Against Public Reason

Political liberalism seeks to define the principles of political association in terms that are independent, not only of religious convictions and substantive notions of the human good, but also of the individualist ideals, encouraging a self-critical attitude towards the conception of the good one espouses, to which the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill typically appealed. This chapter explores the basic problem of political life to which political liberalism aims to provide a solution, the means—among which the moral assumptions, particularly a principle of equal respect for persons—by which it seeks to solve this problem, and the ends it can reasonably hope to achieve by the solution it develops.