Cecile Laborde

This chapter explores the possibility that morally ambivalent practices (practices that are neither morally abhorrent nor morally indifferent) can be protected as rights to do wrong. The chapter considers three possible justifications for Legal Toleration: Integrity, Uncertainty and Disagreement. Each relies on a distinctive account of what it means for a practice to be morally ambivalent. After showing the limits of the Integrity and the Uncertainty accounts, the chapter discusses in greater depth the potential and pitfalls of a defence of Legal Toleration grounded in Disagreement. On that view, morally ambivalent actions are liable to be exempted from general laws because they express liberal disagreement about justice. The defensibility of Legal Toleration ultimately hinges on the plausibility of compromises about justice within political liberal theories of public justification.

This chapter examines Philip Pettit’s republicanism of non-domination in the light of relational theories of equality. Republicanism seems to be a paradigmatic relational theory of equality. First, and much in the spirit of Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler’s relational approaches, the republican ideal as defined by Pettit aims at creating a society where citizens enjoy equal standing by promoting freedom as non-domination. Second, republicanism relies on an anthropology of social interdependence and mutual vulnerability that accounts both for the value it gives to relational equality and for its analysis of domination as a central threat. Drawing on the work of French sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Serge Paugam, and Robert Castel, this chapter argues, however, that the republican conceptions of domination and vulnerability are too narrow to accommodate important threats to relational equality and it shows that, if that is the case, the pursuit of relational equality cannot be reduced to the pursuit of non-domination.

Quentin Skinner's 1998 book Liberty before Liberalism brought to light a pivotal tradition of thought that conceived liberty as independence from arbitrary power. A mystery remained: why did this way of thinking get displaced in the 18th and 19th centuries in favour of an alternative conception of liberty: liberty as the absence of restraint? In this much-awaited new book, Liberty as Independence, Skinner completes his monumental history of liberty as independence, charting its rise and eventual decline in the late 18th century. Skinner suggests that it was not that this conception of liberty was too conservative, too elitist in the newly emerging commercial age. Rather, liberty as independence was too radical. In advocating liberation from the arbitrariness of colonial and monarchical rule, and from the bonds of slavery and patriarchy, the ideal of liberty as independence was dangerously revolutionary. This article reflects on what liberty as independence illuminated but also on what it itself hid from view. It focuses on the historical and conceptual antithesis of liberty: slavery. Slavery was both a focal point and a blind spot for theorists of liberty and independence. Any retrieval of the tradition for contemporary purposes must remain aware of its historical blind spots.

Recent theoretical debates have questioned the compatibility of patriotism with global political responsibilities, as identified by cosmopolitan theory. In response, several authors claim that a cosmopolitan patriotism is both possible and desirable. In this article, we propose two desiderata for cosmopolitan patriotism as a civic ideal, which existing accounts fail to meet. First, arguments for cosmopolitan patriotism should provide an account of collective identification, supporting the relation between the actions of one's country and one's appropriate reactive attitudes. Second, such a theory should be able to explain the patriot's commitment to critical engagement with her country's actions. We then offer a critical appraisal of two accounts linking patriotism with global responsibility—Permissible Partialism and Globally Responsible Nationalism—-and demonstrate how they fall short. Finally, we propose an account of civic republican patriotism, which better explains how cosmopolitanism and patriotism can be brought together.

This article asks whether discrimination law should be symmetrical: whether it should offer the same level of protection to dominant and dominated groups. It articulates a structural inequality theory of the moral foundations of discrimination law and defends it against prominent alternatives, such as the view that discrimination is wrong because it is irrational or disrespectful. The paper then argues that while direct discrimination is symmetrical, indirect discrimination is asymmetrical. It cannot be claimed by those – men, or white persons – who are not at the sharp end of structural inequality. Furthermore, even dominated groups cannot claim to be indirectly discriminated against by just any law that has a disparate impact on them. If the structural inequality view is correct, the protectorate of discrimination law is not as extensive as is commonly assumed.

Members of racial and sexual minorities often live in the fear of arbitrary interference from others—rogue police officers or sexual harassers. Are they unfree by dint of believing they are unfree? I draw on the republican theory of freedom—according to which we are unfree if we are subjected to a risk of arbitrary interference—to offer a qualified positive answer. I clarify the role of probabilistic judgements about risk in republican political theory. I argue that under specific circumstances, diagnoses of republican freedom can be indexed to a certain belief about probability—what it is warranted for someone to believe in light of their distinctive epistemic perspective.

