II. Political Liberalism

Liberalism, in all its varieties, begins with the affirmation of a principle about the conditions in which the exercise of political power is legitimate. According to liberals, political power is justified only if this power is exercised on the basis of principles derived from ideas that the citizens themselves endorse. This is the ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’.⁸

Political liberalism was born out of a crisis in this principle of legitimacy. Liberals have long sought to define the good of political association in terms of a minimal moral conception; that is, a basic value or set of values that most citizens share despite their many important differences.⁹

Political principles are neutral—and thus satisfy the liberal principle of legitimacy—insofar as they can be justified with reference to such shared values, without assuming the validity or truth of any particular (controversial) conception of the good life.

In the seminal formulations of Kant (1724–1804) and Mill (1806–73), the liberal commitment to state neutrality was justified ultimately by reference to a particular view of human moral nature: a view championing autonomy (for Kant, a life lived according to rational will) and individualism (for Mill, a life featuring an experimental attitude toward one's projects). Both Kant and Mill, each for his own reasons and in his own way, affirmed the idea that the liberal state should not seek to impose any particular view about the good life on its citizens. Rather, these liberals argued that forms of life have their value to people when, and precisely because, individuals freely affirm these ways of life for themselves. Some contemporary ‘ethical liberals’—Ronald Dworkin, Will Kymlicka, and Joseph Raz prominent among them—continue to defend liberal politics firmly within this tradition, though typically by defending ever more expansive or even communitarian conceptions of autonomy.¹⁰

However, an increasing number of theorists have come to worry that even a broadened ideal of individualism is something over which people may reasonably disagree. Larmore, for example, traces a Romantic movement from Johann von Herder (1744–1803) to Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel in our day, one central strand of which has been a critique of precisely those moral ideals associated with Kant and Mill. In opposition to the traditional liberal emphasis on reflective individualism as a philosophy of life, thinkers in this Romantic tradition have stressed the values of belonging and custom. For some citizens, Larmore says, “such ways of life (shared customs, ties of place and language, and religious orthodoxies) shape the sense of value on the basis of which we make whatever choices we do.” These commitments reach to the foundations of people's nature as moral beings: “They are so integral to our very conception of ourselves as moral beings that to imagine them as objects of choice would be to imagine ourselves as without any guiding sense of morality.”¹¹

From this perspective of human moral nature, the individualistic philosophy of ethical liberalism seems bound to destroy the roots of morality itself.

The problem is not that Romantics reject the importance of critical reasoning and freedom of choice tout court. In fact, they typically emphasize that individuals must come to their religious commitments freely. As citizens some individuals may support freedom of choice as a political matter. What Romantics reject, though, is any suggestion that autonomy or open-mindedness captures the essence of human moral nature. Instead, they value such attitudes only instrumentally, as goods having value only insofar as they successfully link a person to truth.¹²

If these forms of enthusiasm for custom and moral embeddedness are incompatible with any recognizably liberal ideal of human moral nature, then the acceptance of Romanticism as a permanent part of Western culture of life undercuts the traditional justification of liberal politics. Accepting this form of pluralism creates a crisis for traditional accounts of liberal legitimacy.

John Rawls describes the motivational foundations of political liberalism in just this way, though he describes the crisis of legitimacy as arising internally to his own argument for justice as fairness. If state-backed coercion in the name of some set of principles of justice is to be justified, then it must be shown that these principles matter to citizens in a first-personal and moral way. Rawls calls this the ‘test of stability’.

In the third part of A Theory of Justice (henceforth Theory), Rawls describes how people who have once acquired a sense of justice could reasonably be expected to regard justice not as a constraint but as a good in itself. “The desire to act justly and the desire to express our nature as free moral persons turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire.”¹³

Rawls was confident that this congruence would obtain because of the way that the principles of justice were themselves derived. These principles were derived from a device called the original position, a device in Theory that is sometimes described as representing an important fact about people: their true moral nature is to be free. An account of justice derived from a particular conception of human nature—if the conception hit upon were true—could then reasonably be expected to be recognized by people as reflecting who they really are. Insofar as people desire to express their true moral nature, and thus avoid giving way to “the accidents and contingencies of the world,” they could be expected to recognize those principles as congruent with their own good.¹⁴ Coercive power exercised on the basis of principles derived in this way could thus satisfy the liberal principle of legitimacy.

