Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2012 Don Dorf lecture in memory of this country's third warden, Ralph.
Don Dorf, I'm delighted to welcome several members of the to family here today.
It's a great pleasure to have you with us. I'd also like particularly to recognise Professor Michael Gehring of the Site Foundation in Hamburg,
to which Rudolph was very closely connected and which has been a great friend of the Don Dorf program.
I think it's no exaggeration to say that our lecture this evening is the most influential philosophical exponent of liberalism in the world today.
That's certainly true in the English speaking world, almost certainly in the wider West, but even beyond the traditional West.
I was just recalling that we met quite by chance in the foyer of a grand hotel in Beijing,
where some senior members of the Chinese academic establishment had asked Professor
Dworkin to explain to them this apparently somewhat unfamiliar concept of liberalism.
For more than 40 years, Professor Dworkin has developed, elaborated, refined a consistent account of modern egalitarian liberalism,
particularly in the field of philosophy of law, but by no means only.
And many of us will remember a conference in this very room three years ago which
resulted in this publication you can pick up outside called Liberalism in East and West,
in which after two days in which we had explored all the multiple complexities of liberalism in different parts of the world and the many,
many meanings of the term. The very end. Professor Dworkin stood up and told us exactly what liberalism is in the singular,
in a really magnificent account which has now culminated in this book, Justice for Hedgehogs.
The word magisterial is much overused, like the word revolution, but this is truly a magisterial book immensely learned,
lucid, wide ranging and also strikingly moving in its reflections on how a good and meaningful life might be lived.
Reflections from perhaps a slightly later stage than than some people in this room.
And therefore, there could be no speaker better qualified to address us today.
On the question of how universal is liberalism, we are also extremely fortunate in our respondent, our own Professor Adam Roberts,
president of the British Academy Emeritus Professor of International Relations in this university, the doyen of international relations in Britain.
And many of us will recall that in your retirement seminar, if if retirement is exactly the right word from what followed,
which was, in a sense, all about this question, it was about what we call complex universalism.
And the question how you build a liberal international order.
The subject on which Professor Roberts is currently writing a book in a world of very different cultures and civilisations and a world in which.
non-Western powers are becoming more powerful and arguably trying to spread their own rather different norms.
So no one could be better qualified to respond from the perspective of international relations.
So with that, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming this year's Down to Earth lecture.
Professor Oliver. Thank you.
And I have to turn this. I'm sorry. Can I be heard now on the back?
Thank you for that extraordinary introduction.
Undeserved, but nevertheless very welcome, particularly considering its source.
Our topic, as Tim said, is liberalism a political creed?
The creative Ralph Dawn of the creed that I would venture to say most of us here endorse.
Our question is about the scope of liberalism's domain, its authority.
Is liberalism a required political morality?
Everywhere there are human beings so that a society in which women are subordinated or there's grotesque
inequality of wealth or people are required to worship in a certain way or politics is one party,
if any part of it. Can we say of such places that they are illegitimate because illiberal?
Or on the contrary, should we say that liberalism is a mandatory political morality only in those communities
in which liberalism resonates with shared understanding and shared tradition?
That would be the view that liberalism is only parochial, not universal,
and is moreover parochial so only a relatively few political communities in the world.
The question is which of these two views is right?
Politicians in the West, particularly in my country, strongly support the universal view.
They say we should export our values and they speak.
Famous line now a very long time ago.
We should make the world safe for democracy, by which was meant we should make the world safe for our conception of democracy.
But the rival view, the view that liberalism only has a parochial grip, is held by a great many scholars and is held in a range of sophistication.
There are, for example, cultural anthropologists who say that a political morality can't be true,
absolutely can only be true for those communities in which it has roots.
There are more sophisticated versions of this idea.
One developed by Isaiah Berlin, has proved particularly influential and to be called, as he called it, pluralism.
Let me read his one of his statements, a piece he wrote in the New York Review of Books.
I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments.
I believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek and that these values differ.
There is not typical Berlin statement that there is not an infinity of them.
The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human assemblage, my human character is finite.
Let us say 74 or 122 or 26 or some other number, but finite, whatever it may be.
And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not am able to understand why he pursues it,
what it would be like in his circumstances for me to be induced to pursue it.
Now, John Rawls, certainly the most influential political philosopher of all time,
endorsed Berlin's view in Rawls's mature later book, Political Liberalism.
And he quoted the following further passage from Isaiah Berlin The realm of values is objective,
but values clash, and the full range of values is too extensive to fit into any one social world.
Not only are they incompatible with one another imposing conflicting requirements on institutions,
but there exists no family of workable institutions that can allow sufficient space for them all.
A just liberals ASADA. They may have far more space than other social worlds, but it can never be without loss.
The basic error is to think that because values are objective and hence truly values,
they must be compatible in the realm of values as opposed to the world of fact.
Not all truths can fit into one social world.
Well, that is an elegant, very refined statement of the parochial view.
It is the view that I wish to contest.
I want to argue that liberalism is a universal creed.
Universal in the sense that if it's true for anyone, it's true for everyone.
We have to pause now. I've been speaking as if it was perfectly clear what liberalism is.
I said it was a political creed, but there are many different theories, some radically different from another that people have called liberalism.
And the ambiguity, or at least abstraction of these views, has caused trouble.
I remember that when I first came to Oxford as a student, I.
Was asked, what are your political views? I said, I am a liberal.
Very unexpected reaction. All the nice, scruffy, bearded people showed me the tarps that I later learned to call them.
Thought I was. I was all right. In America now, liberalism is a pejorative term.
No politician running for office, for the office of the president, certainly since Michael Dukakis announced that he is a liberal,
Obama calls himself a progressive, but I don't think he uses the word liberal.
I have on my shelves a book whose title is How to Speak to a Liberal, If You Must.
Now, let's distinguish between types of liberalism.
Let's try and just ambiguity the term. There is what we might call minimal liberalism.
