Foundations of Liberalism
Margaret Moore
Abstract
Foundations of Liberalism is a critical examination of contemporary liberal theories of justice (Gewirth, Rawls, Gauthier, Raz, among others) focussing on the familiar problem of how to relate the personal point of view of the individual to the impartial perspective of justice. Two kinds of problems typically arise from the attempt to ground liberal justice in an individualist foundation. The ‘motivation problem’ refers to the difficulty in explaining why the individual would be motivated to act in accordance with liberal justice. The ‘integrity problem’ refers to the tendency to ... More
Foundations of Liberalism is a critical examination of contemporary liberal theories of justice (Gewirth, Rawls, Gauthier, Raz, among others) focussing on the familiar problem of how to relate the personal point of view of the individual to the impartial perspective of justice. Two kinds of problems typically arise from the attempt to ground liberal justice in an individualist foundation. The ‘motivation problem’ refers to the difficulty in explaining why the individual would be motivated to act in accordance with liberal justice. The ‘integrity problem’ refers to the tendency to explain the above by presenting an incoherent or divided account of the person, with one part motivated by self‐interest, and the other part, by the impartial rules of justice. The book develops a more plausible account of the relation between self‐interest and morality, which avoids these two problems, and which is more similar to the revisionist liberal accounts of Rawls's Political Liberalism and Raz's The Morality of Freedom.
Keywords:
impartiality,
individualism,
integrity,
justice,
Liberalism,
moral foundations,
morality,
motivation,
self‐interest
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1993 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198273851 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 |
DOI:10.1093/0198273851.001.0001 |