However, as Rawls came later to see, “Theory relies on a premise the realization of which its principles of justice rule out.”¹⁵

The premise is that all good citizens must converge on the particular view of human moral nature that the original position was said to model: the true moral nature of people lies in their capacity for freedom. But this particular view of human moral nature—as much as the individualism of Mill or Kant—is something about which many citizens of goodwill, and Romantic “citizens of faith” in particular, disagree. Indeed, Rawls realized, disagreement about the true character of human moral nature is particularly likely in a society that gives central place to associative and deliberative liberties, the hallmarks of a liberal society. Liberal principles of justice support precisely the institutional conditions that undercut (or make unrealistic) the comprehensive form of justification upon which Rawls's argument in Theory depended.

No doubt, some citizens who reject autonomy as an ethical ideal do so because they wish to impose their own conception of moral or religious truth on others, for example, by using the power of state institutions to impose their particular view of religious truth on other citizens. Many people who reject the moral ideal of autonomy, however, are firmly committed to taking part in political association with (diverse) others on terms that all can accept. Among this group are religious citizens, many of whom affirm orthodox or literalist interpretations of their religious commitments. How might liberal forms of state coercion be justified to “politically reasonable” citizens such as these?

To justify political coercion in conditions of reasonable value-pluralism, political liberals seek to detach political philosophy from moral philosophy. Leaving aside disputes about human moral nature, they stress the formative role of liberal institutions. People brought up in Western constitutional democracies may share certain political ideas—namely, that society is best conceived of as a fair system of cooperation over time, and that persons should be treated as free and equal for political purposes. Deep principles of justice—of the sort that might guide writers and interpreters of constitutions—might be derived from these shared political ideas rather than from any particular view of moral personality.

Of course, one cannot simply assume a congruence between people's deep moral beliefs and the principles of justice produced by constructivism done in this purely political way. So, once justice has been “politicized” in this manner, further stages of justification must be introduced. These stages test whether people in a society that is diverse in terms of their deep moral principles can affirm a common set of principles of justice, each from his or her own distinctive moral viewpoint. If people can, then an “overlapping consensus” forms and an even further level of justification, “public justification by political society,” has been achieved. In this event, the conditions of legitimacy have been met. Political liberal theory has provided us with an argument for a particular conception of justice and an account of how coercion in the name of this conception might be justified, even in a society that accepts citizens of faith as well as autonomous individualists.

Political liberalism attempts to build political life by accepting deep value differences, rather than by attempting to resolve them. In this regard, its impulses are more Reformation than Enlightenment, more Locke than Mill. While still in its infancy, a number of interesting challenges to this paradigm already have been raised. Some critics argue that political liberalism fails on its own terms: when we look closely, we find that political liberalism rests on foundations that are not free from philosophical controversies about moral truth.¹⁶

Other critics argue that the political liberal emphasis on “political autonomy” is psychologically indistinguishable from most ethical liberal accounts of “moral autonomy”: beneath all the technical camouflage, political liberalism is but a species of ethical liberalism after all.¹⁷ Others, more basically still, argue that even if political liberals can distinguish their view from ethical liberal forms of justification, they should not wish to do so: the life of autonomy and reflective individualism is indeed the good life. Good liberals should stand by their traditional defense of this ideal.

While these are important challenges, a question that interests me far more is one that arises for those who accept political liberalism. Political liberals aim to construct a freestanding argument for a conception of justice from purely political ideas of persons and society. This is a conception of justice that they hope can win the first-personal assent not only of the traditional liberal constituency but of Romantic citizens of faith as well. Moreover, political liberals wish to gain such assent while retaining all of their familiar egalitarian ambitions at full strength.¹⁸

The question thus arises: If political liberals move to a broader, more inclusive foundation, what corresponding adjustments might be required in the design of the liberal house?

