Abstract
This paper distinguishes two ways in which to think about the freedom of extremists. Non-pluralists claim to have identified the general rule for resolving moral conflicts, and conceptualize freedom as liberty of action in accordance with that rule. It follows, if extremist violence breaks the rule in question, removing this option does not infringe the freedom of extremists. In contrast, for pluralists there is no one general rule to resolve moral conflicts, and freedom is simply the absence of interference. I argue here that pluralism provides a principled defense of freedom, as it allows us to see that removing options from extremists is worse, on prima facie grounds, than not doing so. Also, non-pluralists cannot show that they have identified the general rule for resolving moral conflicts, and in particular, are forced to rely on quite different principles altogether when justifying paternalistic responses to extremism.
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Notes
I use the term ‘dilemma’ here only to be accurate with respect to Rawls’s own text. I use it here to refer to the kinds of moral conflicts that have been the focus of the paper throughout. Unlike Lisa Tessman, therefore, I am not making a distinction between moral conflicts and moral dilemmas, where it is only in respect of the latter that, in a situation of conflicting moral requirements, there are ‘non-negotiable moral requirements [that] remain binding even when they become impossible to fulfill’ (Tessman 2016: 1).
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Fives, A. The Freedom of Extremists: Pluralist and Non-Pluralist Responses to Moral Conflict. Philosophia 47, 663–680 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0015-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0015-5