Contemporary Liberal Democracies Research Articles

"Pro-Minority" Criminalization and the Transformation of Visions of Citizenship in Contemporary Liberal Democracies: A Critique

In this article, I offer a critique of contemporary trends in "pro-minority" criminalization policy, defined as criminal offenses that are specifically designed to protect women and minorities. I show that, in the late 1970s, a new paradigm emerged for thinking about the role of criminalization in minimizing patterns of social inequality. I trace the historical processes that led to the emergence of this new paradigm and discuss its inherent limitations in meeting its stated aims. The discussion shows that these limitations are rooted in the embedding of contemporary "pro-minority" criminalization policy within the broader frameworks of neoliberal policymaking, and in the inherent flaws of the new vision of citizenship upon which these models rest. I argue that the potential contribution of criminalization to the alleviation of social inequalities can only be realized within a vision of citizenship that is radically different from the one endorsed by neoliberal governments over the last three decades.

‘In Canada of all places’: national belonging and the lost Canadians

This paper explores the role of kinship and ethnicity in the designation of Canadian citizenship. Using the phenomenon of Lost Canadians – people whose citizenship status is ambiguous due to conflicting laws, unfamiliarity with requirements to maintain citizenship and quixotic enforcement of these requirements – the paper offers evidence for the kinship basis of a contemporary liberal democracy and reveals the degree to which a Canadian ethnic identity is operative in this settler society. But the objective of the analytical exercise is not to rest at the observation that Canadian nationalism is ethnic. Rather, by examining the ways in which the complex rules of Canadian citizenship define or exclude people from citizenship, we see how thoroughly rule-bound the status of national belonging really is. It thus might be observed that Canadian nationalism, indeed, all nationalisms, are civic since they rest on rules for belonging. Once we notice the rule-boundedness of belonging it becomes possible to disentangle these rules – kinship rules – from their connections to nature and biology and thus to appreciate their social character. From this vantage we might begin to think about alternative, and potentially more democratic, forms of belonging.

Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben s enigmatic treatise on the intricacy of sovereign power and the state of exception in his Homo Sacer has received wide critical attention from and social theorists in the past decade. In gesturing to the condition of the modern concentration as a paradigmatic case of what he calls - human subjects reduced to a naked depoliticized state without official status and juridical rights - Agamben identifies a similar form of totalitarian power operating in the juridical realm of contemporary liberal democracies (Agamben 1998). Extending upon Agamben, critical migration scholars have recently taken up his conception of bare life to delineate the plight of refugees and unauthorized migrants floating in the global economy, who live in an indefinite and suspended state of noncitizenship (Rajaram and GrundyWarr 2004; Salter 2008). The move in paralleling Homo Sacer s caricature of the juridico -political space of camp with the geopolitical condition of undocumented migration corresponds with Agamben s call to examine the ways in which citizen-subjects of our age have all appear [ed] virtually as hominess sacri (Agamben 1998, 111). Agambens transhistorical call notwithstanding, to what extent is the space of camp (and by implication, the largely suppressed agency of bare life caught within the camp) an adequate depiction of the social condition of undocumented migrants? Examining the workspace of private households where female migrants work as domestic workers and where labor laws and regulations are indefinitely suspended, in this essay I argue that, while these laboring spaces relate to as the undocumented workers are stripped of juridico -political rights and reduced to a state of exploited bare life, the conception of lacks a dynamic account of power relations to address the complex agency of migrant subjects as they negotiate their daily workspace. Significantly what begins for Agamben as a space of interstitiality posited in - a zone between life and death; inside and outside - ultimately slides into an immobile binary between the beings of citizens and the excluded bodies of bare life. Yet if the space of is interstitial in nature, what preempts the possibility of the abject manifesting an agency that is also interstitial in character? If the sovereign power occupies a space that is simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order, so does the undocumented in navigating a terrain of resistance/negotiation inside and outside the normative arrangement of citizenship. As I will argue, this negotiated resistance does not fundamentally alter the structured materiality of modern liberal juridical order and the economy of irregular migration that Agamben and his migration studies followers so powerfully portray. However, at the point when Agamben declares the death of life for the bare subjects, he omits a crucial spectrum of ambiguous and interstitial practices mounted by the abject - mediating between the two extreme ends of and nonpolitical - that actually extends and reanimates the life of from the very margins of abjection. In the following, I will first address the relevance of Agamben s work for studies of undocumented migration. Two elements in his conception of are particularly compelling for the condition of refugees and undocumented migrants: the immanence of interstitiality and the depoliticized state of bare life.1 In turn, I look at how critics have problematized Agamben s thesis and its connection to unauthorized migration by raising issues such as location and agency in an effort to resurrect the political for the abject. In particular, they point to of refugee antideportation campaigns and undocumented-worker protests as counterexamples of acts of citizenship or noncitizen citizenship that defy the image of as bodies of victims. Yet while chronicling such resistant constitutes an urgent intervention that counters the state of abjection, by understanding as solely visible and audible acts, this line of critique actually falls into Agamben s rigid binary that divides humanity into life (citizenship) and bare life (no rights, nonparticipation) - with the only difference being that the latter, byway of her citizen-like acts, can now transform and elevate into the position of the former. …