III. Compassionate Conservatism

To some, the term ‘compassionate conservative’ may sound like a cynical campaign slogan, or even an oxymoron. In American political parlance, ‘compassion’ is a term firmly associated with the political Left. A ‘compassionate’ legislator is one who supports an expansion of governmental services to the least well off. The centralized social welfare programs that were initiated in the 1930s with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and that reached their conceptual zenith in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society are paradigms of this professionalized, top-down approach to social compassion. Historically, such programs have sometimes been opposed by conservatives in America on classical liberal terms: such programs violate the property rights of individuals and replace the vitality of civil society with deadening bureaucracies. But American conservatives have also sometimes opposed such programs on Social Darwinist grounds. Generational cycles of poverty, on this strand of conservative thinking, are evidence that some individuals and groups are less worthy and able than others.

In contrast, politicians on the left have stressed the essential goodness of people. When lives go badly, this is not because of an individual's or group's intrinsic inferiority; instead, it is mainly the result of a bad environment (for example, the result of what are described as structural defects in the operation of capitalist markets). To counteract such environmental factors, the government should establish programs that redistribute resources so that every citizen is provided with the material and educational bases of a successful life. Within a pluralist society, such basic resources should be provided neutrally and unconditionally, as entitlements rather than as conditional opportunities. Government respects its citizens when it provides these basic entitlements in a nonjudgmental way, for only in this way can the state help its citizens while at the same time leaving each individual free to live her life according to whatever deep values she herself thinks best.

Public disillusionment with this Great Society approach to social service provision—and especially to fighting severe poverty—grew during the 1980s and early 1990s. Even as more public money was spent, the number of people on the long-term welfare rolls steadily increased. Many problems that government-run programs were meant to solve worsened and seemed ever more intractable, culminating in President Clinton's signing of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, promising an end to “welfare as we know it.”

Compassionate conservatism emerged during this period. Against the Great Society emphasis on people's external circumstances as a cause of their hardships, Marvin Olasky, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and others sought to revive a distinction from American history between poverty and pauperism.¹⁹

Whereas ‘poverty’ denotes a lack of resources, ‘pauperism’ refers to a corruption of a person's inner self. Pauperism involves a lack of discipline, self-respect, and sense of commitment to others. The danger of any system intended to alleviate poverty is that the system, if done crudely, may itself inadvertently pauperize people and hold them in this condition. Breaking the cycle requires not only material resources but also inner change. Social service institutions, to be effective, must deliver a complex mixture of material resources and value-laden incentives for inner change. Poverty-fighting, on this view, is thus intimately personal work. It requires compassion not merely in the Great Society sense of an ever larger and more professionalized cadre of caregivers treating their “clients.” Rather, poverty-fighting often requires ethically charged engagement between particular individuals: ‘compassion’ in the literal sense of ‘suffering with’.

Many compassionate conservatives are deeply religious, often but not always in an orthodox or literalist way. Like compassionate liberals, compassionate conservatives see each individual as essentially good: in the compassionate conservatives' terminology, every human life is created in the image of God. However, they believe that each person is also flawed by sin. People have the tendency to put themselves first and shun responsibilities to others. It is only by bonding with others in a transformative way—with family, friends, communities of fellow believers, and ultimately with God—that each individual can realize her or his true moral nature.²⁰

Explicitly rejecting the ideal of personal autonomy that they see as having been the aim of the Great Society–style programs, compassionate conservatives such as Olasky stress two primary values: affiliation and bonding. Affiliation might take any of a variety of forms: familial, communal, or ethnic. Bonding requires the construction of intimate connections with others that go to the very core of one's identity—especially for volunteers, who sometimes in essence become new family members for those they help.²¹ Social service providers should seek not simply to set people free. Rather, they should seek to encumber them—artfully and lovingly drawing each person back, one by one, into communion with family, neighbors, and, most important, God. The fight against poverty, in every case, is a fight to redeem a person's soul.

