Last Word

Extract

What are the virtues that befit citizens of a liberal democracy? What moral constraints should the state respect in its sponsorship of political education? In “Political Liberalism and Political Education” I gave a partial answer to the first question; apart from a solitary footnote, I ignored the second. Yet some of my Rawls-inspired remarks about the connection between the burdens of judgment and toleration blurred the distinction between the two questions. That is unfortunate because the distinction matters.

Suppose we answer the first question correctly. We might still be tempted to pursue the ends of political education with Jacobin ferocity, laying waste to all that impedes our righteous cause. That course is subject to overwhelming moral criticism. Liberals must care about freedom of conscience and not just about the freedom of the virtuous liberal conscience. Alternatively, a correct answer to the second question might coincide with a certain blindness to the importance of the first or with a tendency to confound what is properly tolerated in a liberal democracy with what is rightly deemed virtuous. Liberals cannot afford to be indifferent to the virtues that are distinctive of the liberal conscience or to neglect the educational practices that would nourish them. If a self-defeating cultural aggressiveness is the vice of some who are fixated by the first question, an equally destructive cultural complacency is the besetting sin of those who take the second question seriously without having a credible answer to the first.