R.F.A. Hoernlé and Idealist Liberalism in South Africa

This paper describes the ‘idealist liberalism’ of R.F.A. Hoernlé (1880–1843), who taught in Britain, the United States, but also at the South African College and at the University of the Witwatersrand. I argue that this liberalism was strongly influenced by the British idealism of Bernard Bosanquet and T.H. Green, but also by key features of Hoernlé’s South African experience. Hoernlé’s idealist liberalism, I maintain, not only offered a response to the challenges of living in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial state such as South Africa in the first half of the 20th century, but bears on similar challenges found in contemporary liberal democracies.

Rethinking rights: historical, political, and philosophical perspectives

As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today's newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights - but all too often the sound bytes seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia.This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. Rethinking Rights offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity.The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities.An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights.Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, Rethinking Rights proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today's world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, Rethinking Rights offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies.

Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege

Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege

Diversity and Unity

Although Habermas's sophisticated conception of constitutional patriotism successfully avoids the charge of trying to ground patriotism in a set of principles that is too thin and abstract to sustain a real sense of solidarity and belonging, his optimism regarding the prospect in modern pluralist societies of building a genuinely shared political culture is misplaced. The march of modernization as rationalization is neither as relentless nor as inevitable as Habermas assumes. Hence the rational consensus on liberal constitutional principles that is to provide the basis for a shared political culture remains elusive. However, while Habermas's solution to the `solidarity gap' that confronts many contemporary liberal democracies remains problematic, he is right to point to the importance of a shared identity that is strong enough to turn strangers into fellow citizens. The challenges that cultural diversity and value pluralism pose for contemporary states cannot be resolved via a procedural approach that focuses solely on political legitimacy. Yet the difficulties that surround Habermas's conception of `constitutional patriotism' suggest modern states will struggle to build a collective political identity that can generate a genuine sense of solidarity. If this is so, modern pluralist states face a more profound challenge than writers such as Habermas assume.

Devourer of our convictions: Populist and academic organizational theory and the scope and significance of the metaphor of ‘revolution’

