LIBERALISM

As a Political Ethics
 INTRODUCTION
 Liberalism is one of the most central and pervasive political
theories and ideologies. Its history carries a crucial heritage of
civilized thinking, of political practice, and of philosophical-ethical
creativity.
 Liberalism begins with the assumption that people are or should be
free and that restrictions on their liberty must be justified.
 Liberal thinkers debate the proper role of the state and often agree
that it is a limited one which would result in very few restrictions
beyond those needed to secure the rights of everybody living under
its jurisdiction.
 When this was first proposed, during an era of absolute monarchy
and nearly unchecked power of institutions over individuals, it was
a radical claim.
 Without liberalism one could not conceive of the modern state.
 Introduction
 The state liberals envisioned was one that places the good of individuals
before that of rulers; that recognizes both the limits and the possibilities of
government; that enables the market exchanges that are necessary to
proper standards of living; that justifies the holding of private property
beneficial to individual prosperity; that releases individuals from
burdensome hindrances to their freedom and flourishing; and that
respects the law and constitutional arrangements.
 Without liberal conceptions of human dignity, it would be difficult to
imagine personal originality and uniqueness.
 Besides, in its recent history liberalism upheld the concern for the plight
and welfare of others, and it has insisted on sensitivity to social
differences within societies.
 Some of the important liberals are: John Locke, Adam Smith, Immanuel
Kant, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, T.
H. Green, John Dewey, Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls.
 Liberalism and its Critics
 Liberalism originated out of a European set of beliefs, but within Europe
the connotations it arouses have located it on very different points of the
political spectrum: left of centre in the United Kingdom, right of centre in
France and Germany. In Scandinavian countries, particularly in
Sweden, many liberal ideas have been disseminated under the heading
of social democracy, which has frequently been linked to elitist or middle
class individualism.
 Socialists of all stripes have accused liberalism of acting against the
interests of the working classes and of furthering anti-social selfishness,
defying the message of inclusiveness that many liberals wish to spread.
 In the United States it is seen as a supporter of big government and
human rights. In some highly religious societies, liberalism is
tantamount to heresy, falsely deeming human beings, not God, as the
measure of all things, elevating the secular hubris of individual
preferences above the divine will.
 Two Forms of Liberalism
 The term “liberalism” conveys two distinct positions in political
philosophy, the one a pro-individualist theory of people and
government, the second a pro-statist or what is better termed a
“social democratic” conception.
 The former is often referred to as “classical liberalism”, the latter
“modern liberalism” or “social democratic liberalism.” Some of the
classical liberalists are John Locke, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
Modern liberal thinkers include J.S. Mill, T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse,
John Hobson and John Rawls.
 Although there are differences among the views of both classical and
modern liberals (which will be discussed at the end) there are certain
core beliefs that are held by all forms of liberalism.
 Before discussing the core beliefs let us start with few definitions of
liberalism. Below are some of the definitions given by different
philosophers on liberalism:
 Definitions of Liberalism
 A political ideology centred upon the individual, thought of as possessing rights against
the government, including rights of due process under the law, equality of respect,
freedom of expression and action, and freedom from religious and ideological constraint.
(Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)
 Liberalism … begins with the recognition that men, do what they will, are free; that a
man’s acts are his own, spring from his own personality, and cannot be coerced. (R.G.
Collingwood)
 Liberalism is an all-penetrating element of the life-structure of the modern world …
Liberalism is the belief that society can safely be founded on this self-directing power of
personality, that it is only on this foundation that a true community can be built. (L.T.
Hobhouse)
 The content of a liberal political conception of justice has three main elements: a list of
equal basic rights and liberties, a priority for those freedoms, and an assurance that all
members of society have adequate all-purpose means to make use of these rights and
liberties. (John Rawls) 
 Liberalism consists of a particular theory of equality, whereby citizens are treated as
equal by insisting that government must be neutral on what might be called the question
of the good life. (Ronald Dworkin)
 Core Concepts of Liberalism:
(1) Liberty
 A fundamental feature of liberalism is its support for individual
liberty. Most liberals, traditional and contemporary, consider ‘liberty’
as the core of liberal ethical and political theory. Liberty means
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, assembly and so forth, but for
most liberals it means more.
