This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within the (...) framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls ' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

Political liberalism’s central commitments to recognizing reasonable pluralism and institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice are inconsistent. If reasonable pluralism applies to conceptions of justice as it applies to conceptions of the good, then some reasonable people will reject even many liberal conceptions of justice as unreasonable. If so, then imposing these conceptions of justice on citizens violates the liberal principle of legitimacy and related public justification requirements. This problem of justice pluralism requires that political liberals abandon (...) their commitment to institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice. Instead, political justification should be limited to the public justification of a modest scheme of rights and a set of constitutional rules. Justice pluralism chastens the ambitions of political liberalism while pushing the political liberal research program in new and promising directions. (shrink)

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within the (...) framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

We provide a justification for political liberalism’s Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the (...) Reciprocity Principle, we will argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle. (shrink)

In this work, Paul Weithman offers a fresh, rigorous and compelling interpretation of John Rawls' reasons for taking his so-called 'political turn'.

One of political liberalism’s central commitments is to a principle of public reason. Political liberals frequently justify this principle by appeal to considerations of respect. In this article, I argue that political liberalism cannot be grounded in a moral principle of respect for persons. Instead, I argue that a particular interpretation of the principle of public reason can be justified as a key component of a political conception of mutual civic respect.

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines -- religious, philosophical, and moral (...) -- coexist within the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls' plans to revise Political Liberalism, which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on A Theory of Justice...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." -- Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a special sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges (...) that it comes at the cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems. (shrink)

Susan Okin criticizes John Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ because it does not apply principles of justice directly to gender relations within households. We explain how one can be a ‘political liberal feminist’ by distinguishing between two kinds of justice: the first we call ‘legitimacy justice’, conceptions of which apply to the ‘legally coercive structure’ of society; the second we call ‘ethos justice’, conceptions of which apply to citizens’ ‘non-coercive’ relations. We agree with Okin that a society in which (...) most persons act in accordance with ‘gender equal’ ethos justice is morally superior to one in which most persons do not. A shared commitment to a particular conception of ethos justice, however, cannot be required by a conception of legitimacy justice. A political liberal feminist is committed to promoting gender equality with respect to both legitimacy justice and ethos justice, but recognizes that different means are necessary to do so. (shrink)

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate (...) and the electorate with the nation, the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due (...) concern for the disabled while upholding political liberalism. To achieve this aim, a revision of the basic ideas of persons and society is proposed. The idea of persons should be regarded as more fundamental than that of social cooperation, and persons should be defined in terms of minimal moral powers. (shrink)

For over twenty years, Paul Weithman has explored the thought of John Rawls to ask how liberalism can secure the principled allegiance of those people whom Rawls called 'citizens of faith'. This volume brings together ten of his major essays, which reflect on the task and political character of political philosophy, the ways in which liberalism does and does not privatize religion, the role of liberal legitimacy in Rawls's theory, and the requirements of public reason. The (...) essays reveal Rawls as a thinker deeply engaged with political and existential questions that trouble citizens of faith, and explore how - in firm opposition to political realism - he tries to show that the possibility of liberal democracy and the natural goodness of humanity are objects of reasonable faith. The volume will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, moral theologians, and religious ethicists. (shrink)

Timothy Michael Fowler has argued that, as a consequence of their commitment to neutrality in regard to comprehensive doctrines, political liberals face a dilemma. In essence, the dilemma for political liberals is that either they have to give up their commitment to neutrality (which is an indispensible part of their view), or they have to allow harm to children. Fowler’s case for this dilemma depends on ascribing to political liberals a view which grants parents a great degree (...) of freedom in deciding on the education of their children. I show that ascribing this view to political liberals rests upon a misinterpretation of political liberalism. Since political liberals have access to reasons based upon the interests of children, they need not yield to parent’s wishes about the education of their children. A correct understanding of political liberalism thus shows that political liberals do not face the dilemma envisaged by Fowler. (shrink)