After presenting the recent republican revival, focusing in particular on the neo-republican school of thought, this chapter assesses the exact nature of the differences between liberalism and republicanism, and notably the republicanism of freedom as non-domination associated with Philip Pettit. Drawing on the tools of ideological analysis, as laid out by Michael Freeden, it shows that some of these disagreements are conceptual; others are normative; and yet others are strategic. In particular, republicans have a distinctive understanding of the concept of liberty; their focus on non-domination and ‘anti-power’ shapes a more comprehensive, progressive political agenda; and their language is more effective as a critique of real-world neoliberal politics.

The republican tradition seems to have a blind spot about global justice. It has had little to say about pressing international issues such as world poverty or global inequalities. According to the old, if apocryphal, adage: extra rempublicam nulla justitia. Some may doubt that distributive justice (as opposed to freedom or citizenship) is the primary virtue of republican institutions; and at any rate most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realized in the polis not in the (oxymoronic) cosmopolis. The article sketches a republican account of global non-domination which suggests that duties of distributive justice are not bounded to the institutions of a single society. In particular, it argues that republicans have good reasons to seek to curb those global inequalities which underpin what I call capability-denying domination.

The contributors to this Special Issue all suggest that Christianity is compatible with political liberalism. In this paper, I first illuminate the grounds of this compatibility. I then focus on one distinctive—yet unexplored—premise of the compatibility argument. This is the thought that religious and secular reasons are essentially on a par, in terms of their contribution to public reasoning. I critically examine Christopher Eberle’s claim that, as their epistemological status is equivalent, both secular and religious reasons may play a decisive role in justifying coercion-related state policies, including in contexts of war.

Recent decades have seen a dramatic transformation in the mode of governing, with government increasingly outsourced to a network of private actors, spanning education, prisons, regulation, arbitration, the military, and access to healthcare and welfare. Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State probes the ethical and philosophical questions raised by this transformation, and develops a distinctive account of the wrong of privatization: that a privatized government cannot be a legitimate government. In so doing, Cordelli engages and advances not only pressing questions about privatization, but also broader questions about public administration, political representation, democratic authority, and neorepublicanism. This symposium brings together scholars for a wide-ranging discussion of this transformation in governance and the deep and challenging questions it raises.

In Liberalism's Religion, I analyse the specific conception of religion that liberalism relies upon. I argue that the concept of religion should be disaggregated into its normatively salient features. When deciding whether to avert undue impingements on religious observances, or to avoid any untoward support of such observances, liberal states should not deal with ‘religion’ as such but, rather, with relevant dimensions of religious phenomena. States should avoid religious entanglement when ‘religion’ is epistemically inaccessible, socially divisive and/or comprehensive in scope. In turn, states should show special deference to religious observances insofar as they exhibit what I call integrity – whether personal or collective. The upshot of this interpretive strategy is that liberal law need not recognise religion as such. As a result, there are gaps between the liberal construal of disaggregated religion and the lived experience of religion as a uniquely integrated experience. Are these gaps morally regrettable? Are they unjust?

Liberal societies conventionally treat religion as unique under the law, requiring both special protection and special containment. But recently this idea that religion requires a legal exception has come under fire from those who argue that religion is no different from any other conception of the good, and the state should treat all such conceptions according to principles of neutrality and equal liberty. Cécile Laborde agrees with much of this liberal egalitarian critique, but she argues that a simple analogy between the good and religion misrepresents the complex relationships among religion, law, and the state. Religion serves as more than a statement of belief about what is true, or a code of moral and ethical conduct. It also refers to comprehensive ways of life, political theories of justice, modes of voluntary association, and vulnerable collective identities. Disaggregating religion into its various dimensions, as Laborde does, has two clear advantages. First, it shows greater respect for ethical and social pluralism by ensuring that whatever treatment religion receives from the law, it receives because of features that it shares with nonreligious beliefs, conceptions, and identities. Second, it dispenses with the Western, Christian-inflected conception of religion that liberal political theory relies on, especially in dealing with the issue of separation between religion and state. As a result, Liberalism's Religion offers a novel answer to the question: Can Western theories of secularism and religion be applied more universally in non-Western societies?--