 Locke, one of the founders of classical liberalism, believed that
individuals are naturally free, subject only to the law of nature. In his
Second Treatise of Government Locke writes:
 To understand political power correctly and derive it from its proper source, we must consider
what state all men are naturally in. In this state men are perfectly free to order their actions,
and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone’s
permission— subject only to limits set by the law of nature.
 The natural right to liberty is a right not to be interfered with: “to be
at liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others” (Locke).
 Liberty
 J S Mill thinks that every individual should be free to act
according to his desires in matters concerning his own life. A
society and its members should respect his liberty. Mill allows
that society can interfere with free action on some conditions.
He says,
 …the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the
only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others (Mill, “On Liberty”).
 Prevention of harm to others is the only justification for limiting
liberty. How the harm principle should be interpreted is a
subject of controversy. But it is clear that Mill meant to ensure
that individuals would have a large scope for exercising choice
and living according to their ideas of the good.
 Negative Liberty
 For Mill, Locke and many classical liberals, liberty is what Isiah
Berlin describes as negative liberty:
 I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with
my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act
unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I
am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain
minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved (“Two Concepts of
Liberty”).
 Negative liberty is negative because it is defined by the absence of
something (i.e. of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from
others) that could impede one’s action.
 The negative concept of freedom is most commonly assumed in liberal
defenses of constitutional liberties typical of liberal democratic
societies, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and
freedom of speech, and in arguments against paternalist or moralistic
state intervention.
 Positive Liberty
 Some liberals like Joseph Raz and Charles Taylor think that positive
liberty is fundamental to liberalism.
 To enjoy positive liberty a person has to be self-determining, i.e. he or
she has to be able to rationally choose and pursue his or her own ends.
Self-determination requires the presence in an individual of self-control,
self-mastery and an ability to be self-realizing.
 Theorists of positive liberty are concerned with internal factors that affect
the individual’s ability to act autonomously. Those who stress the
importance of autonomy are likely to insist that a liberal society should
act to prevent people being acted on by forces that limit their autonomy.
 In his “Positive and Negative Liberty” (2012) Carter remarks:  
 …one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined
society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its
democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive
freedom. For example, it is sometimes said that a government should aim actively to create the
conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization.
 Liberty
 Those who favour positive liberty in this sense generally
think that everyone should be provided with resources
sufficient to enable them to be truly free.
 They favour a distributive account of justice and other
measures to ensure that individuals can become self-
realizing.
 Classical liberals favor negative rights to the extent that
governments and other people should not be allowed to
interfere with the free market or natural individual freedoms.
Modern social liberals, on the other hand, believe that
individuals have positive rights, such as the right to vote, the
right to a minimum living wage, and—more recently—the
right to health care.
 Core Concepts of Liberalism:
(2) Equality
 All liberals insist that from a moral point of view individuals are
equal. Every human being should be treated with equal respect.
 Liberals generally assume that persons are alike in important
relevant and specific respects – by having the same basic needs, for
example. John Rawls identifies primary goods as goods that all
individuals will require whatever goals they choose to pursue. They
are what ought to be distributed to all members of a society
according to his principle of justice.
 However, liberals do not assume that individuals are alike in their
tastes, situation or preferences or that they should be treated in the
same way. Equality in their view is compatible with diversity and
inequalities in personal attributes as well as with different ideas of
the good.
 Equality
 For liberals, moral equality translates into political equality. Individuals
are equal citizens enjoying equally the rights that citizenship entails.
