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According to a number of recent critics, various efforts to justify liberalism in a neutral or merely "political" fashion have failed badly In response, William Galston and Ronald Dworkin, as well as other theorists, have tried to articulate a foundational conception of the good from which liberal politics can be derived. In analyzing their competing conceptions of ethical liberalism, I assume that any reasonable liberalism must be consistent with individual agency and the idea that genuine goodness is a product of inner persuasion and belief. Galston's "purposive liberalism" rests on a teleological structure that compromises his expressed concern for those value considerations and opens the door to public coercion and manipulation as a way of maximizing his liberal good. Since Dworkin's approach manages to avoid such problems, I argue that his "challenge model" of the good life provides a superior ethical foundation for liberalism.
While much of the world struggles to achieve liberal democracy, communitarians and other critics have been challenging the practical viability and even the ethical desirability of liberalism itself. In responding to these external critics, liberal theorists have been driven to a vigorous internal debate regarding the best way to characterize and ground the familiar principles and institutional arrangements they favor. As a result, we now confront a range of liberalisms, each of which offers a different and competing justification of liberal politics. In one recent analysis, Patrick Neal has identified three competing "'models' of a liberal order." The first, which he defends and I will leave aside, treats liberal institutions and principles as a "vulgar," neo-Hobbesian modus vivendi between citizens with irreconcilable conflicts of interest, but a shared strategic interest in avoiding suffering and violence. The second model, familiar from the work of John Rawls and others, treats liberalism as a "neutral" and merely "political" response to the presence of plural and incommensurable views of the good amidst an underlying commitment to equality. Without much evaluation, Neal also mentions recent efforts to develop an "ideal-based" model that specifies "a theory of the good life generally as the foundation of a political theory" justifying liberal institutions and practices (1993: 623, 626-27).
In what follows, I hope to contribute to the evaluation of this third model by explicating and analyzing two competing versions...