John Rawls claims that the kind of citizenship education required by political liberalism demands ‘far less’ than that required by comprehensive liberalism. Many educational and political theorists who have explored the implications of political liberalism for education policy have disputed Rawls's claim. Writing from a comprehensive liberal perspective, Amy Gutmann contends that the justificatory differences between political and comprehensive liberalism generally have no practical significance for citizenship education. Political liberals such as (...) Stephen Macedo and Victoria Costa maintain that political liberalism requires a form of citizenship education that is far more demanding than that suggested by Rawls. Gordon Davis and Blain Neufeld, in contrast, defend Rawls's position. These different views have implications for the content of mandatory citizenship education, understanding of the ‘common school ideal,’ and the scope for educational choice within the framework of political liberalism. However, the differences between Gutmann, Macedo, and Costa, on the one hand, and Davis and Neufeld, on the other, might be attributable, at least in part, to their different foci. Gutmann, Macedo, and Costa focus on non-ideal theory, specifically the contemporary American context, whereas Davis and Neufeld begin, as does Rawls, within ideal theory, and consider non-ideal circumstances from that perspective. (shrink)

Rawls hoped to meet these critics on their own ground by accepting that a comprehensive liberal position cannot be vindicated and by showing how a less ambitious, merely political, version of liberalism could be vindicated. His conception of political liberalism was less ambitious in two ways. In the first place its substantive normative claims were confined to the domain of politics: all he aspired to was a liberal theory of justice. Secondly, he argued that liberalism (...) could dispense with metaphysical and moral foundations: liberal justice could be vindicated as “political not metaphysical.” Since the publication of Political Liberalism, the term ‘political liberalism’ has increasingly been used to indicate this quite specific version of liberalism, whose normative claims are merely political, and which purports not to draw on “comprehensive moral doctrines,” or on unsustainable metaphysical claims. (shrink)

This article argues that political liberalism, of the type formulated by John Rawls and Charles Larmore and further developed in Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach, is superior to more comprehensive political views both in domestic and in global affairs. Perfectionist liberalism as advocated by John Stuart Mill and Joseph Raz attempts to erase existing religions and replace them with the religion of utility or autonomy. This is wrong, because in the ethico-religious environment of reasonable (...) disagreement that we inhabit all comprehensive forms of political morality pose a threat to people's liberty and equality. Only thin and narrow conceptions of value like the ones suggested by Rawls, Larmore, Sen, and Nussbaum can guarantee the respect for diversity that is needed in a pluralistic world. Although Rawls famously failed to extend this idea from domestic to transnational matters, the argument of the article is that not only do the principles of political liberalism apply to global mat.. (shrink)

(Please note: the main ideas of this paper are restated in revised/developed form in: "On actualist and fundamental public justification in political liberalism" and "Patterns of justification: on political liberalism and the primacy of public justification". Both papers are available from philpapers.) The paper suggests the deep view of Rawls-type public justification as promising, non-ideal theory variant of an internal conception of political liberalism. To this end, I demonstrate how the deep view integrates a (...) range of ideas, views and commitments at the core of political liberalism’s justification structure, including pro tanto justification, full justification, political values and their priority, justificatory neutrality, the role of reasonable comprehensive views, the nature public reasons, the wide view of public political culture, the role of overlapping consensus and political legitimacy, and not least, the status of reflective equilibrium and the Original Position. I then contrast the deep view with Quong’s ideal theory variant if the internal conception, and argue that we should prefer the deep view. Thus, the prospects of political liberalism depend not so much on whether we find ways to make ideal theory relevant for non-ideal purposes. Rather, it depends on whether political liberalism can devise a credible response to the problem of public dogma. (shrink)

This article suggests a Kantian reading of Rawls’s Political Liberalism. As much as Rawls distanced himself from a presentation of his theory in terms of a comprehensive Kantian moral doctrine, we ought to read it as a noncomprehensive Kantian moral-political theory. According to the latter approach, the liberal conception of justice is compatible with a plurality of comprehensive doctrines as long as they share the independently defined and grounded essentials of that conception of justice—that is, as long (...) as they are “reasonable,” to use the term that does most of the Kantian work. (shrink)