 The liberty that the state is supposed to allow, encourage and protect
belongs to each citizen equally. T.H. Marshall contends that “all who
possess the status of citizenship are equal in respect to the rights and
duties with which the status is endowed” (“Citizenship and Social Class”,
2009).
 Marshall divides citizenship rights into three categories: civil rights,
political rights and social rights. Civil rights comprise the right to
freedom of speech, thought and belief, the right to own property and to
conclude valid contracts and the right to justice. Political rights are the
rights to vote and to hold political office. Social rights are the rights to
education, healthcare, unemployment insurance and an old age pension.
For Marshall, the total expression of citizenship requires a liberal
democratic welfare state.
 Equality
 However, liberals differ on what equality means. For some liberals, like
Locke and Nozick, equality means equal rights of liberty and property,
including an equal natural right to self-ownership. Every individual has
the same natural right to acquire property – so long as enough and as
good is left over for others.
 However many liberals, like Marshall, believe that equality requires
that individuals receive an equitable share of social resources.
 For Ronald Dworkin, equality of respect is the basic liberal
requirement. Equality of respect means the right to be treated with
equal concern.
 Dworkin insists that a government “must not distribute goods or
opportunities unequally on the ground that some citizens are entitled
to more because they are worthy of more concern. It must not
constrain liberty on the ground that one citizen’s conception of good life
is nobler or superior to another’s”.
 (3) Rationality
 Rationality is a persistent core liberal concept. Liberalism
presupposes the capacity of people to make reasonable choices;
to reflect on their ends and ways of life; and to behave towards
others in a considered, intelligible, and respectful manner.
 Some philosophers employ the notions of autonomous and
purposive agency in identifying what is rational about members
of a liberal society. By that they mean the capacity to plan, to
anticipate, to seek the optimal options for themselves, to be
entrusted to make sensible decisions for themselves, and often
also to live harmoniously with their fellow women and men.
 In rationality argument equal rights and opportunities for every
person expresses that rationality. Rationality directs human
beings towards a good life for themselves, and towards regard for
the preferences of others in their own search for the good life.
 (4) Toleration
 Liberals support toleration. For contemporary liberals, the ideal of
toleration is closely linked to other liberal values: to the commitment to
state neutrality, to the promotion of individual freedom, equal concern
for individuals and to the preservation of social unity and peace.
 The negative version of toleration (“live and let live”) requires people to
abstain from interfering with the worship, speech and ways of living of
others. The right to liberty gives others a duty of toleration.
 Locke argued that civil and ecclesiastical authorities ought to tolerate
diversity of religious belief because genuine belief cannot be legislated.
Individuals do not choose at will what they believe.
 Locke also supported toleration because he believed that political power
should not be used to regulate those activities and interests of
individuals that are purely private and have no harmful effects on others.
 For Mill, toleration of the ideals and choices of others follows from his
defence of liberty as self-realization.
 Toleration
 Many liberals defend toleration as necessary for liberty or autonomy.
Dworkin defends it as a requirement of equality of respect.
 Some contemporary liberals believe that toleration is a fundamental
liberal virtue – the virtue that allows a liberal society to incorporate a
diversity of minority groups – including those whose members are
not liberals.
 The practice of toleration as a virtue enables minorities to be
accommodated in a liberal society. The distinctive ethnic and
religious practices of minority groups are permitted, not interfered
with and even respected by majority group members when a liberal
society practices toleration.
 Toleration is therefore important in a liberal plural society for
ensuring peace and encouraging harmonious coexistence of ethnic
and religious groups.
 (5) Liberal Neutrality
 The concept of neutrality is connected to liberal requirements of
liberty and equality and toleration. Neutrality can be defined as
the obligation to refrain from intervening to promote particular life
plans or conceptions of the good, while ensuring equal
opportunities for all citizens to pursue their particular ends.
 W. Kymlicka (“Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality”, 1989)
defines neutrality as “the view that the state should not reward or
penalize particular conceptions of the good life but, rather, should
provide a neutral framework within which different and potentially
conflicting conceptions of the good can be pursued”.
