ABSTRACT
Liberalism says that persons owe one another the satisfaction of basic needs and ought to participate in a thoroughly democratic way of life, one aim of which is to achieve that end by appropriately redistributing the means. Using a loose evaluative standpoint and giving liberalism the benefit of the doubt when people could, liberalism’s answer to their framing questions has a prima facie good justification, they concluded. Egoism becomes a trivial idea. “Perform the act that fits best” might show up in one of the non-egoistic moralities as a means to the highest good envisioned there, say in utilitarianism, as a means to the greater good of persons impartially. The attractiveness of the objective approach is that if it leads people to a successful argument, it will have given people a standard of value which would be also the first goal of a right-thinking person.