Compassionate conservatives point to the strong track records of some small grassroots poverty-fighting groups, many of which have an evangelical or religious basis, and they emphasize recent instances where government institutions have actively encouraged such initiatives.²²

For example, in 1997, when Stephen Goldsmith was mayor of Indianapolis, he established a special office called the Front Porch Alliance. Noting that evangelicals and other “social entrepreneurs” typically attempt to launch their projects on shoestring budgets, Goldsmith assigned full-time city administrators to help cut through red tape (e.g., by expediting applications for building permits, zoning variances, and certificates of occupancy).

Another example of government working with religious groups was an experimental prison pre-release program that George W. Bush launched in the late 1990s while governor of Texas. Noting that as many as sixty percent of released inmates nationwide return to prison, Bush's program invited any private organization, religious or secular, to set up and run value-based pre-release programs alongside the existing state program. In a Houston prison, Charles Colson's evangelical Prison Fellowship set up one such program called Inner Change, an eighteen-month, Bible-based program that emphasized how God can change hearts. (In Texas, the state made room for such programs but did not fund them.)²³

Prisoners nearing their date of release could participate in the state's secular program or in the religiously based one, as each inmate preferred.

City officials in Cleveland, Ohio, faced with seemingly intractable problems in their system of government-owned schools, experimented with a program of vouchers. Poor students were eligible to receive state-funded vouchers that parents could use to send their children to any participating school, whether public or private, secular or parochial. An overwhelming majority of parents chose to use their vouchers at Catholic schools. Thus, the Cleveland program had the effect of allowing public funds to be used in part to support the teaching of religious beliefs.²⁴

Compassionate conservatives argue that partnerships between government and social entrepreneurs—partnerships such as those in Indianapolis, Houston, and Cleveland—should be established and expanded on both the federal and local levels. In particular, compassionate conservatives make three proposals. First, institutions should be established to allow fast-track review of facially neutral government regulations that hinder civil society organizations, whether secular or religious, that have a social service mission. Second, the tax code should be reformed—under the banner of “charitable choice”—to create additional incentives for people to contribute directly to poverty-fighting organizations of their choice.²⁵

And third, public monies gathered by regular taxation should be made available to religious organizations that provide social services.

As this sketch shows, compassionate conservatism is a complex cluster of proposals. Along with the question of whether these proposals should be implemented on the federal or state level, each proposal might be formulated in less controversial or more controversial ways. For example, there are questions about the scope of the programs that compassionate conservatives wish to reform: Are these proposals to apply only to existing governmental programs that minister to the worst-off members of society (e.g., programs providing aid to dependent children), or to programs that identify all citizens as potential beneficiaries (e.g., public schooling)? There are also less controversial and more controversial ways of characterizing the conditions in which such proposals would kick in. Do they kick in only when government-run institutions are failing? If so, then the rationale to seek novel ways of delivering services might be derived fairly straightforwardly from the right of the beneficiaries to receive the good at all. Or do the proposals kick in whenever people wish to offer or receive social services in a way that accords with their own deep values? This stronger claim would require a more sophisticated form of justification, one aiming to make out a right of religious liberty held by providers and recipients alike.

The compassionate conservatives' set of proposals also might be interpreted in less or more controversial ways depending on how much conflict with other values the proposals involve. Fast-track review, for example, might merely involve speeding up the regular review processes, or it might involve granting social service organizations special exemptions to generally applicable laws and statutes (at least up to the point where such exemptions might begin to conflict with the basic rights and liberties of other citizens).