This is the view that. Ultimate political power should rest in the people as a whole rather than in a monarchy or in oligarchs.
That view is compatible with no constraint at all on what the people may do.
Another form of liberalism, often called classical liberalism, or even Manchester liberalism,
adds to the requirements of popular sovereignty, certain rights.
Eminent among these are economic rights, free trade, the free market, no redistribution that dishonours the result of a free market.
Also what have come to be called liberal negative rights.
Freedom of speech, for example. Certain degree of privacy, rule of law, fair trials and so forth.
The third kind of liberalism, the liberalism so disappointed in the United States now is egalitarian liberalism,
or, as it's often called in Europe, social democracy.
And this adds to the economic rights and the negative rights.
Derogate from the economic rights to the extent necessary rights to economic equality and rights to social equality,
favouring redistribution in search of greater equality and favouring government constraints to protect social equality.
To guard against discrimination of various kinds.
Now we have these three, and there are more accounts of what liberalism is.
As Tim said, I think there's a right answer to this question and I'll try and say what I think it is.
But we should notice a temptation. Many people have succumbed to it.
The temptation in the face of ambiguity or conflict in a shared political value is to recommend junking the term.
Not worrying about whether liberalism is universal or parochial,
but asking much more concrete questions like in what kind of society is a free press necessary?
I think that's a mistake. Political concepts.
Justice. Democracy, liberalism.
Those are represent a kind of sharing of values that represent values that we accept exist in some neighbourhood,
even though we disagree about precisely which values those are.
And that makes possible a kind of discussion of the kind that, as Tim said, we have in this room last year and which we might have this evening,
how should we understand what justice really is or democracy really is, or in our case, what liberalism really is?
I am therefore going to suggest that we raise the bar of abstraction.
I'm going to offer two principles which I believe can be defended as basic liberal principles,
principles that are shared among those who endorse or disparage particular more concrete statements of what?
Liberalism is these are principles that are defended before they are, in fact let loose at large injustice.
The hedgehogs. So I'm going to state them in a rather summary form this evening.
The first basic principle of liberalism is that coercive government is illegitimate.
Except on the assumption. Of equal concern for all those against whom Dominion is exercised.
Equal concern means that in political calculations in the final overall decision of what to do in the coercive realm.
Everyone's fate comes the same. That's the first principle.
The first of the basic liberal principles. The second is that coercive government is not legitimate unless it respects the
right and responsibility of each individual to decide for himself or herself.
What counts would count as success in living.
What would count as a good life?
That is a decision. According to the second liberal principle that must be left to individuals one by one.
That, of course, is not the decision. What economic system to impose, what criminal law to have it hold only for each person's decision.
A decision that must be taken into effect by equal concern as to what success in living would be for that person.
Now I wanted to comment about these two principles.
As I say, I've argued for them and tried to make them more developed elsewhere.
But one thing it's important to remember is that these are principles about the necessary conditions of legitimate coercion.
They are not principles of individual morality.
I am not required by any moral code to have equal concern for your children, as I have for my children.
I am certainly not required to respect your idea of what a good life would consist.
I may, in fact, hold that view in contempt and try to persuade you out of it.
These are principles only about the conditions of collective coercion.
Secondly, just part of that first I of marriage, these are positions of about coercion, not persuasion.
It is doesn't follow from these Liberal principles that government may not endorse.
Particular values may not, for example, construct museums and select which art is protected in which museum.
These are about direct coercion of individuals.
Now, the third and most important point about these basic principles.
Is that they are both imperative.
It's perfectly true that the first principle of equal concern sounds like equality,
and the second principle of respect for people's autonomy sounds like liberty.
And it's an old idea in political morality that liberty and equality must one day conflict and that governments must be free to choose,
among them, value pluralism.
The view, endorsed by Berlin and Rawls, takes as its paradigm instance the supposed conflict between liberty and equality.
As I've stated these principles, liberalism denies that these are principles that can be compromised.
One to the benefit of another.
They are both imperative because they state the conditions of human dignity.
And dignity is not for compromise.
But how do we apply them together? Through interpretation, we must arrive at a an understanding of what equal concern requires.
That is consistent with respecting individual autonomy.
We must correspondingly develop a sense of what autonomy requires that is consistent with our understanding of equal concern.
We must approach political morality as a problem calling for a solution to simultaneous equations.
How might that how might that go? I'll summarise two important consequences of seeing these as principles with simultaneous demands.
The first A Theory of Distributive Justice. Society has resources, develops these resources through commerce and trade and production.
How shall the consequences be distributed?
You might think that equal concern for the fate of everybody will require a distribution in which everyone has, in the end, the same wealth.
Without regard to skill. Without regard to luck, without regard to choices.
Of occupation or work as against leisure investment as against consumption.
You might think that equal concern would require what sometimes called flat equality,
but we can see quite quickly it can't be that that understanding of equal concern would destroy the second principle,
because it would deny individual responsibility for all the kinds of decisions I've just mentioned.
No, we cannot aim. If we want to take both principles on board, we cannot aim at equality of well.
Ex post. That is, after all the decisions have been made after the wheel has spun.
But we can and must insist on equality, ex ante equality before the various decisions have been made.
And that means that we must see distributive justice as guided.
Buy insurance. By asking suppose before all of the decisions, all of the episodes of good bad luck have been met.
Suppose people had equal wealth and could buy insurance against unemployment.
Accident or disease on the same terms.
Of course that. Is it an imaginary fantasy?
But we can answer the question, I suppose.
And that question can't be answered. Precisely.
Serves as an important guide. Two programs of distributive justice.
I believe it can be seen, for example, as the skeleton model behind President Obama's Affordable Health Care Act.
I'll say something about that in a few moments.
Free speech. Topic of our deliberations tomorrow.
The two basic principles together demand a very generous understanding of free speech.
The first principle, principle of equal concern requires not just equal concern in the economic distribution.
It requires political equality and political equality.
Requires democracy. And democracy requires not just equal vote, but equal voice.