 This means, he says, that the state must not justify its policies on
the basis of the intrinsic superiority or inferiority of particular
conceptions of the good life and it must not attempt to influence
people’s judgments of the value of these different conceptions.
 Neutrality
 In the history of liberalism, neutrality has meant, above all,
neutrality in respect to religion. The state is not supposed to
favour one religious group over another.
 Neutrality in respect to religion is a means of dealing with
diversity of religious belief within a society and was thus a
solution to the conflicts over religion gripping Europe during the
16th and 17th centuries.
 Neutrality in matters of religion goes along with the advocacy of a
secular state – a state that protects the rights of individuals but
does not favour any particular religion or interfere with the
religious life of individuals. In a secular state religion is assumed
to be a private matter. Individuals are entitled to worship as they
please – that is their business. But they should not attempt to
use political power to favour their religious way of life.
 Neutrality
 Dworkin regards neutrality as required by the basic value of
equality. Equal respect means that the state cannot promote the
way of life favoured by the majority or interfere with a person’s
pursuit of her good even if the majority regards it as pernicious,
disgusting or unworthy.
 Thus we see that neutrality is one of the most important features of
a liberal society for accommodating difference. Impartial treatment
of religion and culture by the liberal state ensures that people in
minority ethnic and religious groups get equal treatment,
opportunities and rights.
 Neutrality is supposed to ensure that they are free to practice their
own religion, engage in their own cultural activities and live
according to their idea of the good without being disadvantaged by
the laws and political practices of their society or forced to
accommodate themselves to the cultural practices of a majority.
 (6) Individuality

 Individuality is another core liberal concept.

 Individuality is different from individualism. Individualism is a view
of social structure that prioritizes the role of individuals and regards
them as the only unit of society—self-contained and self-sufficient.
Individualism rejects approaches that identify groups, or even society
as a whole, as distinctive entities.
 But individuality sees people as endowed with a qualitative
uniqueness. They are regarded as capable of self-expression and
flourishing, and they require those attributes in order to realize their
full potential.
 Individuality possesses spiritual and moral elements of character
and will that may be nourished by individuals themselves, but it also
depends on fostering the educational, economic, cultural, and health
environments that provide the necessary opportunities for that
nourishment.
 (7) Progress
 Progress is another core concept in its own right. It introduces
the dynamic of positive movement and development into
liberalism. Progress includes the constant improvement of
material technology and increasing standards of living through
human inventiveness and effort.
 Above all, it focuses on an optimistic view of time as unfolding in
the direction of social betterment in the broadest sense. The
unfolding of liberal time is not predetermined or teleological—that
is, it does not inexorably move towards a projected end, as may
be the case in some socialist or utopian ideologies.
 Instead, it is open-ended. Human development is a continuous
process that harnesses and reflects the free will of individuals
embedded in and secured through the other liberal core
concepts.
 (8) General Interest
 The concept of the general interest is another core concept. This
core concept conjures up the liberal claim to include all individuals
— and groups — in its purview rather than emphasizing class,
race, gender, or ethnicity as points of rupture. Liberals thus appear
to be resistant to those distinctions as a matter of principle.
 General interest means the desire to appeal to universal human
interests as such, to what unites people rather than what divides
them, even to some fundamental consensus. That may refer to a
sense of decency, to reasonableness, to mutual respect and
equality of regard, and to a wish to promote the collective good of
individuals.
 Even among those who interpret liberalism as a market oriented
and competitive ideology, there are emphatic references to the
general interest.
 Classical Vs. Modern Liberalism
 (a) On freedom and individual rights: Classical liberals believe in
'negative freedom', as expressed in J. S. Mill's 'Harm Principle'.
'Negative freedom' is the belief that individuals are free when they
are simply free from oppression.
