The problem of political liberalism is: How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines? Put another way: How is it possible that deeply opposed though reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together and all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime? What is the structure and content of a political conception that can gain the support of such an overlapping consensus? These are among the questions that political liberalism tries to answer.
-John Rawls in Political Liberalism
Introduction
This post is about small-L political liberalism, the idea that the government should limit itself to enforcing neutral consistent rights that can be agreed on by people with radically different reasonable values, and not impose a specific contentious vision of the good life on its people. This post is not about American capital-L Liberalism, the politics associated with the Democratic Party. I’m both, but the version of liberalism I’m describing in this post also describes moderate Republicans and most politicians in most western governments. It’s the dominant political ideology on Earth.
Anti-liberals on the left and right spend a lot of time diagnosing political liberals and constructing complex stories about what liberals believe and why. For anti-liberals, liberalism is at best a fear of change, and at worst a trick by the powers that be to justify injustice and evil as the result of a neutral system of rights, rather than of systems of power, dominance, and oppression that should be questioned and dismantled. Liberalism seems so unnatural and unresponsive to the obvious on-the-ground evils Marxists or deep ecologists on the left or fascists or religious extremists on the right see around them that it is difficult for them to understand how anyone who’s awake and willing to question the world could call themselves a liberal. They infer that liberalism must be the result of brainwashing or neurosis or the desire for power and status within an unjust system, rather than reasoned argument. I rarely meet anti-liberals who are open to having a direct conversation about the merits of liberalism. Instead they basically always revert to “You’ve been brainwashed, let me help you unplug from the Matrix” and immediately resort to attacks on my emotional relationship to power or complicity in the system. For them, liberalism is a form of being asleep they need to wake me up from, not a coherent set of beliefs they need to argue against. The core appeal of liberalism is so non-obvious to so many people that it’s a barrier to communicating the basic idea in the first place.
This is a shame, and bad for political dialogue. Political liberalism is one of just a few basic foundational ideas that guide my thinking, and I think it’s much more radical and utopian than its critics often understand. My goal for this post is to get across the main argument for political liberalism so that anti-liberals can understand why it continues to inspire such deep commitment. If you’re a critic of liberalism, my goal isn’t to convert you, it’s only to get across the argument. I’ll write more about why the idea is so appealing in a separate post.
There are other good introductions to liberalism out there, but I haven’t found a specific online article that captures everything I’d like, which is why I’m writing this.
Some quick notes on the argument
Liberalism is a combination of a bottom-up emergent property of industrial societies and a top-down order imposed on otherwise illiberal cultures. This post is meant to exclusively be an argument for liberalism as the best political order we can currently aim for, not a claim about how liberalism emerges. Individual liberal citizens and leaders often do not know the background philosophical presumptions implicit in their day to day engagement with liberal society, and they do not need to know those presumptions for the system to work. Much of the knowledge that exists about how liberal societies work is embedded in our institutions and cultural practices rather than in the rational brains of individual citizens.
Liberalism is not written into the universe as the final best answer for how to organize society. I’m arguing for it as a kind of tragic compromise necessary due to our apparently inherent human limit in understanding which values to pursue.
Because it is fundamentally an imperfect compromise, liberalism contains many core issues and unresolved tensions. If you notice any that I didn’t describe, see if you can find information about how liberal thinkers have addressed the issue before assuming liberals are blind to the problem.
Most of what I’ve written here is actually just a series of summaries of much broader debates. Each point of the argument deserves a lot more writing than I’m able to provide.
The Argument
Free reasonable people will always come to develop deep value disagreements with each other.
There are three options for how to avoid violence between people with different values:
The Cage of Norms: Isolate into societies of people with identical values.
The Totalizing State: Attempt to impose one value system on everyone without the possibility for others to impose their own systems.
The Liberal Compromise: Build a system that allows people with very different values to live together without killing each other over value disagreements. Each citizen must constantly compromise some of their values to help prevent the pluralist society from descending into the Cage of Norms or Totalizing State.