An equal voice must mean.
But each of us is free not just to vote his own convictions, but to attempt in the fora of democratic argument to convince others to his view.
And he must have that right, no matter how unwise.
Or repellent or offensive. His views may be that is a condition of democracy, which is a condition of equal concern.
And we must accept that with whatever price we must pay in injured feelings to secure the second principle.
The second basic principle also recommends a generous conception of free speech.
It says people have the right and responsibility to form their own personality.
Their own sense of what counts is good for them.
And that, as sociologists have taught now for two generations, cannot be done by individuals just behind their own arms.
We form personalities in society, and we form them by presenting ourselves to others as having the personality we wish to be understood to have.
And again, this can't be done unless individuals are free to express their opinions, however unpopular or indeed however repellent.
Now these are examples of the consequences that I believe follow from liberalism understood not in any particular concrete way,
but understood as the two basic principles I've tried to describe that is understood in an abstract way.
Now we come back to our question. Are the two principles?
Is liberalism so understood for everyone?
Is it a universal creed or only parochial for those communities whose traditions endorsed it?
Of course. Liberalism.
The two principles must be sensitive to the circumstances of a particular community.
They must be sensitive to the wealth of the community.
What concern requires by way of medical care must be different in a poor community from a rich one.
And what counts as incitement to violence will depend upon vocabularies which differ from society to society.
Our question is not. Does liberalism have different consequences in different under different circumstances?
It's rather the question is liberalism itself the two principles true only for some communities and not for others.
That is our question. We come now to what I believe is a very important juncture.
I wish to argue. That though political morality may be sensitive to distinctions of culture.
What counts as the correct morality in one society is not necessarily the same as what counts in another society with very different traditions.
Political morality can be sensitive to culture, broadly understood, but it cannot be sensitive all the way down.
It must bottom out in principles that are claimed to be universal.
Consider by way of an example what I suppose is the most extravagant version of cultural relativism that we could imagine.
Consider the following theory.
Political morality of a particular community must be a morality that reflection has roots in resonate with shared understanding and a shared history.
Foster. That sounds tremendously.
Parochial. But since it's a moral claim, we must ask.
Why? Why is that so?
And many answers are in principle available.
We might say, for instance, what some anthropologists had said, cultural diversity is itself something worthwhile.
Different communities have different cultures and hence different kinds of institutions.
And it is a very good thing that there be that kind of diversity for any number of reasons.
That's it. You might say a collective rather than an individual claim, but there are individual claims we might make.
We might say that a society which has not known democracy will be.
Riddled with tensions will become inefficient or become unstable if an attempt is made to end graft, democracy and a culture resistant to it.
We hear this quite a bit. We hear about Asian values.
Mr. Business man called Mr. Lee wrote an extremely interesting op ed piece in The New York Times a couple of months ago saying
explaining that the Chinese conception of democracy is very different from ours because the Chinese believe that democracy is a means.
Whereas he said, You in America somehow seem to think it's an end in itself.
And he offered that as an explanation for the massacre of Tiananmen Square.
There's there are other possible explanations, justifications for this paradigm of cultural relativism.
We might talk about people's expectations. We might talk about people's sense of dignity being connected to continuity with their ancestors.
The world is full of explanations of that. So but one thing that must be true about each of them is that it must claim universal dominion.
But they claim that diversity of culture is something good in itself can't itself be thought to be parochial or cultural.
Because then we would have an infinite regress of explanation.
Relativity was bottom in a universal claim.
It cannot we cannot if we're talking about morality rather than simple anthropology,
our moral conviction must, in the end, be universal in their claim.
Now. How deep?
Can. Relativity go, when must it bottom out?
Here's a suggested answer. Relativity must come to a point.
At which it deploys principles of moral valence.
Principles of moral valence are those that answer the question when morally speaking, are things getting better and what are they getting worse?
It doesn't demand that doesn't demand a consequentialist answer, though consequential and consequentialist answer would serve.
A principle of moral valence may be a candid kind of claim about intrinsic respect for human being,
or it may be a claim about the prosperity of community.
But again, a claim of moral valence is indispensable.
At some point you can't have a moral theory without an understanding when things are getting better or getting worse, morally speaking,
and any such theory of moral balance must be universal in its claim, or it can't do the work it has to do to make a theory of moral theory.
Now I emphasise that because the two basic principles of liberalism are principles stating moral valence.
But first principle says what counts as going better has to do with the fate of individual people.
And the fate of each must count the same when coercion is in point.
The second principle argues what counts as things going better for an individual.
It says that must be left person by person to the person whose life it is.
These are statements of moral vengeance. They may be wrong, but they can't be right for some and wrong for others.
If liberalism is true for some. If it's true for us, it's true for everyone.
Is it true for us? I've argued that it is true.
Indeed, I've offered an argument in the Hedgehogs book, which I'm now going to summarise.
I find that argument absolutely compelling. And here it is.
We're talking, remember, about coercion, about people in power, forcing other people to do what they do not want to do.
Coercion is justified only when certain conditions are met.
Coercion is justified only when it is consistent with the dignity of the person coerced.
It cannot be consistent with his dignity unless it treats his fate as as important as anybody else's.
Otherwise, it's a form of slavery and inconsistent with dignity.
It cannot be consistent with dignity if it usurps that person's judgement about what it is to take his interests into account as an equal.
Now, as I say, I find that perfectly compelling. I admit, reluctantly, that you may not.
But. If you don't, then you have another theory.
Another theory of what justifies coercion. That is a theory of moral valence.
And that theory, whatever it is, must be universal.
I. I might take a moment to. To warn against a certain mistake that might be possible at this point.
I think it's a mistake. And that is to say. We can't talk about political morality, liberalism or any other.
As true or false. They're entirely subjective.
And because they're subjective, they can only be different.
Not right or wrong, not true or mistaken.
Time is now short, so I can't be polite that viewers incoherent.
It's incoherent because scepticism of that form is itself a moral position.