 On the other hand, modern liberals such as T. H. Green and John
Rawls have espoused 'positive freedom'. 'Positive freedom' is the
belief that 'negative freedom' is an insufficient measurement of
freedom, because individuals are only free when they are enabled to
achieve their hopes and goals.
 (b) On Equality: Classical liberals believe that a society is sufficiently
equal if all individuals are treated in the same way by the law,
because of everyone's equal moral worth.
 On the other hand, modern liberals argue that society could only be
equal when individuals all have equal opportunity to work and live at
a high standard. This is called equality of opportunity.
 Classical Vs. Modern Liberalism
 Role of State: Classical and modern liberals disagree over the role of
the State. While they both believe that some form of State needs to
exist, classical liberals only support minimal state intervention. They
are generally suspicious of big states, as they believe that they may
impose upon individuals' negative freedom.
 Modern liberals have rejected this view of the state because they
believe that the state is obligated to intervene in society in order to
enable citizens to achieve equality of opportunity. John Rawls
described this when he first coined the term 'enabling state‘.
 Classical liberalism is a combination of civil liberty, political freedom,
and economic freedom. Modern liberalism is a combination of social
justice and mixed economy. Modern liberalism understood that
chasing away the government’s power was doing more harm than
good. Modern liberalism realized that in order to protect people’s
rights, the government had to be involved.
 Classical Vs. Modern Liberalism
Definitions Freedom Equality Government Power Economic
Preferences
(a) Classical (a) Classical (a) Classical (a) Classical (a) Classical
liberalism is a liberalism liberalism believes liberalism only liberalism liked
combination of believes in that a society is support minimal taxation with low
civil liberty, 'negative sufficiently equal if state intervention. taxes, low or no
political freedom', the all individuals are They are generally tariff, etc.
freedom, and belief that treated in the same suspicious of big  
economic individuals are way by the law, states, as they (b) Modern
freedom. free when they because of believe that they liberalism liked
  are simply free everyone's equal may impose upon high tax systems,
(b) Modern from oppression moral worth individuals' many laws on
liberalism is a (b) Modern (b) Modern negative freedom. businesses, high
combination of liberalism liberalism argues (b) Modern minimum wage
social justice believes in that society could liberalism believes laws, etc.
and mixed 'positive freedom' only be equal when that the state is  
economy. - individuals are individuals all have obligated to
  only free when equal opportunity to intervene in society
they are enabled work and live at a in order to enable
to achieve their high standard. This citizens to achieve
hopes and goals. is called equality of equality of
opportunity. opportunity.
 Legacy and Prospects
 Liberalism remains a vibrant and influential, if divided, political
ideology. In the two decades following the elections of Thatcher
and Reagan in 1979–80, modern liberalism appeared to be in
dispirited decline. Most sectors of the British and American
economies during this period were deregulated or privatized to
effect what Reagan called “the magic of the marketplace.”
 Unregulated markets, it was claimed, produce prosperity,
abundance, and economic efficiencies. In keeping with this
vision, regulations governing the banking, insurance, and
financial industries—many in place since the New Deal—were
watered down or eliminated in the 1980s and ’90s. The resulting
lack of oversight was a major factor in a worldwide financial crisis
that began in 2007–08 and threatened to turn into a
global depression.
 Legacy and Prospects
 Almost overnight, the ideal of the unregulated market was discredited
in the eyes of many. The then newly elected U.S. Pres. Barack
Obama undertook, with widespread popular support, a “new New
Deal” in which banks were re-regulated and the automobile
industry radically (albeit temporarily) restructured. Formerly
overshadowed, modern liberalism had gained a new lease on life.
 That moment proved transitory, however, as Obama’s
successor, Donald J. Trump, repudiated and set about undoing many
of the regulations that the Obama administration had put in place.
 Finally comes Biden administration. We have to wait and see whether
or not he follows the lead of Obama to put in place some of liberal
viewpoints in his administrative policies.