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In spite of its long history and evident appeal, an actual contract theory of political obligation now tends to be rejected. This chapter focuses on two standard objections to the theory, the no-agreement objection, which depends on the empirical claim that most people have not agreed to uphold any political institutions; and the no-obligation objection, which argues that even if they had, not all of the agreements made would obligate the participants. It invokes the possibility that one or more parties entered a pertinent agreement or supposed agreement in coercive circumstances, and the possibility that the agreement is to uphold morally suspect political institutions. The no-agreement claim is clearly a problem for the theory given the tests proposed in chapter 3; the no-obligation objection may be open to rebuttal. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of some contemporary alternatives to actual contract theory: arguments that appeal to subjective identification and relationships, with reference to those offered by John Horton, Joseph Raz, and Nancy Hirschmann.

Yael Tamir argues that the notion of collective rights, understood as entitlement bestowed on a group rather than the individuals that make up a group, should be rejected in principle. According to Tamir, the notion of a collective right is meaningless, because groups are not moral agents; it is unnecessary, because most morally relevant interests to be protected by such rights can be protected by individual rights, and those that cannot are better taken care of by contingent policies or institutional arrangements that are not couched in a discourse of rights; and it is dangerous, a threat to the individual rights of members and non‐members alike.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Susan Okin, in her essay on group rights, gender, and realistic rights of exit, is mostly concerned, not with the oppression of traditional groups by the liberal state, but with the oppression of individuals, and especially of girls and women, by the traditional community. She is critical of those liberal theorists who argue that a right of exit is sufficient to qualify a cultural or religious group for special recognition in liberal societies, and to counter these views, she notes that the unequal treatment of girls and women can mean that even though they may have a formal right to exit a group, their actual opportunities for doing so are far less adequate than those of their male counterparts. She holds, then, that the right of exit is not sufficient and that the liberal state should have a higher requirement, namely, that girls and women should be treated fairly within the group and thus should be able to take advantage of any formal right of exit. The chapter is arranged in three sections: Section 12.1, Gender and Other Forms of Inequality in Group Rights Theories, shows, by looking at three examples of liberal defenders (as exemplified by Joseph Raz, William Galston, and Chandran Kukathas) of group rights, that they tend not to take gender inequality seriously when considering group rights and limitations; Section 12.2, Cultural Factors Affecting Women’s Realistic Rights of Exit, specifies and discusses a number of reasons that contribute to women being significantly less able than men, in many cultural contexts, to chart their own courses of life outside their community of origin; and Section 12.3. Rights of Exit and Realistic Rights of Exit for Women, concludes that the theories examined contain several problematic elements concerning rights of exit for women.

This chapter examines Raz's theory of legal system, which explicitly sets out to overcome difficulties in Hart's account regarding the identity and borders of legal systems by introducing new explanatory elements. Raz claims that legal systems are unique normative systems since they claim, via the activities of a broad range of norm-applying institutions, to govern comprehensively, supremely, and openly the social life of their subjects. Unlike Hart's, Raz's theory is avowedly state-based and state-restricted, as he says it is not meant to be tested against non-state phenomena of legality. It is argued that there are nonetheless several problems with Raz's theory as a contribution to general jurisprudence. In addition to leaving the problem of indeterminacy unresolved, Raz's theory is unable to explain various types of state legal systems that are comprised of federalist structures as well as shared and distributed governance arrangements.

This chapter argues that Joseph Raz's autonomy-based version of the harm principle suffers from two serious problems. First, Raz's argument fails to yield a principled commitment to liberal toleration — it is instead contingent on certain empirical assumptions that should be irrelevant to a theory of liberal toleration. Second, the chapter shows that Raz's argument for the harm principle does not provide us with reasons to treat non-coercive state perfectionism differently than coercive perfectionism. Thus, if his harm principle precludes paternalistic coercion, it must also preclude the kinds of non-coercive perfectionist policies liberal perfectionists advocate. If successful, the objections in this chapter indicate that the value of autonomy cannot provide the foundation for liberal perfectionism in the way many contemporary perfectionists have assumed.

This chapter argues that liberal perfectionism is almost entirely unable to escape the charge of paternalism. This is true because liberal perfectionism has no satisfactory answer to a simple but important question: why is state action necessary at all to achieve perfectionist objectives? Even non-coercive action, the author argues, can be paternalistic when motivated by a negative judgement about the ability of others to run their own lives. The author claims that it is this negative judgement regarding others that captures the distinctive nature of paternalism. In its efforts to be less coercive, liberal perfectionism has therefore failed to address the problem of paternalism that besets perfectionism. Furthermore, the author argues that paternalism is presumptively wrong because of the way it denies someone's moral status as a free and equal citizen. This means perfectionism, even when pursued by non-coercive means, is presumptively wrong.

