Conceptions of the good, rivalry, and liberal neutrality

Abstract

Liberal neutrality is assumed to pertain to rival conceptions of the good. The nature of the rivalry between conceptions of the good is pivotal to the coherence, scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. Yet, liberal theorists have said very little about rivalry. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing three conceptions of rivalry: incompatibility rivalry, intra-domain rivalry and state power rivalry. I argue that state power rivalry is the morally relevant conception of rivalry, and that it has significant implications for the scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. I conclude that in the light of state power rivalry, the only feasible liberal neutral state is a very minimal one.

Keywords:

• neutrality
• political liberalism
• conceptions of the good
• rivalry
• minimal state

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Robert Jubb, Peter Jones, Cécile Laborde and Albert Weale for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy for their suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Liberal neutralists often use the terms ‘competing’, ‘conflicting’ and ‘incompatible’ interchangeably with ‘rival’; yet, as I hope to make clear in this paper, there are important conceptual differences to be made between these different interactions between conceptions of the good. I have chosen to use ‘rivalry’ as it serves as an umbrella term that is inclusive of these different types of interaction.

2. The former is certainly the most prominent version of liberal neutrality in the literature, and the latter is a distinct but under-scrutinised version. I believe it is not worth considering further versions of liberal neutrality here such as neutrality of aim and neutrality of outcome, given that they are almost universally rejected in the literature. Neutrality of aim is generally ignored in the literature since neutrality of justification is considered its proper liberal interpretation (Wall and Klosko 2003, pp. 7–8, Lecce 2008, p. 237). Neutrality of outcome (Montefiore, 1975) is almost universally rejected in liberal political thought (Jones 1989, pp. 16–17, Kymlicka 1989, pp. 884–5, Waldron 1989, p. 67, Arneson 2003, pp. 193–194, Wall and Klosko 2003, p. 8, Lecce 2008, p. 236).

3. Lecce (2008, p. 234 fn. 9) also affirms Dworkin’s broad view.

4. Barry (1995, pp. 29–30) affirms Rawls’s broad view. Similarly, Patten (2010, p. 270) defines conceptions of the good as entailing ‘special commitments’, which he says arise in wide array of what I call domains of life.

5. Sher (1997, pp. 37–43) highlights several difficulties with pinning down a definition of ‘conception of the good’ that can account for all our intuitions about the term. For our purposes though, Sher’s argument is not incompatible with allowing for everyday things being included in one’s conception of the good. His criticism is directed at the supposed controversy about views on the good, and their overlap with views on the right, rather than whether things are sufficiently moral, political or religious.

6. For example, Larmore (1987, p. 51) describes ‘ideals clashing’. Nagel (1991, p. 164) describes ‘radical disagreement because of incompatible values’. Jones (1989, pp. 13–14) appeals to r1 when discussing the mutual frustration of people’s competing conceptions of the good. Waldron (1989, pp. 66–67) affirms r1 on the conflict between Christianity, Humanism and Hedonism. Barry (1995, pp. 26–27) affirms r1 when discussing ‘mutually inconsistent ends’. Barry (1995, pp. 37–38, 69, 82, 163–165, and 169–172) frequently discusses ‘rival religions’ too. Rawls (2005, p. xvi) sets out the ‘serious problem’ for modern democratic societies as being the plurality of ‘incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines’. Lecce (2008, pp. 3–4 and 8) traces the trajectory of religious toleration to state neutrality in liberal political thought, and appears to affirm r1 in his use of ‘mutually exclusive’ beliefs about the good. Horton (2012, p. 441) uses religious conflict. And like the term, ‘conception of the good’, this understanding of rivalry is shared with liberal perfectionists (e.g. Raz 1986, p. 133).

7. For example, Barry (1995, p. 99) discusses the equitable distribution between sports. Harry Brighouse (1995, p. 38) directly compares different sports. Arneson (2003, p. 198) compares support for opera in comparison to ‘other forms of entertainment’. Patten (2010) relies on the rivalry between sports throughout his analysis. And Horton (2012, p. 435 and 443) compares the subsidisation of different arts.

8. It is possible that neutrality only applies to the state’s use of coercive power (however that might be defined), and so the state may be non-neutral in its use of non-coercive power. If so, this does not affect the substance of my analysis, only its scope.

9. Some fundamentalist Christians could claim that skateboarding is incompatible with their conception of the good because skateboarding does nothing to contribute to the ‘glory of god’. Hence, I say they are not necessarily incompatible. The point remains that rivalry can arise without incompatibility.

10. Here, we might also consider a fourth kind of rivalry, namely, inter-domain rivalry, but this is implausible, given rivalry within domains. A state could not be neutral where the domains of religion and sports are advantaged equally by advantaging one religion and one sport equally. Here, we could say that the state is neutral between domains on some kind of macro level, but of course, it remains the case that a particular religion is advantaged over other religions, and a particular sport over other sports. Note also that it logically follows that if the state is neutral between all conceptions of the good, then it is neutral also within domains. Thus, the paradigmatic instances of non-neutrality between domain rivals remain accounted for in r3.

11. Jones (2012, p. 503) gives a response along these lines in the context of the fact that there are some matters to which the state cannot practically be neutral, such as language. He writes, ‘if we accept that a society cannot be, or should not be, impartial about everything, it does not follow that it cannot be, or should not be, impartial about anything’.

12. For a critique of supposed ‘neutral reasons’ or ‘neutral justifications’, see Raz (1986, p. 116), and Patten (2010, pp. 255–256).