ABSTRACT
In this paper, I want to discuss some aspects of the modem liberal theory of legislation and state action. In particular, I want to consider what I shall call ‘ the doctrine of liberal neutrality ’, expounded by philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, and Robert Nozick.1 But though I shall be concentrating on the suggestions that have been made in these recent writings (together with some rather less explicit arguments in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice2), the themes that I shall be discussing have a rich heritage. The idea of neutrality is only the most recent attempt to articulate a position that liberals have occupied for centuries: the ancestry of the idea may be traced back through John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty and Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Justice at least as far as John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and maybe even further.3 It is the latest expression of a view that liberals have always held about the attitude the state should take to the personal faith and beliefs of its citizens.