I focus on the interpretative significance of OT theories influenced in part by sociology and set this discussion in a historical context. Looking initially at Hamel’s theorization and then the influential theories of Hammer and Champy (re-engineering), I draw out an initial analysis of the rhetoric of ‘revolution’ in OT. I contrast these analyses with more academic examples from OT (Burrell and Morgan [1979] and Ralph Stacey’s [1996, 2000] complexity theory), which discuss the contrast between different ‘registers’ of use of the term ‘revolution’: the metaphoric which is associated with the commonplace deployment of ‘revolution’ (e.g. ‘a revolution in advertising’), and the literal which is associated with great and significant events (especially political/historical).Together these uses comprise the scope of the rhetorical deployment of the metaphor of ‘revolution’. I argue that organizational theories play on a dynamic of tension between these two registers both at the level of sub-text (populist literature), but also at a meta-theoretic level (for example: Burrell and Morgan 1979). I also suggest that the organic theories of complexity present an intermediary case, between these extremes. I also argue that the rise of the term ‘revolution’ in OT resonates with the Republican conception of revolution which is associated with the 18th century forebears of contemporary western liberal democracy. A consequence of this historiographic interpretation is that the modes of reasoning present at the inception of the enlightenment, and politically advanced by Republicanism, have a methodological impact. This effect may be felt in terms of a semantic relativism which underpins the flexibility of metaphor in OT, but which is ultimately subordinate to the anchor of a neo-liberal agenda.

The State and the Parties

This article focuses on the relationship between political parties and the state. We propose an analytical framework distinguishing between three different dimensions of the party-state linkage: the dependence of parties on the state, the management of parties by the state and the control of the state by parties. We provide a cross-national empirical analysis of the relationship between parties and the state in contemporary liberal democracies. Our analysis underscores the considerable importance of the state for political parties in general. It also highlights important differences between old and new democracies, as well as important regional differences in terms of the nature of the relationship between parties and the state in the recently established democracies. We argue that these different types of linkages are highly relevant for party system development and the nature of democracy.

Improving Democracy in Religious Nation-States: Norms of Moderation and Cooperation in Ireland and Iran

Many in the human rights community have expressed concern about the illiberal religious political system found in Iran today. However, Iran is not unique in its illiberal religious nationalism. Some contemporary liberal democracies in the West also have a history of illiberal religious nationalism. The English and later the British discriminated against Catholics in various ways. The Irish also have a history of discrimination against Protestants and inequality towards women which was based on a deep seated illiberal Catholic nationalism. In all of these cases moderation and liberalization occurred over time. An interesting question is whether moderation over time might be repeated outside of Europe, especially in religiously based nations in the Middle East.When looking especially at the evolution of Ireland we notice that: economic prosperity spread throughout the population, the perception of a threat from the United Kingdom declined, European norms were spread within Ireland, and there were scandals within the Catholic Church. All these factors diminished the power of Irish illiberal Catholicism over time. If the external threats to Iran were removed and economic prosperity was to spread, as corruption and scandals came to light, we might expect that Iran may begin to moderate its political system.The goal of this essay is to analyze what conditions are conducive for the gradual transformation from an illiberal, religiously defined nation-state to a more moderate, democratic one by examining Iran and Ireland. This article suggests that the evolution of religiously based political systems can lead to more democratic political systems which are more cooperative with other countries and are less supportive of violence and terrorism.

Assessing the Power of the Purse: An Index of Legislative Budget Institutions

To compare parliamentary capacity for financial scrutiny, I construct an index using data for 36 countries from a 2003 survey of budgeting procedures. The index captures six institutional prerequisites for legislative control, relating to amendment powers, reversionary budgets, executive flexibility during implementation, the timing of the budget, legislative committees and budgetary information. Various methods of index construction are reviewed. The results reveal substantial variation in the level of financial scrutiny of government by the legislature among contemporary liberal democracies. The US Congress has an index score that is more than three times as great as those for the bottom nine cases, predominantly Westminster systems. Even allowing for US exceptionalism, the top quartile of legislatures score twice as high on this index as the bottom quartile. These findings suggest that the power of the purse is a discrete and non-fundamental element of liberal democratic governance. For some countries it is a key safeguard against executive overreach, while others maintain a constitutional myth.

