Online research in philosophy

moral foundation of liberalism can be defended in one of three ways: (1) as a conception one accepts as a result of one’s affirmation of political liberalism, (2) as a conception one must affirm as a presupposition for political liberalism, or (3) as a philosophical truth about practical reason and persons. The first option makes it impossible to distinguish a moral consensus from a modus vivendi . The second renders the moral foundation of liberalism dogmatic because it affirms a moral foundation for which no justification is provided. Since there are good reasons for rejecting (1) and (2), that leaves option (3). I argue that (3) should be the preferred option for liberals who advance liberalism as a political doctrine with a moral foundation.

Liberalism is the view that humans are independent, autonomous, and self-sufficient and, thus, institutional policy is warranted only when it advances these values. As an important thread in moral thought today, liberalism defines a good life as the complete freedom of all people to pursue their own desires, provided that little or no harm is done to others along the way.Moral liberalism also pervades the literature in philosophy of sport today. In this paper, I argue that liberalism as moral policy in sport is wrong because liberalism as moral policy is wrong. Human autonomy implies social responsibility, which moral liberalism today disavows. At paper’s end, I sketch out a normative account of sport, aretism, that fleshes out the types of responsibilities that bind athletes to sport, properly construed as a social institution.

My concern in this chapter is the place of autonomy within liberalism, understood as a public morality.1 To what extent is liberal morality necessarily committed to some doctrine of autonomy, and what is the nature of this doctrine? I begin (§2) by briefly explicating my understanding of liberalism, which is based the fundamental liberal principle—that all interferences with action stand in need of justification. Section 3 then defends my first core claim: given a certain compelling view of the nature of moral reasons, the fundamental liberal principle presupposes a Kantian conception of morally autonomous agents. I then consider (§4) an implication of the fundamental liberal principle when applied to public morality and the law, viz. that an interference with liberty must be justified to everyone. This public justification principle, I argue, constitutes a version of Kant’s categorical imperative; thus liberalism is committed to not only autonomy of the will (§3) but a substantive morality of autonomy. By the end of section 4 I will have shown that liberal morality is committed to what may be broadly deemed a “Kantian” conception of moral autonomy.

In this article, I distinguish personal autonomy from heteronomy, and consider whether autonomy provides a suitable basis for liberalism. I argue that liberal government should not promote autonomy in all its citizens, on the grounds that not all members of liberal democracies require autonomy for a good life. I then outline an alternative option that I call a liberalism of conscience, describing how it better respects heteronomous citizens. I subsequently clarify how a liberalism of conscience is different than, and superior to, autonomy-based versions of liberalism.

In replying to Steven Wall’s and Andrew Lister’s thoughtful essays on my account of justificatory liberalism in this issue, I respond to many of their specific criticisms while taking the opportunity to explicate the foundations of justificatory liberalism. Justificatory liberalism takes seriously the moral requirement to justify all claims of authority over others, as well as all coercive interferences with their lives. If we do so, although we are by no means committed to libertarianism, we find that that many of our cherished values, moral intuitions, and political aspirations no longer ground the range of authority over others many of us would claim. In this sense, justificatory liberalism is a theory of limited authority and limited government — which is what a genuinely liberal theory must be.

This paper provides a brief overview of the relationship between libertarian political theory and the Universal Basic Income (UBI). It distinguishes between different forms of libertarianism and argues that a one form, classical liberalism, is compatible with and provides some grounds of support for UBI. A classical liberal UBI, however, is likely to be much smaller than the sort of UBI defended by those on the political left. And there are both contingent empirical reasons and principled moral reasons for doubting that the classical liberal case for UBI will be ultimately successful at all.

In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains for the first time new essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following topics: the nature of the self and its relation to autonomy, the social dimensions of autonomy and the political dynamics of respect and recognition, and the concept of autonomy underlying the principles of liberalism.

Introduction: What is liberalism? -- Three conceptions of autonomy -- A theory of autonomy -- Autonomy and anti-perfectionism -- Autonomy-minded liberalism -- Multicultural liberalism.

Moral and political theorists who espouse Egalitarianism and Marxism have assumed that the tenets of classical liberalism lack a sound philosophical justification. Spector contests this view, and puts forward an original justification theory for the liberal belief in the existence of human rights that constrain government action. His theory is centered in the deontological protection of positive freedom: each human being should have the power to choose between as many alternative actions as possible. The author argues that it is possible to construct a theory about the rational way to protect this right. Among the topics discussed are the concepts of negative and positive freedom, the notion of a moral right, the connection between positive freedom and personal autonomy, the axiological uniqueness of each human being, and the agent-relativity of moral reasons.