be countered on its individual merits, liberalism must formulate a way to demonstrate that its foundational basis is not merely one more competing conception of the good. It must show that it is not merely "good", but "right". Rawls' political liberalism makes an attempt at this, but unstated assumptions and reliance on intuitions undermine his argument. I believe that liberalism is defensible by deriving its central premises from objective first principles, and I outline a very brief sketch as to how one might go about it. As things stand, liberalism is robust but not flawless. Therefore I conclude that liberalism is largely, although perhaps not entirely, defensible as a political philosophy. Bibliography
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