These proposals also admit of a variety of interpretations concerning the mode of support they are seeking. Least controversially, compassionate conservatives might merely be suggesting that the state make room for privately funded programs—as in the evangelical prison pre-release program that then-Governor Bush supported in Houston. If compassionate conservatives are seeking a mode of support that includes funding from public sources, that would be more controversial, but such support might be directed only to recipients via vouchers, thus partly muting its contentiousness. In this way, as in the Cleveland school case, the government's relationship to religious organizations would be insulated by the private choices made by individual citizens. Most controversially, compassionate conservatives might be seeking grants that go directly to religious organizations on the basis of objective, nondiscriminatory criteria, such as the group's proven ability to provide some legislatively identified public good.

While more and less controversial interpretations of the three proposals—fast-track review, tax reform, and public subsidies—have been advanced under the banner of compassionate conservatism, I believe that in each case the weaker, less controversial interpretation has been advanced only for tactical reasons. The essence of what compassionate conservatives are proposing, the conceptual core of the institutional reform they have in mind, lies at the more controversial end of the spectrum of each of these questions. So when I speak of compassionate conservatism, I shall be referring to the strong interpretation of each of the three proposals, as I have identified them above.

A final caveat about the compassionate conservative program is worth mentioning. This concerns the kinds of restrictions that might be put on public grants to religious groups. I mentioned earlier that many church leaders originally expressed skepticism about Bush's Faith-Based Initiative. Urban ministries in particular have long agonized over whether to accept direct support from government agencies, fearing the mission-constraining strings that might be attached to such support.²⁶

Some who have accepted public funds have been forced to walk a delicate legal and spiritual tightrope, for example, by agreeing to remove all religious references from the publicly funded parts of their programs and to offer religious instruction only as optional, privately funded supplements to their programs.

Compassionate conservatives show a new boldness, however, in challenging such restrictions. They want grants without any special religion-limiting strings at all. Olasky describes a conversation that he had with Kathy Dudley, an evangelical poverty-fighter in urban west Dallas, which expresses well the grounds for this boldness. On Olasky's report, Dudley believes in fighting both spiritual and economic poverty, and she rejects governmental restrictions that might force her to choose between these two emphases: “Our mission is discipleship, so if the government gives money to gain one result of the mission, housing, but at the same time tells us we must give up the mission, that makes no sense.”²⁷

Olasky thinks that compassionate conservatism can respond to Dudley's concerns. Provided that there are secular options readily available, government officials with the power to reward or withhold grants should not be allowed to consider the form and frequency of prayers that might be offered by, or even required of, participants in faith-based grant programs.²⁸

What explains this new boldness? Compassionate conservatives see evangelical participation in public works projects not as a privilege but as a basic right. Pilot programs such as those in Indianapolis, Houston, and Cleveland—where government actively supported religiously based social initiatives—are not instances of a privilege fleetingly granted by administrators who happened to be sympathetic to the concerns of religious folk. Instead, these programs are early manifestations of a basic right of citizenship that religious citizens are now seeking to have recognized and then exercised across an expansive range of social service domains. Olasky explains, “[T]he aim is not to grant religious preferences but to stop discrimination against social involvement by churches, synagogues, mosques, and other faith-based groups of all kinds.”²⁹

Compassionate conservatism rests fundamentally on an assertion of a right to religious liberty. The social upshot of recognizing this right would be a society very different from that of contemporary America. This would be a public square where the domain of the “public” could not be identified in any simple way with that of the “governmental.” Instead, in this society, religious and other value-laden approaches to the provision of social goods—whether concerning housing, nutrition, reproductive counseling, job training, childcare, or schooling, and whether considered from the perspective of providers or of recipients—would be publicly supported on an equal footing with traditional governmental and publicly funded programs. ³⁰

IV. A Puzzle for Political Liberals

What should political liberals think of compassionate conservatism? Of course, we need to distinguish the particular formulations of the Faith-Based Initiative that the Bush Administration has so far advanced—formulations that reflect crisscrossing waves of strategic decision-making, and perhaps unsteady commitment to principle, in a politically charged environment—from the deeper structure of compassionate conservatism as an internally consistent ideal. But if we focus on this ideal, what should political liberals make of it?

