Political Liberalism, Political Independence, and Moral Authority

As I use the term here, the central component of political liberalism holds that political institutions are not to be guided by substantive principles of the good about which reasonable people may disagree. If a particular policy or institutional action is a requirement of justice, this cannot be because this policy or action promotes human welfare, well-being, or flourishing. Morality, on the other hand, isn’t like this. Morality doesn’t bracket substantive considerations about the value of human life in assigning moral obligations. It seems perfectly sensible to say that if it’s the case that a particular action of mine would render many people’s lives more valuable, this is certainly a moral reason to do it. These two facts form the central tension I explore in this paper. Political liberalism, or so I claim, comes out with the short end. The general argumentative structure runs like this: first, under the sort of political liberalism at issue here, individuals can be subject to competing and conflicting political obligations and moral obligations. At a given time, someone can be morally required to φ, required as a matter of political justice to ¬φ. Second, I argue that this fact creates a problem for political liberalism. Liberals are forced to either reject a sensible claim about the rational authority of moral requirements, or adopt a position that is incompatible with one of liberalism’s central motivations.