To say there can't be right or wrong is to say the rich have no obligation to help the poor, that they do have an obligation to help the poor.
It's a moral claim. No matter how fancy we get with ontology, no matter how much we talk about the distinction between meta ethics and ethics,
it remains true that someone who says there is no right and wrong in this neighbourhood is denying that rich people have an obligation.
To help the poor. He understands the language he must use tonight.
It so impolite. Incoherent.
I want to end with.
An observation that as I began these remarks by talking about politicians in the West, a lot of them in the United States, I confess,
who talk about exporting our values to the rest of the world, exporting or might say our liberal attitudes to the rest of the world.
But we. We understand liberalism in terms of the two principles.
We can hardly say with a straight face that we have achieved liberalism.
The welfare state in this country. Admirable, I believe.
Could be seen as an attempt to distribute in accordance with the hypothetical insurance.
I think it can be I think that was the the Fabian instinct behind the development of the welfare state here.
But if we look at it that way, we must agree that it's dramatically underfunded and getting worse day by day.
In the United States, we celebrate the generosity of our conception of free speech.
But our Supreme Court so much understood what free speech is about,
that it held that our Constitution demands that corporations be allowed to give unlimited sums to political campaigns.
That's in fear, striking distance, corrupting democracy beyond repair.
And it's an extreme, illiberal understanding of free speech in France.
I've discovered by reading about the recent election,
the odious Michel Le Pen was convicted of a crime for saying that the Nazi occupation of France was not inhumane.
That's a repellent view, but we can't suppose in any fidelity to the basic principles of liberalism that it's a criminal offence.
We should stop talking about exporting liberalism for a while and begin to think about importing liberalism from where?
From the only place we can. From universal, timeless, objective, moral truth.
Where else? Thank you for your patience. Well, ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me all right at the back?
Oh, I'm sure you will agree with me that that was an extraordinary tour de force.
Done. Note this.
My comments will not be so hopeless because Professor Wilkin was kind enough to give me some advance warning of his main line of argument.
And it helped me to compile some notes, which I think will be sure to come into his category of incoherence.
And he, early on in his remarks, I quoted and criticised Isaiah Berlin.
And I'm reminded that once when going from Oxford to Chelsea to give a lecture in the early post-Cold War years on the subject of international norms,
I found myself standing at the bus stop in the high street next to Isaiah Berlin,
and I couldn't resist the opportunity to get a line from him as to what I should say at LSC.
I said, Are there any such things as universal norms?
And as I said, No, no, no.
Such thing as a universal norm viewed equality that is universally admired is courage, and that's deeply ambiguous.
So that was his answer to today's question.
And today we've had a rather more inspiring and encouraging answer, which is that liberalism is of universal value.
And I start out from a sympathy with that position.
Indeed, today I was reading, as is my habit, a report from the Canadian Parliament,
which was giving an award recognising the extraordinary achievements of Metropolitan Jet Ski in the Second World War in saving the lives of many Jews.
And it referred to human rights as mankind's highest obligation.
And again, I have deep sympathy with that approach.
It's a noble expression of, uh, not just an important point of view, but a fundamental value.
Well, now, I still have to confess that I have a bit of trouble with the presentation that we had just heard from Ron Dworkin.
Uh, he laid out the central question before us with absolutely characteristic clarity.
Um, he said one question is whether liberalism is only a parochial political morality with roots and authority and only part of the world.
Not as many of us think, a universal political manoeuvre, morality with authority everywhere.
Now, my purpose in these initial remarks is to suggest a slightly different framing of the question,
and I'll suggest a slightly reframed version at the end on the way there.
I'll try and indicate where I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Dworkin and where I have some reservations.
Professor Dworkin makes it crystal clear that his advocacy of a universal political morality is not the same as advocacy of particular actions,
whether they be trade boycotts or military interventions, etc., to end practices we dislike.
So this is not an argument about intervention. However, the risk of making a cheap point,
I should say that there's a long history of a belief in the universal value of
liberal ideas being associated inextricably with patterns of interventionism.
This nexus has continued in our own time with interventions Western interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Now, you may take different views of each of these, and I'm not criticising them all.
Some I have great sympathy and support for, but because of that nexus,
I am perhaps more wary than Professor Dworkin about proclaiming the universality of liberalism as a foundational political idea.
If, despite my note of concern, we agree on the principle.
This is not a discussion about interventionism.
We also agree that liberalism, which this discussion certainly is about, is both an important concept and one that is very hard to define.
It's certainly not for me to go into the different meanings of liberalism in any detail, but I do just want to move a difficulty,
which was also noted by Professor Dworkin about the sheer complexity of getting a formal agreed definition of what liberalism is.
The term is encrusted with a huge number of barnacle like connotations, nowhere more so than, as he indicated in the United States.
Indeed, so much so that the American inner city political joke has some real resonance.
A question What is the definition of a liberal answer?
A decent person who hasn't been mugged yet? If one ignores the whole question of connotations, even basic meanings of the term can vary.
The meaning pursued in this discussion can be put reasonably simply,
it refers to a political philosophy that emerged in modern and still recognisable form in the late 18th century.
And the essence of it is a belief in liberty as the key condition of intellectual,
social and economic growth, and in progress as an attainable outcome from it.
The main, perhaps the only constraints on liberty that are accepted are those that are embodied in an agreed framework of law,
administered with impartiality and integrity.
And that's why Professor Dworkin does something really valuable when he seeks to refine liberalism,
as he has done here today, into two basic principles which I remind you of.
Take it as coercive government. Note that interesting emphasis on coercion is not legitimate unless it meets the two conditions.
It shows equal concern for the fate of all those under its dominion.
And unless it acknowledges and facilitates the responsibility of all those to define for themselves their own conception of how to live well.
No one may, I think, legitimately wonder how even reduced to this essential core.
These how universal these two principles can be even long established, democratic and yes,
liberal polities may fail to meet the high standards of these two basic principles.