If we want to create the Liberal Compromise, there are three core requirements:
a. and b. both require a deep cultural and institutional commitment to mediate all violence through an external organization rather than using vigilante violence against perceived aggression. These together are what has come to be called small-L liberalism.
1: Free reasonable people will always come to develop deep value disagreements with each other.
The foundational idea of reasonable pluralism
Some ideologies have single big foundational ideas that are core to everything else in their system, and can help predict how their adherents behave and think. Understanding these foundational ideas can clarify every other aspect of the ideology. Marxists have the alienation of labor from the means of production, Christians have the claim that Christ is God, and deep ecologists have the idea that all living things and/or systems have inherent value regardless of their relationship to humans and society.
The foundational idea that liberals are responding to is what Rawls called the fact of reasonable pluralism:
Under political and social conditions secured by the basic rights and liberties of free institutions, a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable—and what’s more, reasonable—comprehensive doctrines will come about and persist if such diversity does not already obtain.
-Political Liberalism
A comprehensive doctrine is a broad system of values and beliefs about the good life. Some examples of comprehensive doctrines:
Catholicism
Marxism
Feminism
Deep ecology
American consumerism
Utilitarianism
Many comprehensive doctrines don’t have names, and are just a jumble of different values and moral intuitions.
To put Rawls’s point another way, brute reality does not give us enough moral information to expect all free reasonable people to agree on every contentious ethical question. If everyone in the world were reasonable and perfectly free, they would still come to very different conclusions about core value questions about things like gender, economics, nature, animals, religion etc. Rawls referred to this as “the fact of reasonable pluralism” because we can still distinguish views we disagree with but are held by reasonable people from views that (likely) no reasonable person could hold. I think there are reasonable people who care about animal rights and reasonable people who don’t care about animal rights, but I don’t think there are reasonable people who believe that society should allow people to torture children for fun. What counts as reasonable vs. unreasonable is itself a blurry boundary that liberalism needs to mediate. The “reasonable” in “reasonable pluralism” is only meant to convey that we don’t need to entertain literally all beliefs to have a free and pluralist society. Rawls is not saying that we should behave as if any moral claim at all might be true, only that there are a lot of important questions on which reasonable people disagree and will continue to disagree. This is the core fact about the world liberalism is responding to.
One very important point here is that liberals are not obligated to be moral relativists. I and most liberals I know have very strong beliefs about what is right and wrong and work hard to see those contentious values reflected in broader society. Liberalism is a claim about how to keep society functioning and free, not a claim that each individual needs to completely abandon their comprehensive doctrines and values.
This seems simple at first, to the point that it doesn’t seem worth thinking about. Of course reasonable people disagree about values! What implications can be drawn from something so obvious?
The next section will show why this simple observation actually creates incredibly complicated problems that come from . These problems are related to the potential for violence that comes from radically different values reasonable people can hold. Before we get there, we need to consider two possible objections.
What counts as reasonable? Why?
The abortion debate is a good chance to clarify what Rawls means by “reasonable.”
I’m extremely pro-choice. I’m in a minority of Americans who believe that there should be no legal limits on abortion at all. I’m adding this detail only because I’m going to speak favorably of pro-life people and don’t want this to be read as a pro-life argument.
I’ve known people who are much smarter than me on basically every metric who disagree strongly with me about abortion. Some of them are mostly pro-life except for extreme cases. Others support just a few more limits on abortion than I do, like a ban on medically unnecessary late-term abortions. Are these people reasonable? Some might say no. Maybe they have all been brainwashed into hating women or are overvaluing the life of the fetus for irrational emotional reasons. A majority of American women support more restrictions on abortion than I do, but it could be that they’ve all been tricked by society.
An aspect of most comprehensive doctrines is the belief that other people are being tricked. Marxists believe that working class people who favor capitalism have been tricked. Protestants believe that non-Protestants have been tricked. I have somewhat extreme views on animal welfare and believe that almost everyone has been tricked into undervaluing the wellbeing of farmed and wild animals. If we define reasonable as “Not tricked by individual bad people, material interest, or complex systems” then basically no rival comprehensive doctrines will consider anyone who doesn’t believe the doctrine reasonable. This does not bode well for building a society where people with different comprehensive doctrines can live together. Simply asking whether other people have been brainwashed by a rival comprehensive doctrine does not seem like a useful tool for determine who is reasonable.
