Liberalism’s Troubled Search For Equality

By Dr. Robert Jones

I wanted to share the book with the FaithfulDemocrats.com community because it shows how including religious voices in progressive politics might help progressives be truer to their own commitments to equality and avoid getting trapped in ideological orthodoxy.

In the book, I argue that egalitarian liberals ought to oppose physician-assisted suicide — at least until we find the political will to ensure access to health care for all. More broadly, I challenge progressives to find the heart of the liberal tradition not in allegedly neutral appeals to “choice” but in a renewed commitment to equality and social justice that welcomes public religious voices as allies.

My book, Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality, is both about the issue of physician-assisted suicide and about progressives’ larger commitment to equality.

I first became interested in the topic when I became aware of the fact that the leading champions of equality among liberal political philosophers — most notably, Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls — supported legalized physician-assisted suicide in direct opposition to groups of disadvantaged citizens they theoretically championed. It soon became evident to me that there were two things that hindered liberals from having a broader vision that saw the risks that legalized assisted suicide might pose for the poor and disadvantaged who lacked health insurance and financial resources.

First, leading liberals in the debate saw the issue of PAS simply as another “pro-choice” issue. Seen exclusively through this lens borrowed from the abortion debates, social and financial pressures become invisible. Second, liberals largely dismissed religious voices who called attention to these risks because they took them to be a cover for a “pro-life” argument. In the book, I argue that egalitarian liberals ought to oppose physician-assisted suicide — at least until we find the political will to ensure access to health care for all.

More broadly, I challenge progressives to find the heart of the liberal tradition not in allegedly neutral appeals to “choice” but in a renewed commitment to equality and social justice that welcomes public religious voices as allies.

As a board member of FaithfulDemocrats.com, I wanted to share the book with this community because it shows how including religious voices in progressive politics might help progressives be truer to their own commitments to equality and avoid getting trapped in ideological orthodoxy. In the past two years, I’ve worked in a variety of settings helping progressives understand religion and the unique contributions religious voices might make to the progressive movement. I served as the founding Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, where I continue to serve as a senior advisor. Currently, I am an independent consultant on religion and progressive politics, working with other progressive clients such as the Third Way. I am also completing a second book, Progressive AND Religious: The New Face of Religion in American Public Life (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming June 2008), which paints an exciting portrait of the emerging progressive religious movement through interviews with leaders in progressive Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

EXCERPT

Moving liberalism successfully in an egalitarian direction requires rethinking what have been two central and related components of American liberal theory, its commitment to its own neutrality and, by implication, its conflicted attitude about the role of religion in public debate. I argue that one of the insights that the PAS debates concretely demonstrate is that liberalism’s overconfidence in its own neutrality potentially undermines its ability to hear the real voices of the disadvantaged it promises to champion. If liberalism backs away from its claims of neutrality, it must also come to terms with an area of human culture that served as its doctrine of neutrality’s raison d’etre: religion. Becoming more “religiously musical,” to use Max Weber’s famous phrase, and I would add “culturally musical,” is a prerequisite for a liberalism that would be both inclusive and egalitarian. A truly egalitarian liberalism will be achieved only if liberalism replaces a misguided quest for neutrality with a more reflexive and inclusive theory of culture. Such a correction supports a more adequate view of religious and other thick moral languages not simply as problems but as potential resources supporting egalitarian commitments.

Religion, then, plays an essential if indirect role in the analysis of liberalism’s troubled search for equality because it has so often served as the focal point — indeed it is often viewed as the root — of conflicts that have supposedly necessitated the creation of a neutral space; this space is manufactured via a separation of the right, values that can be known by all, and the good, values that only register within particular communities. Political liberals, citing the historical “wars of religion,” have largely seen religion primarily as a “problem,” something that leads to incommensurable and conflicting positions (Rawls 1993, xxiv, 10, 154). Religion is, in other words, something that presents difficulties that must be overcome or bracketed in order to arrive at shared principles of justice and to maintain civility among radically incommensurable and mutually hostile conceptions of “the whole truth.”…

The debates over the legalization of PAS are uniquely suited to cast light on this hidden fault line within egalitarian liberalism. Because PAS inevitably raises the kind of “ultimate questions” that have traditionally been the purview of religions (e.g., the significance of human finitude, the meaning of a good human death and a good human life), the issue invites involvement by a wide variety of religious organizations and therefore brings into focus the tensions between religious (and other cultural) appeals to thick moral languages and liberalism….

While liberals have historically believed that such openness to religious and other thick moral languages would lead to the demise of the liberal project, I argue on the contrary that such reflexivity is the key to the realization of liberalism’s egalitarian aspirations, since it prevents premature closure on what qualifies as an issue of justice. Such a correction would prevent the curious constriction of moral vision evident in the PAS debate, where liberals dismiss both the claims of the disadvantaged themselves and the arguments of many who speak from a religious perspective on behalf of the disadvantaged. By insisting that such personal and religious claims were “private values” and by construing the debate almost exclusively in terms of individual liberty, liberals were unable to see two important and interrelated aspects of the PAS debates:

1) the way in which the legalization of PAS may have unjust outcomes because of underlying social inequalities;

2) the validity of multiple moral languages and forms of reasoning, including the religious, which have the potential to provide resources for perceiving these inequalities.

Thus, in this book, I offer a detailed analysis of this failure of moral vision and propose a theory of culture as a corrective lens for current egalitarian liberal proposals in order to reorient liberalism toward a neglected aspect of its historical tradition, its emphasis on equality.