The question of whether or not a government shows equal concern for the fate of all those under its dominion is precisely what is in contention.
Whether one is discussing the budget. The excessive power of the Murdoch press, the provision of protective equipment to our troops in Afghanistan,
or the residential arrangements of gypsies. And to what extent did we wish in the past to extend to Catholics,
or do we wish today to extend to Muslims or Hindus or others the right to define for themselves how to live well?
Similar questions arise, if in subtly different forms in other liberal democracies, including, of course, in France.
So I end up being even more cautious than Professor Dworkin about whether there can be an agreed and universal definition of liberalism.
But there certainly is a universalist strength in liberalism.
There's a general tendency in political theory, anyway, to work from first principles,
to work out what the good life consists of, and to devise a political system of universal applicability.
That's a characteristic of political science or much political science.
And liberalism has been very much part of that approach.
And since at least the 17th century, many enunciation of liberal interventionism,
whether by politicians or writers, have been worryingly general in character.
The US Declaration of Independence, 1776.
Famously, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Wonderful words, but with an implication of universality.
No, not for nothing.
Was the UN's first declaration the first document on human rights after the charter called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
It couldn't be anything other than Universal. The whole point of it was to establish that there are basic human rights that
should apply to all societies and to get a minimum agreement on what they are.
And in no way do I want to mock this universalist streak.
As a matter of record, all those political philosophers and there have been many who have pronounced that certain types of people were not
yet ready for the practice of democratic politics have been proved wrong in one respect or another at various times.
More or less serious academics have said that of Asians, of Arabs, of Catholics,
that they are destined towards authoritarian rule and nothing can change that.
Yet events in many countries Korea, Spain, Portugal, one could go on and on with a very long list.
Show that. That. Negative approach or denial of the applicability of Western or generally universal liberal ideas is itself simply wrong,
that there is a general attraction that even states clinging on to systems of one party
rule often go to some lengths to pay at least lip service to liberal ideas and decency.
So it's obvious that I don't think that liberalism is only a parochial political morality with roots and authority is only part of the world.
To use the exact words. The initial question we were asked.
Doesn't follow them. That the alternative is to view it as a universal political morality with authority everywhere.
Again, quoting from Dawkins words.
My answer, I'm afraid, is no, it isn't a universal political morality.
True, no society is immune to liberal ideas.
Maybe one could even say that no society is immune to the ultimate implicated implementation.
But liberal ideas always have to compete with others, and other ideas do sometimes have a logic to them,
especially in deeply divided societies in which distrustful communities jostle for power.
There is often a case for a degree of authoritarian rule.
This is not a matter of one part of the world being inherently different from others.
Even in our own, I hope, relatively liberal policy of the United Kingdom,
we imposed direct rule on Northern Ireland for most of the time between 1972 and 2007,
because of the unsatisfactory problems of the relationship arising from the relationship between majority and minority communities.
In some countries, such as Singapore. A similar authoritarian version of democracy flourishes.
And because it flourishes, will be very difficult to change.
And it's true also, as Tim mentioned in introducing this today's event,
that new powers don't necessarily subscribe to a single core of liberal values, newly emerging powers.
And it is also noteworthy that when liberal ideas do get implemented in authoritarian societies, they often get implemented piecemeal.
Uh, liberal ideas in culture or within particular areas of society, in universities or whatever.
Rather than being implemented as a general philosophy, we are not.
It seems to be yet at a stage where it's wise to claim that a political idea is universal.
Ideas of the world, consisting of a plurality of types of political system still themselves have some moral value.
This was put eloquently by my predecessor to his Montague Burton professor, all in an article in Foreign Affairs all the way back in 1972.
And that was, of course, at the time of the Vietnam War, which he was deeply critical of.
And he wrote that the world is still divided into different political and cultural civilisations.
And the main rationale and function of a multiple balance in the past has been to
preserve the freedom of its members while minimising the risks and scale of war.
The autonomous state or of civilisation has a great deal of vitality and we are more likely to live in relative tranquillity if
we respect differentiation while opposing the temptations of universality for our own values or the claims of other polities.
In conclusion, then coming back to Professor Dawkins original question,
I would say liberalism is not just a parochial political morality with a roots and authority in any part of the world,
but is rather one political morality with appeal everywhere, but which must necessarily coexist and compete with other political realities.
Thank you very much. Now, I think that with ideas as well as with people, we should avoid guilt by association.
It's perfectly true that the issue I spoke about is often confused with the question of intervention at many different levels military,
economic, voluntary boycott and so forth.
And it may be that talking as many of my presidents have done about universal values is dangerous politics.
But that's not our issue here. Issue is whether it's true or false that liberalism has the universal authority that I claim.
I should also I meant also to say that we're not talking.
Not only are we not talking about intervention, we're not talking about blame.
Abraham Lincoln, the saint of emancipation, once said that, of course, a white man should not sit down to a table with a black man.
We we find that repulsive. But we don't blame Lincoln.
I think it's all very different from the question that we're discussing, which is whether it's right or wrong.
The second point I want to make is to emphasise the importance of disentangle the various questions.
One is the question of whether we perforce will find ourselves having to accommodate and live with different conceptions of political morality,
competitive conceptions. Of course we will.
That is our situation.
But we mustn't confuse whatever accommodation we make, however, that affects as it should affect our decisions about even rhetoric.
We mustn't confuse that with the question of whether it is what our rivals say is true,
whether it's right that what's true for us is not true for them.
And I think we have to be very careful intellectually to separate the practical questions and indeed the historical questions.
Will we ever achieve liberalism?
From the question of how we should define liberalism and what is to be said in its favour.
How we should do. I agree. That it is very unlikely that we could come to an agreement.
Statement I offered two principles. I said, maybe you will disagree with them, then you should supply others.
It isn't. It seems to me important whether we will precisely agree on them.
What is important that we try to achieve some clarity in what our claims are and to make the best case we can for those claims.
Adam said that in some parts of the world there is a case for a degree of authoritarian rule.
