Liberalism Defended: The Challenge of Post-Modernity (The Shaftesbury Papers, 9)

Liberalism is today under serious intellectual attack. It is said to undermine its own principles, to have lost any strong claims to universal validity, and to foster injustice and inhumanity. Liberalism is associated with Enlightenment thought and is considered by some as an outmoded political philosophy. Professors Rasmussen and Den Uyl take up this challenge to liberalism. They show that liberalism is not locked into traditional ways of understanding itself and has the capacity to enrich itself by intellectual traditions not usually associated with liberalism. Unlike much of liberalism, which defends its politics by resorting to either moral skepticism or moral minimalism, Rasmussen and Den Uyl employ a distinction between normative and "metanormative" principles. The latter are more directly tied to politics and concern principles that establish social/political conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. Thus it is not necessary to minimize the moral universe to support liberalism. Rasmussen and Den Uyl support their distinction through a novel use of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, and they show the importance of this distinction when they specifically address the positions of two leading critics of liberalism - John Gray and Alasdair MacIntyre.