The actual line between what’s reasonable and unreasonable is blurry and subjective. There’s nothing written into the universe that says exactly where to draw the line. History is a long list of brutal suppression of people under the justification that they are unreasonable. Critical theory at its best is about examining background assumptions about who and what is considered reasonable and default. The debate is too broad to summarize here and there are many reasonable conclusions to draw from it. The main point I want you to draw here is that comprehensive doctrines are on their own drastically unreliable guides to what’s reasonable, because almost all can provide easy justifications for treating non believers as unreasonable. This should trouble us and we should hold onto it as a fact as we try to live with people who are different from us.
Rawls’s definition of reasonableness is a little verbose but worth reading:
Assume first that reasonable persons affirm only reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Now we need a definition of such doctrines. They have three main features. One is that a reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values so that they are compatible with one another and express an intelligible view of the world. Each doctrine will do this in ways that distinguish it from other doctrines, for example, by giving certain values a particular primacy and weight. In singling out which values to count as especially significant and how to balance them when they conflict, a reasonable comprehensive doctrine is also an exercise of practical reason. Both theoretical and practical reason (including as appropriate the rational) are used together in its formulation. Finally, a third feature is that while a reasonable comprehensive view is not necessarily fixed and unchanging, it normally belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of thought and doctrine. Although stable over time, and not subject to sudden and unexplained changes, it tends to evolve slowly in the light of what, from its point of view, it sees as good and sufficient reasons.
This account of reasonable comprehensive doctrines is deliberately loose. We avoid excluding doctrines as unreasonable without strong grounds based on clear aspects of the reasonable itself. Otherwise our account runs the danger of being arbitrary and exclusive. Political liberalism counts many familiar and traditional doctrines—religious, philosophical, and moral—as reasonable even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves, as we think they give excessive weight to some values and fail to allow for the significance of others. A tighter criterion is not, however, needed for the purposes of political liberalism.
-Political Liberalism
Not the clearest definition of reasonableness. The definition might just need to remain contentious.
The critique that beliefs are warped by the powers that be
You might object to the fact of reasonable pluralism and argue that many of the value differences in society are the result of the powers that be, and authentically free reasonable people would not disagree about them. If you’re a Marxist atheist, you might assume that religion is promoted by the ruling class to keep workers docile, and authentically free reasonable people wouldn’t become religious. If you’re a Catholic, you might assume that Marxist atheism is the result of people straying from God and that if everyone could be brought into the church unblinded by sin they would all pursue God as well and abandon their Marxist beliefs.
Each of these might be true, but there are two big problems:
Even communities in agreement with each other about many core values still often come to disagree about extreme questions. If you’re on the radical left, it is likely that at some point you’ve debated animal ethics. Some on the radical left say that animal ethics matters a lot because it concerns the vast majority of conscious beings on Earth. For others, animal ethics is an abstract distraction from human injustice. It is noticeable that people can fundamentally agree that capitalism is systematically exploitative and that workers should own the means of production, but still come away with lots of other value disagreements. This is in some ways obvious, but you should remember its obviousness when you assume that a liberated society would have no need to mediate drastic value differences. If you try to build a movement without expecting these value differences to pop up, you are always going to be disappointed even if you agree on a lot of core claims.
All political (and religious, and philosophical) worldviews are by definition simplistic and limited. We each have about 2 pounds of brain interfacing with 2,500,000,000,000,000 pounds of civilization. It is likely we will get some things wrong. High confidence that most people around you have been brainwashed and need to have a radically different value system imposed on them to be authentically free has historically yielded some unpleasant results. It can be used to justify fascism and totalitarianism. It’s also achieved some of the most important moral steps in history, notably the slavery abolition movement’s idea that white society had been blinded by racism and greed to the barbarity of slavery. I don’t claim to know a hard and fast rule for when to decide that society has been brainwashed to the point that it needs to be radically restructured, but I would be hesitant to use the explanation often.