Compassionate conservatism appears to require an affirmation of the political ideas of person and society that are central to Rawlsian liberalism, starting with the acceptance of the fact of reasonable value-pluralism. After all, compassionate conservatives do not advocate allowing any one group to use governmental power to force its view of moral value on other citizens, for example, by demanding a monopoly of social service provisions under some group's religious banner. While often committed to religious views as individuals, compassionate conservatives are pluralists on the political level: they insist that every individual should be able to choose from a range of social service providers—religious, atheistic, and secular.³¹

Further, compassionate conservatives implicitly accept the core political liberal idea of society as “a fair system of cooperation over time,” along with the attendant idea that social justice requires citizens to “share in one another's fate.”³²

Compassionate conservatives see themselves as merely asking to be included in the project of realizing social justice. Olasky writes, “As members of a community, we have a mutual responsibility for the poor among us and for educational needs, but we have the freedom to carry out that responsibility in a way that accords with our beliefs.”³³

What should political liberals make of the claim that citizens of faith are discriminated against by a public system of social service provision that is conducted solely on a nonreligious basis? The government of a diverse society cannot intentionally promote any one moral or religious viewpoint over any other politically reasonable one. For this reason, government-run programs for the delivery of social services must necessarily take a nonreligious, secular form. But, compassionate conservatives argue, a secular approach to social services, since it must by definition leave out religious values, cannot really be value-neutral. By providing goods and services via mechanisms that are stripped of the particular values of affiliation and bonding that religious citizens hold dear, secular programs in effect promote an approach to life that many politically reasonable citizens reject: a life in which individualism, rather than piety, is valorized as the highest personal value.³⁴

Neutrality in the delivery of publicly funded social services, from this perspective, is not a property of individual sites for the delivery of such services. Rather, neutrality—or discriminatory bias—is a property that can only be discerned by examining the system as a whole. In a social world committed to treating citizens of faith and secular nonbelievers as full political equals, a public system that mandates that none of its delivery sites may include religious perspectives would fail this test of neutrality.

In an era marked by a vibrant civil society and a small government, the secular bias of government-run programs might not cause any serious problem. Before the rise of the administrative state, as historian David Beito has demonstrated, social services in America typically were provided by charities and a complex system of mutual aid associations.³⁵

Citizens—whether recipients or providers of social services—would not regularly come into contact with secular governmental agencies. Religious citizens would find ample opportunity to develop themselves and express their concern for one another according to the “Romantic” approaches to value that they affirmed. But as the role of government expands, the effects of the bias inherent in the secular, government-based approach are amplified.³⁶ For citizens of faith, freedom of religion may become ever more difficult to achieve.

Legal scholar and judge Michael McConnell has made precisely this argument in the context of First Amendment jurisprudence. During the period of American history when the First Amendment was proposed and debated, McConnell notes, the government had little or no involvement with education, social welfare, or the formation and transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Religious freedom was protected naturally, so to speak, by the limited nature of government. But as the size and purview of government grew, especially during the middle part of the twentieth century, the adoption of a strict separationist interpretation of the First Amendment created special burdens for religious citizens. “Religious influences are confined to those segments of society in which the government is not involved, which is to say that religion is confined to the margins of national life—to those areas not important enough to have received the helping or controlling hand of government.” In such conditions, a simple separationist or “no-aid” First Amendment jurisprudence becomes oppressive. “More sophisticated and more contentious devices, based on self-conscious religious pluralism even within the public realm, become essential.” Without such devices, the institutions of American government would in effect become “a relentless engine of secularization.”³⁷

The compassionate conservative program—with its proposals for fast-track review boards, tax code reform, and a greatly expanded system of vouchers and grants—represents a set of sophisticated and contentious devices self-consciously addressed to just the problem that McConnell has in mind. But can a justification for these devices be found? Can a justification be found, not at the level of political calculation, prudent policy-making, or even of constitutional law, but at the most fundamental philosophical level: the level of social justice at which political liberalism operates?

