Liberal Neutrality: A Reinterpretation and Defense*

Abstract

AFTER a brief ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of liberal neutrality has fallen out of favor in recent years. A growing chorus of liberal writers has joined anti-liberal critics in arguing that there is something confused and misguided about the insistence that the state be neutral between rival conceptions of the good. Assuming we can even make sense of the idea of neutrality, these writers contend, it is a mistake to think that there is anything in liberal principles that commits the liberal state to neutrality. With a number of former neutralists softening their support for the idea, the rejection of neutrality is quickly becoming a consensus position, even amongst liberal political philosophers. According to one writer, all that remains to be done is an “autopsy” on the idea of state neutrality. Much of the critique of neutrality has proceeded on the basis of four assumptions. The first contrasts neutrality with perfectionism. To defend state neutrality is to deny that the state can legitimately use its power to encourage ways of life that it supposes to be valuable or to discourage ones that it regards