This critique is genuinely disturbing and something liberals need to wrestle with. There are no easy answers to the question about what values are unnaturally enforced by our current social systems, as opposed to the result of our social systems liberating people and allowing them to finally articulate and believe the values in question.
2: These value disagreements by definition give people strong reasons to use violence against each other, even when no one is predisposed to be violent.
Why should we expect violence to spring up between people with different values? Maybe in a world where violence is less normalized, people could mediate value differences between each other without requiring external institutions. For the sake of argument, I’m going to pretend we live in a world where no one has any natural propensity for violence. It’s surprisingly easy to show that in this world, value difference would still lead to incredible and constant violence if it weren’t mediated by institutions.
Offensive vs. defensive violence
I’m going to define offensive violence as the act of initiating violence unjustly against an innocent person. Everyone agrees that offense violence is bad.
Defensive violence is violence used to protect people from offensive violence. If I see someone running at an innocent person with a baseball bat, I am entitled to tackle them to prevent them from hitting the innocent person. Tackling them is defensive violence.
I’ll make a claim I think most people would agree with: people are morally required to use an adequate but minimum amount of defensive violence to protect innocent people from offensive violence. If we allow a serial killer to run around killing people without using some basic forms of violence to try to stop them, that is a moral failing.
Violence and value difference
An aspect of difference in values is that it creates disagreement about what counts as offensive vs. defensive violence. There are a lot of obvious cases. I’ll use abortion as an example.
Let’s say someone wants to use a minimum amount of violence to prevent a woman from getting an abortion. Is this offensive or defensive violence?
Pro-choice answer: This is offensive violence. The woman has every right to have an abortion, and the person using violence trying to stop her is aggressing against that right. We should use defensive violence to protect women who want to have abortions.
Pro-life answer: The abortion itself is offensive violence against the woman’s child. Using some minimum amount of violence to stop that is defensive violence and is morally required to protect the child.
Notice that neither the pro-choice or pro-life person is motivated by bloodlust. They are both committed to protecting who they see as innocent people from offensive violence using a minimum amount of defensive violence. However, because they disagree on contentious claims about value (whether the fetus is a moral patient, whether the woman’s bodily autonomy should override the fetus’s moral patienthood if it is) they not only have a reason to use violence against each other, they are actually each morally obligated to use violence against the other. Thus, even in a world where every human is basically an angel and has no desire to use violence, value difference will lead to violence unless it is somehow managed. If everyone is given the instruction “respond to offensive violence using your best understanding of what counts as offensive violence” then any pro-life and pro-choice person will have a strong reason to use violence against the other.
This can spring up due to all kinds of differences in opinion about ethics and metaphysics. Let’s imagine there are no systems in place to mediate violence and see the results of some common value differences:
I believe it is an act of incredible offensive violence to factory farm animals. You don’t. You open a factory farm to feed yourself and your meat eating community. I am now obligated to use what I see as defensive violence against you to stop it. When I restrain you from eating meat, your value system obligates you and others who agree with you to use violence against me to make me stop. Things escalate.
A Mormon believes it is a sin to consume alcohol. It is an act of violence against your soul to consume it. They see you producing alcohol to sell and use a minimum amount of violence to stop you. You believe you have a right to produce alcohol and are being aggressed against. You use what you see as defensive violence to protect your right to produce alcohol. Things escalate.
You have literally any disagreement about the ownership of property. You use property someone else does not consider yours. You have basically stolen something and are aggressing against the owner. Other people have a moral obligation to stop you using a minimum amount of violence. When they do that, you fight back, because to you they are using offensive violence against you. Things escalate.
I could make a list with thousands of these points, but you get the idea.
If you have trouble imagining someone actually trying to use defensive violence to stop some of these things, you might be bad at imagining what it’s like to actually believe in things very different from your current worldview. If you believe that abortion is identical to murder, you will see a woman getting an abortion as meaningfully similar to someone walking up to a child with the intent to murder him. This is not something that you could let go as just a difference of opinion. You would be obligated to do something to stop it.