Here is where the disentanglement is very important.
This could mean a case for living with it, or it might mean a case for it if there's a case for it.
If there's a moral argument in its favour, then that moral argument will have to find roots in more general moral principles.
And if it can be found in the two principles I'd describe, which might, given the circumstances happen, then we can endorse it.
Otherwise we will say regrettably, Singapore will continue.
It doesn't mean that we have to say there's a case for Singapore on this.
We can make out a case other than in the fact that we have it and we have to live with it.
Finally. What is the role?
Something I didn't talk about. Terribly interesting. What is the role in all of this?
Of history? What is the role of the fact that liberalism emerged as an distinct and identified political morality at an identified time?
I think that's important for what I tried to say earlier.
When that history gave us an assumption, a shared assumption.
That has a value somewhere in the neighbourhood that we each try and get at with our unpersuasive definitions.
That's an important fact,
but it isn't important that the understanding we now promote of liberalism be like that which was promoted in the 18th century.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Adam,
I think with your permission for an open but just to state again one of the questions on the table is whether a plurality of political systems or
models is itself something potentially desirable in the way that desirable and argued that a plurality of individual values was itself desirable.
I'm sure there will be many questions if you could please identify yourself and ask for
preference short questions rather than long statements at the back Rasmus Nielsen doesn't make.
Thank you very much of a very inspiring and rich lecture, Professor Dawson.
I have a very simple question the way. Do you think it is in any way a problem for your argument that it's force?
If you will seem to rely on the idea that people who do not agree with you simply do not get it,
that they are either at best suffering from false consciousness or at worst in bad faith.
They certainly don't have to be in bad faith to disagree with me. I think I'd turn this off.
I've known people to disagree with me in perfectly good faith.
But no, I don't find it. I would find it surprising if people agreed with me in great masses.
The whole it's one of my one of my more theoretical claims that these concepts liberalism,
justice, democracy, or what I've called interpretive concepts,
that is, we share them, but we disagree in the large very often and almost always in detail about the best interpretation of them.
And I think that the disagreement in interpretation is very valuable.
Thank you very much. Daniel Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint.
You mentioned in the course of your remarks that there were different kinds of liberalism.
You mentioned in particular classical liberalism and what you called egalitarian liberalism or social democracy.
And one gathered you said that you thought there was a right answer as to which which was fully entitled to to the claim.
You didn't quite spell that out,
but I assume that you felt that the you feel that the egalitarian form of liberalism has a better claim to to it, but under your principles.
And you also mentioned Obamacare as a good example, perhaps, of the insurance principle.
But under your two basic principles, I can just about see how mandatory health insurance could be justified.
I can see no case at all for how you could justify forcing, for example,
Catholics or evangelicals institutions to provide services under under Obamacare, which contradict their basic religious principles.
So my question really is, is egalitarian liberalism really capable of observing your two principles?
Thank you. Well, it will be controversial in any case, whether the two principles, as Adam said,
people disagree about what equal concern is in me and a particular case that you mentioned.
I believe that Catholic institutions should not be required to provide abortions.
It's and that is the view of the Obama administration. It's a distinct question.
Here's where the controversy lies, whether if a Catholic hospital takes out group insurance plan for its employees,
whether that insurance plan can can be required to provide abortion services.
Now, that's very different. I take the view that that is not engaging the hospital in violating its principles.
So I don't have trouble with that particular case, but I certainly agree they'll be very hard cases.
Now. I already have about seven people who want to ask questions.
So with your permission, Randy, I know groups and groups of three.
I'll talk less. Michael I think, I think you can probably manage without the mike from here, but if you read, I want to help you.
You. Yes, please.
To bring my simple proposition to you is that a parochial view of Jerusalem is that it is universal.
Is itself a notion that derives from it is located in particular.
Yes. Oh, thank you. Okay. Or do you want to.
Oh, yes. No. Jeremy, could you sing the mic down?
Right. Run from all souls.
Ronnie, at the beginning you mentioned the possibility that liberal values may resonate in some social settings and not on others.
And I wonder whether we didn't brush past that a little bit too quickly.
The respect principle talks about the self constitution of an individual life.
And we can imagine social settings where that really makes sense to an awful lot of people and strikes them as tremendously important.
And other social settings. Where that seems like an idiosyncratic concern or a marginal concern or for many people is largely
unintelligible because they think about their lives in ways that are quite different from that.
So I wondered what you thought about that, because it looks as though the respect principle.
The second of the two principles that you mentioned requires us to pay attention to a facet of
people's lives that may not be as central always for them as the principle makes it appear.
And this might indicate that liberalism in some sense has limited scope because there is a deeper principle that has universal scope.
And the deeper principle, a sort of a pre liberal principle, is pay attention to people's lives in terms that make sense to them.
Yeah. And that we would accept as a universal, say, a necessary condition on fundamental moral valence.
But it might yield the conclusion that these specifically liberal principles,
fundamental though they are, will apply perhaps in some circumstances, not on others.
Perhaps in some eras. And not in others. Thank you.
Um. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Um. I'm so sorry.
Wave to me earlier, Pablo said literally of his months in college.
The form of your argument seems to be not limited to political principles.
You defined your first two principles as principles of legitimacy, of coercive, uh, exercise of coercion by the within dominion.
Nevertheless, the principles of moral valence could easily apply to any ethical principle.
We make these distinctions, even in interpersonal or simply personal assessments of our virtue or of our lives.
So doesn't your argument take you to ethical universalism as well?
I finally suggested paradox enticing, but I.
Yes. Universalism is, in one sense, parochial.
It's unpopular in a lot of places, particularly universities.
It's it's very popular in illiberal societies.
Universalism has its its most enthusiastic reception in tyrannies.
That was, I think, the point of two concepts of liberty.
The great essay in which. Pluralism made its particular appearance in our.
Addiction. It doesn't mean that Universalism is itself parochial.
Whether it's parochial, there's not a sociological question about where and how enthusiastically it's received.
