ABSTRACT
My intention in this book is polemical, but not rhetorical. For while I shall try to persuade readers that the whole idea of a liberal morality is in the end untenable, the very possibility of my doing so rests on a sense of, and a confidence in, a rationality which it is liberalism’s great achievement to have bequeathed us. Thus an underlying theme is that liberalism’s loss of confidence in a universal and impartial rationality, resulting in its transformation into the series of relativisms now described as postmodernism, is misplaced; but that the seeds of this transformation have lain dormant in the liberal tradition. In particular, it is liberalism’s difficulties in justifying morality which are central to that transformation and which show why, its achievements notwithstanding, liberal morality is in the end conceptually inadequate to the point of being corrosive.