Enlightening revolutions: essays in honor of Ralph Lerner

1 Part I: The Medieval Renaissance Chapter 2 The Moral Status of Teaching and Writing Chapter 3 Averroes on Law and Political Well-Being Chapter 4 Prudence, Imagination, and Determination of Law in Alfarabi and Maimonides Chapter 5 Averroes, Dante and the Dawn of European Enlightenment 6 Part II: The Modern Revolution Chapter 7 Law and Innovation in Machiavelli's Prince Chapter 8 Resistance to Punishment: Controversies Old and New Chapter 9 The Right to Life and Human Dignity 10 Part III: The Place of Philosophy in Modernity Chapter 10 Adam Smith on Natural Liberty and Moral Corruption: The Wisdom of Nature and Folly of Legislators? Chapter 11 Swift Sailing Chapter 12 Montesquieu's Prelude: An Interpretation of Book I of The Spirit of Laws Chapter 14 Tocqueville's Understanding of Conditions of and Conditions of Inequality 14 Part IV: Equality and Greatness in Tocqueville and America Chapter 15 Who is Publius? The Debate Over the Constitution and the American Revolution Chapter 16 Benjamin Franklin's Biblical Parable on Toleration Chapter 17 Tocqueville as Politician: Revisiting the Revolution of 1789 Chapter 18 Is There a Right to Live as We Please? (So Long as We Respect the Right of Others to Do the Same) Chapter 19 Two Nations Were in Her Womb: Contemporary Liberal Democracy and the Political Teaching of the Bible Chapter 19 Democratic Greatness in the Founding 20 Part V. Learning from Antiquity and the Thought of Leo Strauss Chapter 21 Justice Overruled: The Ambition of Xenophon's Cyrus the Great Chapter 22 Plato and Relativism Chapter 25 Leo Strauss in His Letters Chapter 26 How Strauss Became Strauss Chapter 27 The Writings of Ralph Lerner

The Conduct of Citizenship in the Case of Turkey's Jewish Minority: Legal Status, Identity, and Civic Virtue Aspects

Contemporary liberal democracies confront governance problems elicited by the discord between the principles of equality and difference, and between the concepts of majority and minority. Citizenship came to be recognized as a vital governance tool in response to this challenge evidenced by growing academic and political interest in the concept. The basic precept that citizenship refers to is a constitutionality-based relationship between the individual and the state, implying a unique, reciprocal, and unmediated bond between the individual and the political community. It is argued that citizenship has three main aspects. First is the legal status aspect, which enfolds citizenship in terms of civil, political, and social rights, plus duties such as obeying laws, paying taxes, and performing military service. The second aspect is the identity dimension of citizenship, which regards individuals' membership in different social and political groups in multiple categories of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, profession, and sexuality. The third aspect is related to citizens' capacities, responsibilities, and willingness to cooperate, in short the civic virtue that the citizens possess and perform. The sense of identity that citizens have; their maneuvers to deal with competing identities; their willingness to participate in collective decisions and access to political processes; their sense of belonging to the social, political, and economic order; and their initiative potency all refer to different features of civic virtue. All in all, modern citizenship is perceived as the combination of legal status, social roles, and moral attributes that necessitate good citizenry. It has been suggested that these three aspects of citizenship—legal status, identity, and civic virtue—are interrelated; as the sensitivity to identities increases, demands for legal rights increase correspondingly. It is also claimed that identity affects the way people perform their duty of civic participation and their conception of responsibility. From another point of view, it is also argued that the three components of citizenship conflict with one another under certain circumstances. For instance, claims for cultural recognition of minorities may conflict with equal citizenship status. An empirical investigation of citizenship is complementary to understanding the interaction between these three aspects. This study undertakes the crucial task of providing evidence from the field to illuminate the complex correlations and divergences within citizenship and the relational bond between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects. In this article, the results of qualitative research on a particular group of citizens—Turkish citizens with Jewish background—are discussed in the light of the parameters set above. The study provides empirical evidence to illuminate the dynamics at stake in the relationship between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects in the specificity of Turkey's Jews and the conduct of Turkish citizenship. With the use of in-depth interviews conducted with the sample group of Jews, the study attempts to understand how being a non-Muslim minority group living in a Muslim-predominant society influences the perceptions and experiences regarding citizenship. The discussion developed in the article is presented in three parts. In the first part, an overview of Turkish citizenship and the status of non-Muslim minorities per se is put forth. This part also sets forth the essentials of Turkish citizenship with its legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects. In addition, the paradoxical consequences of the dominant paradigms inherent in citizenship in Turkey regarding non-Muslim minorities are demonstrated. The second part focuses on the field research conducted with the Jewish community in Turkey. After a brief summary of methodology and a portrayal of the general characteristics of the sample group, it discusses how members of Turkey's Jewish community experience and perceive Turkish citizenship through its aspects of legal status, identity, and civic virtue. The respondents' perceptions and experiences regarding being Turkish citizens and a non-Muslim minority are also covered. The third part offers a discussion on Turkish citizenship in the light of the research results and gives a citizen-centric account through the lenses of respondents.