This book contributes to both the internal debate in liberalism and the application of political liberalism to the process of democratization in East Asia. Beyond John Rawls’ original intention to limit the scope of political liberalism to only existing and well-ordered liberal democracies, political liberalism has the potential to inspire and contribute to democratic establishment and maintenance in East Asia. Specifically, the book has two main objectives. First, it will demonstrate that political (...) liberalism offers the most promising vision for liberal democracy, and it can be defended against contemporary perfectionist objections. Second, it will show that perfectionist approaches to political Confucianism suffer from practical and theoretical difficulties. Instead, an alternative model of democracy inspired by political liberalism will be explored in order to achieve a multivariate structure for citizens to come to terms with democracy in their own ways, to support a neutral state that ensures the establishment and stability of democracy, and to maintain an active public role for Confucianism to prevent it from being banished to the private sphere. This model represents a more promising future for democracy in East Asia. (shrink)

According to political liberalism, laws must be justified to all citizens in order to be legitimate. Most political liberals have taken this to mean that laws must be justified by appeal to a specific class of ‘public reasons’, which all citizens can accept. In this paper I defend an alternative, convergence, model of public justification, according to which laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons grounded in their comprehensive doctrines. I consider three (...) objections to such an account—that it undermines sincerity in public reason, that it underestimates the importance of shared values, and that it is insufficiently deliberative—and argue that convergence justifications are resilient to these objections. They should therefore be included within a theory of political liberalism, as a legitimate form of public justification. This has important implications for the obligations that political liberalism places upon citizens in their public deliberations and reason-giving, and might make the theory more attractive to some of its critics, particularly those sympathetic to religious belief. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being either ‘liberal’ or ‘fundamentalist’ and ignores a third, in-between group, namely traditionalist religious actors and their (...) claims. After having explained what makes traditionalist religious actors different from liberal and fundamentalist religious actors, the author develops 4 areas in which political liberalism should be pushed further theoretically in order to correctly theorize the challenge which traditional religious actors pose to liberal democracy. These 4 areas are: the context of translation; the politics of exemptions; the multivocality of theology; and the transnational nature of norm-contestation. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess John Rawls' repeated claim that the duty of civility is only a moral duty and should not be enforced by law. In the first part of the paper, I examine and reject the view that Rawls' position may be due to the practical difficulties that the legal enforcement of the duty of civility might entail. I thus claim that Rawls' position must be driven by deeper normative reasons grounded in a conception of free speech. (...) In the second part of the paper, I therefore examine various arguments for free speech and critically assess whether they are consistent with Rawls' political liberalism. I first focus on the arguments from truth and self-fulfilment. Both arguments, I argue, rely on comprehensive doctrines and therefore cannot provide a freestanding political justification for free speech. Freedom of speech, I claim, can be justified instead on the basis of Rawls' political conception of the person and of the two moral powers. However, Rawls' wide view of public reason already allows scope for the kind of free speech necessary for the exercise of the two moral powers and therefore cannot explain Rawls' opposition to the legal enforcement of the duty of civility. Such opposition, I claim, can only be explained on the basis of a defence of unconstrained freedom of speech grounded in the ideas of democracy and political legitimacy. Yet, I conclude, while public reason and the duty of civility are essential to political liberalism, unconstrained freedom of speech is not. Rawls and political liberals could therefore renounce unconstrained freedom of speech, and endorse the legal enforcement of the duty of civility, while remaining faithful to political liberalism. (shrink)

