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This dissertation aspires to revive the dystopian liberalism which identifies the avoidance of the worst as the fundamental aim of politics. The theory I present consists of three elements overall: The first element is what I call the Priority Claim, stating that the most important aim of social institutions should, morally speaking, be to avoid cruelty qua worst evil (Part I). The second element is the identification of the informal structure, the set of social norms within a population, as an important site to realize this ideal (Part II). The third element is the application of the principle that cruelty be avoided to the in-formal structure (Part III). This leads to an account of desirable social norms and in turn to a concrete answer to the question how individuals can in their everyday lives do their part to create a world that is overall less cruel and more humane.

Liberal neutrality – as understood in current legal and political debates – has two underlying intuitions and therefore two distinct elements. On the one hand it refers to the intuition that there are matters the state has no business getting involved in (hands-off element). On the other hand it is motivated by the idea that the state ought to treat citizens as equals and show equal respect and for their different conceptions of the good life (equality element). This thesis defends this two-fold understanding of neutrality with reference to Rawls’ conception of society as a fair system of cooperation and the idea of citizens as free and equal persons. In particular, the idea that citizens are to be treated as free justifies the hands-off element and argues that the state must be involved in nothing but justice. In the context of political decision making this requires the state to be justificatorily neutral. Treating citizens as equals requires the state to grant its citizens equal political rights and also to ensure that these rights have “fair value.” Given the danger that cultural bias undermines the equal standing of citizens the state has to ensure procedures of political decision making that are able to take citizens’ different conceptions into account. Treating citizens as free and equal therefore requires that the state bans all considerations of the good from being part of the justification of state action while at the same time taking these considerations into account when deliberating the way how these regulations are to be implemented.

In this thesis, I argue for rationalism, the claim that political legitimacy should be distributed such that justice is promoted best. In chapter 1, I define legitimacy as the permission to rule. I deny that political institutions generally enjoy authority, which is the moral power to directly impose duties on others. I then describe how legitimate political institutions without authority are possible in principle. In the second chapter, I outline a major problem for rationalism. If individuals have strong, moral rights, then it seems that political institutions cannot legitimately operate without their subjects' consent. I describe the key assumptions in this argument, and discuss a series of unconvincing proposals in the literature to escape it. In chapter 3, I argue that we can solve the problem if we look at theories of the moral justification of rights. There are two major such theories, the interest theory and the status theory. I outline the interest theory, and argue that it allows for non-consensual but legitimate political institutions. In chapter 4, I describe a Kantian claim about the nature of rights, according to which our rights are fully realised only if there are political institutions. If we accept this thought, then non-consensual political institutions can be legitimate on the status theory as well. In chapter 5, I outline what it means to promote-rather than respect-justice, and argue that the promotion of justice enjoys primacy over other values. At first sight, rationalism appears to have very radical implications, given that it asks us to base legitimacy on justice. In chapter 6, I argue that this impression is mistaken. We should often pursue justice indirectly, for example, through methods which focus on legal validity or democratic procedure rather than justice.

Precis The Political philosophy of John Gray touches a number of topics and also has gone thrue a couple of modifications. However this thesis aims to show that there can be found a consistent political doctrine of agonistic liberalism in Gray's thought that arises from his critigue of rationalistic theories of liberalism. Agonistic liberalism is based on the naturalistic ethical theory of value-pluralism which Gray adopted whit some modifications from Isaiah Berlin. On the ground of incommensurability and uncombinability of some values within individuel lives as well as within life forms Gray comes to conclusion that the conflict of values is ineradicable part of our lives. And that's the reason why any legel or political theory cannot set up a set of liberal principles that could claim universal validity. That is why Gray sets up the concept of modus vivendi, political ideal of coexistence of individuals, groups and societies based on mutual toleration. With regard to the rational indeterminacy of conflicts over values, according to agonistic liberalism these conflict has to by resolved by political means.

Human powers of moral reasoning and motivation are fragile. How should citizens committed to the achievement of liberal justice respond to this fact? This dissertation theorises a class of moral requirements that are central to the practice of liberal democracy but have been recently overlooked by political philosophers: the fortificational duties, which enjoin citizens to design and submit to civic practices that improve both their moral reasoning and the motivational resilience of their sense of justice. It considers the proposition that a conception of justice is unjustified if unlikely to generate its own freely willed maintenance, or stability, in the face of human nature, and it argues that this proposition is false. If justice may face overwhelming resistance unless steps are taken to fortify ourselves against our own fallibility, the right response is to pursue precisely such fortification. Chapter One sketches the orienting ideal of the dissertation: an ideal of a social world in which citizens live together as free and equal. Chapter Two assesses the proposition that we ought to modify or abandon this ideal if we determine that it is unlikely to be freely realised without serious civic or institutional assistance—a move suggested by John Rawls’s “stability test”—and it argues that the candidate arguments for this conclusion fail. The chapter instead argues that citizens are subject to moral requirements to fortify their sense of justice by designing and submitting to measures that increase the likelihood that they will accurately identify and freely comply with their fundamental moral duties. These measures together constitute a liberal democracy’s “stability charter.” Chapters Three to Six explore proposed elements of citizens’ stability charter. Chapter Three discusses the fortification of moral reasoning through democratic deliberation. Chapter Four considers what institutional mechanisms could keep democracy oriented toward the achievement of justice despite human fallibility, and it defends a minimalist conception of judicial review as a case study. Chapter Five argues that the practice of criminal punishment is justified by the duties of wrongdoers to pursue additional fortificational measures in the aftermath of their moral powers’ defective operation. And Chapter Six focuses on the special problem posed to the enduring achievement of justice by “unreasonable citizens” who reject fundamental liberal values. The distinctive contribution of the dissertation lies, firstly, in its novel appropriation of the Rawlsian ideal of stability—reconceiving stability not as a justificatory condition set by reason on our convictions, but as a practical challenge that our own convictions set for us—and, secondly, in its deployment of that insight to motivate novel arguments about the character of democratic deliberation, the limits and role of judicial review, the proper purposes of criminal punishment, and the ideal method of engagement with unreasonable citizens.

Despite its prominence as a pejorative term in moral and political philosophy, the phenomenon of ethnocentrism has escaped the focused attention of moral and political philosophers. Little sustained effort has been devoted to its in-depth analysis. This thesis attempts to fill in that gap in the philosophical literature, with a particular focus on the analysis of ethnocentrism as a problem, or rather a set of problems, facing the theory and practice of human rights. The thesis begins by drawing a core distinction between ethnocentrism as a moral phenomenon (i.e., a form of moral partiality), on the one hand, and as an epistemological phenomenon (i.e., a mode of judgment), on the other. After singling out the epistemological aspect of ethnocentrism as its main focus, the thesis argues for four interlocking claims. The first claim is that ethnocentrism represents an unwarranted mode of judgment, and thus an epistemic hazard that ought to be avoided if at all possible (Chapter One, §3). This claim is defended at length against the version of political constructivism advanced by John Rawls, which, by grounding political argument exclusively in ideas and values embedded in a common public culture, implicitly justifies a form of ethnocentrism (Chapter Two). The second claim is that moral argument cannot avoid ethnocentrism by grounding itself, as some have thought, in judgments upon which there is broad moral consensus, or rather by avoiding any appeal to judgments that are the subject of marked dissensus (Chapter Three and Chapter Four). Thirdly, the thesis argues that ethnocentrism is, if avoidable, only so to a limited extent (Chapter Six, §2). And fourthly, it offers an outline of how this limited form of avoidance might work (Chapter Five and Chapter Six, §3).