It is therefore impossible to produce a society where people agree that no unjustified violence is being done, unless everyone agrees on every contentious ethical question, which they never will. As an animal welfare supporter, I believe that most governments are aiding and abetting a massive amount of torturous violence against hundreds of millions of sentient beings. Pro-life people believe the US government aides and abets the killing of about 5 million people each year. Some on the far left believe that all deaths resulting from poverty are the result of violence, because violence is used to defend property. There is no way we will ever reach a point where most citizens of a pluralist society believe that no illegitimate violence is being done.
When anti-liberals complain that liberalism ignores the inherent violence of the political system they support, they are making a complaint which will always apply to every possible political system that doesn’t involve complete regimented agreement on all possible value judgments. It is a fair complaint in the sense that they are allowed to voice it and lobby the society to change how it’s structured, but it is unfair if they mean to imply that there is an obviously superior system where no one involved will ever believe that massive amounts of unjustified violence is happening. This is the price of living in a pluralist society. Liberals are very aware that any system will not adequately address all conceptions of what counts as violent, and most liberals do not believe that any society is actually preventing all or even most offensive violence. But before addressing the unjust offensive violence that society continues to allow, we need to hold in our heads the fact that there is always going to be drastic difference of opinion in whether offensive violence is happening.
This is not to say that society should not change. I would like the end of animal farming. I don’t need to give up that goal to be a political liberal or to live around people with very different beliefs. But we should expect that in all possible societies where people are allowed to change their minds, drastic disagreement on what is offensive and defensive violence will persist. This necessarily follows if you accept claim #1 that reasonable people will reach different conclusions about value judgments.
I’ve shown here that because value differences involve very different claims about what counts as offensive vs. defensive violence, and people are obligated to use defensive violence to stop offensive violence, people with different values will always have strong reasons to use violence against each other unless it is somehow mediated.
3: Given 2, people with radically different values will always be extremely dangerous to each other if the potential for violence isn’t mediated.
Imagine that society did not have any institutions to mediate violence. Let’s assume there are also no social bands of people with mutual agreements about when to use violence. This has never been the case in human history, but for the sake of the argument let’s start here and just think about what would happen.
You find out one day that someone has wildly different beliefs about abortion than you do. She believes that abortion is murder, and you believe that it’s an inalienable right. How safe are you around her? Probably safe until someone in your community decides to have an abortion. Suddenly there’s an incredibly high possibility for violence. As in the examples in the last section, there are uncountably many possible beliefs that could yield violent conflict between people where both believe they are engaging in defensive violence. You would always have a reason to look over your shoulder. Engaging with basically anyone would involve a significant threat of being killed. We can call this the “War of All Against All” as Hobbes called it.
To emphasize an important point again: defensive violence is extremely hard to avoid. If you find out someone is going to kill or enslave or steal from innocent people, it would feel deeply wrong to look the other way and not try to intervene. Two people with different and opposite ideas of what counts as offensive vs. defensive violence will always feel that same compulsion to intervene on the other one.
Obviously no human societies are anything like the War of All Against All. What do they do instead? Most societies with weak institutions for mediating violence become extremely monocultural. They apply an incredible amount of social and material pressure on their members to abide by similar values. Why do they do this? If they can’t control the ways that each member of the society is violent, the next best option is to apply a lot of social and material pressure to make everyone in the society have enough similar values that they don’t anticipate violence springing up as a result of value disagreements. They understand that total freedom would lead to the situation described above where everyone would have a lot of strong reasons to be violent against each other, and they mostly solve it through repressive social norms.
In The Narrow Corridor, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson describe societies where there are not strong institutions to mediate violence between very different people as existing in a “Cage of Norms”:
The condition where society, in absence of a state, organizes itself to avoid extensive violence — but only through restrictive social arrangements.
Norms determine what is right and wrong in the eyes of others, what types of behaviors are shunned and discouraged, and when individuals and families will be ostracized and cut off from the support of others. Norms also play a vital role in bonding people and coordinating their actions so that they can exercise force against other communities and those committing serious crimes in their own community.