I think that this is a puzzle. But note how high the stakes are for political liberals once this puzzle has been set before them. Political liberals are asking Romantic “citizens of faith” to sign on to principles of justice that have a demanding egalitarian element. Such principles might very well justify Great Society–style programs, the present structure of which these citizens abhor. Without some explicit recognition of their concerns about these state-run programs, they might very well not sign on to these principles. Political liberals want to move to a new, broader foundation, but they do not want their old house simply to collapse. They need to find a way by which the egalitarian elements of their view might survive. How can political liberals accomplish this?

I believe that the move to a political form of justification requires that these liberals go back in and do some creative design work on the egalitarian principles of justice themselves. A detailed architectural model of the adjustments that political liberals must make in the egalitarian model is beyond the scope of this article. Still, I would like at least to sketch what a suitably remodeled liberal house might look like, while tying the discussion to the idea of egalitarianism itself.

V. Egalitarianism and the Worth of Religious Liberty

Classical liberalism—the liberalism of John Locke, for example—mandates an equality of status between citizens. The right to hold property, to speak, to vote or to hold public office should not be the prerogative of the members of any particular family, social class, gender, or racial or ethnic group. Rather, basic rights are held equally by all adult members of each liberal political community.

This liberal ideal of equality proved itself a potent solvent against the gummed-up social hierarchies of 17th century Europe. However, even the greatest proponents of this solvent have periodically worried about liberalism's ability to seep down and dissolve the deepest, most hardened sources of political inequality. For however potent the classical liberal viewpoint may be against systems of formal inequality, liberal theory seems to have little to say about inequalities in the actual life prospects of these (formally equal) liberal citizens. We can put this old worry about liberalism in contemporary terms: the court system of the United States recognizes the very poorest person in America as having exactly the same right to hold and enjoy property as does, say, multibillionaire Bill Gates. With respect to the right to hold property, the two of them are precisely equal. But the value of such a right to a person as wealthy as Bill Gates may be dramatically greater than the value of the right to a person in poverty. Similarly, every American reader of this article has exactly the same right to speak and publish his opinions as does, say, the chairman of Times-Warner Communications. I, too, have exactly the same right to influence the political process as does any citizen born a Rockefeller, a Kennedy, a Gore, or a Bush. But, again, in all such cases, the value of rights held by people as a matter of formal equality may be dramatically unequal.

Egalitarian liberals are liberals who believe that liberalism—against its classical formulations—carries within itself coercively backed guarantees against inequalities such as those described above. The liberal commitment to equal freedom, on its modern reformulation, requires not only equality of status. This commitment also allows, indeed requires, that the liberal state act to rectify inequalities in the worth of people's liberties—at least where those inequalities become great enough to threaten people's status as political equals. The worth of people's liberties is now understood to be connected in important ways to those people's ability to command resources. The main thrust of the liberal research agenda for the past thirty years has been to demonstrate that a response to concerns about inequalities in the worth of liberties can be built into liberal theory at the level of justice. In addition to mandating equality of status between citizens, liberal theory is now said to generate far more ambitious principles. These principles require that the state seek to rectify an ever expanding array of inequalities in people's actual life prospects, especially inequalities that result from unchosen circumstances such as differences in people's natural talents or their social starting places. John Rawls's famous “difference principle,” which sees liberal justice as requiring that social inequalities be arranged so as to benefit the least well-off members of society—is a paradigm expression of this feature of egalitarian liberalism.³⁸

However, the rise of the administrative state in the pursuit of egalitarian justice may have consequences that were unlooked for by proponents of egalitarianism. In the context of an expanding social role for state agencies, objectionable inequalities in the worth of people's liberties may be generated not only by differences in people's native endowments and social starting places. Inequalities in the worth of citizens' liberties may be generated by activities of the state itself. Because of the great power of the state, both economic and cultural, even state action in pursuit of legitimate egalitarian aims may generate such inequalities. From an egalitarian perspective, such inequalities merit redress, even were they not intended by liberal policymakers.

