Liberal Faith: Essays in Honor of Philip Quinn

5. Moral Foundations of Liberal Democracy, Secular Reasons, and Liberal Neutrality toward the Good

121 Five Moral Foundations of Liberal Democracy, Secular Reasons, and Liberal Neutrality toward the Good Robert Audi A comprehensive political philosophy should provide an account of the normative basis of the form of government it favors. It should also show how the normative basis it articulates can justify a constitutional structure. In that light, it will support a range of standards not only for evaluating laws and public policies but also for the ethics of citizenship on the part of individuals. The form of government in question here is liberal democracy, and my central questions are how it may best be seen to be morally grounded and how, given a plausible moral grounding , it may conceive the good of citizens. Must a liberal democracy be, for instance, neutral with respect to all goods other than those that must be maintained in order for citizens to be genuinely free and to WeithProof.indb 121 WeithProof.indb 121 6/30/08 11:53:17 AM 6/30/08 11:53:17 AM 122 Robert Audi have basic political equality? Or may it seek to promote human flourishing of various specific kinds? These questions are not only of great theoretical interest. They also bear on many problems important in the current climate of nation building, in which constitutions must be constructed, new laws framed, and sound standards of political conduct articulated and internalized. There is a particular urgency about achieving a sound conception of liberal democracy today. The rise of terrorism is forcing the democracies of the Western world—those commonly considered liberal by any plausible definition—to weigh civil liberties against considerations of safety and to try to balance the costs of military and police power against those of social welfare. A single paper cannot fully answer any of these questions. What it can do is present one plausible way in which liberal democracy may be morally grounded and defend, on that basis, some major elements in a position on how such a form of government may grant a special place to a certain broad conception of human flourishing. I will begin with a sketch of a theory of normative foundations of liberal democracy and, building on that, present a conception of the limits of liberal neutrality and a related view of political obligation. An Approach to the Moral Grounding of Liberal Democracy There are many ways to provide a normative grounding for liberal democracy, and in earlier work I have detailed a number of them.1 They have much in common, in part because of their common object: to justify democracy’s two fundamental commitments. One commitment is to the freedom of citizens; the other is to their basic political equality, symbolized above all in the practice of according one person one vote. Kant put this dual commitment of liberal democracy even more strongly. He suggested that standards of freedom and equality are the only moral ones deserving a place in the constitutional structure of a morally sound political system: “It is a fundamental principle of moral politics that in uniting itself into a nation a people ought to subscribe to freedom and equality as the sole constituents of its concept of right, and this is not a principle of prudence, but is founded on duty.”2 Given the two fundamental commitments—which we might call the libertarian and egalitarian commitments—it is plain that a liberal WeithProof.indb 122 WeithProof.indb 122 6/30/08 11:53:17 AM 6/30/08 11:53:17 AM Moral Foundations of Liberal Democracy 123 democracy must respect the autonomy and political rights of persons. A vote can represent a citizen’s political will only if it is autonomous. This entails that it is not only uncoerced but also free of the kinds of manipulation and rights violations that would prevent its appropriately representing the values of the voter. If democracy may be conceived as a government of, by, and for the people, none of this should be controversial. The for here carries great weight. Conceiving a democracy as for the people suggests that, in a certain way, a democracy—and this certainly applies to a liberal democracy—is individualist. It does not view the political structure of society as subordinated to the good of a sovereign, to a class of society, or even to the glory of God, if that is conceived as incompatible with the earthly flourishing...