Although norms play an important role even under the auspices of a Despotic Leviathan (could the Third Reich have survived if all Germans thought that it lacked all legitimacy, stopped cooperating with it, and organized against it?), they are critical when the Leviathan is absent because they provide the only way for society to avoid (war).
The problem for liberty, however, is multifaceted. The same norms that have evolved to coordinate action, resolve conflicts, and generate a shared understanding of justice also create a cage, imposing a different but no less disempowering sort of dominance on people. This too is true in every society, but in societies without centralized authority and relying exclusively on norms, the cage becomes tighter, more stifling.
-The Narrow Corridor
Liberals are famously concerned about the power of the state, but the Cage of Norms is another drastic threat to freedom and pluralism. In the Cage of Norms, reasonable people could be completely denied material and social resources purely for coming to different conclusions about contentious questions. This would be a bad and unfree society. Its unfreedom does not come from a top-down authoritarian ruler, it comes from a natural dynamic that arises between individuals in the absence of a way to mediate value differences. Without powerful external institutions to mediate violence, the only other option is strict rigorously enforced shared cultural norms.
4: There are three options for how to avoid violence between people with different values:
a) The Cage of Norms: Isolate into societies of people with identical values.
b) The Totalizing State: Attempt to impose one value system on everyone without the possibility for others to impose their own systems.
c) The Liberal Compromise: Build a system that allows people with very different values to live together without killing each other over value disagreements. Each citizen must constantly compromise some of their values to help prevent the pluralist society from descending into the Cage of Norms or Totalizing State.
The liberal justification for the state
A state is a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. If the state is strong and consistent, most citizens feel strongly disincentivized to use interpersonal violence to achieve their political ends. As a vegan, I’ve never considered going up to random strangers and wrestling chicken from their hands, partly because I know that the state would interrupt this before I could make any kind of serious change. I also feel strong social pressure by society not to use violence outside of the state to achieve my political ends.
Liberals want the state to be strong but restrained. Strong in the sense that it cannot be threatened by rival violent groups or people within society, and restrained in the sense that it is limited to mediating violence and enforcing basic rights rather than imposing very specific lifestyles on its people. The liberal motivation for having a strong but restrained state is that it removes individuals’ sense that they are obligated to use defensive violence against people with different values, both because they know that materially the state will overpower them and that there are strong social norms in place pressuring citizens to settle all questions of violence in the institutions of the state itself. By monopolizing violence, the state removes our incentives to use violence against people different from us. If I am pro-life, I can organize people who agree with me to change the state’s abortion policy, but I can’t go around killing pro-choice people. If I’m vegan, I can lobby the state to ban factory farmed meat, but I can’t physically attack meat eaters.
Liberals believe that a restrained state makes people more free than they would be without one, because the state interrupts the dynamic of the War of All Against All without resorting to the Cage of Norms. This means that I can live side-by-side and trade with people with radically different values than me without being threatened by them. I’m threatened by them politically in the sense that we would both try to influence the politics of the state, but I wouldn’t be threatened with violence on a day-to-day basis. I would not need to bunker down in tightly-knit ideological communities of like-minded people for safety, and thus I would feel less pressure to contort my own thinking to the values of my local community.
This is a key aspect of liberal political philosophy, so just to reiterate:
We have seen that free reasonable people will develop deep value disagreements that will strongly incentivize them to use violence against each other if it’s not mediated.
Without forming an organization to monopolize violence and take away individual incentive to use it, the only other option for living with other people will be a Cage of Norms where individuals feel intense social and material pressure to contort their thinking to their local communities.
The state as a monopoly on violence is thus the only way to break out of the Cage of Norms and bring people to a higher level of freedom and pluralism.
Most stateless societies that I’m aware of often have extremely regimented cultural norms practices and values. This makes sense, because otherwise people would come to form very different beliefs and eventually threaten each other. In comparison, I as an atheist can live next to a devoutly religious family without either of us feeling the need to attack each other. This kind of radical freedom to pursue drastically different ends is only possible if there is a strong institution to mediate violence, which in my case is my city and federal government. If those institutions didn’t exist, I would be much more wary of the religious family since there would be a lot more possible points of friction and disagreement where violence could spring up, and so I would cluster around extremely like-minded people instead. My freedom of thought and freedom to live where I want would be radically constrained.