Political liberals routinely distinguish between two senses of neutrality: (1) ‘neutrality of aim’, which is the principle that the liberal state should not do anything that is intended to favor or promote any one reasonable moral view over any other one; and (2) ‘neutrality of effect’, which holds that the state should not do anything that makes it more likely that individuals accept any particular moral view over any other. While affirming a commitment to neutrality of aim, political liberals reject neutrality of effect as impossible to achieve.³⁹

Political liberals surely are right to do this: political institutions intimately affect individuals' life prospects, influencing the “ethical background culture” against which each develops his most most basic ways of perceiving the world.⁴⁰ To accept a commitment to neutrality of effect would be a recipe for paralysis, making political society itself an impossibility.

But what is the reason behind the liberals' commitment to the other form of neutrality, neutrality of aim? Liberals affirm this principle not as an end in itself but for a deeper purpose: that of respecting citizens as free and equal for political purposes. A government maximizes the freedom of its citizens when it minimizes the unintended effects of its own (legitimately pursued) policies on citizens' personal life plans. While important in the context of any egalitarian society, this idea takes on special significance in the context of political liberalism. Political liberalism avoids collapsing into but another contentious form of ethical liberalism only insofar as the distinction between a state's promotion of political autonomy and its promotion of full-blown ethical autonomy can be maintained. But some reasonable citizens, here citizens of faith, are claiming that the existing system of advancing political autonomy has the effect—even if not intended—of obliterating exactly this distinction in their case. Since this is precisely the group of politically reasonable citizens that political liberalism was designed to include, this is a concern that political liberals must address. Egalitarian principles of justice may need to be adjusted if they are to fit squarely atop the wider moral foundations that political liberals accept. The arguments of compassionate conservatives, weighed with some Rawlsian insights, may provide the plumb line we need to begin this task.

Rawls's conception of justice as fairness was developed and defended within an ethical liberal framework.⁴¹

The most reasonable conception of social justice, Rawls argued, would consist of two lexically ordered principles, the first setting out equal rights to basic liberties, the second guaranteeing a form of egalitarianism in material goods and opportunities. In our terms, the first principle guarantees citizens a status as equally free, while the second rectifies inequalities in the material holdings on which the worth of those liberties is based.

This conception of justice may be interpreted, or even supplemented, in various ways. For example, Rawls thinks that the political liberties, listed among the basic liberties under the first principle, have a special standing such that they should be guaranteed to citizens at their “fair value”—a more demanding distributional standard than even that of the difference principle.⁴²

In light of the concerns raised by compassionate conservatives, might one argue that religious liberties have some special standing akin to that of the political liberties? If so, one technical response to the claims of discrimination we have been considering might be to guarantee citizens' religious liberties at something like this “fair value” standard. Less stringently, one might consider adding a third principle of justice to address these concerns. This principle, positioned lexically posterior to the first two principles, might run roughly as follows: when facing a choice among rival systems for the delivery of social services guaranteed by the first two principles, preference should be given to the system that minimizes any deleterious, differential impacts of the system itself on the worth of citizens' religious liberties.⁴³

To determine which, if either, of these strategies would be most appropriate would require a great deal of careful analysis. But however that analysis might turn out, adjustments such as these would be meant to track and express an extremely important idea: in conditions of reasonable value pluralism, respecting citizens means attending not only to what people are owed, but also to the nature of the delivery mechanisms by which that debt is discharged. Citizens are owed this dimension of respect as a matter of justice.

I am not suggesting that adjustments such as these should be made merely because I think that many citizens of faith—including, perhaps, compassionate conservatives in America—would find them appealing. This would be to make the principles of justice political in the wrong way. Instead, I believe that these changes, or ones like them, could be justified in a freestanding way from the general ideas of person and society with which political constructivism begins. Implicit in the idea of a public society in which citizens of diverse viewpoints are to be treated as free and equal is the idea that such a society should be as much as possible a receptive home to all reasonable citizens, rather than merely being minimally acceptable to them. Principles of justice adjusted along the lines that I have described would require that publicly funded institutions be arranged in a way likely to realize this societal ideal.