Liberal Ethos Research Articles

The complexity of justice : A challenge to the 21st century

The author discusses two questions, the relation between liberalism and democracy, and the relation between ethics, morality and law. As to the first question, she argues that neither liberalism nor democracy are merely formal. Roughly spoken, it can be said that liberalism stands for negative liberties, whereas democracy stands for positive ones. She observes a non-contingent tension between the ethos of liberalism (personal freedom) and the ethos of democracy (equality; majority rule). It is the task of morality to maintain and restore the balance between these two kinds of ethos. As to the second question, she is worried about the balance between law (legal regulation), ethics, and morality. On the one hand, abolishing legal regulations would amount to abolishing the freedom of the moderns. On the other hand, the substitution of legal regulations for ethical regulations would lead to a similar result: the end of the freedom of the moderns through the homogenisation of life. In the former case, personal support, charity, magnanimity, and caring would get lost, while in the latter there would be no escape from community pressure towards uniformity.

Liberalism and the Cultural Studies Imagination: A Comment on John Frow

Liberalism and the Cultural Studies Imagination: A Comment on John Frow Michael Warner (bio) As I find much to agree with in John Frow’s essay, which is certainly flattering in devoting such careful reflection to an essay of mine, I would like here to offer not exactly an opposing view, but rather some questions and qualifications for extending his inquiry. The first of these has to do with what is called liberalism. Frow’s essay is evidently culled from a longer piece, which might well have more to say about the subject, but in this version a strain of deep ambivalence about the liberal tradition is in evidence. He notes the semantic flexibility of the term, calling it a loose ethos rather than a philosophy. He also shows, as do many other commentators, that “[l]iberalism” is a mix of different strains of thought, with radically different implications in context. It is therefore something of a surprise when we encounter the claim that “[l]iberalism fails—constitutively, not accidentally—to think three modes of historical transformation” in the twentieth century. Frow does not develop, in this version of his essay, the claim that the limitation is constitutive, a necessary failing of liberalism. To be frank, I must say that I don’t see how this claim could be made good, at least with respect to the first two points, both of which can be easily contradicted. There is quite sophisticated work, well within a tradition that is commonly called liberal, that describes the problems of corporate agents and concentrated capital, as well as the complex and multivalent manifestations of the state. Michael Walzer, to cite only one example, has consistently made both of these central to his work for the past twenty years, and has vigorously argued against the rejection of key aspects of the liberal tradition. Even Galbraith and Keynes could be cited as counterexamples, and some of the tenets of liberalism as Frow cites them have never been univocal. “Negative liberty,” in particular, is a red herring, in my view. As for the third allegedly constitutive blind spot of liberalism, the transformation of the citizen into a mass subject, one might even want to cite Frow himself as a counterexample. For he offers some extremely astute and sophisticated comments on the nature of politics in the context of mass culture, and yet it turns out that some of his central commitments could easily be described as compatible with, even definitional of liberalism. I find this to be the case especially in his last paragraph, where he invokes the ideals of rational debate, suspicion of power, “limited justice,” “acceptance of cultural alterity,” etc. This might well reduce to a semantic dispute. Frow might respond that by “liberalism” he means something close to what he elsewhere calls neoliberalism (of [End Page 431] which he has a shrewd analysis); that the failings he calls constitutive blindnesses are definitional of this narrower usage; that his comments are meant only of the version of liberalism that has been dominant in Anglo-American culture; and that the ideals that arise so passionately and compellingly in his last paragraph, though overlapping with some parts of the liberal tradition, are shared with a social-democratic one that needs to be distinguished from the regnant neoliberal tradition. Fine. In that case, why does the essay need an enemy called liberalism? Would it not be a more powerful political strategy to lay claim to those parts of liberal thought that motivate the critique? Does it not produce a kind of political and rhetorical weakness to pretend that neoliberalism reigns unchallenged as the true expression of the liberal ethos, that similar criticisms have not long been audible within serious liberal thought? 1 On the subject of mass culture and its implications for citizens, individuals, and politics, Frow makes a number of astute observations. He is certainly right, for example, to observe that there can be no return to a public world untroubled by the distortions of mass media, even if we thought that eighteenth-century print culture was free of contradiction (which almost no one, least of all Habermas, really thinks). He is also right when he notes...