The totalizing state
In reading the last section you might have fairly pointed out that states were mostly not formed to escape the Cage of Norms. The actual history of state formation involved incredible amounts of violence, abuse, slavery, and war.
We can call a state totalizing if it attempts to impose a contentious vision of the good life on its people, or takes rights away from its citizens who do not conform to that specific contentious vision.
There are compelling accounts of how states progressed to modern liberal states out of their barbaric origins. My personal favorite is Violence and Social Orders by Douglass C. North, but liberals disagree on this point.
The liberal argument for the state does not depend on the actual history of state formation. History has put us where we are, and the main relevant question is what society we should be aiming to build. It is difficult for liberals to see how a stateless society could remain free and pluralist without falling into the Cage of Norms.
A core concern of liberal political philosophy since its inception by Locke is how to limit the power of the state. Liberals are deeply aware that while states can provide the grounds on which to be free, the state is a constant threat to freedom and can potentially be seized by small groups and used to impose their own totalizing vision on everyone else. Liberals see this as a violation of the purpose of the state: to allow people with deeply pluralistic values to live and trade together.
States ultimately rely on a compact between many actors and coalitions working together. While states are a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence, liberal societies have found ways to de-monopolize the state power itself and give to diverse and competing people and groups. There’s a long history and debate about how liberal societies avoid becoming totalizing states that it would be difficult to summarize here.
The liberal compromise: between the state and the cage of norms
The only way to avoid both the cage of norms and the totalizing state is to accept living around others with radically different values to yours, allowing everyone to pursue their own ends when they don’t conflict even if you find others’ ends distasteful or even evil, and agreeing to peacefully adjudicate value differences that do conflict through the mechanisms of the state rather than through individual violence. All of this requires a strong shared cultural understanding of the background value of maintaining the society. The liberal pluralist society is in some ways fragile and in some ways strong. It is fragile because it relies on constant yielding of different core values and compromise with radically different people. It is strong because it can pull from a much broader range of citizens with unique talents and insights to achieve its ends. Another reason pluralist liberal societies become more stable is by accepting so many diverse value systems that no one system can have much hope of rallying everyone else to help it take over the state.
5: If 1 is true, reasonable free people will always come to disagree with each other on core values. The Cage of Norms would regularly involve reasonable people being forced out of their societies when they came to develop value disagreements, and/or experience enormous social and material pressure to conform. The Totalizing State would involve reasonable people being regularly forced into compliance with an alien value system with no hope of ever influencing the system themselves. It would lock in a very specific set of values for as long as the state itself survives. The Liberal Compromise is the option that will best allow reasonable people to pursue their values, mutually benefit people with very different values, and think through and adjust their values over time.
This part’s just the logical implication of the previous sections. How do we build the liberal compromise?
6: If we want to create the Liberal Compromise, there are three core requirements:
a. A consistent set of reliably enforced rules designed to help people each pursue their own ends when those ends don’t directly conflict with each other.
b. A representative way of adjudicating which values should be enforced when values do directly conflict with each other.
c. Cultural and institutional norms against using the power of the state to impose specific contentious value systems.
a. and b. both require a deep cultural and institutional commitment to mediate all violence through an external organization rather than using vigilante violence against perceived aggression.
These together are what has come to be called small-L liberalism.
What is the motivation for each of these rules?
a. A consistent set of reliably enforced rules designed to help people each pursue their own ends when those ends don’t directly conflict with each other.
Let’s say that I as an atheist live next to a Catholic. We have a lot we disagree about, but there’s a lot we can benefit each other in too. Neither of us is interested in getting randomly attacked on the street, so a reliably enforced rule preventing random attacks. Having a system of exchange where we can sell goods and services to each other allows us to get a lot more value from the other person. Having basic reliable services like roads and transit and plumbing each helps us pursue our own (very different) values.
