119 - Liberalism as comprehensive doctrine

Summary

A variety of comprehensive doctrine, comprehensive liberalism is a philosophical position, complete with an ordering of values, that supports liberal political principles; Kant and Mill are Rawls’s main exemplars of it (CP 409). Like other comprehensive doctrines, as opposed to “merely political” ones like Rawls’s, such theories present their political elements as entailed by more general moral, religious, or metaphysical considerations. Since liberal principles are embedded within broader, deeper theories that make claims of epistemic correctness, they are thought to be emphatically true, and opposed doctrines to be false. Moreover, they represent relatively cohesive worldviews that cover matters (in particular, interpersonal ethics) beyond the scope of Rawls’s theory, which is more narrowly focused on the institutions and principles of the basic structure of society. Kant’s and Mill’s comprehensive liberalisms, according to Rawls, have two major components. First, they base the primacy of rights and liberties on the notion that the value of either autonomy (Kant) or individualism (Mill) is preeminent (CP 409–412). Second, since these values do not dictate individuals’ ways of life, emphasizing instead the importance of freely choosing such things for themselves, comprehensive liberals accept the existence of a multiplicity of rationally desirable human goods that correspond to different ways of life. Hence, they reject classical and Christian doctrines according to which political order is secured through widespread acceptance of a more unitary or exclusive conception of the good life, and thus endorse some principle of toleration or neutrality vis-`a-vis different comprehensive doctrines.