Why Liberalism Needs Autonomy

2021

Book Symposium on Dealing with Diversity: A Study in Contemporary Liberalism by D. Melidoro: comments and replies.

2019

PDF-PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on Tuesday, 9th July 2019 at the IVR 2019, Dignity · Democracy · Diversity, 29th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law & Social Philosophy, University of Lucerne, 7-12 July 2019.

2019

Res Publica, 2005

Ethics, Politics & Society, 2021

Book Symposium on "Dealing with Diversity: A Study in Contemporary Liberalism" by D. Melidoro: comments and replies.

Routledge, 2024

This volume brings together diverse sets of standpoints on liberalism in an era of growing skepticism and distrust regarding liberal institutions. The essays in the volume: - Relate concerns for liberal institutions with classical themes in perfectionist politics, such as the priority of the common good in decision-making or the role of comprehensive doctrines. - Analyse how perfectionist intuitions about the political life affect our concepts of public reason or public justification. - Outline various moral duties we have toward other persons that underlie the liberal institutions or notions of rights functioning across the contemporary political landscape. - Explore various aspects of pluralism from within influential religious or philosophical traditions, applying insights from those traditions to issues in contemporary politics. The comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and researchers of politics, especially those in political philosophy and political theory.

There is no single conception of liberalism in today’s world, neither has there ever been. From Mills’ and Locke’s minimal government involvement conception of liberty to Berlin’s and Taylor’s distinction between negative and positive liberty, to Kymlicka’s liberal multicultural hypothesis to Okin’s redressal of liberal ideas of multiculturalism and their clash with feminist values, there have been a wide array of definitions for liberalism. In this paper, I will argue for the greatest challenge of liberalism being the tensions within it, especially tensions between individual choice and liberal justice. I will first flesh out the different conceptions of liberty and explicate possible points of contradiction within them. Then, having established a tension within liberalism, I will use this hypothesis and apply it on 3 different kinds of cases in details. These cases would be 1) The imposition of democracy, 2) The ban of the burqa in France, and 3) The legitimacy of the ‘choice’ to discriminate. Finally, I will conclude the paper by attempting to minimise these tensions within liberalism and formulate a more consistent version of it.

PDF-PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on Monday, 14th May 2018 at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Les Ateliers de l'Éthique 6(2), 2011