Samuel C Rickless (University of California San Diego) has posted A Transcendental Argument for Liberalism (San Diego Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Liberalism is the view that the state should not, except on mutually justifiable grounds, coerce a society’s citizens to adopt, support, or follow some particular comprehensive conception of the good. The hope of many philosophers and political theorists is to find a way of justifying liberalism to those who find it unfair, disrespectful, or simply unduly constraining. But this hope has run headlong into what appears to be an insurmountable dilemma. For in justifying liberalism, it seems, the liberal theorist must either make appeal to, or abjure reliance on, a comprehensive (or partial) conception of the good. If the liberal theorist appeals to a conception of the good, she is vulnerable to the charge of incoherence or unfairness. For her rejection of a social order organized around a particular conception of the good itself depends on a particular, and oftentimes rival, conception of the good. But if the theorist refuses to appeal to a conception of the good, then her defense of liberalism either rests on foundations too weak to support such a strong conclusion or ends up presupposing substantive axioms that make a mockery of her aspiration to axiological neutrality. My aim in this paper is to clarify the nature of this dilemma, and then explain how the liberal can avoid it. The key to defending liberalism is to turn the tables on the illiberal, by demonstrating that commitment to liberal principles is, at least in the case of most contemporary ideologies, a necessary condition of the very possibility of illiberalism.