Political Neutrality This page intentionally left blank Political Neutrality A Re-evaluation

Edited by Roberto Merrill University of Minho, Portugal

and

Daniel Weinstock McGill University, Canada Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Roberto Merrill and Daniel Weinstock 2014 Chapters © Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-28510-1

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ISBN 978-1-349-33019-5 ISBN 978-1-137-31920-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137319203

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Notes on Contributors vi

Introduction 1 Roberto Merrill

Part I General Approaches

1 Neutrality and Political Liberalism 25 Richard J. Arneson 2 The Possibility and Desirability of Neutrality 44 Peter de Marneffe 3 Perfectionist Neutrality 57 Steven Wall 4 Expressive Neutrality 83 Kwame Anthony Appiah 5 Neutrality toward Non-controversial Conceptions of the Good Life 97 Ruwen Ogien 6 Consequential Neutrality Revivified 109 Simon Clarke

Part II Specific Issues

7 Neutrality and Liberal Pluralism 125 George Crowder 8 Perfectionism and Democracy 144 George Sher 9 Neutrality, Public Reason and Deliberative Democracy 159 Colin M. Macleod 10 A New Approach to Equality 178 Christine Sypnowich

Bibliography 210 Index 223

v Notes on Contributors

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He was born in London, grew up in Ghana, and received both BA and PhD degrees in philosophy from Cambridge University. He has taught in Ghana, France, Britain, and the United States, and has published widely in philosophy as well as in African and African- American literary and cultural studies. Among his books are The Ethics of Identity (2005) and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), which won the Arthur Ross Award of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2013 Harvard University Press published his Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity. Richard J. Arneson is a professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy. He works in ethics and political philosophy, with an emphasis on theories of justice. He aims to contribute to our under- standing of how to integrate sensible ideas of personal responsibility into broadly egalitarian theories of justice. Another theme is the place of the advancement of human well-being in a balanced view of social justice. In a slogan, the idea is that justice is good lives for people, with good fairly distributed across people. Simon Clarke is Associate Professor at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. He studied at Oxford and Auckland Universities and specializes in political philosophy, the history of polit- ical thought, bioethics, and moral philosophy. He was a member in the Philosophy Department at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand from 2003 to 2009. He is the author of Foundations of Freedom: Welfare- Based Arguments Against Paternalism (2012). George Crowder is Professor in the School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. His books include Liberalism and Value Pluralism (2002), Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (2004), The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (co-edited with Henry Hardy, 2007), and Theories of Multiculturalism (2013). Peter de Marneffe is Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Liberalism and Prostitution (2010), The Legalization

vi Notes on Contributors vii of Drugs (with Doug Husak, 2005), and he has published articles on individual rights, government paternalism, and neutrality. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1989, and wrote his dissertation, ‘Liberalism and Education’, under the direction of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon. He has been a visiting fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University.

Colin M. Macleod is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Victoria in Canada. His research focuses on issues in contemporary moral, political, and legal theory with a special focus on distributive justice and equality; children, families, and justice; and democratic ethics. He is the author of Liberalism, Justice, and Markets (1998), the editor of Justice and Equality (2012) and co-editor with David Archard of The Moral and Political Status of Children (2002).

Roberto Merrill is a researcher in political philosophy at the Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho (CEHUM) and Associate Researcher at CEVIPOF (Sciences Po-Paris). He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Ethics at the University of Montreal (CRÉUM) in 2006–7, Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School (Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health) in 2011, and honorary fellow at the Hoover Chair of the Catholic University of Louvain, in 2013. He received his PhD in political philosophy at the Centre Raymond Aron (EHESS, Paris). His research interests include the relationship between art and morality, liberal neutrality and value pluralism, left-libertarianism, as well as neo-republicanism and multiculturalism.

Ruwen Ogien is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. His work focuses on moral philosophy and the philosophy of social science. His books include La faiblesse de la volonté (1993), L’éthique aujourd’hui. Maximalistes et minimalistes (2007) and La liberté d’offenser. Le sexe, l’art et la morale (2007). George Sher is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He is the author of Desert (1987), Beyond Neutrality (1997), Approximate Justice (1997), In Praise of Blame (2006), and Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness (2009). His most recent book, Equality for Inegalitarians , will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Christine Sypnowich is Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of The Concept of Socialist Law (1990) viii Notes on Contributors and a number of articles on issues of egalitarianism, perfectionism, utopianism and procedural justice. She is the editor of The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen (2006), and co-editor (with David Bakhurst) of The Social Self (1995). She is currently working on a manuscript provisionally entitled ‘Equality Renewed’ which sets out a human flourishing approach to egalitarianism. Steven Wall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he is a member of both the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and the Politics, Philosophy, Economics and Law Program. He is the author of Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint and an editor, with George Klosko, of Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory . He is currently an editor, with David Sobel and Peter Vallentyne, of the newly established series Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy . Daniel Weinstock is Professor of Philosophy at McGill’s Faculty of Law. He held the Canadian Research Chair on Ethics and Political Philosophy. He was also the director of the Research Centre on Ethics at Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) for many years. He has published widely on the ethics of nationalism, problems of justice and stability in multinational states, the foundations of international ethics, and the accommodation of cultural and moral diversity within liberal democratic societies.