Some religiously devout individuals believe divine command can override an obligation to obey the law where the two are in conflict. At the extreme, some individuals believe that acts of violence that seek to change or punish a political community, or to prevent others from violating what they take to be God’s law, are morally justified. In the face of this apparent clash between religious and political commitments it might seem that modern versions of political morality—such as (...) John Rawls’s political liberalism—that refuse to take a stance on controversial religious matters, or eschew appeal to perfectionist doctrines, are beset by a particularly acute version of this problem of religious disobedience. Whilst political liberalism follows this path so as to generate wide and stable support, it raises the question of how political liberals should respond to religiously motivated non-compliance with the norms of that liberal conception of justice. This article evaluates what resources are available to political liberalism to respond to this challenge. It examines whether anti-perfectionism can be sustained in the face of those whose religious beliefs are in conflict with the law. We argue that, under certain circumstances, political liberalism requires direct engagement with the religious views of the unreasonable, including offering religious arguments to show that their particular interpretation of their faith is mistaken. This view takes political liberalism away from its usual ambitions, but it is a position that is both anticipated by Rawls and consistent with his view. It does, however, require that political liberals give up the claim that the view is a wholly non-sectarian, purely political view, and accept that, under certain circumstances it is a partially comprehensive version of liberal theory. (shrink)

Several philosophers of education argue that schooling should facilitate students’ development of autonomy. Such arguments fall into two main categories: Student-centered arguments support autonomy education to help enable students to lead good lives; Public-goods-centered arguments support autonomy education to develop students into good citizens. Critics challenge the legitimacy of autonomy education—of the state imposing a schooling curriculum aimed at making children autonomous. In this paper, I offer a unified solution to the challenges of legitimacy that both arguments for autonomy education (...) face. I first defend a particular construal of liberal legitimacy, and then consider each legitimacy challenge in light of that construal. I argue that the legitimacy challenges confronting both types of argument can be overcome. Further, I explain why we should pursue both arguments, rather than resting the entire case for autonomy education on one or the other. I conclude that each argument—if it can justify autonomy education at all—can justify autonomy education consistent with the requirements of liberal democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Rawls's (1993) account of an overlapping consensus and recent proposals to introduce citizenship education in parts of the UK. It is argued that both Rawls and the proposals mistake the significance and nature of such a consensus. Partly as a result of this mistake the proposals are insufficiently radical.

Three interlocking features appear to underpin Rawls’s justification of political compliance within the context of political liberalism: namely, a specific territory; a specific society; and a specific conception of what it is to be reasonable. When any one feature is subject to critical examination, while presupposing that the other two are acceptable, Rawls’s argument for political compliance may seem persuasive. But when all three features are critically examined together, his justification of political compliance within (...) class='Hi'>political liberalism can be seen to lack cogency. Thus, political compliance fails to be justified by a free-standing political liberalism. Key Words: philosophical anarchism • political duties • political liberalism • political obligation • Rawls. (shrink)

At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on (...) justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This – epistemic question – has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public. (shrink)

I argue that there is nothing in Kant’s moral theory that legitimates condemnation of same-sex relations and that the arguments from natural ends Kant relies on in doing so are unjustified by the constraints placed upon morality to avoid the empirical determination of judgments. In order to make clear why same-sex activity does not contradict the requirements of the moral law, we need to understand Kant’s account of legitimate sexual activity. I provide this reconstruction in the first section, drawing upon (...) the Lectures on Ethics and Metaphysics of Morals. In the second section, I critique the first kind of argument that grounds Kant’s assessment, that from natural ends. I show how it is based upon underlying teleological premises and raise doubts concerning Kant’s reliance on “regulative ideas” in making a consistent ethical theory. In the third section, I argue that same-sex activity that conforms to the conditions of the moral law, especially given the concepts of consent and reciprocity, are in conformity with Kant’s formal requirement of the law of pure practical reason, and therefore cannot justifiably be condemned on those grounds. Finally, I conclude with some discussion about Rawls and political liberalism. I hope to show how the present Kantian revival in ethical theory can place itself in opposition to the conservative and homophobic hysteria surrounding debates on political and legal issues such as same-sex “marriage.”. (shrink)

