ABSTRACT
A number of political philosophers writing in the 1980s took issue with the notion that justice can be detached from considerations of the good. Political liberalism insists on bracketing our comprehensive moral and religious ideals for political purposes, and on separating our political from our personal identities. The case for liberalism, John Rawls argues, is political, not philosophical or metaphysical, and so does not depend on controversial claims about the nature of the self. The political liberal might reply that the political values of toleration and equal citizenship for women are sufficient grounds for concluding that women should be free to choose for themselves whether to have an abortion; government should not take sides on the moral and religious controversy over when human life begins. For political liberalism, the asymmetry between the right and the good is not based on a Kantian conception of the person but instead on a certain feature of modern democratic societies.
