Blain Neufeld is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He also serves as Director of the interdisciplinary certificate in Ethics, Values, and Society (CEVS). His research focuses on various issues related to the account of justice and legitimacy known as “political liberalism.” He has written articles and chapters on a variety of topics in political philosophy, including citizenship education, liberal feminism, political liberty, public reason, and international justice. His primary project for 2017 is to complete a book under contract with Routledge tentatively titled Public Reason: Consensus or Convergence?

Abstract:
Citizenship Education, Non-Domination, and Religious Diversity

In his 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin significantly shaped subsequent discussions of freedom by political theorists and philosophers through his formulation of the ideas of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom. Over the past two decades, though, a ‘third concept’ of liberty—‘republican’ liberty, or freedom as ‘non-domination’—has been formulated and defended by Philip Pettit (among others). In addition to arguing for its normative superiority to positive and negative liberty, Pettit holds that we should understand republican liberty as a ‘supreme political value.’ It is its overriding commitment to freedom as non-domination, Pettit claims, that distinguishes the republican view of political justice from various forms of liberal egalitarianism, including the political liberalism of John Rawls.

Against Pettit, I explain that Rawlsian political liberalism is in fact implicitly committed to a form of non-domination, namely, a ‘political’ conception, which differs from the ‘comprehensive’ conception of non-domination endorsed by Pettit. Specifically, the political conception of republican liberty: (a) is limited in its scope to the ‘basic structure of society’ (roughly, society’s main political and economic institutions), and (b) is ‘freestanding’ in nature (and thus is compatible with what Rawls calls the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’). I show that the political conception of non-domination is an integral part of Rawlsian political liberalism through an exploration of the kind of ‘citizenship education’ that political liberalism mandates for all students. Such an education would impart to future citizen the skills and knowledge necessary for them to realize non-domination vis-à-vis their political institutions and their workplaces.

One potential deficiency of a political liberal citizenship education with respect to the realization of non-domination, however, concerns persons’ relations within associations that are not parts of the basic structure, such as religious communities. (For instance, Susan Okin, although not arguing from an explicitly republican perspective, contends that political liberalism unjustly accommodates sexist religious communities.) In response, I propose that a political liberal citizenship education requires that all students learn that they have an enforceable ‘right of exit’ with respect to all associations in society, including religious communities, and, moreover, that students learn how to exercise effectively this right. I conclude by proposing that a pluralist society committed to the political conception of republican liberty may enjoy less domination overall, given the limited scope of that conception, than a society committed to Pettit’s comprehensive conception.