Political liberalism, virtue, and neutrality: the limitations of liberal justice

Abstract

This essay critically explores the role of virtue within political liberalism. It argues that the viability of political liberalism depends upon the willingness of citizens to cultivate certain virtues. It also argues that, under in a political liberal society, this is unlikely to happen. Political liberals require citizens to be virtuous for instrumental reasons. The attainability of key political liberal outcomes is dependent upon the presence of the virtuous of empathy and benevolence. Specifically, unless citizens are sufficiently empathetic, public justification cannot be accomplished. Also, unless citizens are sufficiently benevolent, standards of liberal distributive justice will not be realised. This essay also argues, however, that in a political liberal society, the virtues of empathy and benevolence are unlikely to be present. It claims that, since neither empathy nor benevolence can be properly regarded as a political virtue, these virtues cannot be consistently promoted by a political liberal basic structure. Political liberals are therefore dependent upon certain forms of social perfectionism, that is, the cultivation of empathy and benevolence without any direction or support from the basic structure. It turns out, however, that political liberalism is an inhospitable environment for the fostering of social perfectionism. This is because it is committed to viewing reasonable people as morally entitled to pursue their chosen conception of the good life. Such a view, I argue, is hostile to social perfectionism. This means that political liberals are not only unable to demand the cultivation of the virtues they require; the very nature of political liberalism discourages citizens from viewing themselves as morally required to cultivate these virtues. This essay concludes by asking whether this difficulty concerning the relationship between virtue and liberal outcomes can be extended to other forms of liberalism. It suggests that certain key liberal concepts, like the liberal theory of legitimacy, must be rejected if the outcomes of public justification and liberal distributive justice are to be preserved.