This chapter argues that liberal perfectionism lacks a convincing account of political legitimacy, that is, an account of how the liberal state gains the moral right to rule. Perfectionists, the author claims, have been too quick to assume that if citizens would be justified in following perfectionist directives issued by a state, this is sufficient to show the state has the moral right to rule over those citizens. What justifies an institution is not always what legitimates an institution, but this insight is ignored by liberal perfectionism. The final sections of the chapter defend a natural duty approach to political legitimacy, and explain how this approach coheres with a political liberal conception of legitimate authority. The chapter concludes by surveying the arguments made against perfectionism in the book thus far.

Liberals usually insist that justice must have priority over other values in our practical deliberations, but this insistence seems to pose particular problems for political liberalism given two of its other commitments. The first is the commitment to abstain from appeals to truth in political philosophy. The second is the commitment to avoid scepticism about our capacity to know the good. Critics argue that political liberalism cannot justify the priority of justice without falling foul of at least one of these two commitments. This chapter shows why this objection is misguided, and how political liberalism's criterion of reasonable acceptability can posit the priority of liberal justice while avoiding controversial claims about truth and scepticism.

The first chapter prepares the ground, and the conceptual tools, for an exploration of reasons in contexts of human agency, by exploring reasons broadly. It examines the normative and explanatory force of reasons. It argues that reasons have normative force in so far as they make acting, wanting, or believing something right or appropriate; and that, in the case of believing, the rightness or appropriateness concerns the concept of truth; while in the case of acting and wanting, it concerns the concepts of what is valuable and of the good, broadly conceived. It then examines the variety of roles that reasons can play and focuses on the justifying, motivating, and explanatory roles of reasons.

The previous chapter explored the nature of the indeterminacy claim and offered an argument that the application of Canon 915 to Catholic public officials is a central case. Most of the bishops in the United States apparently thought that the application of Canon 915 constitutes a more difficult case. There are at least five objections that might be raised in relation to the application of Canon 915 as a clear case. The objections are based upon: firstly, doubt about whether or not a Catholic public official, who favors permissive abortion or euthanasia laws, is in fact a “grave sinner”; secondly, undue interference in the political process through an arbitrary application of law; thirdly, the social teaching of the church; fourthly, the sacramental nature of the Eucharist; and lastly, other provisions of canon law, including the right to receive the sacraments and the diocesan bishop's authority. Each of these objections calls into question the clear case approach to Canon 915, and thus raises the indeterminacy claim. This chapter presents each of the five objections and then discusses them in terms of responses based upon what Joseph Raz describes as detached normative statements. The purpose here is not to evaluate whether or not the application of Canon 915 is a good church policy. Rather, the chapter attempts to clarify what might be the correct internal point of view of a bishop participant in relation to Canon 915.

This chapter explains how the contemporary idea of human rights developed out of the natural rights tradition. It adopts a natural rights, although not a natural law, approach to human rights in international law and national legal systems in order to explain their moral dimensions. It defends this approach against the criticisms of Joseph Raz, John Rawls, Rex Martin, Thomas Pogge, and Charles R. Beitz. However, it does not deny that alternative approaches such as their political, social practice, institutional, and practical conceptions are also useful and probably necessary for any complete theory of human rights

This chapter uses Antigone to establish the fundamental conflict between man's law and the higher law. It argues that law's claim on us derives, in part, from its authority. When we refer to man's law, the authority for that law is man and the institutions that he creates. And when we refer to the higher law, the claim of authority is less clear. The authority of the higher law can be based on conscience, religion, duty, morality, or something other. The conflict between Creon and Antigone is a conflict about conceptions of law and about its authority. It is also a conflict which is as present today as when brash Antigone defied headstrong King Creon.

According to the guise of the good thesis, everything wanted is wanted under the aspect of some good. The truth of this thesis is a matter of controversy. But what hangs on this controversy? The point of the chapter is to question the need to settle whether the guise of the good thesis is true. I argue that guises of the good are many, not one, and that they matter because they promise to yield a viable account of how we know of something that it is good. But asking whether guises of the good matter is not the same as asking whether the guise of the good thesis matters. One can take full advantage of guises of the good while remaining neutral on the truth of the guise of the good thesis. Having seen this, we should slow down and ask ourselves why we need to decide whether everything wanted is wanted under the aspect of some good.