Norms of liberty : a perfectionist basis for non-perfectionist politics
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Norms of liberty : a perfectionist basis for non-perfectionist politics
Pennsylvania State University Press, c2005
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at / 10 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How can we establish a political/legal order that in principle does not require the human flourishing of any person or group to be given structured preference over that of any other? Addressing this question as the central problem of political philosophy, Norms of Liberty offers a new conceptual foundation for political liberalism that takes protecting liberty, understood in terms of individual negative rights, as the primary aim of the political/legal order.
Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue for construing individual rights as metanormative principles, directly tied to politics, that are used to establish the political/ legal conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. These they distinguish from normative principles, used to provide guidance for moral conduct within the ambit of normative ethics. This crucial distinction allows them to develop liberalism as a metanormative theory, not a guide for moral conduct. The moral universe need not be minimized or morality grounded in sentiment or contracts to support liberalism, they show. Rather, liberalism can be supported, and many of its internal tensions avoided, with an ethical framework of Aristotelian inspiration-one that understands human flourishing to be an objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, social, and self-directed activity.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Part I: Liberalism and the Political Order
1. Liberalism in Crisis
2. Liberalism and Ethics
3. Liberalism's Past and Precedents
4. Why Individual Rights? Rights as Metanormative Principles
5. The Natural Right to Private Property
Part II: A New Deep Structure for Liberalism
6. Individualistic Perfectionism
7. Defending Individualistic Perfectionism
8. Natural Law and the Common Good
9. Self-Ownership
Part III: Defending Liberalism
10. Communitarian and Conservative Critics
11. The Structure of the Argument for Individual Rights
12. Defending Individualistic Non-Perfectionist Politics
Epilogue
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"