Can and should political liberals recognize and otherwise support legal marriage as a matter of basic justice? In this article, we offer a general account of how political liberals should evaluate the issue of whether the legal recognition of marriage is a matter of basic justice. And, we develop and examine some public reason arguments that, given the fundamental interests of citizens, could justify various forms of legal marriage in some contexts. In particular, in certain conditions, the recognition (...) of some form of legal marriage may be the best way to protect the fundamental interests of women as citizens in freely chosen associations. Or, it may be that, in certain conditions, to secure the social conditions necessary for gays, lesbians and bisexuals to be free and equal citizens, some form of legal marriage can or should be recognized. (shrink)

This essay argues that neutral paternalism (NP) is problematic for antiperfectionist liberal theories. Section 2 raises textual evidence that Rawlsian liberalism does not oppose and may even support NP. In section 3, I cast doubt on whether NP should have a place in political liberalism by defending a partially comprehensive conception of the good I call “moral capacity at each moment,” or MCEM, that is inconsistent with NP. I then explain why MCEM is a reasonable conception on (...) Rawls's account of reasonableness. In section 4, I handle concerns that showing NP fails the test of Rawlsian public justification is a nonstarter since NP does not threaten any of our basic liberties. I sketch an argument that, if this is so, the burden is on political liberalism to defend its particular account of basic liberties, since MCEM is reasonable on Rawlsian grounds. More precisely, MCEM is a conception that challenges the way Rawls characterizes basic liberties; that is, his list of basic liberties should be more inclusive by political liberalism's own structural commitments, including Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy.” On this revised account, political liberalism can mount a strong opposition to hard legal paternalism. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that John Rawls’s account of political liberalism requires a conception of mutual respect that differs from the one advanced in A Theory of Justice. We formulate such a political liberal form of mutual respect, which we call ‘civic respect.’ We also maintain that core features of political liberalism – in particular, the ideas of ‘the burdens of judgment’ and ‘public reason’ – do not commit political liberalism to an (...) ideal of personal autonomy, contrary to claims made by various commentators. Furthermore, we maintain that teaching the idea of ‘public reason’ to students in civic education courses does not threaten their ‘ethical integrity.’ On the basis of these points, we maintain – against political and educational theorists like Eamonn Callan and Amy Gutmann – that political liberalism permits a wider range of educational policy options, including some ‘school choice’ policies, than most forms of comprehensive liberalism. We conclude the article by considering some such policies. (shrink)

What is the theoretical and applied responsibility of practical legal policies against environmental degradation? Which political-philosophical attitude is implicit in the International and European environmental legislation for reducing and preventing the environmental degradation? The concepts and means, developed to compare us with the environmental issue, are adequate to capture the reality of these emergencies? The basic thesis, I intend to discuss and defend, argues that there is a “question incompatibility” between political liberalism and environmental protection.

Liberalism and ecologism are widely regarded as incompatible. Liberalism and environmentalism might be compatible but liberalism and ecologism are not. A liberal state cannot promote policies for ecological or ecocentric reasons. An individual cannot be both a liberal and a committed advocate of ecologism. This paper challenges these claims. It is argued that Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ is compatible with ecologism and, in particular, the idea of ‘ecological justice’. A Rawlsian state can promote ecological justice. A (...) committed political liberal can also be a committed advocate of ecological justice. The argument is developed through a close textual examination of Rawls’s brief discussion of our duties to ‘animals and the rest of nature’. Rawls leaves far more scope for liberal ecologism than his critics have suggested. The proposed version of liberal ecologism is defended against charges of substantive and procedural bias toward humans and against nonhuman nature. Liberal ecologism may not be enough for some ecologists—especially ‘ecological constitutionalists’ seeking constitutional protection for nonhuman nature—but it is a serious and defensible political and moral theory. (shrink)

This book reveals the rich and complex nature of the dialogue among proponents of political liberalism and its important nuances, and in so doing offers a ...