What it Means to be a Liberal
Published by Hanno Kaiser October 30th, 2006 in CultureGeoffrey Stone proposes ten principles of what liberalism means in this article for the Chicago Tribune (HT: Brian Leiter). Here is an abbreviated version.
- Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. …
- Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. …
- Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. …
- Liberals believe “we the people” are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. …
- Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. …
- Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. …
- Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. …
- Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. …
- Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. …
- Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. …
Surprisingly (to me), there’s nothing on that list that I disagree with. Read it along with Brian Leiter’s scathing critique of We Answer in the Name of Liberals.
[tags]politics, liberalism[/tags[
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I think The Poor Man Institute gave a worthy treatment of the latter article. Their review of it is called “Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious”.
Anyway, right now I’m conversing over the former with Clark at Mormon Philosophy and Theology blog.
I consider myself to be closely allied with principled modern liberalism, and a fair distance from libertarian stances. So I collect opinions about the meaning of “liberalism” as much as I can. And surely, this “top ten” list has left a great deal out. It isn’t very clear about the common points of debate, says little about the historical links to related ideologies and the contemporary ambiguities of the term, and doesn’t perform the kind of taxonomic niceties that I think research into these areas ought to do. Still, it’s better than the usual nonsense you’ll find out there, and was offered in the spirit of discussion, which is good.