A Radical Ethos

AbstractThis article analyzes today's global values crisis as a matter of both personal and institutional failure. Social disintegration constitutes humanity's greatest challenge at the turn of the millennium. A viable future requires a new social project which embodies a new ethos—one which includes both traditional and liberal values and which avoids their vices along with the traps of authoritarian socialism. In order to spell out this new social project, the article describes the essential features of the traditional ethos and the liberal ethos: their economies, the understanding of nature, religion, history, politics, and ethics. This article argues that the needed participatory radical ethos incarnates Christian values for our time.

Economic Justice in American Society

America is entering a new age of discord, warns Robert E. Kuenne. In addition to a panoply of other structural troubles, the nation must now confront unprecedented demands for the kind of justice that will meet the needs of the elderly, handicapped, and impoverished. Furthermore, American society faces the pressing problems of the disadvantaged with no explicit code of justice. Claims to various kinds of government entitlements are based increasingly on appeals to economic but no real national agreement exists on what that expression means. In this ambitious work, Kuenne sets out to remedy this want of consensus.After an extensive evaluation of earlier thinking about distributive justice, Kuenne proposes a new theory, dualistic that is consistent with the American ethos of political and liberalism. He then frames a formal Bill of Economic Rights and Obligations, which defines proper governmental conduct in the terrain as the American Constitution does in the political. Defending a form of governmental policy that strikes a balance between the egoistic and compassionate elements of American individualism, Kuenne also considers the practical tasks of program implementation, and goes on to assess the feasibility of meeting concrete redistributive goals over the next thirty years. His thorough investigation of one of the country's most urgent predicaments could do much to stimulate debate over the ad hoc and unprincipled distributive policies that now prevail in the United States.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Liberal attitudes and homophobic acts: the paradoxes of homosexual experience in a liberal institution.

Rates of victimization of and attitudes towards lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals at a well-known national liberal arts college were reported and compared to other institutions. Based on two campus-wide surveys of employees and students respectively, differences in degree of exclusion, isolation, sexual harassment, needing to deny one's sexuality, self-censorship, and other factors were found among employees and students, people with varying sexualities, people of color, and whites. The paradoxical finding of extensive attitudinal support and widespread victimization was explored. The explanation suggested for the paradox drew on institutional characteristics, culture, and priorities. Based on the configuration of these, I suggested that the paradox resulted from two competing values, a liberal ethos focused on equal rights, and a heterosexual orthodoxy, and that many people were pulled between the two. Theoretical implications, counter-explanations, and implications were briefly explored.

Careerism and the Ethics of Autonomy: A Theological Response

AbstractThis essay analyzes the moral and theological significance of the preoccupation of today's college students with careers and preprofessional training and illustrates how the theology component of the undergraduate curriculum can respond to the moral dilemmas presented by careerism. It contends that careerism is but a symptom of a more fundamental malaise of the social ethos and that by engaging in a critical inquiry into the moral roots of the ethos of liberalism—the ethos that gives rise to careerism—students can be challenged to investigate their own personal career choices in the context of the society in which they live. This can be done successfully only if analytic categories are available that provide a “bridge” between the personal experience of the students and the social experience of the larger society. The Ethics component of the Theology curriculum can provide these categories of analysis. Ethos, narrative, character, and vocation—terms integral to the discourse of Christian Ethics—provide helpful ways of structuring this analysis in the classroom.

The presbyterian church in Ireland and the government of Ireland act (1920)

The government of Ireland act (1920) did not fall, like Athene, fully fledged from the head of Zeus, so its historical development has to be considered if the presbyterian attitude to it is to be understood.Presbyterians in Ireland had been second-class citizens up to 1780, and from then until the act of disestablishment in 1870 a tolerated church. This was a vital factor when they were called upon to face the issue of home rule in 1886. A second was that they were a minority, the majority of whose members lived in Ulster, whose community interests with Britain had been accentuated by industrialisation. They owed little or nothing to an irish parliament or Dublin so far as relief from legal disabilities and their standard of living were concerned. A third factor was the ‘vote tory manifesto’ of ‘catholic nationalism’ in 1885 which ended liberalism as a party in Ulster politics leaving presbyterianism without a political party of its own liberal ethos. Politically, presbyterians had now no option but to choose between the toryism of the former ascendancy and an aggressive catholic nationalism which at times resorted to force and violence against the union with Britain on which their standard of living and economic welfare depended.