It's a moral question, and I've dragged into it.
My answer is at a certain level. Moral principles have to be universal.
On the whole house of cards collapses.
Jeremy's point about Shouldn't we have a pretty liberal principle that says political authority should be exercised?
Some make sense to them. Makes sense to the people.
Well, I find make sense ambiguous. Does it mean it can be endorsed by them?
In which case it's just the second principle all over again.
And I like it. If it means make sense to them in a way that is.
The fact is due to the fact that they don't believe that they should think about and endorse a way of life.
And just to worship, for example, if they think that is part of what makes my life go well, if liberalism says be our guest.
On the other hand, if the pre political liberalism says they are stuck with it,
we don't ask them to understand or endorse the values that are reigning over them.
Then I'd just agree with it. Now, it's not only a pretty liberal, it's an anti liberal principle.
Now on valence and personal morality.
Yes, that is that is certainly so when I say that the liberal principles up political principles and principles about coercion.
I don't mean that there aren't universal ethical principles.
Universal moral principles. I think there are I've tried to defend some of them, but there are different principles.
As I said, I don't have to have the same concern for your children as I have for mine.
That's a matter of personal morality. It's because I'm not in a position to exercise power over you.
Thank you very much on it. Beautiful to.
In my many discussions with the late Jerry Cohen, I would, at a suitable stage, introduce the concept of the real world.
Which he always rejected as a red herring.
Could I dangle this red herring before your nose with the following question?
If, as you say, liberal values are political values, they require political institutions or devices for their implementation.
What are the minimum political conditions?
The minimum institutional? Conditions when you stripped out all communities specific variations,
all legitimate communities specific variations for ensuring that liberal values can prevail to the benefit of all or most.
My own shortlist would be respect for the individual person.
Which is, of course, the history of the world, a revolutionary idea.
The rule of law and the accountability of the governors to the government.
That's my shortlist. My question is, does it satisfy you?
Do you want it shorter, still or longer? Thank you very much.
I'm very sorry if I failed to grasp this.
And it may be because you had to condense your argument.
And if I read the book, I probably will understand it better. But as I understood your two principles, the state.
Can use coercive power as long as it takes account of equally of the interests of all.
And at the same time, it has to allow each to define his or her interests for his or her self.
And that's second. But I'm not quite clear how it works.
Supposing I define my interests or my idea of the good life as one in which I can have four wives,
or I have authority in my family and will not allow girls to go with my daughters,
to go to swimming classes with my sons, or a number of other things like that.
I think you get my drift. I'm not quite clear how the state, in using its coercive power, goes about respecting those views that I might have.
Simon Head, Oxford and NYU. Rania I want to focus on the concept of dignity, which features very prominently in your discourse.
And you define dignity, it seemed to me, is the right of people to decide how they would live well and make something of their lives.
And I recall that Bernard Williams,
in the great essay he wrote at the end of his life philosophy as a humanist discipline used exactly the same form of words.
I also recall that you in the conference we had with the New York Review.
You know, we've used the word tyranny to describe the growing inequality of wealth and power in the American capitalist economy.
And one could say the same thing in the British. I would put it to you that one of the aspects of this tyranny is that an increasing
proportion of the population is being denied the economic preconditions of dignity.
And these preconditions require a certain education to make a way in the capitalist economy the availability of work and when work exists.
But it should have a certain dignity. And it seems to me that we are in the capitalist economy,
moving to a kind of radical instrumental ism in the deployment of labour, which actually is a threat to dignity.
So my question is, how far are we away from a situation where the growth of what you called a tyranny
undermines the liberal legitimacy of American or British capitalist society?
Thank you. Now a prelude to my answer.
I'm very fond of herring. And I I've never had a red herring, but particularly one dangled in front of me.
But I certainly would try it if I had the opportunity.
I the I wouldn't now say that I want a longer or short of this.
I want a more sensitive list that is.
In some communities, I would say that judicial veto over legislation is an institutional,
if not requirement, at least that it's enormously recommended in that community where you have,
for example, to use a now immortal phrase in a footnote in the Supreme Court opinion where you have impacted isolated and discrete minorities.
I would say that the institutional arrangement cannot be fully majoritarian and achieve liberal consequences in other communities.
It may be it may be very different. So I think I agree with you that the real world is important.
But, you know, as said, we have to have ideas in the back.
We've got to have theories in the back.
Now, the distinction that Mortimer suggests is this If someone says, I need four wives to make my life complete,
it follows from liberal principles that government must not say to him, You are wrong in your view about what makes your life go better.
However, it's our job taking at face value that that's how you define it.
It's our job to protect other people from your pursuit of that way of life.
That's a distinction I think crucial to liberalism and is liberalism.
Reject the false consciousness view rejects the idea.
We know better than you what's in your good, but it certainly does not endorse the idea that you can have whatever you think is in
your good because equal concern requires a discipline to protect the rights of others.
In this case, three of the four wives and.
Simon yes, I, I agree about the tyrannies.
I think that we don't that they we don't have to look to the consequences downstream
of a terribly unjust distribution of wealth to see whether it threatens dignity.
I think that, too, to run a course of legal order, to take taxes from people,
to limit them via the criminal and civil law in a society in which they are being denied,
the economic resources that equality would require is in and of itself an insult to that dignity.
Now, you are quite right that the downstream consequences of that in many societies
deprives people of education and corrupts their ability to live a decent,
dignified life in other ways. I would agree with that. We don't have to reach that point.
We have tyranny enough at the start. Thank you.
I'm afraid we are running out of time, so I'm going to select on the principle of equal voice.
In other words, to start with someone slightly younger.
Jeff Howard. Hi, I'm Jeff Howard.
I'm a Dphil student in political theory at Nuffield College.
Professor Dorgan, you mentioned Abraham Lincoln earlier, and it's it strikes me that if you or I had been born in a similar context to Lincoln,
you or I could also share the idea that it would be impermissible morally or inappropriate in some way to share a dining table with a black man.