GDP as a measure of value is an interesting example of a liberal tool designed to allow for a plurality of values to live together. Critics of GDP as a measure will regularly point out that it doesn’t measure “what’s really valuable.” They might mean human connection or the environment or status or bringing people into the correct religion. The reason why liberal states prioritize increasing GDP is exactly because GDP does not claim to measure what’s ultimately valuable, because citizens drastically differ on what they think is ultimately valuable. What GDP measures is roughly how much of what each individual person wants is being produced by a society, regardless of that person’s specific values. It’s a way of allowing each person to maximally pursue what they want without being forced into a value system they might not agree with. A Muslim or Mormon may complain that GDP includes alcohol sales, which is clearly bad for society because it’s sinful, so GDP itself does not measure what’s actually valuable. I as a vegan would say that the portion of GDP from animal agriculture represents a horrific crime against animals, but others would disagree. I would like to live in the same society as Muslims and Mormons and meat eaters, so the government choosing to measure GDP over a more “real” value is a great way to allow that to happen.
Another way of helping people each pursue their own ends is redistribution of resources. Most modern liberals (myself included) believe strongly in the need for redistribution to help each person access society and the economy so they can pursue their values as they see fit. Most see redistribution as compatible with markets. There’s a good paper on the relationship between free markets and redistribution you can read here. Liberalism does not imply libertarianism. Libertarianism is a subset of small-L liberalism, but most liberals are not libertarians. Moderate amounts of redistribution do not target specific people for their values (only total wealth or income) and so fit within the liberal compromise.
b. A representative way of adjudicating which values should be enforced when values do directly conflict with each other.
There are many values where the government by definition cannot remain neutral. If and when abortion should be illegal is a clear example. The state cannot make everyone happy with any one rule about abortion, so it has to choose a specific rule that will make the majority (but not all) of its citizens happy. Committing to a contentious belief is dangerous, because people who disagree still need to feel like participants in the broader political system whose voice can be heard, or else they’ll feel that the state has been seized by a faction with rival values and the basic liberal compact is broken. Violence is suddenly justified, because the main arbiter of violence has broken the contract allowing it to be that arbiter in the first place.
There are very different systems for deciding which laws and methods of enforcement by the government should be left to democratic control and which should be interpreted by the courts and drawn from the Constitution. The system is imperfect, but it’s kind of stunning that it has so much political buy-in from people with so many different value systems. The mere fact that pro-life and pro-choice people can live around each other is in some ways a miracle.
c. Cultural and institutional norms against using the power of the state to impose specific contentious value systems.
If a new leader is threatening to break the liberal compromise and impose contentious values on the country, they and their supporters suddenly become a threat to everyone else. The supporters are organizing to break the compromise and attempt to impose contentious values on everyone else. Liberal society only operates well when there is a strong norm against this.
These together are what has come to be called small-L liberalism
Recommended Further Reading
Liberal philosophy and history:
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on liberalism - Best place to start!
The Machinery of Government - The best description of the philosophical assumptions of liberalism I know of.
Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy - Goes into detail on how liberal political philosophy intersects with climate change and the ethics of the future.
Political Liberalism - John Rawls’s lectures on political liberalism, quoted in the post a lot.
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty - A description of how liberal societies attempt to balance between the Cage of Norms and the totalizing state. This is where the term Cage of Norms comes from.
Violence and Social Orders - A history of how states evolved into their current liberal form.
More generally, thanks for writing this up! I never studied political science or philosophy and always welcome a plain-language explainer!
>a claim I think most people would agree with: people are morally required to use an adequate but minimum amount of defensive violence to protect innocent people from offensive violence.
I disagree - I think most people would say even if e.g. it's wrong for someone to hit a dog, you have no moral obligation to go physically stop your neighbor from hitting their dog. If there is crime in your neighborhood, you don't have an obligation to be Batman and go prevent crimes. I'd guess people are more likely to say that society as a whole should coordinate to have laws and enforcement that prevent/address this kind of thing, but not that it's the moral obligation of random people to personally intervene.