Challenging neoliberal hegemony

This article seeks to develop two key arguments: the first is that contemporary liberal-democracies are not post-ideological societies, but that they are dominated by a very powerful ideology, that...

Bioethics in pluralistic societies.

Contemporary liberal democracies contain multiple cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. Within these societies, different interpretive communities provide divergent models for understanding health, illness, and moral obligations. Bioethicists commonly draw upon models of moral reasoning that presume the existence of shared moral intuitions. Principlist bioethics, case-based models of moral deliberation, intuitionist frameworks, and cost-benefit analyses all emphasise the uniformity of moral reasoning. However, religious and cultural differences challenge assumptions about common modes of moral deliberation. Too often, bioethicists minimize or ignore the existence of multiple traditions of moral inquiry. Careful consideration of the presence of multiple horizons for moral deliberation generates challenging questions about the capacity of bioethicists to effectively resolve complex cases and social policy disputes.

Die morele verantwoordelikheid van internetdiensverskaffers: ‘n Christelik etiese perspektief

The article deals with the moral responsibility of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) concerning the distribution of information in the virtual world, seen from the perspective of Christian Ethics. A number of case studies are discussed to illustrate some of the typical problems of responsibility experienced in this regard and the inadequacy of international legislation regulating internet services is pointed out. To adequately deal with specifically the moral responsibility of ISPs contemporary shifts in the concept of responsibility as a result of the process of modernisation are discussed. It is argued that the moral responsibility of ISPs is at least equivalent to that of other distributors of information. Nonetheless the moral responsibility ascribed to ISPs on the basis of liberal values would be different from that ascribed on the basis of Christian values. Liberals would tend to underplay the moral responsibility of ISPs to control the flow of information on the internet, while Christians would tend to emphasise their prospective responsibility to bar harmful information from the internet. However, in contemporary liberal democracies only ISPs serving Christians can be expected to exercise the moral responsibility that is regarded as ideal from a Christian perspective. From all ISPs the exercise of an optimal moral responsibility can nonetheless be expected.

An Interview with Robert K. Fullinwider

In this interview, Professor Robert K. Fullinwider, Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland, provides an excellent and much needed overview of the debate on multiculturalism and `identity politics' and its relevance to educational theory. The interview also examines questions related to citizenship education, inclusion, and diversity in American public education. It also addresses several other important questions in contemporary political theory and philosophy of education, e.g. the civic purposes of public schooling, the sharp decline of civic culture over the past decades, issues of cultural diversity and value pluralism in contemporary liberal democracies.

現代リベラル・デモクラシー下の個人:環境・自己所有権・他者

現代リベラル・デモクラシー下の個人:環境・自己所有権・他者

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (review)