And I find that an extremely sobering notion, not because it impugns my belief in the universality of liberal values,
but that it clarifies to me just how difficult it is to convince other people to accept liberal values.
And so I wonder if you have any reflections on what our argumentative strategy should be
in engaging people who don't hold liberal values to think about endorsing those values.
Shoot the microphone across to Dominic Burbidge here at Fame Row.
If you sling it along. Thanks very much.
Just a question about what is the role of a good citizen in this view.
So is it, um, firstly to to speak about one's own conception of the good life,
or is it to speak only about whether coercive government is illegitimate?
Or finally, would it be to listen to other people's conception of the good life?
Very much so. I'm the female equal voice catcher, but not from the catcher in battle from the International Herald Tribune.
I was wondering whether, even though we probably all agree that there is no such thing as a perfectly liberal society today and probably in history,
whether you can cite an example from history and perhaps also from the present that would have come closest to your ideal version of a society.
Yeah. Okay. Argumentative strategy.
I think we have to start by distinguishing persuasion from argument.
They're not the same thing as when we are here trying to find out what's true.
We're not concentrating and we would do better not to concentrate on what will be persuasive.
Unfortunately, as American politics demonstrates amply, what is persuasive is often absurd, low quality jingles and that.
So the question is how far should we demean ourselves by adopting techniques of persuasion which ought not to be effective because they are effective?
And I say in my view, we should go very far down that road.
The stakes are very high. And if our politicians are going to.
Use Liberal as a dirty word. Then maybe we should practice saying conservative with a sneer twice.
Should we be? The answer to the question about good citizens is all of the above?
I would emphasise that first you've said you're a good citizen.
Proclaim his view of the good life and try and persuade others.
I'm mainly concerned to say it shouldn't be made difficult for him to do that.
But I don't think myself that good citizenship demands that, or certainly it shouldn't conjecture only in that politics.
Speaking out on justice. That is what good citizenship requires.
Listening to others. Yes, but very important.
We now connect the two questions because you're not going to be persuasive unless you listen to them.
An example of a successful I am I'm a you may be very surprised at this.
I'm very partial to Norway. They've been through, I think, the decision, for example,
of the government to argue for the insanity of this killer shows the subtlety of the society that says,
let us that is brand, this person is insane and therefore not to be imitated rather than a martyr who might be imitated.
That's not the only reason I like Norway,
but it's really achieved to decent society with the help of being perfectly a budget is almost perfectly homogenous.
That's under threat and with the help of being extremely rich, poor citizen.
Still, they've done very well and it's almost a perfect note to end on.
I apologised profusely to all those who didn't get a chance to ask questions,
but I do think that since this is the demand of lecture, the last question should go to Lady Dundas.
So Ellen, like do you want to make.
Yeah, my parents coming up. Thank you, Tim.
And in a way, I'm raising the voice of Rob Diamond up here because what puzzled me.
Always listening to you is the conviction that ultimately you can resolve the issue of liberty and equality.
It seems to me that you're talking about a world without conflict, and there always is going to be a conflict in human society.
And at the end of the day, there's going to be a conflict between those two values.
And I don't quite understand how you think you can eliminate that problem.
Don't. I'm not talking about eliminating conflict.
Conflict for conflict. Liberty. Equality.
Oh, that conflict. Well, I live in hatred and elimination.
Again, we come to the same ambiguity about, you know,
trying to talk people into accepting a certain view and figuring out what view it is that you ought to be defending.
Now, I am now under an illusion that I will cause people, maybe a very few of them,
around the edges to give up the idea that on the one hand, equality requires sacrifice of liberty, or on the other that liberty.
They won't give that up. They'll continue to say that. But I have to decide what my role in the argument is.
And all I can do is tell you how I understand what what has to be philosophically present in order for there to be a conflict.
I don't think there can be a conflict between two values.
Now, as Tim said, he showed you a book.
Very fact book. And that's the burden of the argument of that book.
So I want to distinguish my case for there being no conflict here from my chances of persuading others to eliminate their ideas of the conflict.
The first, I'm quite tentatively pleased with the second.
Of course, I don't think I can. Thank you very much.
Adam, would you like to? Yeah, I enjoyed it.
Perhaps I could just comment on the issue of Universalism, which we come back to, which is at the core of the discussion.
Just to say, I thought Michael Friedman's question.
Is Universalism always a form of parochialism was very apropos,
and it reminded me of the wonderful organisation of the Liberal International and
much of the work and records of the Liberal International would give comfort,
I think, to Michael Friedman as in this proposition.
But I think the discussion tonight and the lecture we've heard suggests actually
that there is a permanent tension between the appeal of a universal political idea,
and liberalism has enormous appeal and some of the difficulties of the real world that were put in front of us by Peter Boxer and others.
And I thought in that against that background, what we heard was fairly far from the pure parochialism of that.
Michael Positive. Thank you very much, Adam.
Once again, apologies to those who didn't have a chance of have equal voice.
If you are still wishing to speak, there are outside cards giving you the website address of our big free speech project
free speech debate dot com and we would welcome you all to come and give voice there.
Professor Dworkin also has a website set up to respond to critics on his book.
It's called Justice for Hedgehogs or one word dot net and one response to a rather I think generous reviewer kind of get.
This is professor Dworkin responding his his conjugate and equally generous comments says if I were a hotel I would be the Savoy in London.
That hotel. I note this is Professor Dworkin speaking was closed a few years ago as an urgent need of modernisation, open brackets.
It has since reopened. Now, I have to tell you that my wife and I recently had the pleasure of staying at the reopened Savoy.
I hasten to add, not at our own expense. And it is the most wonderful combination of tradition and modernity.
And I think, ladies and gentlemen, that that is what we have had this evening in a truly memorable evening,
one that Ralph turned off would immensely have enjoyed, both from our responded Andrew Roberts, and especially from a dot of lecture, one talking.
Thank you both very much indeed for.