Reviewed by: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stephen E. Lewis Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Giorgio Agamben. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 199. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). The central claim in Giorgio Agamben’s latest book to be translated into English (the Italian original was published in 1995) is extremely provocative: the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise of power in western politics, including contemporary liberal democracies. He pursues his argument not through historiographical inquiry but, rather, through what he calls an “historico-philosophical” analysis of nothing less than the fundamental structure of sovereign power as exercised in the West from Aristotle to the present (10). Through primary reference to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, the book defines sovereignty [End Page 163] as a relation of exclusionary inclusion between the sovereign power and what Agamben terms “bare life.” Bare life (“la nuda vita”) is something like “life in general” (66) or “pure being” (182), as opposed to the “way of life proper to men” (66). Within the context of the sovereign relation, bare life is the part of the political subject’s existence excluded from the juridical order instituted by the sovereign power. Nevertheless, this exclusion of bare life from the juridical order in fact constitutes a hidden inclusion with relation to sovereign power because the sovereign power must, in order to be able to manifest its absolute authority at any given moment, reserve the right to suspend the juridical order it instituted. Thus the thing upon which sovereign power exercises its absolute, extrajuridical power within the state of exception is the very thing that was excluded at the moment of juridical institution: bare life. Paradoxically, then, bare life is “the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty” (67). If all of this sounds abstract, that’s because it is. Indeed, for a book intended as a response “to the bloody mystification of a new planetary order,” it is in many ways too abstract, particularly in its first third (12). Only when Agamben arrives at the second of his three sections, the one devoted to the “protagonist” of the book, homo sacer (sacred man, the incarnation, so to speak, of bare life), does the sovereign relation Agamben is describing become clear in concrete terms (8). This second section of the book is the most “historical” insofar as it builds out of various well-chosen, logically and structurally homologous examples of power relations drawn from archaic Rome to the present a narrative account of the developing fate of the life of homo sacer in relation to sovereign power. This narrative begins with homo sacer, a man so designated in archaic Roman law as he who, in punishment for a crime, cannot be sacrificed according to the methods proscribed by divine law and yet may be killed without the killing being considered murder according to the laws of the city. The life of homo sacer thus, argues Agamben, concretely instantiates bare life’s relation of excluded inclusion with regard to sovereign power. From this fascinating point of departure, Agamben proceeds to construct a chronological narrative of key moments of transformation in homo sacer’s relation to the sovereign, evoking along the way such intriguing figures as the King and his two bodies in the English and French royal contexts, the “wolf-man” of early medieval Anglo-Saxon and Germanic law, the corpus singled out in the writ of habeas corpus, and the citizen of the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.” Then, in the book’s third part, Agamben finishes his protagonist’s story with a consideration of the Nazi concentration camp internee and such contemporary incarnations of homo sacer as the comatose patient on life support or the refugee. In the course of this narrative, some of the most interesting consequences of Agamben’s argument surface—for instance, his critique of the understanding of the sacred as ambiguous, which in turn leads, on the one hand, to a critique of Georges Bataille’s understanding of sovereignty (Agamben sees it as politically empty and therefore...

Diversity and the lexical priority of the right to equal freedom

It is uncontroversial to observe that in contemporary liberal democracies there is much dissensus about the nature of the good life. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, atheists and many others hold profoundly different and conflicting views about which personal ideals are fulfilling. Given this we need to know how the State should respond to such a lack of consensus. Various positions have been proposed and one can discern (at least) three possible responses. Some defend what might be termed the democratic solution: this affirms that when people are divided over an issue they should resolve the matter politically and decide the issue by voting on the matter. A second position sometimes affirmed is what might be termed the perfectionist solution: this states that when citizens disagree about which personal ideals are valuable the State should promote the most worthwhile ideals. In cases of conflict between conceptions of the good the State should decide in favour of the most valuable and fulfilling conceptions of the good. A third position might be termed the liberal solution: this maintains that the appropriate way for the State to respond to disagreement is for it to allow people equal freedom to make up their own minds. Now one can, of course, combine these three positions. One could, for example, embrace (b) and (c) and claim that the State should encourage worthwhile conceptions of the good but do so in a way that respects people's most important freedoms.' In this paper I shall consider and appraise Hillel Steiner's defence of what I have termed the liberal solution. In his important work An Essay on Rights he argues that given the existence of unresolvable disagreement there should be a right to equal freedom.2 Furthermore, he argues, this right is lexically prior to all other values.3 This claim that people have a right to equal freedom plays an important role in his theory. From it he derives an account of distributive justice that stipulates that people are entitled to (i) ownership of their bodies (231-2), and